The night before The Jinx aired its bombshell finale in 2015, the late real-estate scion and docuseries subject Robert Durst was arrested in New Orleans for the 2000 murder of his best friend, Susan Berman—an arrest made possible because of evidence The Jinx’s filmmakers shared with authorities. This milestone for the then 71-year-old eccentric proved as bizarre as the others detailed in Andrew Jarecki’s Peabody- and Emmy-winning docuseries: Durst was found staying under an alias in a Marriott hotel with a latex mask, a revolver with live rounds, around $44,000 in cash, enough marijuana for 300 joints, and a map of Cuba stashed in his room.

This is where The Jinx Part Two, premiering April 21 on HBO, picks up—spitting viewers right back into the Durst-verse to chronicle what happened after Durst appeared to confess to three murders on mic until he was finally convicted, in 2021, for Berman’s murder. The new episodes will also touch on Durst’s 2022 death as a prisoner in Stockton, California.

“Normally your obligation is to protect your subject,” Jarecki tells Vanity Fair about his strange journey with Durst. “But what happens when your subject becomes the enemy?”

The six-episode sequel series recounts how Jarecki and his team cooperated with John Lewin, the Los Angeles deputy district attorney who ultimately cracked Durst’s expensive defense. Lewin, in turn, shares behind-the-scenes details about how he built his case atop The Jinx’s evidence—an incredibly rare joint effort by law enforcement and filmmakers.

The Jinx Part Two introduces viewers to a whole new cast of peculiar characters, including several who stayed loyal to Durst for decades—like Chris Lovell, the Galveston juror who helped get Durst acquitted of murdering neighbor Morris Black in 2001, after the real-estate scion admitted to killing Black in self-defense and dismembering the body because he thought police wouldn’t believe his story; Nick Chavin, a wannabe rock star turned mutual best friend of Durst’s and Berman’s who became a secret witness in the 2021 trial; and Susan Giordano, a woman with whom Durst talked about building a “love nest,” and who sent him a suitcase of clothes to New Orleans containing $115,000 in cash. (She testified that she wasn’t aware there was money in the bottom of the suitcase.)

While editing the sequel, Jarecki says that the Jinx team came up with a saying: “How do you kill three people over 30 years and get away with it? It takes a village.” The village, says the filmmaker, “became, to me, the centerpiece of Part Two—the idea that there’s this constellation of people who all see themselves as good, decent people…and yet here they are helping a murderer.”

When the sequel premieres, it will mark 20 years since Jarecki first started researching his subject. “This is a story that has kept me fascinated because it keeps changing,” the director says. “Anytime anybody gives me a thought or an idea, it opens some little door because I have all these other pieces of the story…. Obviously we’re obsessed with this material, and we think that there are many things that are not [what] people would anticipate.”

Ahead, in his first interview about The Jinx Part Two, Jarecki previews the electric sequel, recalls his trek to see Durst in prison, and parses his complicated feelings about the murderer with whom he found himself so unprecedentedly entangled.

Vanity Fair: There’s a scene in the first episode of Part Two that shows the family of Durst’s late wife Kathie McCormack reacting in real time to Durst’s finale confession. It seems like you never stopped filming. At what point did you decide you were making a sequel?

Andrew Jarecki: I was very happy with where we [ended the show] before. I had been thinking, “Bob Durst is a fascinating chapter in my life that’s closed.” During the pandemic, they started proceedings in the Susan Berman case and maybe had already started some preliminary witness testimony. I remember texting Zac [Stuart-Pontier], who’s my creative partner in making the show, saying, “Doesn’t this make you want to make more episodes?” And he wrote back, “Yes!”

We had been filming stuff as we went without any real knowledge of what we’d use it for. You have a sense of responsibility to the story and feel like, I don’t know who else is going to be able to explain this. Other people will try to cover it, or there’ll be a quick piece on television or in the news or a magazine. But it really took getting the band back together—a team of people that cared this much about the story and had the institutional memory that Zac and I had for it.

How does The Jinx Part Two compare to the original for you?

It’s such a different animal—this is a deeper dive. I think the first season was about getting the bones of the story because, thanks to Bob, this story is so twisted. Just getting it laid out in a way that the audience can understand was a big chore. There are three interconnected murders, and the only thing that links them is the psyche of an inscrutable person.

The difference here was that we’ve developed a much deeper understanding of the case and suddenly had access to all kinds of material that we would never have been available to us before Bob was arrested. Before, we couldn’t get Bob’s prison phone calls. That’s why this season does have a different energy. And if people say, “Oh, well, what’s going to be the big bang [revelation]?” There are actually lots of bangs. But mainly, it’s the experience of going that much deeper that is, for me, every bit as satisfying as the surprises in the first part.

