‘The Jinx—Part Two’ Damns Everyone in Its Bleak Finale
Andrew Jarecki’s original 2015 docuseries The Jinx was about whether Robert Durst killed three different people: his first wife Kathie, who went missing in 1982; his best friend Susan Berman, who was executed in 2000; and his neighbor Morris Black, whom he admitted to dismembering in 2001. The Jinx—Part Two, meanwhile, has to this point been about his arrest and trial, both of which have long been public record. Consequently, unlike its predecessor, it hasn’t been building to a jaw-dropping bombshell; instead, as its closing episode confirmed, it’s always been something more depressingly chilling: a portrait of rampant, repugnant complicity.
Unsurprisingly, tonight’s season (and series) finale focused less on Durst’s death behind bars—an already known fact—than on how he managed, for decades and in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, to weasel his way out of trouble. The simple answer, it turns out, is money, which buys support, silence, lies, and the morality of the weak, manipulatable, and greedy. It’s a case study of the fact that, for a particular kind of monster, selling one’s soul to the devil is a very good deal.
The Jinx—Part Two’s penultimate installment concluded with the question of why Durst’s second wife Debrah Lee Charatan—who sent her attorney Alan Abramson to the trial in her place—needed a lawyer at all, much less one who was present in court. This mystery speaks to the series’ primary argument: namely, that rather than a “lone wolf” who got away with murder on his own (until he didn’t), Durst was a fiend who used his wealth and power to amass a cabal of conspirators. It’s fitting, then, that following his sentencing hearing, during which he receives life in prison without the possibility of parole, he’s largely abandoned by his friends and former cohorts, whom he cries out to in messages left on answering machines in his pitifully gravelly, frail voice (Stewie! Susie! Debrah!). Finally, the killer is alone.