Andrew Jarecki on Peeking into the Dark Mind of Killer Robert Durst

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki knows this voice intimately. It has seeped into his consciousness: the unmistakable, raspy voice of Robert Durst, scion of a powerful New York real estate family and a man suspected of triple murder.

“Once it’s in your head, you can’t get it out,” he said.

Jarecki heard that voice too many times to count: in interviews, in jailhouse phone calls, in wiretaps, in voicemails—the persistent, insistent complaint that conveyed to Durst’s accomplices, co-conspirators, and lawyers: “This is what I need from you.” And his signature “Goodbye,” spoken almost mechanically but with an open voice that sent a message: “Until the next thing I need from you.”

“His voice played a big part in this sort of hypnotic quality of Bob,” says the director of The Jinxparts 1 and 2. “He is able to exercise his dominance by his voice and his elocution.”

That larynx, that haunting buzz, drove people to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise—for example, donating money to Durst while he was on the run, or eliminating potentially incriminating evidence, turning a blind eye to his habits of deception and homicide. Often with the implicit promise of a reward. Whenever things looked bleak for Bob, someone always came to the rescue.

His situation seemed particularly dire after the first episode aired. Bad Luck In a stunning scene from 2015, Durst, unaware that he could be heard through a wireless microphone, seemingly confesses to killing three people: his first wife, Kathie, her friend Susan Berman, and a neighbor from Galveston, Texas, whose dismembered body was found floating in Galveston Bay. “What the hell did I do? I killed them all, of course,” Durst mutters in that nasal voice. Authorities, armed with the recording and other vital clues Jarecki had uncovered, zeroed in on Durst, who was then living in Houston. With his back to the wall, Durst used her powers of persuasion and her purse to enlist the help of Chris Lovell, a man who happened to be on the jury that acquitted Durst in the Galveston murder trial. After the trial, the capital murder defendant and the juror became friends. Imagine that!

“Lovell, the juror in the Galveston case who acquitted him, later helped him escape from his Houston apartment and flee,” Jarecki recalled. “Chris Lovell and his wife received more than $700,000 from Bob for their help.”

Susan Giordano, another friend of Durst’s, performed similar favors for him, ensuring he had access to cash when authorities were pursuing him. He compensated her $350,000. At Durst’s 2020 trial in Los Angeles for allegedly killing Berman, his closest friend, the lead prosecutor questioned Giordano about the arrangement.

“Your relationship consists of conversations between you and Bob, and Bob sends you a lot of money?” Assistant District Attorney John Lewin asked. Giordano responded, “We also went to dinner together.”

Part 1 of The Jinxwhich won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, was all about Durst and whether he would be brought to justice after people close to him were murdered or disappeared. Part II, also nominated for that prestigious Emmy category, expands the scope to examine those around Durst: alleged accomplices like Giordano, his friends Stewart and Emily Altman, and his second wife, Debrah Lee Charatan.

“This story was about stepping back and looking at this constellation of characters. It wasn’t just a question of whether Bob Durst could sustain himself for six more episodes. It was a question of whether the world that Bob Durst created could sustain our interest,” Jarecki says. “And I think the answer to that question is that we’re fascinated by watching ourselves on film. And when you see people doing really bad things or helping someone else do really bad things, it forces you to ask yourself those questions. It forces you to think, ‘What would I have done in that situation?’ And that’s where it starts to get really interesting to me.”

The question of complicity is a hot one, Jarecki argues, pointing the finger at those who surrounded a certain former US president while he was in office.

“You have people who say, ‘Well, I didn’t do this. I was one of the gatekeepers. I wasn’t there to separate children from their parents at the border. I was one of the adults. I was trying to keep this from getting really bad.’ Oh, really? But you accepted the title. You accepted a government job, you accepted your association with this regime, and yet somehow you found a way to explain to yourself or to your children that this was OK,” Jarecki charges. “And that’s what we saw in The Jinx. You see people like Susie Giordano or the Altmans fighting for Bob even though they knew Bob was committing murders.

