The Jinx Part Two shows Susan Berman was 'wilfully aware' of Robert Durst's crimes

The Jinx Part Two director Andrew Jarecki's opinion of Robert Durst's victim Susan Berman "really changed" after new evidence was discovered that suggests she helped him cover up the disappearance of his wife Kathie in 1982, he admits to Yahoo.

Berman, who was friends with Durst, was murdered in 2000 at her home in LA. Her death remained unsolved for years until the discovery of a letter that Durst had written to Berman during the filming of The Jinx Part One, which appeared to match a note sent to police after her murder.

The 2024 follow-up to the 2015 documentary features a similarly shocking piece of evidence, a recording of Berman speaking with a man named Albert Goldman in 1982 about Kathie Durst's disappearance. During the conversation Berman appears to test different theories around what could have happened to her, seemingly fishing for ways to suggest to the press that she'd run away or had been killed.

Jarecki was as surprised by the recording of Berman as viewers will be when they watch the docu-series' third episode, telling Yahoo: "It really, really changed my view of the case. It didn't make me think that Bob had killed her any less, I still knew that Bob had killed her.

"But I think I went from seeing Susan as somewhat involved and wilfully ignorant to wilfully aware of what Bob had been doing. That really changes your perception of somebody in the story."

The documentary also shared the theory that Berman impersonated Kathie to say that she was too unwell to attend class at medical school. The conversation was believed to be her last known contact before disappearing.

Read more: The biggest revelations from The Jinx Part Two

"This story has been painted for many years as the terrible murder of three people by an entitled sociopath," Jarecki went on. "Who happens to be extremely charming and funny, and odd and quirky — so you see the roles fairly clearly defined.

"You see Bob as the bad guy and these other people as victims. That changes [in Part Two], and that's not something I expected."

As well as Berman's murder and his wife Kathie's disappearance, Durst was implicated in the 2001 murder of his neighbour Morris Black who was found dismembered in Galverston, Texas, which he was acquitted of in 2003. The real estate heir was arrested for Berman's murder in 2015 after the filmmakers' discovery of the aforementioned letter, and he was found guilty of her murder in 2021.

The director explains that making a follow up to The Jinx wasn't always the plan but something that came out naturally as the case against Durst progressed during the release, and in the aftermath of, Part One. His reasoning for making a second docu-series was simple, there were more people involved with Durst than Part One had previously explored.

"The real thing that drove me to want to do a Part Two was this idea of complicity," Jarecki shares. "The idea that, yes, you have one hypothetically lone wolf person who's off making mischief but the reality is the things that happened to people around Bob Durst could not have happened without the help of a whole group of other people.

"So suddenly I was seeing those people testify [in his trial for Berman's murder] and I was texting with my partner Zach [Stuart-Pontier], and we hadn't really talked about Bob in a consistent way in a while and then all of a sudden he was saying, 'did you see what this person said?' And I said, 'well, did you see what this person said?'

"Then one day I just texted him, I said it 'doesn't this make you want to make more episodes?' And he said yes so that then that's when we started to work on it."

Watch the trailer for The Jinx Part Two:

Jarecki admits he was "amazed that [he] could still be surprised" whilst making Part Two after telling the story for so many years. One person who surprised him was Nick Chavin, one of Durst's longtime friends who features in the documentary and testified against him during his trial.

Chavin was meant to appear in Part One back in 2015, Jarecki reveals, but hid from the documentary team when it was time for his interview after being warned off it by Durst's brother Douglas. In the end, Chavin admitted to Jarecki that not being part of the 2015 docu-series was "the worst mistake [he] ever made" and so he jumped at the chance of featuring in Part Two.

Read more: The Jinx Part Two review: Robert Durst documentary makes a dramatic return

Jarecki describes Chavin as "infuriating" when he looks back, saying: "I felt that there was a good person in there, and yet he was absolutely adamant about describing himself in these very compromised ways. He says 'I guess I just didn't have a problem with murder and murderers', so he sees himself as a bad boy.

"He sees himself as Bob's sidekick, somebody who would go along with whatever anarchic views he and Bob cooked up.

"He saw himself as as a bad boy and I wasn't sure he was a bad boy, I thought he was a sad boy. I thought that he was somebody who had really been taken in by Bob and a lot of things around Bob."

Chavin proved to be an integral voice in the documentary, despite this, sharing how he wanted to be loyal to friend Berman by speaking out. The advertising agent plays a significant role in episode three, where he is seen testifying in court that Durst once admitted to him that he killed Berman.

"I think the experience of him doing it was a lot deeper than he thought," Jarecki says. "Because I thought he was going to go in there and just be Mr Bad Boy and say, 'oh I think Bob is innocent, everybody's being mean to him and I stand by my friends and I'm loyal.' But that's not where it goes with Nick, and it was very, very important I think to have him in the show."

Reflecting on the docu-series as a whole, Jarecki adds: "You learn a lot about how people participated, you learn a lot about who is complicit, how they were complicit and I think why they were complicit. And that's where it gets so interesting to me, because it's not as simple as you would expect.

"Most people would just say 'well of course Bob had all this money, so he was just buying people's silence' or 'he was just buying people's loyalty', I don't think that's true.

"There's no doubt that Bob had a lot of money, and there's no doubt that a lot of these people ended up with some of it in their bank accounts, but I think this story is more. It is deeper, and it's much more revealing about human nature than [that]."

The Jinx Part Two airs Mondays at 9pm on Sky Documentaries.