Jinxed: Things HBO Won’t (Ever) Tell You About Robert Durst

Dursts Vs Jareckis Part Two: The Epstein Connection

A word about this latest series

As with everything I write, this current series was sparked by a “random” confluence of factors; and as is so often the case, a short essay quickly started to expand into a series. As usual, I blame my wife, who I recruited to do some online digging (into Durst and Jarecki), and whose findings inevitably dictated the course (and dimensions) of the work.

Developing a written piece (sometimes whole books) based on my wife’s initial research can go either one of two ways: either it leads to a “simple”—and fairly rapid, though work-intensive—culling, condensing, organizing, and contextualizing of the data, into a dry information piece with very little commentary from myself; or, it expands in depth, even as I am condensing the detail, and becomes a more personal, textured, and exploratory piece, one in which I discover what drew me to the subject in the first place (besides simple curiosity), and hopefully brings the reader along for the ride.

With the current series, this latter only began to happen as I focused on the deep background of Andrew Jarecki, specifically his 2003 film, Capturing the Friedmans (not surprisingly, this has taken me back into the realm of organized child abuse). As a result, this week’s material (on Robert Durst, the Durst Org, and the Jarecki clan) now feels like a necessary, rather tedious summation of those features I stumbled across on my way to the real excavation site (though also the ones that helped me find it).

Or, to use an analogy closer to both mine and my wife’s experience: like the black sand (with occasional flecks of gold) which we panned together, on our way to the paystreak.

This means the paystreak will have to wait until next week, and that I feel I have to apologize for the perfunctory and impersonal nature of this week’s post (especially since the lack of a response to last week’s post suggests a lack of interest—so far—in the subject matter). For this reason, I am making it a free post, as (unlike what I try to provide every week), I don’t consider it worth paying to read it. I will also skip doing an audio this week for the same reason.

A True Psychopath?  

In 2015, Robert Durst’s brother Douglas was quoted by the New York Times describing Robert as “a true psychopath, beyond any emotions. That’s why he does things, so he can experience the emotions that other people have vicariously. Because he has absolutely none of his own.”

(This is curiously in sync with an exchange I had on the latest Dodcast, talking about sadomasochism, serial killers, and inverted empathy.)

Douglas related a story about a series of seven dogs, Alaskan Malamutes, all named Igor [by Robert], that Robert went through leading up to the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie. According to Douglas, all of the dogs disappeared and were replaced within six months. “In retrospect,” he said, “I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with those dogs.” Later, Robert was recorded in jail saying, “I want to Igor Douglas.” (“Douglas Durst: My Brother Robert ‘Is a True Psychopath’”)

This is Durst biographer Matt Birkbeck (A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst) interviewed by Vulture in “What The Jinx Got Wrong” (non-paywalled here):

There are some really crucial questions here [for Durst]. One of which is, “How did you learn to dismember a body?” And that was never asked. It was more about, “Tell us about Kathie.” . . . . The really big question also was, when Durst was 10 years old, he went to go see a psychiatrist because he was having mental issues after his mother died. The psychologist letter is in the book, and he says he can’t even be treated because he’s got some real severe issues. [“Personality decomposition and possibly schizophrenia.”] It’s a warning to everyone that you’ve got this ticking time bomb . . . back in 1953. And that wasn’t addressed either, the doctor’s letter.  But like you said, he’s a filmmaker, and he’s got his own agenda.

In the same interview, Birkbeck explains that, when he first met with Jarecki in 2005, Jarecki and his producing partner (Marc Sperling) had his book and they spent three hours talking about it. Yet The Jinx ignored many key details in the book, including some “obvious things they could’ve asked [Durst] but they didn’t.”

Serial Killer?

One thing they didn’t ask Durst about was the other missing women.

Durst was considered a person of interest in 2003, in the disappearances of Karen Mitchell and Kristen Modafferi. Mitchell went missing in 1997, while she worked at a homeless shelter in Eureka, Calif., where Durst had been spotted. After leaving the shelter, Mitchell visited her aunt, Annie Casper, at her shoe store and was never seen again. Durst lived in the nearby town of Trinidad at the time, and visited Casper’s store—dressed in drag—at least four times. Modafferi, a college student from North Carolina, also went missing five months earlier.

Birkbeck: “Before these cases even came up before the public, he had been living this random bizarre lifestyle . . . Durst had visited with or seen Mitchell at a homeless shelter that she had volunteered at.” (Durst often lived among the homeless, sometimes dressed as a woman, and used a number of disguises and aliases.)

In March 24, 2015, Vermont police begin investigating a possible link between Durst and Lynne Schulze, a college student who went missing in 1971 after shopping at Durst’s health-food store, back in 1971. A CNN article quoted Middlebury Police Capt. Tom Hanley: “We are aware of the connection between the disappearance of Lynne Schulze and Robert Durst. . . . We have been aware of this connection for several years and have been working with various outside agencies as we follow this lead.” The name of Durst’s health food store where Schulze shopped the day she disappeared was (the name of the movie Andrew Jarecki made about him) All Good Things.

