OKAY, NOW LET’S ALL WATCH THE JINX TOGETHER
Excerpt from Jeanine Pirro’s bestseller He Killed Them All: Robert Durst and My Quest for Justice
I heard from Jarecki again in 2011, when I was in Chicago doing my syndicated courtroom show for Warner Bros. He reached me by phone and asked me to participate in The Jinx, a documentary he was making about the case.
He had some set.
I said, “Why would I participate? You didn’t play me so well in the Ryan Gosling movie.”
But I liked Andrew and I agreed to meet him for lunch or breakfast. He always came off as sincere, low-key, no big deal, an “I’m not going to harm anybody” kind of guy. He told me how the documentary project came about, that Durst himself volunteered to be interviewed after seeing All Good Things. Why would Jarecki devote more time, money, and effort to make another movie about the case? He’d been on it for five years already. If he hadn’t lost interest or gotten frustrated by now, he might be a lifer, like Cody and me. We would never stop looking at Durst until justice was served.
But I said no. I was busy and I still didn’t see what good it would do for the case or for me personally.
Andrew wore down my reluctance over a two-year period. Lots of email exchanges and lunches. He seemed to be passionate about the subject matter, with decent intentions.
When he came to my office one Saturday, we caught up, and, again, he made his pitch. “The documentary will be about right and wrong in the criminal-justice system,” he said. “We might be in totally different fields, but we’re focused on the same thing — justice, the truth, and settling scores.” Jarecki reminded me of his previous documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, about a family that was destroyed by false accusations of child abuse run amok. “Whether it’s Capturing the Friedmans or the Durst case, my goal is about getting to the truth,” he said.
He seemed to be pruriently fascinated by the investigations, but I also thought he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I realized that Andrew and I were on the same side, that there might be a benefit to participating in this documentary after all.
My “no” changed to “maybe.”
A few months later, we were having lunch at the St. Regis in New York. Andrew said, “I want you to see something.” Jarecki took his iPad out of his cross-body-strap messenger bag and cued up a short video.
He gave me the tablet and I pushed play. It was Chip Lewis, one of Durst’s lawyers in Galveston. Lewis said, “It was very easy for us to make her the enemy. We created this mythical creature — Jeanine Pirro. And we took liberty with how directly she was involved in the pursuit of Bob. That message played well. The jury ate that one up.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. He actually said, in no uncertain terms, that they knowingly played fast and loose with the truth about me in court. Why would he admit it? He must really think that he’s a bulletproof superstar and that revealing their strategic deception would bring him to the next level or something. I would be ashamed if I perpetuated a fraud in a courtroom. Lewis acted proud of it.
“Son of a bitch.”
That was it. Jarecki knew the Lewis clip would make my blood boil.
“Maybe” changed to “hell yes!” I said, “I’m in.”
The only stipulation was that I could speak to no one about the project.
Gagged again, but I had no problem agreeing this time. I didn’t discuss The Jinx with anyone, not even Cody, who I knew was also participating in it.
My son, Alex, was upset that I was cooperating with the man who’d been so wrong about me in his previous effort. “After what Jarecki did to you in All Good Things? How could you ever work with him?”
I said, “He’s evolved on it.”
“He’s just going to make money on the case again.”
Many people have made money on Robert Durst (none more than his legal team). He was a cottage industry. For the record, I have been asked many times over the years to write a book about my involvement in the case, and always refused. Until Episode Five, I didn’t see the point of writing a book, because Kathie’s story didn’t have a satisfying conclusion.
I said to Alex, “This case has been a thorn in my side for more than a decade, and if this documentary sheds more light on the Kathie Durst case, I’m happy to be a part of it.”
In advance of my taping, Andrew sent me a three-page list of questions. It was well organized and thorough, starting with my personal background (“Where did you grow up?” “What was your path to becoming the DA?”) and moving into Kathie’s missing-persons case and our investigation into it.
He specifically asked, “New York City case versus Westchester case?” I got an inkling that Jarecki truly understood the issue. He must have seen the original files and deduced for himself that the original investigation by the NYPD had been botched.
One question on the list made me groan: “How did all the media affect the case?” Part of me wanted to talk about how the media leaks jeopardized the case and how DeGuerin had played the media like a fiddle, but I didn’t.
