Since the finale of The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, the timeline of that final interview has seen as much scrutiny and investigation than Durst himself. Basically, Durst’s arrest, the one we saw in the finale, happened in 2013. While the episode makes it appear as though this arrest gives Andrew Jarecki and his team “leverage” in procuring Durst for a second interview, they allege that interview took place a full year before the arrest, in 2012, and that they didn’t discover the now infamous bathroom audio (“killed them all, of course”) for more than two years. But now BuzzFeed has found even more holes in the story.
A source close to The Jinx production told BuzzFeed News that the first set of Durst interviews was filmed in Los Angeles in mid-December 2010 over a few days. In the phone calls we hear between Jarecki and Durst trying to schedule the second sit-down, they mention dates in October and November, and we then see a wall calendar for the month of January. So this haggling seems to be taking place in fall 2011 and winter 2012. That would appear to indicate that Sareb Kaufman, Berman’s surrogate son who discovered the “Beverley” envelope from Durst to Berman, found it between late December in 2010 and early fall of 2011. Although it should be noted that during these scenes in which Durst is being elusive, Jarecki does not specifically mention the envelope; he refers to “everything we’ve learned in the meantime.” The filmmakers do consult with forensic handwriting analyst John Osborn on camera, and show him the envelope — but it’s impossible to figure out when any of these events took place. Kaufman did not return a phone call to his office nor a Facebook message from BuzzFeed News asking when he had found the envelope; Osborn told BuzzFeed News, much like Jarecki and Smerling, that because he is a potential witness, he could not answer any questions.
BuzzFeed posits that if the envelope with Durst’s handwriting and misspelling of “Beverley”, this case’s smoking gun, was found in 2010, that means Jarecki and company held onto it for years before giving it to law enforcement. There is also some question regarding when Durst trespassed near his brother Douglas’s home. In the show, they refer to this as occurring weeks after filming, but filming ended in 2012 and he was arrested in 2013, over a year later.
Regardless of the timeline debate, one thing is true, as pointed out by The Toast’s Nicole Cliffe:
https://twitter.com/Nicole_Cliffe/status/577853125886767104
Source: BuzzFeed