You became a leading character in the Durst story thanks to the evidence you uncovered in the original. But you’ve also spoken about an affection you came to feel for Bob after spending over 20 hours interviewing him*.* Did you two communicate after the finale aired, even though he was in custody?

I wanted to talk to him. To some extent, I felt sort of sad about [the turn of events]. Even if the person that you’re dealing with is the Antichrist, which I don’t think he is, even if he’s an extremely problematic, troublesome person who’s created disasters for lots of other people, he is a human being. I did get to know him very well. He doesn’t know a lot of people. He doesn’t open up to a lot of people. So I did feel a sense that I was betraying him. It didn’t stop me from doing it, but it was a burden to me a little bit.

My daughter wanted to go to Jazz Fest in New Orleans, and Bob was in a jail that was not too far away. I thought, “Well, this is probably my moment.” So I put my daughter in the hotel between concerts and jumped in a car, and drove to the St. Charles Parish jail. I walked in and the woman said, “Mr. Durst is out.” I said, “Out? I didn’t realize you were allowed to go out.” She said, “Well, he’s at an appointment.” I stood outside for a few minutes, and this van pulls in, and I am sure it’s him. And I filmed this. I had my phone on me. They open these two doors, and this little man comes out with handcuffs and leg irons, and he starts shuffling through the breezeway. I said to him, “Bob.” He looked over at me for a minute, and then just shuffled back in the other room.

I went back and said to the woman, “He’s back. Would you mind calling and asking him if I can visit?” She calls and gets back to me and says he declined the visit.

So you never got to discuss the finale with him.

I wasn’t that surprised, but Bob is such a curious, interesting fellow. I kind of felt like he would want to see me.

After that [visit], everybody flipped out. The prosecutor from LA called me and left this message saying, “To say that you’re trying to visit the defendant in the murder case that you’re helping me with is not helpful is an understatement.” But I felt like I couldn’t go through this and not say to Bob, “Hey, I know this happened between us. In some ways, I’m sorry that it happened, but I want you to know that if you have something to say about it, I’m here and happy to talk to you off the record.” I felt like that was an important piece of closure in some way for both of us.

Have you worked through any guilt?

I mean, I don’t want to overstate the guilt. I felt a much greater responsibility to the McCormack family, who lost this awesome girl who was a huge part of their lives and a source of great hope and love for a lot of people. Helping them strongly outweighed any feelings I had about Bob. But you get close to somebody over a period of time. You get a sense of what makes them tick. And I don’t think Bob saw himself as a bad person. My guess is that if you were able to grab him in the middle of the night, give him a dose of Sodium Pentothal, and say, “What really happened?” He would say, “Listen, things with Kathie were going very badly. I reacted. There was an altercation. She ended up dead. But it wasn’t my intention. And after that, Susan Berman was going to talk to the police and maybe tell them something. I couldn’t tolerate that. That would’ve been the end of me. So I was just surviving there. And then Morris Black, this drifter that I meet in Galveston, he’s also onto me…”

I never think people who are seen as monsters see themselves as monsters. They just think, “I’m doing my best. I’m trying to survive.” If you’re going to make stories about people who other people see as monsters, which I tend to do, you have to understand how they see themselves.

A huge part of understanding that world is meeting his inner circle and seeing how they helped him over the years. It’s mind-blowing to realize, for instance, that Durst befriended Chris Lovell, one of the Galveston jurors who helped acquit him in 2003. The sequel shows how Lovell and his wife stayed loyal to him through his 2015 arrest. Nick Chavin is a longtime friend who wouldn’t speak to you originally, but decided to for the sequel. What was it like digging into these new characters?

I feel like I’m through the looking glass in a strange way, because you very seldom get the opportunity to follow a story for 20 years. There were all these people who had a reason why they didn’t want to talk to me [for the first Jinx] and then changed their mind. Nick is a really interesting character. He says, “I guess I just didn’t have a problem with murder and murderers.” So he’s in a lot of ways a morally compromised person. He was a gift in terms of my understanding of who Bob was and who the people around him were.

[These people] see themselves as being loyal to a friend. They separate themselves from responsibility. And then the audience has to ask themselves: What would I have done in that situation? If I had a sick kid or if I needed something, and here’s my friend [Durst, offering to fix it]?

Do you know what he thought about the sequel? He mentions it during one of the prison phone calls featured in the new episodes.

He had heard there was something happening, but I don’t think he had much knowledge about it. We obviously didn’t announce it. Eventually there was a question about whether his lawyers were going to participate. [Editor’s note: one of Durst’s lawyers, Dick DeGuerin, does appear on camera in the sequel.]

