“I think the dominance is big,” he recalled about Durst.
“We see the power of his personality, we hear him say, ‘I'd like you to do this’. There are moments when Bob is asking his friend, Stewart Altman, who's a lawyer and also his ex-buddy, and he's asking Stewart, 'Well, I would like you to find out about sending money to Belize.'
“So why does he want to do that? Because he's trying to hide money from the McCormack family all the time, because he knows there's the possibility of a wrongful death suit [Durst was suspected of his first wife Kathleen Durst McCormack’s death].
“And Stewart says to him, 'I don't know Bob, I don't know that's I don't know if that would be good for my career.’ And it's one of the few times when somebody stands up to Bob, and he immediately just goes, 'alright, well, if you don't want to do it, forget it.’
“Immediately, it's like, 'okay, you want to be out of the club, you want to be out of the Bob club? No problem, if you're afraid to do this’ so he turns to Debbie Lee Charatan [Durst’s widow and executer of his estate].
“Debbie says, 'Well, I don't know.' So what does that tell you? In other words, Debbie doesn't want to do it either. And she said, 'Well, what does that tell you? Doesn't that tell you maybe there's something maybe you shouldn't do it?' And he goes, 'it tells me I haven't found the right people yet.’
“So, he's sifting around through the available helpers to try to figure out who's willing to do something extra naughty that could end up losing somebody their law license or whatever. You know, that's complicity, that's the enforcement and what interests me.”
Having spent two decades chasing Durst and trying to understand his inner workings, does Jarecki believe he will ever meet someone like the late criminal again?
“In some ways I see him is a unicorn just because he had all of these unique elements, right?” he recalled.
“He was oddly charming. One of the most interesting things about him is that we don't hate him off the bat, even if we hate the things that he's done.”
While he may be “oddly charming”, Jarecki did recall one incident where he was left fearful for his life.
After walking home one night in 2015, the filmmaker said his stomach dropped when he saw what he believed to be Durst’s unmistakeable yellow Smart car parked outside his New York apartment building leaving him “freaked out”.
At the time, episode five of his bombshell documentary had just aired on HBO so he was on high alert, only to find out that the car belonged to one of his building’s doormen.
“That whole period was kind of uncomfortable,” he shared. “It just seemed like it was sort of par for the course, there was no getting around it. I learned a lot.”
Soon after he enlisted the help of security detail but he remarked that the FBI didn’t give him the sense of safety he had hoped for.
“I mean, I had an FBI minder, who was sort of supposed to be looking out for me and telling me if Bob was getting close to me or something like that, and I called him around that time.
“And he said, 'Oh, yeah, we lost him.' And I said, 'What do you mean, you lost them? It's just one little guy.' And they said, 'Well, you know, it's actually it's a lot harder than you think, you know, we got a tail a guy, you know, you need multiple people to do it. And you know, if he goes into a mall, he could come out of any of the doorways. So, you got to have a different guy for every doorway.'
“And I was like, 'that sounds like a lot of unnecessary information. I just wanted you to say, we know where he is. And he was like, sorry’.”
The Jinx - Part 2 airs on Sky Documentaries and Now
