Yahoo News Robert Durst's 'confession' in The Jinx was edited and played out-of-order
We'll be honest, we're not sure we've seen a true-crime documentary as compelling, twisted, or as shocking as HBO's The Jinx – and the real-life events that have followed the series are much the same.
Four years after six-part documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst aired – and four years after Robert Durst was arrested for the murder of Susan Berman – it has been revealed that the apparently damning evidence against Durst was edited.
Those who have watched The Jinx will no doubt remember its astonishing climax – an audio recording of Durst appearing to confess to the murder of Berman, and his wife Kathleen, who disappeared in 1982.
Related: 5 times true-crime shows have played a crucial role in their cases
"What the hell did I do?" the filmmakers' microphone picked up, as Durst rambled to himself in a bathroom. "Killed them all, of course."
Now, in a twist befitting of The Jinx, Durst's legal team is hoping to have the film's closing moments thrown out of court in an upcoming trial, with The New York Times claiming the defence will call edits to the audio "manipulations".
Durst's lawyers have provided a transcript of the raw audio unwittingly recorded by The Jinx crew, which they say suggests his 'confession' of "killing them all" was taken out of context.
The transcript is said to read: "[Unintelligible] I don't know what you expected to get. I don't know what's in the house. Oh, I want this. Killed them all, of course. [Unintelligible] I want to do something new. There's nothing new about that.
"[Inaudible - possibly "disaster"] He was right. I was wrong. The burping. I'm having difficulty with the question. What the hell did I do?"
The filmmakers, Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier, have defended their edits, insisting that the final cut was representative of what Durst said.
"We put the line, 'Killed them all' at the very end of the last episode to end the series on a dramatic note, not to link it to any other line," Stuart-Pointer explained.
"It didn't occur to us that other journalists would connect it with, 'What the hell did I do?' There are actually 10 seconds between the two lines, and I think the experiences of reading it and hearing it are very different."
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Instagram and Twitter account.
('You Might Also Like',)
