Via NYT:
The filmmakers, Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, had seemingly managed to elicit a confession from Mr. Durst, who had been connected to three murders over three decades. But with this cinematic coup came questions. When had the filmmakers shared their most incriminating discoveries with law enforcement officials? Had justice been delayed — and a suspected murderer allowed to remain free — for the sake of their story? Could the climactic grand finale of “The Jinx” ultimately become fodder for Mr. Durst’s defense team?While I see what many are getting at with this line of questioning, where the f**k is the outrage at three police departments and one prosecutor's office for the complete bungling of the murder investigations of three families' loved ones? For 30 years no one bothered to check with the doorman at the Dursts' Manhattan apartment to see if Kathie really was seen coming home that night -- everyone just took it at face value when Durst's rep said she had? No one ever pressed Susan Berman's "step" children for her personal effects or potentially relevant material? Prosecutors in Galveston couldn't make the effort to come up with a motive or logical explanation to explain the crime? (And did anyone bother to file charges for abuse of a corpse? Sure, they acquitted him on murder charges, but it's not illegal in Texas to DISMEMBER A DEAD BODY -- or did I miss that?)
I just find it so typical that when some people actually do their job well, they're the ones who end up getting criticized. As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with Jeanine Pirro when she tells it like it:
Kudos goes to Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling. I mean, their tenacity and their determination and their wit and intelligence in moving this case forward is really unparalleled.If only she were saying this about the authorities in New York, L.A. or Galveston.
Sure, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. But after 15-30 years of waiting, I'm sure the families are more than pleased with the way Jarecki and Smerling went about it. And if they had done one thing differently, how do we know it would have turned out like it did?
2 comments:
What I hear from Pirro is that she and the Westchester DA's office DIDN'T do their job. The whole, 'we were GOING to interview Susan Berman (you know - 18 years after Kathie Durst disappeared) hardly holds water.
And I'm not buying for a second that Jarecki "found" the audio of Durst's 'admission' two years after filming. I'm calling bullshit on that.
While I'm generally sanguine about how Jarecki went about putting together an unbelievably compelling work -- in particular because it does seem like he wants to dot his Is and cross his Ts as far as the new charges brought up against Durst -- the main thing I find irksome about the jerking around about the timeline stuff was crystallized for me by this (decidedly negative) piece:
http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/03/18/3635344/pressing-questions-jinx-answered-legal-experts/
Why did Part 6 seem at pains to set it up as though the trespassing arrest (from late 2014) led directly to the second interview featuring the confrontation on the writing sample (which we now know -- or do we? -- came two years ago)? I'd been thinking there was a quid pro quo there, when now it seems completely unrelated. What, then, did lead Durst back to the interview table when it seemed like he'd had enough? Just happenstance? Seems needlessly (manipulatively?) muddled.
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