The Jinx: The Shadowy Figures in Robert Durst’s Inner Orbit

The original Jinx docuseries focused on the life and deaths of Robert Durst. But the sequel, which premiered nine years after The Jinx’s jaw-dropping finale confession, shifts focus to Durst’s best friends.

The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki said that his team’s mantra while making the sequel’s six new episodes, now airing on HBO, was “How do you kill three people over 30 years and get away with it? It takes a village.” That village, said Jarecki in an interview with Vanity Fair last month, “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.”

Each episode, Los Angeles deputy district attorney John Lewin leads viewers through a list of witnesses he ran down while assembling his successful Susan Berman murder case—all people close to Durst who presumably knew some of his secrets. (Lewin convinced the jury that Durst killed Berman because Berman knew one of Durst’s darkest secrets—that he had also killed his first wife, Kathie McCormack.) But all of Durst’s closest “friends” and most loyal supporters, as Lewin points out, had financial ties to the real estate heir, who was reportedly worth $100 million and died in 2022.

“It turns out that when you have a whole lot of money, people are willing to do things for you,” Lewin says in one Jinx episode. “Because they think some of that money might go their way.”

Though many of the people on this list testified in Berman’s 2021 murder trial, the Jinx sequel weaves trial footage of their testimonies with new interviews that shed light on how Durst’s friends helped insulate him for so many years. When VF spoke to Jarecki last month, we asked him what about the sequel will shock viewers. “There are a lot of surprises in the village,” he teased.

Ahead, the inner circle members that The Jinx—Part Two has covered in its first three episodes.

Chris Lovell and His Wife, DonnaChris Lovell was a juror in Durst’s 2003 murder trial—one of the people who voted to acquit the real estate heir after he confessed to killing his Galveston, Texas, neighbor Morris Black and dismembering the body in 2001. (Durst claimed he killed Black in self-defense, then dismembered the body because he did not think police would believe his story.)

The Jinx—Part Two includes photos of Durst with Lovell and his wife, Donna, the latter of whom was working for Durst in an assistant-type position in Houston. She was cleaning his apartment weekly in 2015, when Durst fled during the airing of the original Jinx episodes. An employee of Durst’s building told authorities that both Lovells came to Durst’s apartment the day after he fled, and seemingly removed some of his possessions in bags. When authorities descended on the residence, they found that it had been sanitized.

In the Jinx sequel, Galveston trial judge Susan Criss sounds off on the strangeness of the situation.

“Chris Lovell was one of the jurors in the Galveston case who immediately befriended Bob as soon as the trial was over,” says Criss. “I think he was enamored with Bob because Bob is incredibly wealthy. He was hoping that would provide some financial rewards. I’ve never seen or heard of a juror forming a relationship with a defendant after trial. But then most defendants aren’t extremely wealthy with sort of a celebrity status.”

Referring to the Houston apartment cleanup, she adds, “It is astounding that 12 years after a murder trial, one of the jurors is helping Bob make his getaway.”

Lovell spoke to Jarecki for the first Jinx. “I didn’t set out to be Robert Durst’s friend,” he said. “I just set out to get some questions answered in my mind, but it has developed into a friendship, and I don’t have a problem with him at all.”

Doug OliverLewin dubbed Doug Oliver “the rudest witness I’ve ever encountered in my career.” Vulture called him “a real estate developer who seems awful even by the low standards of real estate developers.” And Robert Durst referred to him as a loyal friend.

According to Charles Bagli of The New York Times, Durst earned Oliver’s allegiance by being generous with him at the beginning of his real estate development career. As Bagli recounts in The Jinx, Durst, who was the scion of a prestigious Manhattan real estate family, fronted the money for a tenement building Oliver wanted to buy. When they sold the building, Durst evenly split the profits with Oliver, launching a lifelong friendship.

“Doug Oliver was [Durst’s] bad-boy, knocking-around friend,” said Jarecki. “They went to St. Tropez and brought girls…. He was like the bad angel on Bob’s shoulder, or vice versa. They were off doing mischief. And he loved that about Bob.”

Oliver was a person worth questioning, according to Lewin, because “he was extremely close to Bob. He was talking to Bob in 1982, the week Kathie disappeared.”

