If you were obsessed with Serial, I feel confident in assuming that your true-crime appetite’s moved on to HBO’s The Jinx, the documentary series from Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) that follows the tremendously wealthy and creepy Robert Durst. For those of you who are well-adjusted and have normal hobbies, Durst has been linked to three deaths, including that of his wife, Kathie Durst, and apparently confessed to murder while miked during Jarecki’s filming; he’s been arrested and now faces a murder trial in Los Angeles.
As if that all wasn’t grotesque enough, you can also read “The Fugitive Heir,” Ned Zeman’s 2002 Vanity Fair piece on Durst. It’s a pretty grisly, disturbing read, that follows the suspicions from a friend of his wife that Durst had killed Kathie. It also goes into detail about Durst’s strange behaviors (including growling), his childhood, and the random act that reopened the Kathie Durst missing person case—and turned it into a homicide investigation. In an article that covers some truly awful stuff, this detail was the one I found the most surprising:
Bobby began seeing a primal-scream therapist, who believed that screaming—and screaming and screaming—would unlock his patients’ suppressed pain and anger. Bobby also started growling. It happened more than once.
“What do you mean, he’s ‘growling’?” Schwank asked when Kathie told her about it. “What does it sound like?”
“GRRRRRRRR!” Loudly. Like an animal. Another time, Gilberte actually heard it in the background. “GRRRRRRRR!”
“Kathie,” Schwank said, “please get out of there. Come live with me.”
“No, I’ll be all right,” Kathie replied. “But if anything happens to me, please don’t let Bobby get away with it.”
I’m not going to embed the confession video here, because it’s eminently Google-able and just indescribably odd. But if you’re deep into the case, do yourself a favor and read Zeman’s piece.
Also, the AP actually had to issue a correction about Robert Durst—namely, that he is not the lead singer of Limp Bizkit. That is a thing that really happened, and probably the only mildly funny thing to come out of this entire strange saga.
I will certainly check out this work, as Capturing the Friedmans was one of the best documentary films ever, and is seriously under-watched by this nation.