Sunday, March 15, 2015

Still in the news: Robert Durst














◼ Did The Jinx's Filmmakers Expect Their Ambush Of Douglas Durst To Work?
Why isn't The Jinx clearer on the Trinidad timeline its own self?

There's a lot of...I wouldn't call it "dead air," but a lot of stuff I feel like we didn't need in "Family Values." The footage of Jarecki putting the letter exemplars in a safe-deposit box; the entire sequence in which Ed Wright can't really talk about what he did or didn't find (and the filmmakers got the report anyway, so why bother with that except to reinforce what we already know about Durst's malleable story about his whereabouts); Durst's visit to his brother's Manhattan townhouse (their estrangement is more than asked and answered, and the "Durst goes to his brother's house with guns in the car" thing isn't followed up terribly well).

Then, when it's time to follow real evidence, like Durst's trip to California in 2000, and his coincidentally silent cell phone when he would have been in Los Angeles, and his smirky "California's a big state," The Jinx doesn't lay its groundwork as carefully. How long has he owned the Trinidad property -- or does he own it, or rent it? How long had his car been in longterm parking? How often did he visit? What about this trip would have been unusual in these respects, besides that Berman ended up dead afterwards?

And once you see the block printing and the misspelling, all of this other "evidence" sort of falls away as far less compelling, so why not boil it down better or cut it entirely? The episode as a whole is not uninteresting, but often feels like it's stalling or needed another editing pass. It's re-answering questions it already asked of some subtopics and not pushing hard enough on others...and thanks to the "cliffhanger" from last time that wound up being a curb cut, I'm not super-confident they can wrap the story in a satisfying way in the hour remaining.
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◼ Manhunt has Humboldt Connection... - North Coast Journal November 29, 2001

◼ With Robert Durst Murder Arrest, National Attention Returns to Karen Mitchell’s Disappearance - Hank Sims/Lost Coast Outpost

The FBI’s arrest of millionaire Robert Durst on murder charges over the weekend has thrown the 1997 disappearance of Eureka teenager Karen Mitchell back into the spotlight....

The Daily News is only one national media outlet looking at the two cases again. EPD Chief Andy Mills told the Outpost earlier that he spoke with NBC Nightly News today, and will likely continue to field calls from national media as they search for the second-day angle on the Durst case.

But Mills wished to have one thing clear: “We have a missing person,” he said. “We don’t have a murder case.”

Mills said that the EPD no longer has the investigative files in the case. They, and the investigation, were turned over to the district attorney’s office some time ago, he said, for reasons that are still unclear to him. However, he would soon be reaching out to the Los Angeles investigators on Durst’s case to see if they might have anything of interest, he said.
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