But when Lewin initially connected with Oliver by phone, Oliver refused to cooperate with the deputy district attorney. That contentious phone call, which gets played in the series, ends with Oliver telling Lewin that he’d rather go to jail than get on a commercial flight to Los Angeles. Oliver also tells Lewin he’ll need a subpoena and a private-jet budget to get him to participate.

In the end, Oliver did bend to the law and testify—though he was admittedly uncooperative, bristling at questions and alleging he could not recall much that prosecutors asked him about (until prosecutors referred him to his previous statements).

After hearing Oliver’s nasty tone with the deputy district attorney, it’s eerie to hear him ooze sweetness in a call with Durst, featured in a new episode: “Whatever I can do for you, Bobby. It’d be my pleasure.”

Nick ChavinNick Chavin is another real estate friend whose loyalty Durst earned by leveraging his financial assets. After Chavin gave up his career fronting the X-rated country act Chinga Chavin—you read that correctly—he was introduced to Durst by their mutual friend Susan Berman.

In the sequel’s second episode, Chavin tells Jarecki that Durst “gave me my business career, the whole thing, on a platter” by getting his family to give its real estate advertising business to Chavin.

Chavin testified that he and Durst hung out in their personal time too—having “boys night out,” going to nightclubs and bars with different girls (even when Durst was married to McCormack), and reportedly visiting the famous Manhattan sex club Plato’s Retreat. He said that Durst would often light up a joint wherever he happened to be—“When you’ve got the money to buy your way out of stuff you can do a lot of shit,” he told Rolling Stone—and that didn’t bother Chavin.

“Bob and I had a contempt for the law and for society and for rules. That was part of what bonded us together,” he tells Jarecki in the Jinx sequel. Perhaps this is why, as Chavin chillingly tells the filmmaker, his affection for Bob didn’t fade after Durst confessed to dismembering Black’s body: “It just didn’t have any impact on me. I just don’t have that same moral hatred of murder and murderers.”

Chavin proclaims his undying love for Durst over and over in the sequel—“No one’s ever gotten as close to my heart and brain as Bob has,” etc.

Ultimately though, Chavin’s wife, Terry, forced her husband’s hand, leading him to cooperate with authorities for the Berman trial. She told Lewin what happened to Chavin when he went to dinner with Durst in Harlem in 2014—that Durst confessed to Chavin that he killed Berman, implying that it was because she might have talked to authorities about Durst killing McCormack. “It was her or me,” Chavin recalled him saying.

Chavin’s testimony was crucial in helping Lewin do what seemed to be impossible at the outset of the trial: prove that Durst killed both Berman and McCormack. (Lewin needed to prove the latter to establish Durst’s motive for killing Berman.)

Though Chavin said he owed it to Berman to testify against Durst, it was still difficult to face off against his longtime friend in court. At one point, his eyes welled up on the witness stand.

“This is not easy,” Chavin said.

A prosecutor asked, “Do you still feel a bond—and a warmth—toward Bob Durst?”

“It sounds ridiculous, but yes,” he replied. “This is a best friend who admitted to killing my other best friend.”

Susan GiordanoSusan Giordano is another loyal Durst supporter from the real estate world. She met Durst while working for Chavin fresh out of college. “Bob looked perfect all the time. He’s confident. He’s very charming,” she recalls in the Jinx sequel. “When you’re in your early 20s, he’s in his early 40s…I was single. We came from two entirely different worlds.”

Though Giordano repeatedly denied she was ever romantic with Durst, prosecutors believed otherwise. She and Durst traded I-love-yous during prison calls and visits. Durst wrote her love letters and authorized $150,000 so that she could build a so-called “love nest” for them. (Giordano testified that she and Durst would have had different living spaces within what she also called “a love nest.”)

When Lewin asked her if she would like to spend the rest of her life with Durst, she testified, “I would absolutely spend the rest of my life. Yes.” (She added that their relationship was still platonic.) During a phone call excerpted in The Jinx, Durst tells her, “You are the woman who I think I could have, and definitely should have, married a long time ago.”

