His wife vanished in 1982 and was never found. His best friend was shot in the head in her own home. His neighbor was found in pieces floating in a Texas bay. For 30 years he walked free, until he stepped into a bathroom during a TV interview and forgot he was still wearing a microphone:
“There it is. You’re caught.” Then: “What a disaster.” Then the line HBO would air three years later, in the last minutes of the series: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
His name was Robert Durst, heir to one of Manhattan’s biggest real estate fortunes. The interview was filmed in 2012 for HBO’s The Jinx. Minutes before the bathroom, the filmmaker had shown him two envelopes with the same misspelled word. Nobody noticed the audio for more than two years, until someone on the team listened to the end of the tape.
His wife Kathie was a 29-year-old medical student. His friend Susan Berman, 55, was killed in Beverly Hills in December 2000. Prosecutors said she had given him a fake alibi. Someone then mailed police a note with her address and one word: “CADAVER.” Beverly was spelled “Beverley.”
A year later in Galveston, Texas, where Durst was living disguised as a mute woman, his neighbor Morris Black was killed and cut up. Durst admitted cutting up the body but said the shooting was self-defense. The jury acquitted him.
The envelope that broke him came from Berman’s stepson, who found an old 1999 letter from Durst. It had the same block letters and the same “Beverley.” On camera Durst said, “I wrote this one but I did not write the cadaver one.” Then he couldn’t tell which was which.
On March 14, 2015, the night before the final episode aired, the FBI arrested him at a New Orleans hotel where he’d paid in cash under a fake name. In his room were a latex mask, a .38 revolver and about $42,000, mostly in $100 bills.
In the video below is the end of that bathroom recording. It’s mostly just his voice, muttering and burping to himself, with no idea the recording never stopped.
In September 2021 a Los Angeles jury convicted him of murdering Susan Berman, and he got life without parole. At trial it came out that HBO had rearranged his words: he said “Killed them all, of course” first and “What the hell did I do?” later. On the stand he finally admitted he wrote the cadaver note. Three months after his sentence, he died in custody at 78.
Was that bathroom a confession to three killings, or did a film edit turn an old man’s mumbling into one?
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A drug-addicted, lesbian, crazy woman in her 20s, a single camera, and a California psychiatric hospital where the doctors wanted to study her. Her file listed being a lesbian right next to theft, as if they were the same kind of problem. In 1967 they sat her down, switched the camera on, and for 27 minutes tried to work out what was wrong with her. More than 2 million strangers have now watched it. The rest of her file read:
“Drug addiction. Lesbianism. Promiscuity. Illegitimate pregnancies. Multiple marriages. Bad checks.”
That’s Patient No. 1. The doctors never recorded her name. She walked into the hospital on her own and signed herself in, and when she came off drugs, they wrote, she slipped into psychosis.
Their diagnosis was antisocial personality disorder. The University of California turned her interview into a teaching film to show medical students what an antisocial and impulsive personality looks like up close. It sat in an educational archive for decades before it reached YouTube.
In the video below she sits across from the doctor and walks him through that file, one item at a time, and never seems to think any of it was a big deal.
Today the same diagnosis is given to roughly 1 to 3% of adults, 3 times more often to men than women. And 6 years after this film was made, in 1973, psychiatrists stopped calling homosexuality a mental illness. Everything else on her list stayed.
Would you trust her?
1
104
Bipolar manic episode, caught on camera in a 1980s psychiatric interview. Judy was in her 40s, she’d just survived a 13-hour Greyhound ride to her 25th class reunion, and for 6 straight minutes she rocks, nods and laughs so hard she can barely get the words out:
“I was on a high I’ve never been on in my life.”
At 5 in the morning she was on the phone in someone else’s kitchen. The woman she was staying with got so angry she walked out of her own house, and her boyfriend called to tell Judy off. He called her “crazy manic.” She told the doctor: “He doesn’t understand me. But neither do I.”
Her luggage never showed up, so she bought a yellow dress, “a knockout,” because yellow “does more for my personality and confidence than any other color.” At a lake party, she says, 4 or 5 men begged her for “an Esther Williams number,” called her the “sex pot of the class” and asked when she’d be in Playboy.
In the video below she jumps from luggage to dresses to swimsuits to compliments without stopping, laughs at her own jokes “like Joan Rivers,” and never once notices anything is wrong. Her last words: “I was right on top of the world.”
About 4.4% of American adults will have bipolar disorder at some point in their lives. A manic episode has to last at least 7 days to be diagnosed, and it usually starts around age 25. In the 1980s the main treatment was lithium, approved in the US in 1970.
Is she the happiest person in that room, or the sickest?