“Right,” Durst agreed.
By this point, Lewin had listened to Jarecki’s 20 hours’ worth of Jinx interviews. He reminded Durst that the millionaire had said in the past that something did bother him about All Good Things.
“Oh, killing all the dogs,” Durst remembered. (Gosling’s character kills the family dog in the film.) Lewin theorized that Durst would never hurt a dog. Durst agreed, though he couldn’t answer as definitively on the subject of hurting women. (When Lewin suggested Durst dismembered the body of his first wife, Kathie, Durst replied, “I’m not gonna go there.”)
Though Durst was worth an estimated $100 million, he admitted to applying for food stamps because he got a kick out of cheating the government. He said he had shoplifted “since I was a little kid” because he had no interest in waiting in line. “I’ve got other things I want to do,” he said. Other kids are taught to respect authority; as Durst told Lewin, “I didn’t have to follow the rules.” At another point, Durst said he declined a television network’s offer to make a special on him that would cast him as a good person. That would be going too far, in Durst’s book: “I never felt that I was really a good guy,” he said.
He volunteered that a previous lawyer didn’t want him to tell the Galveston, Texas, jury about his daily routine: “I’m a millionaire. I don’t have to work. I get up most mornings and smoke pot.” (At another point, he told Lewin, “I’ve been smoking pot every day, all my life, for as long as I can remember.”)
Durst spoke obliquely about his relationship with former inmates, presumably those he met while awaiting his 2003 Morris Black murder trial. After his arrest, Durst jumped bail and was caught in Pennsylvania trying to shoplift a chicken sandwich. The capture blew his inmates’ minds.
“None of the inmates could understand that, at all: ‘You have lots of money. Why’d you get caught?’” Technically, he was caught because he was attempting to steal lunch, a newspaper, and a Band-Aid (with $500 cash in his pocket and $37,000 in the car). Again, why risk your freedom for something so relatively small?
“I can’t explain it to you,” said Durst. “I couldn’t explain it to the inmates. I mean, it was just ridiculous…. I hated being a fugitive…. I was the worst fugitive the world has ever met…. Maybe I wanted to get caught. I certainly can’t explain it any other way.”
Bizarrely, he told Lewin about learning how to more effectively dismember a human body after he chopped up Morris Black. “The way I was doing it was the hard way,” Durst said. “Subsequently, I’ve been told that a surgeon would cut up a body the same way you do a chicken. You go into the joint. And you cut around the joint. You get rid of all the ligaments. And then, the thing comes out. You’re not gonna go and try to cut through the God-damned bone, like I did.”
Julie Miller
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