Does The Jinx: Part Two mark the end of an era for true crime? (2024)

As TV endings go, they don't come much more jaw-dropping than the finale to the first series of HBO true-crime documentary series The Jinx. After six episodes that interrogated US real-estate heir Robert Durst's connection to the mysterious disappearance of his first wife, along with two brutal murders, the season ended with Durst – not realising his mic was still on – heading to the bathroom and uttering to himself the now infamous line "Killed them all, of course" – seemingly confessing to the murders of his first wife, his best friend and a former neighbour. You couldn't have scripted it any better.

The day before the bombshell episode aired in March 2015, Durst was arrested in New Orleans while on the run (having watched the penultimate episode, in which his handwriting is revealed to match that on a vital piece of evidence – the famous cadaver note – he sensed he was in trouble). He was charged with the 2000 murder of his friend Susan Berman and in 2021 was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Soon afterwards Durst was also charged with the murder of his wife Kathie, who disappeared in 1982 without trace, but Durst – worth a reported $100 million – died from cardiac arrest in January 2022 before the case could go to trial.

Durst's death appeared to mark the end of a four-decade saga that had baffled and frustrated detectives, fascinated reporters and – thanks to The Jinx – gripped the public. Andrew Jarecki's Emmy-winning doc series, rather than merely covering the story, became an integral part of it, thanks to Durst's shock confession – which the producers didn't even realise they had on tape for two years. The show – along with the success of the podcast Serial, which aired in late 2014– helped usher in a new era of glossy true-crime shows including Making a Murderer and Tiger King, with TV networks rushing to satisfy demand, turning real-life tragedy into entertainment and raising some ethical questions in the process.

Released in 2020, Netflix's documentary series Tiger King was an early lockdown hit (Credit: Netflix)

Nothing could ever quite hope to top that ending of The Jinx, which remains an unparalleled moment in documentary television. Unlike Making a Murderer and Tiger King, which rushed out second seasons after the success of their first, The Jinx seemed happy to remain a one-off true-crime phenomenon. Until now. Nine years later, it's back with a six-part follow-up.

The Jinx Part Two looks at what happened after that hot-mic-drop moment: the reaction to the show, a new investigation, the trial, and how Durst was finally brought to justice. The first episode – which shows the moment some of the victims' friends and family, and others involved in the case, saw that famous episode for the first time – feels a little like the show giving itself a congratulatory pat on the back. Can you really blame it, though?

Director Andrew Jarecki has said that he feared for his safety before Durst was arrested (Credit: HBO)

Director Andrew Jarecki's connection to Durst goes back nearly 20 years. His 2010 movie, All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, was a fictionalised version of Durst's life, specifically dealing with the unsolved disappearance of his wife Kathie. Amazingly, Durst liked the film and contacted Jarecki offering to be interviewed.

As documentary subjects go, Jarecki describes Durst as "kind of a unicorn… he's such a powerful personality and also reckless and also willing to be honest about things that most people aren't honest about… There's so much to him, and he's a troublemaker and kind of a firestorm. That draws people in. It's very seductive."

Durst was the eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst. His mother died by suicide when he was a child – Durst said he watched her jump from a window, though his brother denies this happened. Estranged from his family, Durst was known for his eccentric personality, something he made no attempt to hide on camera.

"He's not a likeable guy. I mean, he murdered three people," says Lisa DePaulo, a journalist who began covering the story in 2000 after Susan Berman's murder, and appeared as a witness in Durst's trial. "But his character is so unusual. You can't stop watching him."

Uncomfortable viewing

DePaulo captures an uncomfortable truth about Durst – that, for all his horrific crimes, he made for fantastic TV. "He was so riveting because you never knew what was going to come out of his mouth," she tells the BBC. "And Jarecki got Durst, he knew that he was entertaining."

Susan Berman and Durst became friends at university – he walked her down the aisle when she married in 1984 (Credit: HBO)

Over the years Durst has been the subject of SNL sketches, the punchline on late-night talk shows and even a question on quiz show Jeopardy. John Lewin, LA deputy district attorney and the lead prosecutor in Durst's case, admits in The Jinx: Part Two: "I'd be lying if I said I didn't find Bob funny. Just because you're a murderer, doesn't mean you can't be charming." But, he adds, "I made sure our case was not going to live or die on whether people found Bob appealing."

Aside from his personality, the series captures how Durst's privileged background impacted him. Reflecting on Durst's bizarre behaviour in the original series of The Jinx, New York Times crime reporter Charles Bagli said: "The guy is crying out to be arrested, isn't he? On the other hand, he's also a guy who walks through life and thinks he can do whateverhe wants to do. And most of the time he could."

DePaulo agrees that Bob had an undeniable sense of entitlement. "I think he thought, 'I'm Bob Durst, I can do whatever I want.' And I think there was part of him that wanted to get caught… and when he did get caught, he thought he would beat the system. He did think he was on a different level."

Durst's apparent confidence that nothing or nobody could touch him was perhaps one of the reasons he contacted Andrew Jarecki in the first place. Jarecki has said he thinks Durst was carrying around a burden of guilt and had "a compulsion to confess" – though even he didn't expect that to happen in quite such a literal or dramatic fashion.

