• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, May 1, 2024

Photograph courtesy of HBO

If you wanted to make up a character like Robert Durst, the real-life heir to his family’s $8 billion New York real estate fortune, you’d have trouble coming up with the particulars to match his actual crime spree. They’re too preposterous.

In 1982, Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack, a young medical student whom he had abused, “disappeared” as she was on the cusp of divorcing him. Her murder was never proven. In 2000, Durst’s “best friend,” Susan Berman, his biggest defender in his wife’s death and a writer whose father had been a Las Vegas Mafia kingpin, was found murdered in her Los Angeles home. He wrote a note with the word “CADAVER” in all caps to the LA police department so they’d find the body.

By 2001, Bob, as he was known by his friends, a diminutive man, was chilling in a flophouse in Galveston, Texas, and appearing in public as a deaf/mute woman named Dorothy. That’s when he happened to murder his alcoholic neighbor, Morris Black. Fearing that authorities would think he did it, he bought a hacksaw, dismembered poor Black, and threw his parts into Galveston Bay.

Then Bob went on the lam, with firearms, drugs, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his car -- but was arrested for stealing a chicken sandwich at a rest stop.

He was tried for the Black murder, and admitted to the dismemberment, but said he never intended to kill his “best friend,” while fighting him for a gun, which went off in his friend’s face.

With the aid of a crack defense lawyer who wore a white cowboy hat, Bob was pronounced “not guilty.”

So with the hubris that only someone with an inherited fortune and a life without consequences could summon, he agreed to sit for over 20 hours of on-camera interviews with director/ journalist Andrew Jarecki and crew.

Bob had admired Jarecki’s previous documentary, “Capturing the Friedmans,” about a sexually abusive father and son.

The result of Bob’s cooperation with Jarecki was the explosive 2015 six-part documentary, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”

It’s mostly remembered for the atomic bomb that went off in the last episode, when a distraught Bob, followed by a camera crew, went into a bathroom, and while washing his hands at the sink, forgot that his mic was on. He looked himself in the mirror and said, “What have I done?…Killed them all, of course.”

Meanwhile, the documentary-makers had handed their evidence over to law enforcement the previous year, and Bob was arrested in March, 2015, the day before the finale aired. He was convicted of Berman’s murder in 2021 and charged with his wife Kathleen’s disappearance. But in 2022, he died in prison of a heart attack exacerbated by a bout of COVID, at age 78, the day before the trial for his wife’s murder was to begin.

Now, almost a decade after “The Jinx” broke, comes the debut of Jarecki’s “The Jinx: Part 2” on Max. So far, episodes 1 and 2 (of six) have been released. It seems Jarecki has enough unused footage to continue for years, but should we be interested?

As a true crime nerd, I watched.

The first episode is a decent recap of all that went before. But in a meta-meta move, we watch people gather in Jarecki’s capacious apartment to watch the last episode. The crowd included Kathleen’s long-suffering family and Jeanine Pirro and her detective boyfriend. It seemed smug and self-serving.

But we do get a real laugh in episode 2, when the Belcher twins come on camera. They look 16, but they were lawyers for the prosecution team. Michael Belcher explains that when he got the call asking if he’d be interested in working on the “Durst case” he got all excited, thinking that it referred to Limp Bizkit’s lead singer, Fred Durst.

When he discovered otherwise, he asked for his identical twin brother to be hired, too. Once working on the case, they got through the monotony of reviewing thousands of pages of evidence by listening to Durst’s jailhouse calls. Bob had a multisyllablic way of identifying himself as “Baaaawb” that they imitate perfectly.

And the calls are amazing to hear, given that Bob spoke to a group of cronies who kissed up to him. Most had received or made money through him. And he entertained them on the phone in his orange jumpsuit, showing off his “lady push-ups” and asking an ex-girlfriend, Susie, if he needed a shave. He tells a male friend that he wanted to wire Susie $150,000 to find them a “lover’s nest” for when he gets out, but his second wife, the cold and steely Deborah, wouldn’t hear of it.

We see a note he sent Susie, with “I Love You” chicken-scratched in caps all over the page, as if a kindergartener had written it.

All that was pretty sickening -- but then again, it was enough to make me want to continue watching.

I’m hoping the final episode drops another bombshell on us.

But really, how could it ever outdo the original?