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All Good Things The Movie in Beverly Hills, CA

Info
Cast & Crew

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Synopsis:
The marriage between the heir (Ryan Gosling) to a real-estate fortune and a woman (Kirsten Dunst) of modest means goes south after the husband returns to work for his demanding father.

Release Date: -1/17/2010
Running Time: 101

Rating: R - Restricted

http://www.magpictures.com/allgoodthings/
Cast:
Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Frank Langella, Lily Rabe, Philip Baker Hall, Nick Offerman, Kristen Wiig

Crew:
Director - Andrew Jarecki, Screenwriter - Marcus Hinchey, Screenwriter - Marc Smerling, Producer - Michael London, Producer - Marc Smerling, Producer - Andrew Jarecki, Producer - Bruna Papandrea, Executive Producer - Bob Weinstein, Executive Producer - Harvey Weinstein, Executive Producer - Michelle Krumm, Executive Producer - Janice Williams, Executive Producer - Barbara Hall, Cinematographer - Michael Seresin, Production Design - Wynn Thomas, Film Editor - David Rosenbloom, Original Music - Rob Simonsen, Casting - Douglas Aibel

Production Companies:
Groundswell Productions, Hit the Ground Running

Distributors:
Magnolia Pictures

Notes:
- Notes provided by Magnolia Pictures - Inspired by the most notorious missing person's case in New York history, ALL GOOD THINGS is a love story and murder mystery set against the backdrop of a New York real estate dynasty in the 1980s. The drama portrayed in Andrew Jarecki's film was inspired by the story of Robert Durst, scion of the wealthy Durst family. Mr. Durst was suspected but never tried for killing his wife Kathie who disappeared in 1982 and was never found. The original script was developed by Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Marcus Hinchey and written by Hinchey and Smerling. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella as the powerful patriarch. The film is directed and produced by Andrew Jarecki, (Academy Award-nominated Capturing the Friedmans, upcoming Universal/Rogue release Catfish), and produced by Marc Smerling (Capturing the Friedmans, Catfish). It was also produced by Michael London, and Bruna Papandrea and financed by London's Groundswell Productions. About The Production ``If anything happens to me, don't let him get away with it. -- Kathie Durst just before her unsolved disappearance - A love affair that ends with a devastating missing-person's case in New York City that cannot be solved. - An execution-style killing in Los Angeles with no viable suspects. - A dismembered corpse set adrift in a remote Texas bay. These events, which began with the most notorious missing person's case in New York history, were the inspiration behind ALL GOOD THINGS, a love story and murder mystery set against the backdrop of a New York real estate dynasty. The film stars Oscar(R) nominee Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar(R) nominee Frank Langella, and was directed by Andrew Jarecki. The film was inspired by the story of Robert Durst, scion of the wealthy Durst family. Mr. Durst was suspected of, but never tried for, the murder of his wife Kathie who disappeared in 1982 and was never found. To this day, despite multiple investigations and two other headline-making killings, Durst has never been convicted of a single murder and lives as a free, if haunted, man, having received $65 million to sever all ties to his family's vast fortune. The original script for ALL GOOD THINGS was developed by Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Marcus Hinchey and written by Smerling and Hinchey. ``In constructing this film, we used extraordinary elements from the life of Robert Durst as the inspiration for a dramatic story of desire, family, obsession, and murder, says Jarecki. ``We didn't try to replicate the exact history, but worked to capture the emotion and complexity of this love story turned unsolved mystery that has for years been kept hidden from public view.`` ``While we extensively researched the Durst case as a way to ground the film in some of its most unique moments and events, and even discovered things about the case that were not known before, we also wanted to be free to explore all the possibilities: the ones known and the ones that could perhaps never be known said Jarecki. ``So we created characters with fictional names. The main characters in the film are David and Katie Marks, and David's father Sanford Marks. Jarecki is renowned for his Oscar(R) nominated documentary CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS - itself a probing, emotionally explosive examination of a family torn apart by secrets - and might have been expected to take a similar approach to ALL GOOD THINGS. But he turned in the opposite direction. He and his creative partner, Marc Smerling, felt that the events that inspired this film, which have been so resistant to extensive police and journalistic investigations, would require a completely different path. They set out to make a powerful cinematic experience, while also speculating on the nature of and connections between three crimes that have gone unpunished and have never been understood. In the innovative ALL GOOD THINGS, Jarecki explores all three, using the narrative form of a suspense thriller, and recruited some of Hollywood's most sought-after actors - Gosling, Dunst, and Langella -- to bring the characters to life. Jarecki explains: ``For me, the most important thing was getting inside the heart and mind of a man who was suspected