She testified that, over the course of their friendship, Durst had given her more than $350,000 in the form of gifts and loans. (“It was easy to be his friend,” she tells the Jinx cameras.) In return, Giordano was a steady supporter who regularly called and visited Durst in prison. In 2015, she sent a suitcase of clothes to Durst in New Orleans when he was on the run. When authorities intercepted the suitcase, they discovered $115,000 in cash. (She testified that it was dark when she packed Durst’s belongings, and she wasn’t aware there was money in the bottom of the suitcase.) Authorities would later take 60 boxes worth of Durst’s possessions that Giordano was storing at her New York home.

Explaining her love for Durst, Giordano tells Jarecki in The Jinx, “I have so much love to give, you know, whether it’s your kid, your family, your animals…and I used to think he was missing all of it.”

Asked about her decision to stay loyal after Durst confessed to killing and dismembering Morris Black’s body, Giordano tells Jarecki, “Maybe I watch too much Criminal Minds, but I don’t know what anybody would do in a situation. Do I understand it? No. Anything could have happened. Maybe it is the way he said it was. No one else was there.”

During a phone call with Durst, played in the Jinx sequel, Giordano reiterates her allegiance: “I want you to know, I would have taken care of anything you needed taking care of.”

Debrah Lee CharatanDurst could not legally marry Giordano because he was already married to Debrah Lee Charatan, a real estate agent who made headlines in the ’80s when she built an all-female brokerage firm. She began dating Durst at the end of the decade.

In 2000, Durst and Charatan secretly married—a month after Durst learned that the state police in Westchester County had reopened the investigation into McCormack’s disappearance. The two were wed in a Times Square skyscraper by a rabbi who said that Charatan had picked him out of the phone book. The rabbi later told the New York Daily News that Durst “was rather taciturn. He was not buoyant and didn’t smile.” The New York Times reported that friends and family, meanwhile, did not find out about the marriage until Durst was arrested 10 months later for killing Black. It was Charatan who wired him bail money.

Durst later told his sister that his union with Charatan was “a marriage of convenience.… I had to have Debrah to write my checks. I was setting myself up to be a fugitive.”

“For Debbie, it’s all about the money,” Adelaide Polsinelli, who worked as an executive for Charatan for 12 years, told The New York Times. “When she met Bob, she hit pay dirt. I am sincerely sad for her. I don’t think this was in her plan.”

The same feature alleges that Durst and Charatan only lived together once in their relationship. It has long been reported, meanwhile, that while married to Durst, Charatan had a romantic relationship with Steven I. Holm, a lawyer who worked for Durst.

In 2020, McCormack’s family sent the New York district attorney a letter bringing Charatan’s relationship with Holm to his attention. “There is no question that while married to Mr. Durst, Mrs. Charatan purported to contract a marriage with Steven Holm,” said the letter, written by a lawyer for the family. The letter also alleged that Charatan and Durst “never acted as husband and wife other than asserting spousal privilege when dealing with law enforcement,” per the New York Post. “Authorities can’t compel Charatan to provide evidence or testify against Durst because she’s his wife.” The lawyer added, “Their marriage was part of a scheme. Mrs. Charatan-Holm has been paid tens of millions of dollars through Durst Family Trusts as compensation for her participation in that conspiracy.” (Charatan was never charged.)

The letter added that after Holm died in 2019, Charatan gave a eulogy and referred to herself as Holm’s wife, as did others who spoke. Several obituaries, some of which were written by Holm’s family, referred to Charatan as Holm’s wife. This relationship will be a later focus of the Jinx sequel, Jarecki told VF.

“Debrah is an increasingly important part of the story, as you’ll see,” said Jarecki. “She’s a fascinating character and obviously extremely important to him in getting through all this.”

Jarecki said that several months after Durst’s 2015 arrest he bumped into Charatan and Holm at an Italian restaurant while he was having lunch with his mother. Per the filmmaker, he greeted Charatan and asked if it would be okay to introduce her to his mother.

“I said to her, ‘I think it’s funny that I’m running into you because I feel like I know you already. I’ve spent so much time watching video of you and people talking about you and listening to phone calls…it’s a strange situation.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, especially for you.’”

“My interpretation of that,” explained Jarecki, was that she was saying, “I deal with this guy all the time. He’s in my life. I can imagine how strange this must be for you.” He added, “So we had this little moment, and then I never really thought about it after that. There was nobody in that fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side who had any idea that that was anything other than just two casual acquaintances running into each other.”

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