‘The Jinx’ Director Felt He Was in Danger While Robert Durst Was on the Run

Samantha Bergeson
·3 min read
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“The Jinx” filmmaker Andrew Jarecki was living out a personal “The Journalist and the Murderer” saga when Robert Durst was on the run.

During the latest post-episode “Official Jinx Podcast” for “The Jinx — Part Two,” Jarecki and executive producer Zac Stuart-Pontier revealed that they were concerned for their safety between seasons of their HBO docuseries, before the fleeing Durst was apprehended by authorities.

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“I said to them, ‘I think there’s a risk to me. And I’m OK with that, but I’d like to have a plan in place if anything weird happens,’” Jarecki said of telling the FBI. “And then I remember calling up my guy and having him say, ‘Yeah, we really have no idea where he is.’ And I said, ‘Well, how’s that possible? You’re the FBI, right? You’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You should be the boss of where people are, especially if they’re putting witnesses at risk or whatever.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I will keep you posted if we notice anything.’ So that was not confidence inspiring.”

Jarecki hired private security to protect his family while Los Angeles detectives tried to track down Durst.

“My daughter was quite young at the time, maybe she was 11, and I remember saying sort of nonchalantly, ‘Hey, uh, tomorrow morning when I take you to school, we’re going to have a couple of other guys, you know, helping me take you to school.’ And she immediately started crying,” Jarecki said. “And I thought, all right, well, she gets it. Maybe I should take this seriously.”

Stuart-Pontier told The Hollywood Reporter that Jarecki was one of the few people who knew Durst was on the run at the time. Durst planned an escape to Cuba at the conclusion of “The Jinx” Season 1, when Jarecki confronted Durst with new evidence in the December 2000 murder of his friend Susan Berman.

“Andrew knew that he was already on the run because there was some talk about some personal danger that Andrew was in,” Stuart-Pontier said. “So, he did know that for those four or five days that [Durst] was on the run. But this was not common knowledge.”

Durst was finally convicted in the Berman murder in 2021; he died in prison the following year. Durst is suspected of killing his first wife, Kathie, who disappeared in 1982. Prosecutors in the Berman case say Berman helped Durst cover up the murder of his wife. The theory goes Durst killed Berman to remove the only eyewitness from the equation.

Jarecki recalled how he, too, “had a friendship of sorts” with Durst at one point during production, but that Durst realized how it had shifted as the series went on.

“It was not a traditional friendship, it was not something that either one of us expected, but we were thrown together in this weird way. And then we spent a lot of time together and talked and had a lot of conversations,” Jarecki said. “I think Bob is figuring out that, starting with Episode 4, maybe we’re not friends anymore. And then Episode 5, we’re definitely not friends.”

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