Jarecki’s journey with Durst, his immersion into the man’s “life and death” (to use the series’ subtitle), began nearly 20 years ago. As a New York native himself, he was well aware of Durst’s reputation.

“Bob Durst was a man who had been suspected in 1982 of killing his wife, Kathie, and who was wandering around town,” he recalls. “And every time he showed up somewhere, there was a little bit of a buzz around him because he seemed like a man who had gotten away with killing his wife.”

Fast forward to the year 2000, when Jeanine Pirro, then Westchester County District Attorney (yes, that Jeanine Pirro reopened the case of Kathie Durst’s disappearance. She focused on Berman, who had served as Durst’s spokesman after his wife’s disappearance and allegedly provided him with an alibi. Durst, perhaps having learned of the case, sent $50,000 to his friend Berman. Was this to buy his silence? Either way, his silence was guaranteed after her body was discovered in her Los Angeles home, her skull shattered by a bullet to the head.

After Berman’s death, Durst hid out in Galveston, disguising himself as a mute woman. It was the stuff of screenplays. Jarecki turned the twisted story into a narrative film. All good thingsstarring Ryan Gosling as a character very close to Durst, and Kirsten Dunst as someone very similar to Kathie Durst, the missing wife.

“I thought it was best to go back to the very beginning of this relationship, before it all became a dark burlesque show, and try to understand what this relationship was, hence the choice of Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst,” Jarecki explains. “It all started with me wanting to find out who this inscrutable man was, where he came from and what those early days were like.”

Jarecki had contacted Durst during pre-production on All good thingsbut the centimillionaire (as the director calls him) pushed him away. Then one day, the filmmaker found himself on the other end of the line with this hypnotizing New York husky.

“He called me out of the blue and said, ‘I’ve heard good things about this movie. I know you called me a few years ago… I didn’t know what you were working on. Now it’s clear that you’ve done something thoughtful. You’ve done your homework, you’ve done your research. I’d like to see the movie.’ And then we agreed to let him see the movie,” Jarecki recalls. “And that’s ultimately what led to the interviews, which became the basis of The Jinx.”

If Durst had resisted the urge to talk to Jarecki—if he had simply kept silent, as he convinced so many others to do—he might never have stood trial in front of a jury for Susan Berman’s murder. Who knows, he might even be alive. (He died in January 2022, less than a year after being convicted of first-degree murder in Berman’s death.) Jarecki learned of Durst’s death while in the middle of an interview for The Jinx, Part 2; cameras captured his reaction as he took the call informing him that a heart attack had abruptly ended Durst’s life sentence.

“It was a little confusing because I had to ask myself how I felt about it, and my emotions were more complicated,” he says. “There’s no doubt that I deliberately worked to make sure that law enforcement had the evidence they needed to bring him to justice and ultimately convict him. It’s a decision I never questioned. And yet, knowing him the way I did and seeing that he’s a very damaged person, it was just incredibly sad. I didn’t think, ‘Well, he’s been convicted.’” her“I thought it was a missed opportunity. Here was a guy who had all the resources in the world, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who had access to any job he wanted, and he could have spent his time, I don’t know, exonerating wrongfully convicted people; he could have spent his time building homeless shelters with his money, and for some reason or another, he couldn’t find a way to get into that kind of business. And all that happened was he kind of got himself into it… I just thought what an opportunity he had wasted.”

After nearly two decades of following Robert Durst, the saga is moving away a bit. Jarecki has focused on another project that seems to be generating intrigue.

“We’ve been working for five and a half years on a feature-length documentary that I would call confidential… because it’s an explosive subject and we had to investigate it in a secret way,” he explains. “It’s a really different project on a subject that is both disturbing and fascinating.”

Jarecki says of his process: “I feel like I’m walking around, I have a lot of curiosity, I talk to a lot of people and stories emerge… Things cross your path, and if you’re lucky, you notice them.”

He adds: “Our job as storytellers is to try to be open and try to take these little clues and these little hints and try to pull out stories that are going to tell us something about human beings.”