To understand why Robert A.

Durst, the peculiar real estate scion long suspected in

several murders, is now charged with killing his close friend Susan Berman 19 years ago,
look no further than the 2015 HBO documentary about his life.

On the last of six episodes, the producers of “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert
Durst” presented Mr. Durst with an envelope he had addressed. The handwriting looked
identical to that on the anonymous note that had alerted authorities to the presence of
Ms. Berman’s body in her Beverly Hills home. On both, the word “Beverly” was
misspelled “Beverley.”

Then, the episode ended with Mr. Durst muttering to himself, perhaps confessing, as he
marched off to the bathroom, still wearing his microphone from the interview.

“What the hell did I do?”

“Killed them all, of course.”

Viewers were left stunned. The documentary went on to win huge ratings, a Peabody
and two Emmys.

But it turns out Mr. Durst’s remarks were significantly edited; rather than being
consecutive, the two sentences had been plucked from among the 20 in his rambling
remarks, and presented out of order.

Mr. Durst’s lawyers are now preparing to cite those edits — they’ll call them
manipulations — in an effort to cripple his prosecution as they get ready for a trial set to
begin in a few months in California. They are planning to call the documentary
filmmakers as witnesses and to suggest that they cooperated so closely with the police
that they became, in effect, “agents for law enforcement.”

So even though it’s Mr. Durst who is facing a possible prison term, the documentarians
— Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier — will also be scrutinized as
their decision-making is challenged by the defense at trial.

The filmmakers defend their edits as being entirely representative of

what Mr. Durst said. But other documentarians, like Mark J. Harris, an
Academy Award-winning filmmaker and professor at the University of
Southern California, who once taught Mr. Smerling, have questioned
it“The editing is problematic,” Mr. Harris said. “They put those lines together in a way
that’s very damning. But it is definitely more ambiguous in the transcript.”

True crime documentaries like “Thin Blue Line” (1988), have a long history of working
to free the unjustly accused. Much rarer have been those that, like “The Jinx,” were at
least partially responsible for putting people in jail. In the Durst case, the investigators
in Los Angeles did not so much work off leads suggested by the documentary as build
their case atop the evidence unearthed by the series itself. (Lifetime’s recent
documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” also presented a compelling argument for that
singer’s prosecution, and was followed by his arrest.)

Susan D. Murray, an associate professor of media, culture and communication at New

York University, credits “The Jinx” with triggering a recent burst of true crime
documentaries. “The Jinx,” she said, “has all the elements of documentaries, but it also
has the sensational aspect of reality TV unfolding before you.”

And seldom has there been a more compelling subject than Mr. Durst who, at 76 and
with a net worth of $100 million, has spent the last few years in a Los Angeles jail cell.
Long alienated from his family, which built a real estate empire in New York City, Mr.
Durst has also long been suspected of having murdered his wife, Kathie, who vanished
in 1982, though he was never charged. Ms. Berman, one of Mr. Durst’s best friends, was
at his side through most of it, often acting as his spokeswoman.

In 2000, when Ms. Berman turned up dead, shot in the back of the head, Mr. Durst was
also suspected, but he was not initially charged. He was living in Texas at the time. He
had moved there from New York, taking up residence in Galveston and posing as a mute
woman after the authorities in Westchester reopened the investigation into his wife’s
disappearance. Investigators now contend that during this period, Mr. Durst stole away
to California and killed Ms. Berman because he was concerned his old friend would
incriminate him in his wife’s death.

Ten months later, he was back in the spotlight when parts of his Texas neighbor’s body
turned up in Galveston Bay. Mr. Durst was charged with murdering Morris Black and
gave a gruesome account at trial of carving up the body. But he said his gun had gone off
accidentally as he grappled with Mr. Black in self-defense. The jury acquitted him in
2003.

These tawdry details, and the psychological complexities that surround

them, are the core of “The Jinx,” which was 10 years in the making.
Working from a Madison Avenue office, Mr. Jarecki and Mr. Smerling
built a library of documents, court records, interviews and newspaper
articles, all of it cross-indexed and annotated. The material became the
subject of a 2010 feature film by the duo, a somewhat fictionalized
version of Mr. Durst’s life, “All Good Things,” that starred Kirsten Dunst
as Kathie and Ryan Gosling as Mr. Durst. Just before the premiere, out of the
blue, Mr. Durst contacted Mr. Jarecki. They discussed the possibility of a lengthy
interview and Mr. Jarecki arranged for Mr. Durst to have a private screening of “All
Good Things.” Mr. Durst was impressed, even though the film implicated him in three
murders. He liked that it portrayed him as someone who had been buffeted by an
aggressive father. “The movie, I did think,” he said in a 2010 interview with me, “is as
reasonably accurate as anything out there.”
Soon — over the objections of his lawyer — he had agreed to be interviewed by the
filmmakers and sat for three days of filming. He admitted, for the first time, that he had
lied to the police investigating his wife’s disappearance. He described the fractured state
of their marriage before she vanished.

