The arrest of Robert Durst, a wealthy eccentric linked to two killings and his wife’s disappearance, preceded Sunday night’s finale of a TV show about Durst’s life in which he said he “killed them all.”
Durst was arrested on a murder warrant Saturday — a day before the finale of an HBO serial documentary about his links to three sensational killings.
In the finale, Durst was asked about similarities in handwriting in a letter he wrote and another linked to one of the killings. Later, filmmakers said Durst wore his microphone into the bathroom.
What followed was a bizarre rambling in which Durst said, apparently to himself, “There it is. You’re caught” and “What the hell did I do? Killed them all of course.”
Mr. Durst was acquitted in the Texas killing, and was never arrested in the disappearance of his wife or the death of his friend. But on Saturday, he found himself in custody once again, arrested on a charge of murder as he walked into a New Orleans hotel he had checked into under a false name.
On Sunday night, in the final moments of the final episode of a six-part HBO documentary about him, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” Mr. Durst seemed to veer toward a confession that could lift the shroud of mystery that surrounds the deaths of three people over the course of three decades.
His brother Douglas, expressed “relief” and gratitude in a written statement.
“We hope he will finally be held accountable for all he has done,” Douglas Durst said.
In 1982, Durst was the only named suspect in the disappearance of his first wife, medical student Kathleen McCormack, who vanished after Durst maintained he dropped her off at a train station near their home north of New York City in Westchester County.
On Chistmas Eve 2000, after investigators looking into the McCormack disappearance contacted Berman, she was found murdered with a gunshot wound to the back of her head. Durst was never charged.
Last week’s HBO episode hinted that Los Angeles detectives were closing in on Durst, showing an apparent match between a Dec. 23, 2000, anonymous letter alerting police to a body at Berman’s address and the handwriting on a letter Durst sent Berman the previous year. Both letters misspelled Beverly Hills as “Beverley.”
