The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

I've never seen anybody send a letter like that

in previous cases stating there's a cadaver,

as he described it, at a certain location,

because he's more or less giving himself up,

whoever sends that, that letter.

It's just a very, very strange thing.

That's her address.

Uh, block letters of somebody who's hiding their signature.

And they spell "Beverly" wrong.

Somebody had to plan to do this.

They had to go to her house, do what they did,

and, and now you're taking this big risk.

Which big risk?

You're writing a note to the police,

that only the killer could have written.

And the police went on and on about

how "cadaver" is the wrong...

you know, most people wouldn't say "cadaver,"

they'd say "body."

They would conclude that that meant

that the person had something to do with

medical or ambulance services,

somebody who is involved in that

and would know and use the word "cadaver" for a body.

I think that word is so telling.

Kathie had a cadaver in medical school.

She didn't give it a name.

You know, she had respect for the fact that

it was a human being, a living human being at one time.

And so... She talked about her cadaver,

and she talked to Bob about the cadaver.

Bob heard that word over and over again

in relation to a dead body.

If you ask anybody how they would describe

a dead body, nobody says "cadaver."

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Yeah, but Wall Street.

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Oh, Jesus.

"Beverley".

I couldn't help but recognize

a similarity between the two.

I want to know what you thought of it.

I don't know enough about handwriting

to be anything other than dangerous,

but I see similarities and I see differences.

- Oh, God. - The "B" is exactly the same.

Son of a bitch.

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Um, so are you going to record our conversation now?

Yeah.

Are you figuring now, or are you done?

No, it's recording.

That's when it goes into digital.

- See that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How do we make sure that we accomplish our goals?

Number one... Get justice such as

we can get in this case.

So we don't want to interfere with

anything that police could do.

We don't want to interfere with anything

that'll continue to get us more evidence

or any of that.

Bob... Second interview.

It's very possible that he goes into

the interview feeling one way,

and he comes out of the interview

feeling a totally different way.

Whether we use it or not, I would love

to do the handwriting exempt thing

that we were talking about.

My name is John Osborn, and I'm a forensic document examiner.

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What I'm immediately looking at is

letter forms which appear more than once.

So, for instance, you have 1, 2, 3 capital letters "N."

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There's some distinctive characteristics of interest.

But in order to determine whether or not

these two writings were prepared by the same person,

you would have to have a significantly larger

quantity of known specimen hand printing

and numerical figures that are comparable...

Not necessarily the same words or names,

and not necessarily in the same order,

but the same individual letters.

All right. So what do we have documents-wise?

How many documents do we have?

- About 40. - That's a lot.

Oh, my God, look at that.

A lease application where Bob says his job

is a chief botanist.

This is good.

There's a ton of them.

They're very similar, all of them.

So what I'm going to do is first take

the cadaver letter

and the envelope that the letter was received in

and separate out each of the letter forms.

What I want to do is perform a comparative analysis

between the individual letters and numerical figures

that appear in the cadaver letter and the envelope

with appropriately comparable known specimens,

submitted as that of Robert Durst.

The "N"s... The more distinctive characteristic.

Let's take a look at this one right here

among our questioned items, and this one right here.

I mean, I would say they're pretty bang on.

These particular characteristics are unique to one person,

and only one person.

You know, this is a guy who in some ways

I've been giving tremendous benefit of the doubt.

You know, not just in terms of

the kinds of questions I ask him,

but in terms of my emotional connection to him.

You know, I like the guy.

This shift, for me, post-L.A.,

and, you know, with everything

that we've learned in the meantime, is big.

And yet it's not, it can't be evidenced

in my relationship with him.

I can't be, I can't be any different.

And yet my feelings about it are very different.

My feelings are, you know, are different not

because I thought, "Well, I was

"sure that Bob was innocent, but

I wasn't sure that Bob was guilty."

And that's a big, big change.

Your call has been forwarded

to an automatic voice message system.

Robert Durst's voice Hi. This is Bob.

Is not available.

Hey, Bob. It's Andrew Jarecki.

I want to sit down and finish our

trailing questions on our interview.

I'm going to need, you know, a, I don't know, a solid day.

So that's my theory. I'm at your disposal. Bye.

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Do we know where he is in Spain?

Yeah, he's in Madrid.

Well, we don't know that he's in Madrid.

I mean, I find him to be...

- Yeah, I doubt he's lying about that... - Truthful.

Are you guys fucking kidding me?

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Wow.

He actually told me he was in Madrid.

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Is not available.

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So how many days till Bob?

Well, today is Tuesday.

- It's a week. - Next Tuesday, one week till Bob.

If he doesn't cancel.

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I mean, I'm very disappointed to not be doing this on Tuesday.

Oh, me, too.

You know? It's kind of killing...

I feel like we're just...

I... I... I hate to say it,