Regarding the Susan Berman murder, he had the question, “Did you think it was at all connected to Bob and Kathie?”
Uh, yeah!
In the section of questions about the Galveston trial, he included, “What did you think about Bob’s choice to use your investigation as part of his defense? [Pirro’s name doesn’t show up in the press until after Susan’s murder, so Bob’s story isn’t true.]”
Wow. He figured it out. He actually read those papers. It proved to me that by adding that revelation to the show, Jarecki and Smerling were sticking with the facts and ditching the fiction this time around. The last question on their list was, “Were you surprised that Bob reached out to us about telling ‘his side’ of the story? Bob has much to lose. Knowing something about him, can you imagine why he might do that?”
Why indeed?
Robert Durst is a narcissist. He believes the world revolves around him, and he simply couldn’t resist putting his stamp on Jarecki’s interpretation of the case. He is frustratingly slippery, always one step ahead of being caught. He’s the kind of guy who loved to dance on that edge. He clearly got off on it. I believe he agreed to do The Jinx so he could feel superior, smugly smarter than Jarecki and Smerling, and that he’d get to put one over on the viewing audience. Or maybe he did want the truth to come out. On some level, it was possible that he wanted the world to know how he’d gotten away with murder. O. J. Simpson, another egomaniac, wrote a book called If I Did It, trying to get credit but take no responsibility. It was to be his last act. Maybe the playacting Durst had learned in Texas convinced him he could con the world as well.
We taped my interview in the fall of 2013. Jarecki, Smerling, and a crew came to my house and set up in the morning. Filming took place in the library. I was asked to sit in my big burgundy leather club chair even though I was wearing a red-orange dress. Apparently, the light was good in the library. Jarecki sat across from me, conversation style. He knew every fact, every detail, every aspect of the case. He kept a three-ring binder on his lap, his bible of the case, and flipped through it as we talked. The tone was polite, professional, and efficient. There was never a glitch or tense moment throughout the day. There were no egos involved. It went very smoothly. By midafternoon, they packed up their equipment and left. Start to finish, it took six hours.
I believe I was one of the last people interviewed on camera. Of course, Durst’s second interview was the very last one recorded. Jarecki organized his schedule just as I would have, starting on the outside, learning the facts, and slowly working his way in, peeling that onion to the core.
The questions they’d sent and my prepared answers weren’t nearly as important to them as catching on film my raw reaction to things Durst had told them. They asked me plenty, and we discussed all the facts about the case, including the defense strategy. But I could tell they were really waiting for the right moment to show me something, or tell me new bits of information they’d unearthed.
At the very end of the interview, Jarecki handed me a copy of the cadaver letter, which I already knew by heart. Then he handed me another paper and said, “Take a look at this.” It was the envelope addressed to Susan on Durst’s Wall Street stationery that Sareb Kaufman found in a box of his mom’s things.
But I didn’t know that at the time. I asked, “Where did you get this?”
Jarecki just shook his head and said nothing.
I looked at the envelope.
It took a second for me to react. I read it and said, “Beverley,” noticing the misspelling. Then I studied the envelope for a second longer, saw the handwriting similarities, and said, “Son of a bitch!”
In my head, thoughts were exploding. “Oh, my God! Here it is. All these years. Here it is. We can prove it now. We can convict him now. He did it. Of course, he killed her, too.”
I’m sure my thought process was very similar to Robert Durst’s experience of seeing the two Beverleys side by side, both of us quietly contemplating what we were looking at. I felt hot all over, flushed and glowing.
Durst’s blood must have run ice cold.
Holding the envelope was like being lost in the desert and then suddenly seeing an oasis in front of you.
I’d thought I’d found a few oases before with the Durst case. But they were mirages. The two Beverleys were not a mirage. They were the ocean.
When I looked up at Jarecki and Smerling, they were looking at me intensely, and then with slight grins, probably because they knew they had gotten a genuine reaction they could use in the film. I looked at these two guys and thought to myself, Oh, my God. They did it. They got him.
And then another thought struck me. God, would I love to try that case.
Jeanine Pirro is the former DA and county court judge of Westchester County. She is an Emmy Award winner, a legal analyst for Fox News, and the host of Justice with Judge Jeanine. He Killed Them All is available wherever books, audiobooks, and e-books are sold.