According to Birkbeck, the FBI has been involved in the Durst case since 2012. Their interest picked up with the Gilgo Beach murders. Birkbeck again:

I think [the FBI is] convinced that he’s a serial killer, and so they’re trying to connect him to other cases around the country. Being that some of those women had been dismembered, they began looking at him. They couldn’t make a connection, but their interest there led them to the Westchester County District Attorney’s office and the Los Angeles police. . . .  There have been reports linking him to other murders, like Karen Mitchell in California, or Lynne Schulze, who disappeared outside his store in Vermont.[T]he fact is, you’ve got different investigations in different jurisdictions, and it became complicated for them to work with each other. . . . The Mitchell one is the strongest one of them all because you know that he lived up there, he had gone to the shoe store that Mitchell’s aunt had owned, and Mitchell worked there, too. . . . And then you’ve got this dead-on composite [sketch.] Not only is it the spitting image of Bobby, but the guy that gave the composite, he knew Durst.¹

More sensationally, there is William Steele, the ex-con author of Sex and The Serial Killer: My Bizarre Times with Robert Durst. In an interview for The Horror Report, Steele claims he was friends with Durst and was privy to his secret life as a serial murderer. He claims Durst killed and dismembered a dog in his (Steele’s) house, and that he recorded him bragging of other crimes:

The graphic photographs he showed me of many women, naked and bound, women I know now to have been sexually tortured and murdered.  The trophies he kept from the women he killed, the blood and gore covered green dress he wore the night he murdered and dismembered the dog in my house, its parts strewn about, my having slipped in its blood on my floor in the dark.  As I detailed in my book, he stunned me with the revelation that his murdered wife’s remains were in the suitcase he brought to my home “to prove it to me” he said. 

Durst Family Connections

According to a 2023 State of the Nation article, “The Zionist Mafia,” Robert Durst’s grandfather was secretly financed by foreign criminals and the mafia to establish his real estate company. The Dursts covertly work with (Mafiosi) the Genoveses and Luccheses, along with several other Jewish families that dominate real estate in New York City, backed by mobsters and foreign entities with the aim of monopolization.

Seymour Durst lower right, Donald Trump back left

(For some background on NY real estate and Mafia money-laundering, see “How New York Real Estate Became a Dumping Ground for the World’s Dirty Money,” The Nation, and “New York City makes it easy for corrupt people to hide their money in real estate,” Business Insider.)

Grandfather Durst was president from 1945 to 1972 of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, which (to this day) “makes loans without charge to needy individuals of any faith [Jews] and to Jewish community organizations, largely in the field of religious education” (NY Times).

Some current or recent interests pursued by the Durst Org:   

• Durst to fire unvaccinated corporate employees Sept. 6 (2021)

• Durst Family Foundation donated to Woke Covid Response fund

• Durst Family Foundation donated to Increase-Immigrants plan

• Durst Family Foundation is one of “More than 200 philanthropic institutions from across the country have signed onto this joint GCIR statement in support of children and families seeking refuge in the United States.”

For his part, ever the high-roller, Bobby enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA and moved to California in 1965, the exact same time Carlos Castaneda was doing his “field work” for The Teachings of Don Juan. Apparently, Durst was moving in similar circles; soon after he hooked up with (Mob boss’s daughter) Susan Berman, he met John Lennon and Yoko Ono:

during primal scream therapy with psychotherapist Arthur Janov. He was also a follower of Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Friends say Durst affected a hippie image, living in cheap apartments, and smoked a lot of dope. [And in March 1981, while] Susan Berman was in New York, promoting her book, and Durst was not only seeing her but also dating another old friend, Prudence Farrow, Mia Farrow’s sister and famous in her own right as the inspiration for the Beatles’ song “Dear Prudence.” (“Durst Case Scenarios”)

A year later, Durst’s wife Kathleen went missing, a problem Bobby’s crime family helped make go away:

The Manhattan Supreme Court filing says Durst’s late father, real-estate mogul Seymour Durst, paid ex-cop Edward Wright to conduct a “shadow investigation” that kept his family abreast of the NYPD’s probe. Wright’s efforts allegedly revealed that cops “knew or should have known” Durst had repeatedly lied about “his involvement in Kathie’s disappearance and murder.” [A] $100 million suit . . . says the NYPD has been stonewalling a request for its records under Freedom of Information Law for nearly 18 months. “The NYPD knows that once its cover-up is fully and properly exposed, the public will likely conclude that the NYPD intentionally concealed evidence to shield Durst from being prosecuted in connection with the disappearance and/or death of Kathie,” court papers say. (NY Post)

A suit filed by Kathie’s sister, Carol Bamonte, claimed that

the Durst Organization [are] “accessories after the fact” to Kathie’s murder. . . “The crime family members” helped develop “a false alibi” for Durst, telling a series of lies to the media and the cops to keep them from suspecting Robert [and] creating this “false narrative” [as] “further evidence of [Robert] Durst’s guilt” . . . Seymour, who has since died, “ordered” his family and employees “not to cooperate with the police investigation,” and they spread “a publicity smear campaign against Kathie and her family”. . . (NY Post)

Jarecki and The Jinx avoid getting into this swampy background, however, and don’t even mention the lawsuits. A cover-up is insinuated in the fictional version, All Good Things, a movie that Douglas disliked, but that Bobby loved.

