NEW YORK CITY, NY — In the past two months, you’ve probably heard some mention of the name Robert Durst. The real estate millionaire and accused murderer was the subject of an HBO documentary miniseries called “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.” Zac Stuart-Pontier, a local of Narrowsburg and the son of The River Reporter’s publisher Laurie Stuart, was the editor, co-producer and a writer of this riveting series.

The filmmakers, Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, gained access into the world of Durst after they made a movie based on his life in 2010 called “All Good Things.” After seeing the movie, Durst called Jarecki and asked if he would be interested in doing an interview with him. Jarecki said “yes.”

Stuart-Pontier explained that at first, the filmmakers were going to air the Durst interview on TV or use it as a DVD extra for their film, and “that they were considering whether or not they wanted to go down this Bob Durst road again.” But, they felt like it was a much bigger story, so they brought Stuart-Pontier on board to make a movie and began the process of researching and filming. “Gradually it became clear there was too much content,” Stuart-Pontier said. And so, they decided to turn it into a six-part series, each episode around 45 minutes. It uses a range of interviews, reenactments, existing news and security footage, and footage of Jarecki’s film-making process and working relationship with Durst, with whom he became close.

Indeed, there was a lot of footage, and it was Stuart-Pontier’s job as the editor to sort through it and put it together in a cohesive manner. “It came in stages,” he said. “It never was overwhelming, but it was definitely a daunting task to wade through all this different stuff.” He added, “In a lot of ways, documentary editing is going on this journey through all this footage and soaking it all in and digesting it, and when you give it back to the audience you try to get as close as possible to that experience.” The documentary showed in large part the interviews with the characters of the story, everyone who was involved from the cops, detectives and lawyers to Durst family members, to friends of the victims. Stuart-Pontier remarked that it was important to clarify who was talking, and that the perspective became precedent. “I was saying in the edit room, ‘Who are we with right now? If we’re with the Texas cops we can only know what the Texas cops know.’ It was a way of simplifying the storytelling, by forcing the perspective,” he said.

The story is a complex and disturbing tale, one with twists and turns at every step; one without a clear notion of right and wrong, of “did he or didn’t he?” The series focuses on three cases: the unsolved disappearance of Durst’s wife Kathie, the unsolved murder of his friend Susan Berman, and the accidental murder of his neighbor Morris Black, of which he was acquitted after he pled self defense. The friends of Kathie and Susan are convinced that Durst did it, and many people believe the jury was wrong in their verdict of “not guilty” for the Morris Black case.

Stuart-Pontier said the interview with Durst is the “backbone” of the show, and “we knew a big part of the show is Bob gets to tell his story. We had to be true to that and allow him to do that.” The series came to a shocking conclusion. (Spoiler alert!) The filmmakers gained access to a letter that Durst wrote to his friend Susan Berman. The day after Susan was murdered, Beverly Hills Police received a letter with her address and the word “cadaver” written in block letters with the word “Beverley” misspelled. In the letter that Durst wrote to Susan, the block lettering looks very similar to the cadaver note, and Beverley is spelled the same way.

During an interview with Durst, Jarecki confronts him about it, but Durst still denies that he wrote the cadaver note. After the interview, Durst goes into the bathroom unaware that his microphone is still on, and, talking to himself, makes the chilling admission: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The strangeness didn’t stop there: the day before that final episode aired, Durst was arrested in New Orleans on the charge of first-degree murder.

“We had no idea how it was going to end. We went through many different endings,” Stuart-Pontier said. He added that, “For a long time, we weren’t expecting to get to the bottom of it. There was a quest for truth, and there was an idea that we wanted to do right by these people.” These two events catapulted “The Jinx” to national attention, and it received critical acclaim and media buzz. The New York Times called it “gut-wrenching, remarkable television,” and Esquire called the series ending “one of the most jaw-dropping moments in television history.”

The filmmakers acted as investigators and did something documentarians love to do: expose an uncovered truth. “I don’t know if it was growing up in a newspaper family, or my own thinking as a child, but I always loved the idea of being a detective,” Stuart-Pontier said. “I think this is as close as I have ever gotten to that idea or childhood fantasy, and I enjoyed that. It really did feel like we were on an investigation.”

[Zac Stuart-Pontier is a freelance film editor who lives in New York City. He previously worked on the documentary “Catfish” and the feature film “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” He was chosen as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film in 2010. He has also edited numerous short films, music videos and commercials. He also was a columnist for The River Reporter writing the bi-weekly "Letters Home."]