The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki on Durst's bathroom confession: 'It took a while to really understand the impact'

Andrew Jarecki
(Image credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

Robert Durst, the subject of the HBO true-crime documentary series The Jinx, was arrested on Saturday night in connection with a homicide investigation — just a day before HBO aired the final episode of the series, which ended with Durst muttering that he "killed them all, of course" into a hot microphone while using the bathroom.

Given that the murders in question took place decades before the HBO series aired — and that Durst was arrested less than 24 hours before The Jinx premiered its finale — viewers have been left wondering: when did The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki and his team discover Durst's off-camera confession, and when did they share it with law enforcement authorities?

"The fact is, it's a small documentary crew, and we were all working very hard," said Jarecki in a Monday interview on Good Morning America. "It wasn't until later, when we brought on some more editors, that we had the time to go through the old material. And we said to one of the editors, 'Why don't you go through the old material that just has audio?' Because the only time you really look at stuff is when it has video and audio, because you're making a film. And of one of the editors came back, and said, 'I think I found something.'"

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"It took a while to really understand the impact of it," said Jarecki. "It was so chilling to hear it, it was disturbing to hear it, it makes you very uncomfortable to hear it."

Jarecki also says that his team shared the bathroom audio with law enforcement shortly after it was discovered, and that there was no coordination whatsoever between law enforcement and HBO on the timing of Durst's arrest. "We don't have that kind of power," he explained.

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Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.