of involvement in three deaths over the course of thirty years. Whatever the truth is about his involvement, David Marks loses everyone who is closest to him - and most importantly his wife -- the one woman who truly loved him for who he was and who he could have been. The woman who could have been his salvation. I wanted audiences to experience their love story at an emotional level, to gain some understanding of what went wrong, and that meant bringing the story to life in the way that only great actors can. Jarecki has long been interested in the elusiveness of human behavior - a theme that came to the fore in CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS. But now, as he began the hybrid process of making ALL GOOD THINGS, storytelling itself became a means of investigation. ``What was remarkable, he goes on, ``is that in the process of doing research for the film, developing the script, rehearsing the film with the actors and ultimately shooting it, we developed views about the original case that we had never before considered. The final story became very much about power and its proxy - money - and what happens when it takes over at the expense of love, observes Jarecki. ``When power becomes the priority in a family, it can destroy all the love, justice, and humanity it finds in its path. ``TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE AT ONCE Jarecki and Smerling were first drawn into Robert Durst's dark and twisting tale years ago, when it was fodder for a blaze of tabloid headlines. They always suspected there was much more to the story than the lurid, sensational elements that drew so much attention. ``I'm always curious about the human side of monster stories, in decoding the real, complicated life that lies behind extreme behavior, Jarecki explains. ``Robert Durst, the man who inspired the character of David Marks, was presented as an almost burlesque figure in the media - this cross-dressing, fantastically rich, eccentric maniac - but when we began to research him, we found he started out as a guy we all can recognize, someone with hopes and dreams and a desire to have a good life. He met this beautiful girl from a modest family on Long Island, so far from the sophisticated world he had inhabited as a young man, and fell in love. And for a time, she helped to make him a better person. Gosling's portrayal of the film's protagonist, David Marks, brings tremendous depth to the character. Abandoned by his mother who committed suicide when the boy was only seven, he came from a family of frozen emotion, where money and power were paramount. ``At the start of our story, love seemed to have unlocked him; to have opened up dreams of a better kind of life, of greater peace, if only for a moment, and then his fateful decision to return to the his father's world broke everything apart. Jarecki continues: ``As the eldest son myself in a family of privilege, with a father who was unabashed about wanting me to carry on his legacy, I could relate to the character in a personal way. Jarecki increasingly saw his two main characters, David and Katie Marks, as grappling, in different ways, with the conflicts between a yearning for love and the drive of ambition. ``David was someone who was always at risk because of his family history and the damage that was done to him psychologically at a young age, but there was a real person there at one point, the person who went to Vermont with Katie full of hope for a life that would finally allow him love, a life that would put love above the ambition of his powerful father, says the director. ``His tragic error in judgment was returning to work for his father, and sacrificing his heart for a world that meant nothing to him. He continues: ``Katie, on the other hand, was drawn not only to David, in spite of his problems, but to a world that she felt would free her to be all that she wanted to be. Both things can be true: that Katie was an innocent young girl who fell in love with someone irresistibly different; at the same time, she was also ambitious and wanted the opportunities of a life in Manhattan, far beyond what she had seen growing up in Mineola, Long Island.`` Adds Hinchey: ``They were attracted to the opposites in each other. She liberated him from these social chains that had always been part of his life and he offered her the allure of a life she aspired to. It was a very romantic, complicated relationship that became dangerous. You see in their story how quickly a relationship can take on a perilous spiral. Equally intriguing to the filmmakers was the volatile, pressurized relationship between father and son - as the son inevitably follows the questionable choices of his elder. Continues Smerling: ``These were personal themes to us, because Andrew and I both had strong-willed patriarchs in our family. (Smerling and Jarecki have been friends since grammar school.) He continues ``We were both very aware of the kind of pressure that can be created in families when there are high expectations that you will follow in your father's footsteps and add to the family's fortunes. In the case of David Marks, it may have been more pressure than he could stand. The tragedy is that he winds up so far from where he imagined himself as a young man. A psychological question that came up repeatedly for the filmmakers was why the character of Katie would stay with David, even after an abusive cycle of violent episodes had begun. It's a question that seems to arise in real-life again and again, whenever smart, successful, even powerful, women