Back in 2015, the true crime genre’s popularity was exploding across the media landscape thanks to the podcast Serial and the documentary The Jinx. In the years since, however, both series have been called into question. For the former, which concerned the guilt (or lack thereof) of Adnan Syed, an additional documentary and other public matters have brought even more attention to the murder of Hae Min Lee. As for the latter, subject Robert Durst, who was arrested in 2015 on murder charges, is about to go on trial.
According to the New York Times, however, so too is the HBO documentary that supposedly caught his murder confession on tape. That’s because when the filmmakers caught Durst saying to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course,” when he was still wearing his mic en route to the bathroom, it apparently didn’t happen as The Jinx would claim it did:
[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.”
As demonstrated by a transcript provided to the NYT, the two lines said by Durst were actually said in the opposite order of how they appeared in the series. Even so, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier are insisting that their edits are “entirely representative” of what Durst was saying into his hot mic.
(Via New York Times)