Specialising in 'cold' murder cases, LA deputy district attorney John Lewin helped bring about Durst's conviction (Credit: HBO)

Yet for all it achieved, The Jinx wasn't without its controversies. There was confusion over the timeline of events (three years passed between Durst sitting down for that fateful interview and when the final episode aired) and questions over when Jarecki and his team handed over vital evidence to the police. Court documents suggested that the infamous confession was edited and played out of sequence.

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The Jinx returns at a time when true crime is facing something of a reckoning. In the nine years since the show first aired, the genre's popularity has grown enormously – but so has scrutiny over our relationship to it. Whether it's the ethical issues of treating crimes as entertainment, the rise of amateur TikTok detectives (including, recently, people trying to uncover the real-life identities of characters in Netflix drama Baby Reindeer), issues of racial bias (most true crime shows focus on white, often female, victims) and even alleged use of AI imagery, there's been a growing sense of unease over our seemingly insatiable thirst for true-crime stories.

One frequent criticism is that the victims are often sidelined to focus on the perpetrator. "There's a reason why the victims are often ignored in true crime, and that's often because the victim's families really don't want to be involved, which is understandable," says Dr George Larke-Walsh, senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland and author of True Crime in American Media. "But it does mean that there's this bias towards the perpetrator and that is what makes the ethics of true crime debatable."

DePaulo – who knows some of the friends and family of Durst's victims – believes they were largely on board with The Jinx. "Everybody was glad [Jarecki] was doing it. They thought, maybe he'll come up with something we don't know, and he sure did."

Premiering in 2015, Making a Murderer tells the story of attempts to overturn the convictions of two men (Credit: Netflix)

The Jinx was focusing on exposing a suspect, though – while many of the other big true-crime shows of recent years, including Making A Murderer (which the family of victim Teresa Halbach called "one-sided"), have focused on potential miscarriages of justice or flawed cases, following in the footsteps of Errol Morris's 1998 film The Thin Blue Line. The gory details of cold cases are dredged up and pored over by millions of strangers, who all have an opinion on what happened. The Staircase – which later became a TV drama starring Colin Firth – was criticised for focusing on Michael Peterson as the victim instead of his dead wife, Kathleen.

As true crime has continued to grow in popularity, streaming networks have raced to keep up with demand, churning out bingeable series of wildly varying quality where the focus can sometimes be more on entertainment than truth.

Larke-Walsh says that, when done carefully, true crime can educate people on important issues. "I'm a big defender of true crime and think that it can have a social purpose," she says. "I do think it's important for people to be able to see the justice system at work. However, filmmakers have an ethical responsibility to approach these topics with the seriousness and respect that they deserve. When you make a documentary, there's a tacit agreement between filmmaker and audiences that what you're making represents the truth or a truth, even if you can't get to a definitive truth," says Larke-Walsh.

Portraying events as honestly as possibly, while still making shows that satisfy viewers – and TV networks – is the line that documentary makers have to tread. "The desire to make true-crime shows gripping is totally understandable," says Larke-Walsh. "What people need to remember is that a documentary is still a narrative. They're still creating a story and they're still creating characters. You can't knock documentary filmmakers for doing that because you need to create audience engagement. But it's finding that balance."

The Jinx: Part Two features new people, including Durst's friend Nick Chavin (pictured with Berman and Durst) (Credit: HBO)

There are certainly plenty of characters in the new season of The Jinx – even if Jarecki is now reliant on audio and video recordings of Durst from jail, rather than his own interviews.

New faces include two law clerk brothers who work for the prosecution ("the wonder twins") and, most notably, Durst's friend Nick Chavin, who would later testify against him but who, when interviewed for the show, seems remarkably blasé about his friend's misdemeanours. "I don't have that same moral hatred of murder and murderers," he shrugs.

Indeed, much of this new season is focused on the people who helped Durst get away with his crimes for so long. Jarecki told Vanity Fair he was intrigued by "the idea that there's this constellation of people who all see themselves as good, decent people… and yet here they are helping a murderer."

There are a few crass moments in the new season – a reenactment of Bob fleeing for Cuba on a boat in a latex mask (his plan if he hadn't had been caught), and some unnecessarily on-the-nose music cues. They feel like attempts to try and gee up the drama – not that this story needs it.

Anyone hoping for a bombshell revelation like last season is likely to be disappointed though. Only four episodes of The Jinx Part Two were made available to journalists to watch in advance, with the final two being held back, but it's hard to imagine there will be anything even nearly as explosive as last time to reveal. No-one, not even Jarecki himself, could top that, surely?

Instead, this season of The Jinx feels more like a fable on what happens when the legal system comes up against someone with huge amounts of money, power and privilege – and plenty of hangers on prepared to stick by them, motivated by either money or fear. It's a scenario that feels ever relevant in our world– even if Durst himself is no longer in it. "I'm not sure we're going to find another Bob Durst,"Jarecki has said. No matter how compelling a character he might have been, considering the horrors he carried out, we should be grateful for that.

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The Jinx: Part Two is streaming in the US on HBO on Sundays, and in the UK on Sky on Mondays.

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