I’ve been watching that show The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst on HBO. Have you seen it? It’s a six-part docu-series that follows Manhattan real estate scion Robert Durst’s life in order to retrace his past and to make sense of his present. See, Durst has been a suspect in three homicides since the eighties. First his wife disappeared off the planet, never to be seen or heard from again; then his best friend was shot in the head in her California home; and finally, there was the grumpy old neighbor in Texas Durst did admit to shooting, but he claims he did so in self-defense. The dismembering of the body that took place after he shot the guy? That was just strategic thinking to enable him to get a dead body out of a house without drawing too much attention to himself, and he couldn’t very well carry the thing in one piece since he’s a man of very short stature.
Besides, he had spent the last several months masquerading as a mute woman.
(That was not a typo, but the mute woman part of the story requires a lengthy explanation, so to save time, simply allow me to say that he wanted a disguise and felt he couldn’t speak convincingly as a woman, hence the mute factor. It’s actually a rather decent idea and I shall snag every single thing I want for myself in the future by impersonating a mute Kanye West, which is really the very best kind of Kanye West.)
The only murder Durst was tried for was the guy he dismembered. He told a long and convoluted story about how the murder transpired, taking the witness stand to the shock of most assembled in that courtroom. He weaved an awesomely bizarre story out of only split ends and gnarled pieces of rope and a commitment to making people believe him and he ended the story by saying, “I did not kill my best friend; I did dismember him,” and watching it all made me feel terribly cold inside and I thought that I should probably call that girl I cut out of my life back when I was a sophomore in high school to tell her that it’s fine that she was talking some sh*t about me at Nick’s house – at least she didn’t try to dismember me.
Durst got away with that murder. He claimed he had to shoot his best friend in the head in self-defense, but somehow – even though the other limbs and appendages were recovered – the head of his buddy has never been seen again and the jury found him not guilty of murder in a decision so stunning and weird that I can only assume that they were all afraid he would lob their heads off too while dressed as a Swedish woman named Svenhilda.
Last night, just hours before the final episode of the series aired, Durst was arrested for the second of the murders, that of his friend who died several decades ago when she was shot directly in the head in her Los Angeles home. He was apprehended in New Orleans where he was staying at a hotel under an alias and it looks very likely that some of what got him caught for a murder he has avoided charges of for a very long time is directly related to comments he made on The Jinx and to evidence unearthed by the participants of the show and by the filmmakers. Who knows what will eventually happen – I mean, the guy already got acquitted by one jury after fully admitting to dismembering someone – but he might get nailed now for this murder and that is probably a very good thing because this man, though old and rickety-looking, is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to achieve whatever he decides are his immediate goals.
I think that one of the things that I like so much about The Jinx is that I really appreciate watching programming that revolves around less sociopathic behavior than what is typically illustrated on Vanderpump Rules. That’s right: a hacksaw-wielding murder dressed like a mute woman who tossed a severed head into the floating abyss serves as a palate cleanser for having to watch Kristen and Jax and Stassi try to make sense instead of making amends for constantly behaving like toddlers on crack.
The last part of the Reunion begins with the focus centered squarely on Stassi, so that means that the seating plan of the first segment needed to be rearranged so that Stassi could be plunked down next to Katie, the friend she so gleefully passed judgment on before cutting her from the fabric of her life like Katie was one of those bullshi*t extra buttons that come hanging on the tag of a shirt that you will never use anyway. To make room for the most manipulative example of feng shui ever witnessed outside of an interrogation room (I’m sorry; I’ve got murderers on the mind today) James and Kristen had to be moved to the back row, where we got to see them hover behind Katie and Stassi in the most terrifying bit of framing I have ever seen on a reality show and now lets me know exactly I will visually portray the first sign of a haunting should I ever decide to make my very own possession film.
Incidentally, Kristen scares me even more than Robert Durst, and he’s got a body count.
Thank you!
🙂
-Nell