Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki knows that voice intimately. It has seeped into his consciousness — the distinctive New York rasp 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 rid of it,” he says.
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Jarecki has heard that voice too many times to count: In interviews, prison phone calls, wiretaps, voicemails — the persistent, insistent whine that conveyed to Durst accomplices, enablers, attorneys, “This is what I need from you.” And his signature sign-off, “Bye bye,” uttered almost mechanically, but with an open-ended undertone that sent a message: “Until the next thing I need from you.”
“His voice was a big part of this kind of hypnotic quality of Bob,” says the director of The Jinx, parts 1 and 2. “He’s able to exert dominance through his voice and through his delivery.”
That larynx, its mesmerizing drone, got people to do things they might not otherwise have done — funnel funds to Durst when he was on the run, say, or dispose of possibly incriminating evidence, overlook his pattern of deceit and homicide. Often with the implicit promise of a payoff. Whenever things looked grim for Bob, someone always came through.
His situation looked particularly dire after the airing of the original Jinx in 2015. In a stunning scene in that series, Durst, unaware he could be heard through a wireless mic, appeared to confess to offing three people — his first wife, Kathie, his friend Susan Berman, and a neighbor in Galveston, Texas whose dismembered body had been found bobbing in Galveston Bay. “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course,” Durst whispered to himself with that nasal whine. Authorities, armed with that recording and more vital clues discovered by Jarecki, zeroed in on Durst, who was then living in Houston. Back against the wall, Durst used his powers of persuasion, and the purse, to enlist the aid of Chris Lovell, a guy who, it just so happened, had served on the jury that acquitted Durst in the Galveston murder trial. After the trial, capital murder defendant and juror had become friends. Imagine that!
“Lovell, the juror in the Galveston case who basically got him off, then went on to help him escape from his apartment in Houston and go on the run,” Jarecki remembers. “Chris Lovell and his wife got more than $700,000 from Bob for helping.”
Susan Giordano, another Durst friend, performed similar services — making sure he had access to cash when authorities were in pursuit. He compensated her to the tune of $350,000. At Durst’s 2020 trial in Los Angeles for allegedly killing Berman — his closest friend — the chief prosecutor questioned Giordano about the arrangement.
“Your relationship consists of you and Bob talking and him sending you lots of money?” Deputy D.A. John Lewin asked her. Giordano replied, “We also went to dinner.”
Part 1 of The Jinx, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, was all about Durst and the question of whether he would face justice after people close to him kept being murdered or disappearing. Part 2, also nominated in that prestigious Emmy category, expands the lens to examine those in Durst’s orbit — alleged aiders and abettors like Giordano, friends Stewart and Emily Altman, and his second wife, Debrah Lee Charatan.
“This story was about pulling the camera back and looking at this constellation of people. It wasn’t just, can Bob Durst sustain another six episodes? It was really, can the world that Bob Durst created for himself sustain our interest?” Jarecki explains. “And I think the answer to that is we are fascinated by seeing ourselves on film. And when you see people committing acts or helping somebody do some very bad things, it forces you to ask yourself those questions. It forces you to say, ‘What would I have done in that situation?’ And that’s when it starts to get really interesting for me.”
The question of complicity is timely right now, Jarecki maintains, pointing to those who surrounded a certain former president of the United States while he was in office.
“You’ve got people saying, ‘Well, I wasn’t the one that did that thing. I was one of the guardrails. I wasn’t there separating children from their parents at the border. I was one of the grownups. I was trying to prevent it from being really bad.’ Oh, really? But you were accepting the title. You were accepting a government job, you were accepting your association with this regime, and yet somehow you came up with a way of explaining it to yourself or your kids that it was OK,” Jarecki charges. “And that’s what we saw in The Jinx. You see people like Susie Giordano or the Altmans just really going to the mat for Bob when they must have known that Bob was committing murders.”
Jarecki’s journey with Durst, his plunge into the man’s “life and deaths” (to quote the series’ subtitle), began almost 20 years ago. As a native New Yorker himself, he was well acquainted with Durst’s reputation.
“Bob Durst was a guy who had been suspected back in 1982 of killing his wife, Kathie, and then was kind of floating around town,” he recalls. “And whenever he would show up somewhere, there’d be a little buzz about him because he seemed to be a guy who got away with killing his wife.”
Flash forward to the year 2000 when then-Westchester County D.A. Jeanine Pirro (yes, that Jeanine Pirro) reopened the case into Kathie Durst’s disappearance. She took interest in Berman, who had acted as a spokesperson for Durst after his wife went missing, and reputedly had provided him with an alibi. Durst, possibly catching wind of this, sent his friend Berman $50,000. Was it to buy her silence? Whatever the case, her silence became 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. Plenty of raw material there for a screenplay. Jarecki turned the twisted tale into the narrative film All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling as a character very much like Durst, and Kirsten Dunst as someone very much resembling Kathie Durst, the wife who disappeared.
“I thought, well, let’s go back to the very beginning of this relationship before everything became this dark burlesque show, and let’s try to figure out what that relationship was all about, hence the casting of Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst,” Jarecki says. “It started with my interest in trying to get to the bottom of who this inscrutable person was and where he came from and what those early days were like.”
Jarecki had reached out to Durst during pre-production on All Good Things, but the centimillionaire (as the director calls him) rebuffed him. Then, one day, the filmmaker found himself on the other end of the line from that hypnotic New York rasp.
“He called me out of the blue and he said, ‘I’ve been hearing 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 you’ve done something that’s 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 film,” Jarecki remembers. “And that’s ultimately what led to the interviews, which became the foundation of The Jinx.”
If Durst had resisted the urge to talk to Jarecki — if he had just kept silent, as he had convinced so many others to do — he might never have gone before a jury in the killing of Susan Berman. Who knows, he might even be alive. (He died in January 2022, less than a year after he was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Berman). 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 brought an abrupt end to Durst’s life sentence.
“It was a little perplexing because I had to ask myself how I felt about it, and my emotions were more complicated,” he says. “There’s no question that I intentionally worked to make sure law enforcement had the material they needed to bring him to trial and ultimately convict him. That was a decision I never questioned. And yet getting to know him the way that I did and seeing that he is a very damaged person, it was just extremely sad. I didn’t think to myself, ‘Well, he got his.’ I really thought, this was such a missed opportunity. This was a guy who had all the resources in the world, absolutely had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had access to any occupation he wanted, and he could have spent his time, I don’t know, getting unfairly convicted people exonerated; he could have spent his time building homeless shelters with his money, and somehow he couldn’t find his way to that kind of occupation. And all that ended up happening was he kind of ate himself up… I just thought of the opportunity he had squandered.”
After nearly two decades on the trail of Robert Durst, the saga is receding in the rear view. Jarecki has shifted his focus to another project that seems to tingle with intrigue.
“We have been working on a feature-length documentary for the last five and a half years that I would say is confidential… because it’s a volatile subject and it’s something that we’ve needed to investigate in an undercover way,” he says. “It’s a really different project about something that is disturbing and fascinating.”
Of his process, Jarecki says this: “I feel like I wander around, and I have a lot of curiosity, and I talk to a lot of people and stories emerge… Things cross your path, and if you’re lucky, you notice.”
He adds, “Our job as storytellers is to try to be open and try to take in those little hints and clues and try to draw out stories that are going to tell us something about human beings.”
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