HBO Runs 'Harrowing Con Man Doc' about Westchester's Robert Durst

The strange tale of Westchester native Robert Durst, the real-estate heir who killed and cut up a neighbor in Texas in 2001 and is suspected of murdering his wife in 1982 in Bedford and a friend in 2000 in California, is the subject of a new documentary on HBO.

Titled The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, the 6-part series started Sunday night and runs into March. It’s by Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, who created and produced the 2010 film based on the Scarsdale-born recluse, All Good Things.

Critics like the new show. Jeremy Gerard called it a “harrowing con man doc.”

“We see creepy re-enactments of the various horrors, interviews with his lawyers and his victim’s close friends, along with the flummoxed (and none-too-bright) investigators into the crimes,” wrote Gerard on deadline.com. See his full review below.

Reporter Jon Bandler of The Journal News, who has covered the strange story of Robert Durst for years, noted in his article on the documentary that Durst admits lying to police about his wife Kathie’s disappearance from their weekend lakefront home in South Salem.

Though her family has long insisted that Durst murdered her, he was never charged. Nor was he charged in the unsolved, execution-style killing of Susan Berman, his friend who died just before New York State Police and Westchester County officials sought to question her about Kathie Durst’s disappearance.

In the one death he stood trial for, he cited self-defense (successfully—he was acquitted) as his reason for shooting elderly Morris Black, cutting him into pieces and throwing the body parts into Galveston Bay. Before that trial, he ran, touching off a national search when ended when he was caught shoplifting a sandwich (he had $520 in his pocket and $37,000 in the car, as well as Black’s driver’s license).

Now 72, Durst was again in court in 2014—in Texas where he took a plea deal after he urinated on a counterful of candy bars and a cash register while picking up a prescription at a CVS and in New York City, where he was acquitted of trespassing at his estranged relatives’ residences and the judge vacated the orders of protection they had against him.

Sundays at 8PM on HBO.