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Robert Durst, Subject of 'The Jinx,' Claims He Was On Meth 'The Whole Time'
Robert Durst, the millionaire heir alleged (and we mean very strongly alleged) of murdering two people, and acquitted in the murder of a third, arrived in a Los Angeles courtroom on November 7. Durst is facing charges of murdering his long-time friend Susan Berman in 2000, but now claims his apparent confession was meth-fueled.
Crime blotter obsessives and fans of the HBO mini-series The Jinx will remember that Berman was a screenwriter living in a rented house along Benedict Canyon when she was found dead (shot execution-style) on Christmas Eve 2000.
Law enforcement agents discovered her body after responding to a hand-written anonymous tip received by mail.
The Jinx's filmmaker Andrew Jarecki pressed Durst on the letter in multiple interviews. Jarecki noted that the handwriting in the letter matched Durst’s own. Jarecki even used a forensic document examiner to conclude that the handwriting in the anonymous tip is “unique to one person and only one person,” reports the New York Times.
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During one of Jarecki’s filmed interviews of Durst, the eccentric scion of the Durst real estate family heads to the bathroom, his microphone still on. “What the hell did I do?” Durst mumbles. “Killed them all, of course.”
Durst was arrested for Berman’s murder on March 14, 2015—a day before The Jinx's final episode aired. He was picked up at a Marriott in New Orleans along with $40,000 in cash, a mask, revolver, and marijuana. In jail, an L.A. prosecutor asked why he hadn’t fled the country knowing the documentary might lead to his arrest—“inertia”, Durst responded, according to Variety. “I just didn’t really, really, really think that I was gonna end up arrested.”
Now, court documents released on Friday detail further transcripts from the March 2015 jailhouse interview.
“I was on meth, I was on meth the whole time … it should have been obvious,” Durst told the prosecutors, reports the Los Angeles Times.
According to Deadline, one of the prosecutors tells Durst that the excuse “won’t work.”
“I’m not saying my answers were wrong,” Durst continues. “I’m just trying to say that I was ‘gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu’ during the thing. …And, I think, the reason I did it, had to be because I was swooped, speeding.”
On a (somewhat?) lighter note, a prosecutor then asks Durst if he was flattered having Ryan Gosling, “… a guy, uh, that good-looking” play him in Jarecki’s 2010 feature film “All Good Things”.
"Sure," Durst says.
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