reveal abuse by a husband or lover. ``This kind of ambiguity can be uncomfortable for us to accept, but again, I believe two things can be true at once, says Jarecki. ``I think Katie could passionately love David and at the same time fear how he treats her. I think for years, she felt that she was helping him to evolve. Early on, she knew he had psychological issues, but she loved him and was going to stand by him. Later, recognizing that he won't allow her to realize her dream of becoming a mother, she resolves to develop herself, enters medical school, and begins to find success on her own. But when the relationship becomes untenable, she finds herself trapped, unwilling to leave him and give up everything she's worked for. At that point, she becomes dangerously disconnected from her own survival instincts. Things deteriorate to the point that one rainy night in 1982, Katie disappears. DAVID'S LIFE AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE... After Katie's supposed disappearance, David's life changes radically, (as was also the case for Robert Durst, who eventually drifted to the backwater of Galveston, Texas to escape the scrutiny of a renewed investigation into the case eighteen years later). Jarecki calls Galveston ``the very edge of America - the last place you go before you slip off the radar. There, Marks drops out of sight, living in a three hundred dollar-a-month apartment, dressing as a woman, pretending to be mute. David tells us in court that he saw dressing as a woman as the most practical disguise he could think of -- a simple way to leave his old identity behind: ``It seemed to me the problem was David Marks. I just didn't want to be David Marks anymore. In Galveston, David Marks befriends Malvern Bump -- a drifter with a sketchy history (a character inspired by the Durst's elderly neighbor Morris Black for whose murder Durst was ultimately tried in Galveston). ``It was important that all the characters be fully human, says Jarecki. ``Malvern, played by the extraordinary Philip Baker Hall, is lost and extremely lonely. He is about to be evicted from the cheap rooming house where he lives, and sees David as not only a way out, but also a friend. For Jarecki, ``the ambiguity in that relationship is that David may well see Malvern as a friend, but also an opportunity. Malvern comes to believe that when David buys a home for himself in Galveston, he might make room in it for his friend Malvern. So when David's old friend and confidante Deborah Lehrman (a character inspired by Durst's best friend, the flamboyant Susan Berman) is contacted by the police as a potential witness in their re-investigation of Katie's disappearance, and she begins to pressure David for money, Malvern is already beholden to him, and willing to help solve a problem. Days before she is to meet with investigators, Deborah Lehrman is found murdered in her Hollywood home. FROM RESEARCH TO REHEARSAL At the beginning of the script development process, Jarecki, along with writers Hinchey and Smerling, dove into what would become three years of near-obsessive investigative research into the history of extraordinary cases surrounding Robert Durst, unraveling a story that went in so many directions, it was dizzying. They approached Durst through his lawyer to offer him the opportunity to present his own side of things. Behind three decades of suspicion, sensationalism and mysteries, were deep questions that had never been answered. How could a wealthy heir turn from a quiet privileged young man, into one of the most unusual suspects in the criminal annals, apprehended wearing a blonde wig and posing as a mute woman? Who was he when he fell deeply in love with a beautiful girl from a modest background, and moved to Vermont to escape the pressure of his family's expectations, starting an idealistic, counter-culture health food store in the 1970s? How did things change so radically that one rainy night a decade later, he would become the last person to ever see her? And where was he when eighteen years later, police re-opened the investigation of her disappearance, and found their most promising witness, (his best friend, daughter of a notorious Las Vegas gangster) murdered? Who had he become when he was arrested shortly thereafter in Texas for dismembering his elderly neighbor? How could all the pieces of this mystifying puzzle - the complex psychology, logistics, facts and unspoken emotions of three different cases - be put together in a way that explores how love is defeated, and a man's downfall takes place? Durst declined the filmmakers' requests, but many others did talk, ranging from his Westchester neighbors who were home the night his wife went missing, to his wife's family, to investigators and attorneys who had investigated the various cases in New York, Texas, and Los Angeles. In extensive, video-documented interviews, they shared revealing anecdotes, intimate personal memories and their own theories and thoughts about what happened. At the same time, the filmmakers began poring through court transcripts, police reports and news clippings. ``In our research, when we discovered a rare copy of the court transcripts of Robert Durst's own testimony in Galveston Texas - the only murder for which he was ever tried. His lawyer had taken the unusual step of putting Durst on the witness stand, and for a couple of days he tells his life story. That material proved to be the key to giving our main character life, a sense of his humanity said Smerling. In fact, the courtroom dialogue used in the film