by Gill Pringle
After making 2010 feature film All Good Things, about real life triple-murderer Robert Durst – starring Ryan Gosling and Kristen Dunst – filmmaker Andrew Jarecki found himself swept into the world of a killer.
Just as Jarecki was set to release All Good Things, he was surprisingly contacted by the real killer, going on to make Emmy-winning 2015 docu-series, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.
And, in doing so, essentially helped put Durst behind bars.
The son of a wealthy real estate magnate, Durst first gained attention as a suspect in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack; the 2000 murder of his longtime friend, Susan Berman; and the 2001 killing of his neighbour, Morris Black.
Acquitted of murdering Black in 2003, Durst faced no further legal action until his participation in The Jinx led him to be charged with Berman’s murder. Convicted in 2021 and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, he was charged with McCormack’s disappearance shortly after his sentencing but died in 2022 before a trial could begin.
“I was sort of done with Bob Durst after making All Good Things,” says Jarecki. I had researched the story and thought, ‘well, I’ve gotten as close as I could get without talking to the real guy’.
“But then, Bob reached out to me in a very strange way and said, ‘Hey, I hear you’ve made this film about me and there’s this fancy actor playing me, etcetera. I’d like to see it’. And we arranged to see each other here in Los Angeles and for him to watch the film at a little screening room by himself.
“He had originally said to me, ‘Well, it’s going to probably take me a while to absorb this story about my life, so I probably won’t call you right away after I see it’.”
But Durst called him within minutes after seeing the film. “He said, ‘I want you to know, I liked the movie very much. I cried three times. Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife Kathy, and you’ve really done your homework on Bob Durst, so maybe we should talk about doing something together’. He was also flattered because Ryan Gosling played him in the film,” says Jarecki, 61, who wasn’t sure if much could come out of finally getting to know the real Durst.
“There was a reluctance, just because I thought, ‘well, what more is there?’ But then after the 21 hours of interviews, it was clear that he was going to be shockingly candid about a lot of things that he had never said before. And so, we were on this other ride, so we dug in and started making it,” he recalls.
“And that led us into interviewing him for about 21 hours just thinking, ‘well, this is going to be interesting. This is a guy who’s never spoken publicly before. Let’s see what he has to say. And he gave such a remarkable set of answers to questions, including a lot of questions that were disarmingly honest because he’s very good at connecting with you and telling you things that you might be surprised by.
“And I think that for years people thought, ‘well, if he’s that honest about those things, he must be telling the truth about everything, which turns out not to be true. But at that point, we had all these interviews and decided to make something out of it,” says the filmmaker, musician and entrepreneur who is also known for the Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans.
If the premise is that Durst is a “jinx” – murdering three people close to him – then Jarecki ultimately feared that his own proximity to the killer might result in the same fate. His anxiety kicked in as the fifth episode episode of Jinx Part 1 aired. “Bob got to see the evidence, and he thought, ‘well, now I’m in real trouble, and there’s still a sixth episode coming’. So, in that period of time, I did start to feel nervous. He had said to somebody he was very angry – and he was angry at me,” Jarecki recalls.
At the same time, the FBI lost Durst, who managed to dump his cellphone, change cars and disappear.
“My wife Nancy and I had gotten a security detail between Episodes 3 and 6. I remember us talking in the kitchen and we were taking our daughter to school the next day, and she was very young at the time. And we were sitting at the table, and I said to her, very nonchalantly,
‘oh, by the way, tomorrow when we take you to school we are going to have a different driver. We’re going to have another person take us’. And she immediately started crying. So, that was intense because she knew that it was dangerous. And I hadn’t really felt danger, but I knew that I felt danger for her all of a sudden,” says the New York-based filmmaker.
“And then, just weirdly, Bob, when he came for that first interview – he was driving a canary yellow smart car, which you would think is an odd choice for a guy who ought to be keeping a low profile. But no, not at all.
“And so, we went out one night and came back and there was a canary yellow smart car parked directly in front of our building on 66th Street. And we both, like, just stood back and watched. And then we went over to the doorman and asked, ‘what’s going on with the car?’ And he said, ‘oh, Mr. Jarecki, I’m sorry, I parked my car right in front of the door, I’ll move it’. And I said, ‘oh, no, thank God. It’s great. I love that it’s your car’,” Jarecki laughs.
If nobody would actually want Durst as a “friend”, then it’s clear that Jarecki did become somewhat close to his twisted subject – to the point of almost feeling a little responsible for his arrest.
“After he was arrested, and he’s in jail in New Orleans, I felt oddly guilty. I just felt like, what a terrible situation he is in – even if he deserves it. Both things were true for me. I felt responsible and I felt I needed to connect with him. And so, I was taking our daughter to Jazz Fest, and I looked up St. Charles Parish jail, and I told her I was going to go see a friend. I said, ‘you stay in the room and don’t answer the door’,” he says.
Waiting in his car outside the jailhouse, he witnessed Durst returning from an appointment, chained in the back of a van.
“I just watched as these two officers came out and opened the double doors, and out comes little Bob with leg irons and handcuffs, and he kind of shuffles across the tarmac. And I said, ‘Bob, it’s Andrew’. I was in bright sunlight and he was in the shade. And he kind of peeked out at me, and he thought for a second, and then he shuffled back in the room. And then, I was filming, so one of the cops came over and was like, ‘you can’t be doing that’.
“So, I walked back in and asked if he would see me. It’s very boring in here and he likes action. So, if I came all the way to see him, maybe he’s going to come see me. But he declined my visit,” Jarecki says.
Ask the filmmaker how Part 2 differs from the first series, he says, “with Part One, everybody is talking about a historical set of facts. And there are revelations obviously in Part One, but it is largely the telling of a series of stories that have happened in the past.
“And the second part is happening in the moment, where we are really following along as these developments are happening, starting with him getting arrested the day before the final episode of The Jinx. And so, the urgency is much higher. The anxiety level for a lot of the people involved is much higher.”
Of course, it was the evidence discovered by Jarecki and his team that led to Durst finally being successfully prosecuted.
Talking about his role in putting Durst behind bars, Jarecki says, “it was a very nerve wracking thing. Because we suddenly had these dual roles. On the one hand, we felt that we wanted to make a compelling human story. We wanted something that the audience would be grabbed by, surprised by. And then suddenly, we had this evidence that we were surprised by. We always knew that there was a very good chance that Bob had killed these three people. But suddenly, we were faced with evidence that made it clear that that was the case and we thought could be determinative in a trial. If there was ever going to be a murder trial, we thought Bob would be convicted based on that evidence.”
With Durst’s death, Jarecki can today breathe more easily.
The Jinx: Part Two is streaming now.
