In the mid-2000s, the director Andrew Jarecki began work on a film called All Good Things . Starring Ryan Gosling, it was loosely based on the real-life story of Robert Durst, an enigmatic New York real estate heir accused of three murders, including that of his Texas neighbour Morris Black. Claiming self-defence, Durst was acquitted of murder, but was found guilty of tampering with evidence; in court in 2003, Durst admitted to having chopped up Black’s body and dumped his remains in the sea.
Speaking from his home in New York, Jarecki, 61, says he was drawn to the story because “it was so unusual to have a guy from this privileged walk of life end up in a $300-a-month rooming house in Galveston, Texas, having just dismembered his neighbour, and who had a wife [who disappeared in mysterious circumstances] and a murdered best friend. It seemed to me it was a unique story and might give a glimpse into the flawed human beings that we call monsters and [help us] understand their motivations.”
All Good Things was released in 2010, after which Jarecki — who made his name with 2003’s Capturing the Friedmans — assumed he was done with the Durst case and “would be able to take this hard drive out of my brain and do something else”. But then Durst contacted him with a proposition: would he like to interview him so he could tell his side of the story? “So I thought, ‘All right. Better put the hard drive back in.’”
Fourteen years and two documentary series later, that hard drive is still whirring. Jarecki’s wildly gripping 2015 HBO series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst was built around interviews with Durst alongside prosecutors, investigators and friends and family of the victims, and ended with a jaw-dropping off-camera confession. Shortly after being shown a letter, the handwriting on which implicated him in the murder of his friend Susan Berman, Durst went to the bathroom where, still wearing a microphone, he was heard to murmur: “There it is, you’re caught . . . What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
Add the fact that the finale of The Jinx aired the day after Durst was arrested for Berman’s murder and you can see why Jarecki wanted to make a sequel. With Durst in jail, there would be no more one-on-one interviews. Instead, The Jinx — Part Two spans eight years and documents the before, during and after of the trial, which took place in 2021. (Durst died early the following year in a prison hospital in California.) The series features footage of Durst’s police interviews and prison visits, and assembles a remarkable cast of talking heads, among them close friends and confidants who have since had cause to examine their relationship with him.
“Thematically, this season is about complicity,” says Jarecki. “While we were making the first season, the same question came up: how do you kill three people over 30 years and get away with it? As we got deeper into it, we realised it takes a village. We were not dealing with Bob Durst the lone wolf, because he was surrounded by all these people.”
They included Susan Giordano, who visited Durst in prison and received money from him to create, in his words, “a love nest” for them after his release, and Nick Chavin, a country singer turned advertising executive who became a key prosecution witness in the 2021 trial. There’s also Chris Lovell, a juror who helped acquit Durst in 2003 and who subsequently struck up a friendship with him. Watching them grapple with the question of why they remained close to a man they knew had carved up his neighbour with a bow saw makes for terrifically uncomfortable viewing.
Jarecki notes that the making of the second series coincided with the Trump presidency, a time when “you had a lot of people who saw themselves as decent getting involved in some very bad behaviour. So that felt powerful to me. These are people under the influence of a spellbinder, whether a Bob Durst or a Donald Trump, powerful personalities who have a hypnotic voice and a natural dominance. Bob was very good at finding people willing to be submissive. Obviously, they got money but it’s not as simple [as greed]. They also just did what he said, and they all had different reasons for doing that.”
In the nine years since The Jinx began, the TV landscape has dramatically changed; true crime is no longer a niche interest but a mainstream obsession. Jarecki’s series helped trigger that craze, though the director has since become dispirited by a genre that has “gotten to a place where it is kind of perverse and a little unhealthy. A lot of people just love the idea that we can figure out who the bad people are and lock them up. If we’re going to keep doing true crime, I would love it if we would move in the direction of a deeper understanding of the nature of crime: that some crimes are crimes of poverty and the majority of people who commit violent crimes have been victims themselves. It’s not just about good or bad.”
Human complexity, then, rather than simplistic notions of good and evil, is at the heart of Jarecki’s work and what has led him to spend more than 20 years on the Durst case. Returning to that final interview, when Jarecki showed Durst the letter that ultimately led to his murder conviction, he recalls: “The journalist part of me was thinking, ‘This is one of the greatest moments of my life.’ But another part of me felt sad that this incredible charade this man had persisted with for years was all coming down to this terrible moment of truth. In that moment, he was closer than he’d ever been to blurting it out.
“And then what happens? We finish the interview, shake hands and he goes to the bathroom and immediately says: ‘There it is, you’re caught.’ Durst just had this compulsion to confess. And it was tragic, you know?”
With Durst now dead, Jarecki can say with certainty that he has reached the end of the road with the case and the hard drive can finally come out. “I know how fortunate I am to have walked into a deep and extraordinary story that changed as, and sometimes because, we were studying it. I’ll be nostalgic for all the discoveries but equally excited to see what fills the void.”
‘The Jinx — Part Two’ is on Sky Documentaries and NOW in the UK from April 22 and on HBO in the US from April 21