It’s been a while since we last checked in on Robert Durst, the black-eyed, cross-dressing, possibly murderous millionaire whose bizarre life story helped HBO’s The Jinx kick off TV’s current true crime trend.
The five-part docuseries focused on the 73-year-old real estate heir’s involvement in three apparent murders, all of which remain unsolved.
In the shocking final episode, Durst appears to confess to the crimes, muttering “I killed them all” into what he didn’t seem to realize was a live microphone.
Needless to say, this year has been kind of a mixed bag for the aging scions of New York City real estate empires.
Durst is currently behind bars, awaiting trial for the murder of Susan Berman, a longtime friend who was found dead in her home, not long after corroborating Durst’s alibi in his wife’s murder case and accepting a $ 50,000 payment from him.
The case against him may seem pretty open-and-shut, but Durst has beat long odds twice before, being cleared of all wrongdoing in the deaths of both his wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, and another friend, Morris Black.
Now, Durst claims to have an explanation for why he would confess to murders he didn’t commit while talking to himself in an empty room:
“I was on meth. The whole time I was on meth,” Durst said in a jailhouse interview that was filed as evidence by his defense team on Friday.
Durst added that his intoxication “should have been obvious” to anyone who watched The Jinx.
Well, it was certainly clear that something was amiss with Durst, but that’s to be expected when you’re chatting with a guy who’s connected to more disappearances than the Bermuda Triangle.
And if Durst’s meth explanation holds up (and really, who lies about being on meth?) it begs the question:
How long has this bender been going on?
Was he on meth when he (allegedly) left a cat’s head on a judge’s doorstep?
How about when he (allegedly) slaughtered a bunch of dogs named Igor as practice for butchering human flesh?
Look, we fully believe that Durst was consuming loads of Heisenberg-quality crystal while he was filming the interviews that proved to be his undoing, but it’s difficult to chalk all of his behavior up to his drug use.
The fact that Durst has demonstrated a Keith Richards-like longevity as a hard drug user is just one of many factors that’s contributed to a very, very strange life.