You ended up working with law enforcement in 2013 while making the first Jinx, and John Lewin, the prosecutor who got him convicted, plays a large role in the sequel. Can you talk about forming a relationship with the authorities?

That was a really interesting thing to navigate, because most filmmakers are pretty progressive, and think that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Suddenly to be in a position where I had to come to terms with the fact that somebody had absolutely committed three murders and was wandering around, and we were in a position to alter the course of that trajectory…that was a whole other set of considerations.

What did your initial outreach to authorities look like?

I remember knowing we had to be extremely thoughtful about what we did with the [evidence] because we thought there was a very good chance that we would give it to some law enforcement person, and that’s where it would go to die. [Editor’s note: Jarecki is referring to the handwriting sample he confronts Durst with in the finale of the first season, and Durst’s incriminating reaction to it. The audio confession was not discovered until two years after filming, when an editor realized that a mic had recorded Durst in the bathroom.]

We thought [they’d] say, “Well, he is probably going to have a dream team…end up paying his lawyers $12 million and get off. So this is not a case we want to pursue.” So early on we started getting really good advice. When [someone from the] FBI said, “You should give me the evidence and I’ll figure out something good to do with it,” we said, “With all due respect, we’re not going to do that. But if you can show us a prosecutor and an agency that’s well positioned to prosecute the case, then we will consider giving that person the evidence.” He came back with John Lewin, whom he said had done more cold case murders with no body than anyone in the country, and has a perfect record.

I called [former LA deputy district attorney] Marcia Clark and said, “What can you tell me about this guy?” She said, “He’s the real thing. He’s really smart. I think you can trust him.” We got on the phone with Lewin, and started this process of feeling each other out—him trying to figure out if we were flaky filmmakers who were just going to try to record him, do some gotcha, and make it part of some film that’s going to come out 10 minutes later.

That relationship became a very intense relationship. And he appreciated that we had waited [before contacting him]. After we found the [cadaver note handwriting match], we thought intuitively that it would be much stronger if we get him on film reacting to it. And if we do that after we’ve talked to law enforcement, Bob’s lawyers were going to say, “If you were working with the police at that time, then you owed it to him to read him his Miranda rights and tell him that you were working with the police.” That could have been a quagmire had we walked into that.

I mean, you definitely raise the standard of care when you realize that you have evidence that you think will be determinative in a murder case. You just have to start thinking about it differently—not just, “What’s going to make the best film?” but thinking, “What’s going to make the best film?” and “What’s going to make a legitimate prosecution?”

It took decades, but Durst was finally convicted of murder in 2021 and sentenced to life in prison. Durst died just four months later. What was it like to find out that he had died, especially so soon after he was finally held accountable? I imagine you had complicated feelings.

It did feel sad, but sad for everybody. It was sad that Bob couldn’t have done something better with his life; he had every conceivable advantage and opportunity. It was sad for the McCormack family, who were hoping that they would have a conviction for the murder of Kathie. They would’ve feltthat they had closure. So it was very sad when Bob dies, and you’ll see in a later episode that I’m in the middle of an interview when he dies. I discover it in the course of what I’m doing.

You’ve been entangled with Durst in this true-crime ouroboros since 2010. I still can’t believe it was Durst who initially reached out to you—after seeing your narrative movie All Good Things, which was inspired by the suspicion around his wife’s 1982 disappearance.

When he first called me, he thought, “I’m going to get this guy interested. I’m going to flash ‘Bob Durst is going to tell his story,’ and then he’s going to want to get that on TV really fast. So then I’ll have my story out there and I’ll be appreciated for my genius. I’ll be able to get into the co-op that I’m trying to get into. Everybody’s acting like I’m a pariah [after the Galveston trial]. How long could this take?”

I’m in there five years before The Jinx comes out. As far as he’s concerned, this isn’t fun anymore: “[They’re] doing an investigation, which is not what I bargained for.” He couldn’t say, “Well, I didn’t bargain for an investigation.” That would make him seem like he had something to hide.

I can’t imagine how much of your brain the Durst saga occupies. Do you think you’ll find peace after these episodes air?

Yeah, I do think of it as a hard drive that eventually I’m going to have to slide out of my CPU. I’m still at that place where you could say to me, “What was the name of Bob’s landlord in Galveston?” “Oh, Klaus.” “What does he say about Dorothy Ciner, the woman that was living in the house next to Morris Black [and who was actually Durst, dressed as a woman]?” “He said she was a middle-aged woman with a flat bust: ‘Wouldn’t be my type.’”

This is still in my brain. It is going to have to be replaced by other thoughts.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.