Once upon a time trashy documentaries about grisly murders were the preserve of late nights on Channel 5. That was where you went to get your fill of Kids Who Kill and Boston Strangler specials. Then the hit podcast Serial came along, with its social justice concerns and carefully balanced commentary, and suddenly true crime was the dinner party topic du jour. This week everyone will be talking about Sky Atlantic’s HBO import The Jinx, the latest example of the genre’s move upmarket.
Robert Durst, the 72-year-old heir to a real estate fortune is used to getting the best, so when he felt it was time to tell his extraordinary story, naturally he went straight to Andrew Jarecki. Durst was evidently impressed with the director’s 2010 scripted film All Good Things starring Ryan Gosling, based on the 1982 disappearance of the first Mrs Robert Durst, Kathleen McCormack Durst. What man wouldn’t be flattered to be portrayed by Ryan Gosling? It might, however, be Jarecki’s 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans that best qualified him to make The Jinx. Both are controversial documentaries about troubling crimes, with apparently unknowable men at their centres.
Twenty hours of in-depth interviews with Durst form the basis of this six-part series, but he didn’t actually appear in person until the very last scene of this opening episode; Jarecki knows how to let a story unfold, remember. We began instead in Galveston, Texas, where in 2001 detectives fished a man’s torso out from Galveston Bay. Clues led them to an elderly mute woman, who later turned out to be Durst in drag – and that wasn’t even the strangest element of the case. As one of the investigating officers commented, "The guy [Durst] looks like a librarian. He doesn’t look like a person that would dismember a human being." There’s something discomforting, too, about Jarecki’s slick approach(complete with rock’n’ roll theme tune) to a story that, after all, involves real victims, real grieving relatives and – as of Durst’s arrest last month – a real, upcoming criminal trial. Yet there’s no denying how compelling it is, or how jaw-dropping his access to Durst.