The Jinx Season-Premiere Recap: Beverley Hills
Part 2 manages to be both a followup to the fallout of the 2015 miniseries and a victory lap for director Andrew Jarecki.
In Andrew Jarecki’s defense, a game-winning Grand Slam doesn’t end with the crack of a bat. You get to round the bases like Robert Redford in The Natural, in slow motion with the sparks from blown-out stadium lights trickling down on the field like rain. The day before the finale of The Jinx, Jarecki’s six-episode true-crime phenomenon, Robert Durst was apprehended by the FBI for the murder of his friend Susan Berman 15 years earlier in Los Angeles. After the filmmakers discovered a piece of evidence tying a note to the Beverly Hills Police Department to a letter Durst had written to Berman — both addresses were written in similar block lettering and misspelled Beverly Hills as “Beverley Hills” — LAPD investigators reopened the case and would eventually get a man who’d eluded justice for two killings and a disappearance.
The lingering question around this second season of The Jinx is, “Why is this necessary?” Between March 15, 2015, the day the season-one finale aired, and now, Durst was arrested, tried, and successfully convicted for Berman’s murder, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2021, and died a few months ago of cardiac arrest at age 78. The case was no longer cold; Durst’s body was. Based on this compelling but most dispensable first episode, the cynical answer to why this second season exists is as a victory lap for Andrew Jarecki, who had done what so few true-crime podcasts and series about unsolved murder cases had accomplished: cracked it wide open. The show had not merely fiddled around in amateur forensics between spots for Audible and Blue Apron, but aided in the capture of a man so wealthy and elusive that he admitted to killing a man and chopping him into pieces yet still convinced a jury it was self-defense.
The finale of The Jinx was true pop-culture phenomenon — and if your memory is fuzzy on that, the first episode of season two has the newspaper headlines, broadcast reports, and Times Square billboards to remind you. Even John Lewin, an L.A. County deputy district attorney who specializes in cold cases, gushes about the “unheard-of” surprise of getting crucial evidence from a filmmaker. In a way, this first episode suggests that Jarecki and Durst are connected foremost by a shared vanity. During an interrogation at the New Orleans detention facility where Durst was taken after his arrest, Lewin asks Durst why he agreed to participate in the show when it’s pretty obvious that he’d still be a free man if he hadn’t. “I’m still putting that together in my own mind,” Durst replies. But Jarecki’s impulse to do a second season syncs up with Durst’s motives in that they can’t help trumpeting their own cleverness: Durst in getting away with it, Jarecki in celebrating his “gotcha” moment.
In one extraordinary bit of cognitive dissonance, Jarecki has invited members of the victims’ families (primarily from his first wife Kathie’s) and other prominent subjects from the documentary, like Galveston detective Cody Cazalas and former DA/current Fox News ghoul Jeanine Pirro, to his house for a viewing party of the finale. On the one hand, gathering friends together for the finale of a buzzy show like The Jinx is no difficult than what regular folks do when other HBO hits like Succession or Game of Thrones come to an end. But then you also realize that these are people who have had a loved one murdered and now they’re experiencing confirmation of the killer’s guilt as the big twist on the television show. It feels exploitative, but then again, perhaps Jarecki intends for us to have the realization that there are real stakes involved in The Jinx. The gasps and tears that follow Durst’s infamous “Killed them all, of course,” are a reminder that the pain is real and that justice still matters.
Beyond the victory-lap portion of this first episode, Jarecki seeks to continue telling Durst’s story after his incarceration, which is gripping, albeit only a shade more relevant than a supersized DVD supplement. As the series unfolded in 2015, New York Times reporter Charles Bagli would chat weekly with Durst after every episode, which suggests that Durst could have spun The Jinx into a recapping gig. But once the fifth episode aired, it revealed the two “Beverley Hills” letters. Bagli recalls Durst hurriedly cutting short their conversation, and the FBI, concerned about Durst as a flight risk, decided to bring him in. As it happens, the FBI was right: Durst had been “money-structuring” through $9,000 daily cash withdrawals from his home, and when he was found in a New Orleans hotel, he had $80,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, and a map of Cuba. Not exactly subtle. (In a delicious old-guy moment, Durst gave away his location by trying repeatedly to check his voicemail messages remotely — and with much frustration.)
Other stranger-than-fiction moments abound. The first and most galling is the resurfacing of Chris Lowell, one of the jurors who acquitted Durst in the Galveston murder trial and then quickly befriended him. (In the first season, Lowell memorably noted that only three of the 12 jurors originally found Durst guilty and the last holdout was an old lady whose lingering concern about the defendant chopping the victim into pieces had to be assuaged.) In truly gob-smacking surveillance, Lowell and his wife are shown entering his apartment building with empty beach bags and leaving with what appears to be any incriminating evidence left behind in Durst’s home. Crazier still is the latex mask Durst intended to wear in his getaway to Cuba, which Jarecki stages here in a reenactment that looks like a cross between a Michael Mann and Harmony Korine sequence.
In the end, though, it all comes back to a true-crime triumph. Over the phone with one of the many confidants he rings up during his time in a New Orleans prison, Durst admits, “The dumbest thing was doing Jarecki. Oh God, The Jinx.” Jarecki can’t resist tucking one more feather in his cap.
Beverleys
• A good and obviously true observation from Lewis about Durst: “Many times in Bob’s life, in custody [or] out of custody, Bob has an option: One door is keep your mouth shut and don’t say anything and one door is talk. Bob always goes to the talk door. Always.”
• Also from Lewin, on anticipating The Jinx: “This thing is going to be the biggest thing to hit my office since OJ.” Much to unpack about that statement and its queasy intersection of murder and celebrity.
• In reading back the transcript from Durst’s post-episode chats, Bagli has Durst saying, “We’ve heard Kathie’s family saying, ‘Why won’t he tell us what he did with her?’ on and one, as if they actually expect me to say, ‘I put her over there, near the lamppost or something.’” My question, given the killer’s MO: Has anyone dug under the lamppost nearest to Durst and Kathie’s vacation home?
• Durst leaving the police a box of pictures and mementos intended to reveal his caring side is too ham-handed not to be a troll. So well played on that, I guess.
• Durst’s Vegas-based celebrity lawyer, David Chesnoff, looks to be quite a character, given his apparently triumphant defenses of men like Suge Knight and Mike Tyson. But his line about how a “celebrated person” today doesn’t get the breaks sounds more like his pitch to famous, aggrieved clients than any recognizable reality.