Robert Durst Gave a Fascinating Interview the Day The Jinx Ended

Why would Robert Durst, the real estate scion worth an estimated $100 million, ignore his lawyers’ advice and risk his freedom by blabbing to The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki about the three murders of which he had long been suspected? That’s one of the questions cold case specialist John Lewin asked Durst when he sat down with him on March 15, 2015, shortly after the FBI arrested Durst in a New Orleans hotel, and the same day that The Jinx’s bombshell finale aired.

The interview, which Durst agreed to do at New Orleans Parish jail without a lawyer present, is excerpted in the first episode of HBO’s The Jinx Part Two. The entire nearly three-hour conversation is also available via transcript, and is a fascinating read—a glimpse into Durst’s psyche and the strategy of Lewin, the deputy district attorney who would eventually put Durst away for the 2000 murder of his best friend Susan Berman. It’s a true-crime cat-and-mouse dialogue that spanned subjects including Durst’s crimes, his family history, his attitude toward dogs, his drug use, and a potential plea deal.

Again and again, as Lewin pointed out in the interview, Durst, who died in custody in 2022, answered questions and volunteered information that most men arrested for murder would not. He was unafraid to cast himself in an unflattering light, even though he said he had participated in The Jinx because he was hoping for an image boost.

Explaining why he did the docuseries, Durst referred Lewin to Jarecki’s 2010 narrative drama, All Good Things. The film is about a thinly veiled Durst proxy, played by Ryan Gosling, who is suspected of murdering his wife (Kirsten Dunst) after she mysteriously vanishes. Then other people in his life begin to go missing as well.

“The way they made All Good Things, it made me…a sympathetic person, as opposed to a super-aggressive person—which is pretty much correct,” Durst told Lewin of the film, which includes flashbacks of the Durst proxy character’s traumatic childhood. So Durst reached out to Jarecki to tell him he liked the film. At that time, the real estate heir was something of a social pariah. Though he had been acquitted of the 2001 murder of his Galveston, Texas, neighbor Morris Black, his explanation—that he killed Black out of self-defense and dismembered Black’s body because he thought police wouldn’t believe his story—didn’t necessarily endear him to New York society.

After seeing All Good Things, Durst thought Jarecki might make a similarly sympathetic documentary-style project about the real man who had inspired his film. “I wanted them to see the whole thing, and—that they would see me as an acceptable human being, as opposed to all this other stuff,” he explained.

Lewin politely interjected: “All Good Things, you agree, presents you as somebody who’s responsible for three murders. Right?”

“Right,” Durst agreed.

By this point, Lewin had listened to Jarecki’s 20 hours’ worth of Jinx interviews. He reminded Durst that the millionaire had said in the past that something did bother him about All Good Things.

“Oh, killing all the dogs,” Durst remembered. (Gosling’s character kills the family dog in the film.) Lewin theorized that Durst would never hurt a dog. Durst agreed, though he couldn’t answer as definitively on the subject of hurting women. (When Lewin suggested Durst dismembered the body of his first wife, Kathie, Durst replied, “I’m not gonna go there.”)

Though Durst was worth an estimated $100 million, he admitted to applying for food stamps because he got a kick out of cheating the government. He said he had shoplifted “since I was a little kid” because he had no interest in waiting in line. “I’ve got other things I want to do,” he said. Other kids are taught to respect authority; as Durst told Lewin, “I didn’t have to follow the rules.” At another point, Durst said he declined a television network’s offer to make a special on him that would cast him as a good person. That would be going too far, in Durst’s book: “I never felt that I was really a good guy,” he said.

He volunteered that a previous lawyer didn’t want him to tell the Galveston, Texas, jury about his daily routine: “I’m a millionaire. I don’t have to work. I get up most mornings and smoke pot.” (At another point, he told Lewin, “I’ve been smoking pot every day, all my life, for as long as I can remember.”)

Durst spoke obliquely about his relationship with former inmates, presumably those he met while awaiting his 2003 Morris Black murder trial. After his arrest, Durst jumped bail and was caught in Pennsylvania trying to shoplift a chicken sandwich. The capture blew his inmates’ minds.

“None of the inmates could understand that, at all: ‘You have lots of money. Why’d you get caught?’” Technically, he was caught because he was attempting to steal lunch, a newspaper, and a Band-Aid (with $500 cash in his pocket and $37,000 in the car). Again, why risk your freedom for something so relatively small?

“I can’t explain it to you,” said Durst. “I couldn’t explain it to the inmates. I mean, it was just ridiculous…. I hated being a fugitive…. I was the worst fugitive the world has ever met…. Maybe I wanted to get caught. I certainly can’t explain it any other way.”

Bizarrely, he told Lewin about learning how to more effectively dismember a human body after he chopped up Morris Black. “The way I was doing it was the hard way,” Durst said. “Subsequently, I’ve been told that a surgeon would cut up a body the same way you do a chicken. You go into the joint. And you cut around the joint. You get rid of all the ligaments. And then, the thing comes out. You’re not gonna go and try to cut through the God-damned bone, like I did.”

Durst also speculated about a potential plea deal. “If there’s something that I could do that would be worthwhile for somebody else, and they could do something for me, then, you know, there’d be a direction,” he told Lewin. When Lewin brought up Durst’s wife Kathie, and the idea that Durst could finally give her family closure some 30 years after her disappearance by revealing what happened to her, Durst seemed open to the hypothetical possibility. “If there was something I could do for her family and it would get me, then…”

But there was another piece of the Jinx puzzle that did not make sense to Lewin. Jarecki had confronted Durst on camera in 2012 about the incriminating handwriting sample that linked Durst to Susan Berman’s murder. That meant Durst had known about the evidence for about three years. Which gave him plenty of time to flee. Why didn’t he?

“I just didn’t really, really, really think that I was gonna end up arrested,” Durst said. After all, he had been acquitted of Morris Black’s murder in 2003. For about 30 years, since being suspected of Kathie’s death, Durst had been so untouchable that an escape did not seem imminently necessary. “I kept putting it off. I kept making plans and making arrangements,” Durst reasoned. “And then, just, inertia.”