“By 1981,” he told the filmmakers, “our life was half arguments, fighting, slapping,
pushing, wrestling.”

“It deteriorated from there on.”

But he did not acknowledge a role in any crimes.

It took the producers another 16 months to coax Mr. Durst into sitting down for a
second, final interview in April 2012 in a hotel room. By this time they had discovered
the envelope with the similar handwriting and misspelling. They confronted Mr. Durst
with the envelope and the note that alerted authorities to Ms. Berman’s body. He looked
nervous, but denied he had written the so-called “cadaver note.”

When the interview was over, Mr. Durst asked to use the restroom, where for seven or
so minutes he talked to himself. As aired, his soliloquy ended with, “Killed them all, of
course,” though that’s not the order in which Mr. Durst actually spoke the words.

The final episode aired on March 15, 2015. Mr. Durst had been arrested just the night
before and as a reporter who had long covered the case, I was invited by Mr. Jarecki to
join a group of about 30 people at his Upper East Side home to watch the show. The
group included Jeanine Pirro, the former Westchester County district attorney who had
reopened the investigation into Kathie Durst’s disappearance; Rosie O’Donnell; Diane
Sawyer and members of Kathie’s family.

The living room went silent after Mr. Durst’s chilling words aired. Then some of Kathie’s
family began quietly weeping. An indignant Ms. O’Donnell quickly demanded, “How
could they possibly withhold this information for so long?”

That question would reverberate in the days to follow, as journalists and other
documentary filmmakers debated it in the press. By law, the filmmakers had not been
bound to turn over their material to the authorities. But didn’t they have a moral
responsibility to see justice done?

The filmmakers said that, for two years, they had not been aware that
Mr. Durst had been recorded in the bathroom. The audio was not
attached to video that they reviewed in creating the documentary. Mr.
Durst’s defense team has argued that the filmmakers and the investigators coordinated
their timing, arresting Mr. Durst as the final episode aired as part of a publicity stunt to
boost HBO viewership.
“We’re here today,” Mr. Durst’s lawyer, Dick De Guerin, said in a recent interview,
“because the purpose of the producers of the “The Jinx” was to win an Emmy, not to
actually document Bob’s story. This is show business. It’s not a documentary.”

But the investigators, who arrested Mr. Durst in New Orleans, where he was traveling
under an alias, said the timing was purely a coincidence. They had been tracking him,
watching him stockpile cash and feared he was getting ready to flee the country.

The filmmakers have been wary about discussing “The Jinx” because they expect to be
called as witnesses, according to their lawyer, Victor Kovner. But in past interviews with
me in 2014 and 2015 they have discussed how they tried to balance their role as
independent journalists with their obligation as citizens to come forward with the
evidence.

They initially met with the lead prosecutor on the Berman case, John Lewin, in 2013, a
year after they had finished interviewing Mr. Durst, they said. They ultimately provided
investigators with the raw footage of the Durst interviews and the envelope from Mr.
Durst where his handwriting resembles that on the so-called “cadaver note.” Mr. Lewin,
who specializes in cold cases, then bolstered his investigation with additional evidence,
including dozens of his own interviews with Mr. Durst and others.

The filmmakers say it was not until 2014 that they discovered Mr. Durst’s bathroom
remarks and then alerted Mr. Lewin to the additional audio material

In bringing his case, Mr. Lewin was careful to use a transcript of the actual raw audio
from Mr. Durst, not the edited version that was used in the documentary. Several
defense lawyers said they thought the raw audio was likely to be admissible as evidence.
But they predicted the defense would be careful to screen jurors to eliminate any who
just couldn’t shake what they had heard on TV.

“How many jurors saw ‘The Jinx’ and remember the final lines?” said Ben Brafman, a
criminal defense lawyer in New York. “It’s very prejudicial.”

Beyond the courtroom, the discussion among documentarians is likely to focus on the
question of just what is allowed in such editing. Every filmmaker, or reporter for that
matter, edits interviews for clarity and brevity.

“It’s not deceptive as long as it doesn’t misrepresent what the person says,” said Rick
Goldsmith, co-director of the 2009 documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in
America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.’’ “It’s effective storytelling.”

In Mr. Durst’s case, he began his bathroom soliloquy with perhaps his most damning
statement: “There it is, you’re caught.” The filmmakers say they never intended for the
last two lines they aired to be read as a question followed by an answer.

“We put the line ‘killed them all’ at the very end of the last episode to end the series on a
dramatic note, not to link it to any other line,” said Mr. Stuart-Pontier. “It didn’t occur
to us that other journalists would connect it with ‘What the hell did I do?’ There are
actually 10 seconds between the two lines, and I think the experiences of reading it and
hearing it are very different.”

Documentarians, including Mr. Goldsmith, generally admired the work done on “The
Jinx.” But he said the editing of the final sequence left him queasy. “I was uncomfortable
with that one part of the edit,” he said.

Marcia Rock, director of news and documentaries at New York University’s Carter
Journalism Institute said: “We all edit, we all take things out.”

“The test is,” she continued, “is it still the truth, or are you manipulating the truth?”