Back to Jeffrey’s Island (Jarecki Family Connections)

Nick Jarecki and Nancy and Andrew Jarecki are all listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous little black book, on page 29, with 9 phone numbers and 2 addresses under the three names. Their billionaire father, Dr. Henry Jarecki, is listed on page 74, along with 14 phone numbers.

Henry Jarecki traveled with Epstein multiple times, and owns two islands in the British Virgin Islands, where he founded a youth center.

None of this is Andrew likely to be documenting any time soon.

(An online thread on Henry speculates that brother/uncle Richard Jarecki has been involved in money laundering via European casinos.)

Henry Jarecki was worth $1.3 billion in 2014 and made most of his millions dealing in silver and gold. He is a member of the exclusive Futures Industry Association Hall of Fame, along with Alan Greenspan and Sen. Robert Dole. His wife Gloria was a film critic for Time, while Dr. Jarecki dabbled in theater production. (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Tap Dogs played both Broadway and London stages, and Cat won London’s Laurence Olivier Award for the best revival play in 2010.) In the 2012 presidential election campaign, the Jareckis contributed more than $400,000 to Democratic Party candidates and PACs.

Returning to the Epstein connection: Virginia Roberts Giuffre, in court documents from a civil suit, released in 2019, claimed she was told to have sex with (famous computer scientist and 2001-advisor) Marvin Minsky, at Epstein’s compound in the US Virgin Islands, when she was 17 and Minsky was 73 (she also named Alan Dershowitz, Norman Finkelstein’s great nemesis). A second witness testified taking a private plane from Teterboro to Santa Fe and Palm Beach with Minsky, in March 2001, and that Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Dr. Henry Jarecki were passengers on the same plane (PPEmpire, Feb 2023).

Here’s Epstein and Maxwell’s victim/recruiter, Natalya Malyshev, pictured with Henry at a Paolo Zampolli event back in 2010. Paolo Zampolli was one of the primary funders of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Ocean-focused charity, the TerraMar Project.

(At the article, there is also a shot of him with (son of Oliver) Sean Stone, who interviewed me last year. No doubt Zampoli schmoozes with all kinds, but still. . .)

Enter the Loftus

With all of this on record, the involvement of the infamous Elizabeth Loftus in the defense of Robert Durst in 2020 becomes a bit of a smoking gun.

Loftus is a similar sort of high-level fixer-witness to Deborah Lipstadt: her name pops up in all the wrong places. In 2002, she was ranked 58th in the Review of General Psychology’s list of the 100 most influential psychological researchers of the 20th century. Since then, she has become a veritable one-woman False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which was dissolved in 2019). She is most (in)famous as a witness for the defense in the trials of Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In the latter case, Loftus claimed that monetary greed could cause a human brain to create a false traumatic memory; when questioned about the basis of her theory by the jury, Loftus stated: “I am not aware of any studies on that, but based on my research, it’s definitely plausible.” The jury perhaps didn’t ask her about potential motivating factors in giving false testimony.

Loftus has also been called as a witness at the trials of Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menéndez brothers, and the Oklahoma City bombers. That’s quite the (MKULTRA psyop) CV, and it puts Robert Durst in some pretty high-level (and highly dicey) company.²

Can the same be said of Andrew Jarecki?

(To be cont.)

1. The Gilgo Beach serial killings were a series of killings between 1996 and 2011 in which the remains of 11 people were found in Gilgo Beach, located on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, United States. Most of the known victims were sex workers who advertised on Craigslist. The perpetrator in the case is known as the Long Island Serial Killer. In July 2023, Rex Heuermann, a resident of Massapequa Park on Long Island, was arrested in Midtown Manhattan and charged in the murders of three of “the Gilgo Four” victims.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgo_Beach_serial_killings

2. According to the New Yorker in 2021, Loftus “could find little experimental evidence to support the idea that memories of trauma, after remaining dormant for a decade or more, could abruptly spring to life.” From the same profile:

For decades, during cross-examinations, lawyers have accused Loftus, a childless scientist, of being unable to comprehend the pain of victims. “You really don’t know anything about five-year-old children who have been sexually abused, do you?” a prosecutor asked her, in 1985, at the trial of a camp counsellor accused of molesting his campers. “Well, yes, I do,” Loftus responded. “I do know something about this subject because I was abused when I was six,” by a babysitter. At that moment, she later wrote, “the memory flew out at me, out of the blackness of the past, hitting me full force.” The defense attorney at the trial, Marc Kurzman, recalled a “stunned silence.” He said, “That was supposed to be the big finale of the cross-examination, and it pretty much shut the whole thing down.” Some scholars have proposed that Loftus has her own repressed memories. “She has not been able to integrate her own experience into her research,” two literary critics wrote, in 2001. “There is something split off in Loftus,” the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from 2004. “She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.”

See also “Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team use controversial ‘false memories’ theory as part of her defence.”