HBO's The Jinx edited Robert Durst's alleged confession out of order

The New York Times

At the end of HBO's 2015 headline-grabbing documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Durst is heard off-camera in the bathroom with his mic still on saying, “What the hell did I do? ... Killed them all, of course.” That revelation left viewers stunned. But according to The New York Times, "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." The Times also reports that 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.' So even though it’s Mr. Durst who is facing a possible prison term, the documentarians — Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier — will also be scrutinized as their decision-making is challenged by the defense at trial." While the filmmakers defend their edits as being entirely representative of what Durst said, other documentarians are questioning it as being problematic. Stuart-Pontier, meanwhile, is defending the edited lines. “We put the line ‘killed them all’ at the very end of the last episode to end the series on a dramatic note, not to link it to any other line,” said Mr. Stuart-Pontier. “It didn’t occur to us that other journalists would connect it with ‘What the hell did I do?’ There are actually 10 seconds between the two lines, and I think the experiences of reading it and hearing it are very different.”