is drawn from those transcripts. Yet, for all of the research Jarecki, Hinchey and Smerling put into developing the story, some of the most important, emotional aspects would be developed by the actors, when they began to embody their roles. ``As the actors entered the picture and did so much with their individual performances, it let me under the skin of the characters, says Jarecki. ``The research had given us a jumping off place, but to embody their characters, the actors took it to the next level. They would ask questions like 'why would he do that?' or 'what was she thinking?' and that pushed us to look deeper and deeper into their motivations, into their souls. Jarecki continues: ``We are all inherently narcissistic. One reason we watch an actor in a performance, as Aristotle explained, is to see ourselves. To imagine ourselves in extreme situations and feel the emotional rush in a personal way, as if these events were happening to us directly. That can only happen if the characters feel authentically human, with all their quirks and oddities, and inconsistencies. GOSLING, DUNST, AND LANGELLA BECOME THE MARKS FAMILY In casting ALL GOOD THINGS, Jarecki knew he needed actors who could embody the Marks family -- in all their stormy complications -- fearlessly and completely. ``I knew the one thing I most was going to need was authenticity, the director summarizes. He found that core quality in Ryan Gosling, an Oscar(R) nominee for his performance in HALF NELSON and Golden Globe nominee for LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, who plays David Marks; in Kirsten Dunst, whose roles have ranged from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and MARIE ANTOINETTE to Mary-Jane Watson in the blockbuster SPIDERMAN series, who takes on the role of Katie Marks; and in the lauded Frank Langella, most recently an Oscar(R) nominee for FROST/NIXON, who brings to life the imposing Sanford Marks. Rounding out the cast are Philip Baker Hall as David's Texas neighbor Malvern Bump; Lily Rabe as David's closest friend and potential co-conspirator Deborah Lehrman; and comic star Kristen Wiig in a more serious turn as Katie's colorful friend Lauren Fleck. Jarecki felt right away that Gosling, known for disappearing into complex, ambiguous characters, was the best possible match for the story's unique challenges. ``Ryan has a natural inscrutability that he shares with David Marks. You can never be sure what he is going to do from one minute to the next, observes Jarecki. ``He can give you a sense of a kind of hair-trigger unpredictability, and that potential for danger and explosiveness is always right below the surface. There were so many aspects to David's personality that I felt we could only get to with an actor as deep as Ryan. ``The role was also extraordinary, Jarecki continues, ``in that this young actor would have to play a 30 year span of his character's life, so that at one point, Ryan would be playing David as a man in his late 50s. The makeup can be extraordinary, but it never works unless the actor has the ability to transform himself into a much older man, physically and mentally. Ryan insisted on getting every detail right, down to the slightly oversized jacket that made him look physically diminutive as he aged. Kirsten Dunst made for a volatile chemical reaction with Gosling. ``Kirsten is glamorous, but what attracted me to her is how real she is, says Jarecki. ``She has a guileless personality and is a very straight shooter, and that is who Katie is, as well. We needed someone who audiences would feel right away is a genuinely good person and with Kirsten, it's not an act. He continues: ``I was especially drawn to Kirsten's performance in THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, because it had such a heartbreaking, yet beautifully emotional, quality. ALL GOOD THINGS is the first film in which Kirsten truly plays an adult, full of love and conflict. She was also uniquely able to play the range of ages for Katie, who starts the film at 19 and disappears when she is 29. Kirsten is fearless about showing her colors - about trying things she hasn't tried before, exposing her emotion, taking risks. She makes it personal and gives you a kind of raw emotion that keeps you on the edge of your seat. She brings the heart to the story - we worry about her and we root for her. Jarecki always wanted Frank Langella for the role of Sanford Marks. ``I was concerned that he wouldn't do it, the director confesses. ``But then we started talking about the character. We would sit for hours and hours and just talk about our dads. Ultimately, some of the key lines in the movie are ones that came directly from our own fathers. Along the way, Frank pushed us to make the role more honest and penetrating. Really, I don't think anyone else could have given it so much gravitas, presence, and internal conflict. ``THESE THINGS REALLY DO HAPPEN RYAN GOSLING ON DAVID MARKS Ryan Gosling was already a fan of Andrew Jarecki's CAPTURING THE FREIDMANS before he was cast as David Marks. ``I was impressed by his stance on that film, which was not trying to judge or to place blame but to understand that there's more to people than these singular moments that sometimes end up defining us, he says. ``Andrew believes you have to look at the whole picture, not just focus in on one particular dot. When he read the screenplay for ALL GOOD THINGS, Gosling admits he found it to be ``challenging, confronting material - and that is what compelled him. He continues: ``These things really do happen - where people honestly fall in love, get married and then it somehow ends tragically. It happens a lot. Andrew Jarecki comes at this reality in a very confrontational way, almost like a journalist, but without seeing things as black & white. He wants to portray things with complexity and allow the audience to make their own decisions and judgments. From the minute he agreed to the role, Gosling decided that his sole aim would be to capture the character of David Marks on the page, not the Robert Durst portrayed in the media. ``The movie is inspired by the Durst case but, at the end of the day, we can never know exactly what happened behind closed doors, he explains. ``I think the real spirit of the movie doesn't lie in those details, though. It lies in the attempt to explore what may have happened in the context of an entire life.`` Gosling was fascinated by David's psychology and what he sees as his need to escape a world that had troubled him deeply since childhood. ``I think David always had this fantasy that he would leave the city behind for the woods - that the city was everything that was wrong with him and with the world, that it was this chaotic mess full of contradictions. He wanted to isolate himself from that and he was looking for some kind of peace. But David does not find a permanent peace. After returning to the city with Katie all too soon, any solace he might have found is quickly shattered. Gosling says he believes many factors were involved in David's unusual descent. ``It's hard to pinpoint exactly where things went wrong, he says. ``I've known people like David-people with enormous potential, who through a series of bad decisions and gray areas in their lives suddenly become the villain in their own story. We may all be susceptible to that. For Gosling, a real key to the performance was forging a palpably real relationship with Kirsten Dunst as Katie. ``The three of us had a very extensive rehearsal period where Kirsten, Andrew and I just talked a lot and worked all day, coming to understand more and more about the characters and their relationship, he says. ``It was a film where you would do a scene and walk away feeling like you really learned something new. ``DARK AND AUTHENTIC: THE SHOOT It was always important to the filmmakers to shoot ALL GOOD THINGS on location, recreating each of the starkly different worlds in which David Marks moves. Jarecki worked closely with veteran cinematographer Michael Seresin (HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, ANGELA'S ASHES, ANGEL HEART, MIDNIGHT EXPRESS) to come up with a look for the film that would be as dark and gritty as its subject matter, but also contrast the high and low points of David's mercurial life. Getting the period right was key to Jarecki's vision. ``The film is set during a visually and aesthetically important period in America life and we wanted to evoke that slightly washed-out look of 70s cinema, he notes. ``We also wanted to capture the feeling of Times Square in the 1970s as authentically as possible. I had summer jobs in Times Square when I was a teenager, so I knew firsthand what it was like - and it was such an interesting place and time. He goes on: ``We used hundreds of photographs of Times Square from that era and re-created the exact storefronts and even the lettering on the signs. We recreated the Luxor Hotel just as it had been when Times Square was full of massage parlors and prostitution. And we scouted endlessly for the right skyline, because the views have really changed with all the glass towers erected in the 1980s. The interior spaces helped to set up the constant tension inside David Marks - juxtaposing Katie's barebones 52nd Street apartment with the couple's lush and verdant digs in Vermont and with the stark ambition of the Marks' family office tower. Jarecki also sought out such real-life New York power haunts as Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of New York City, where David takes Katie to a lavish social event the very night that he meets her. Each of these touches was essential for Jarecki to build a believable world for events that, at times, seem almost beyond belief. ``The authenticity of the locations grounded the story back in a real time and place, he explains. ``What made the experience so unique, says Jarecki, ``is that by treating a story as a piece of art, we may have gotten closer to the truth of human emotion. Filling in the inexplicable gaps, probing the humanity underneath. THE FACTS OF THE DURST CASE Robert Durst was raised in Scarsdale, New York, the eldest son of the late real estate magnate Seymour Durst, who, on a par with the Trumps, Helmsleys, and the Rubins, developed real estate in Midtown Manhattan, with vast holdings ranging from major skyscrapers to places of ill-repute in Times Square. Robert's mother died suddenly when he was 7 years old, falling off the roof of their home in an apparent suicide. Robert explained in court that he was present when she died. Robert was said by friends to have been severely impacted by the event, and went through extensive psychological counseling, including Primal Scream therapy. In 1971, Robert Durst met Kathleen ``Kathie McCormack, then still a teenager, while she was living in one of his father's buildings on East 52nd Street. They soon fell in love and were married. The couple moved to Vermont to open a health food store called All Good Things. By all accounts, they were happy and devoted to each other in those early years. In 1973, under pressure to join the family business, Robert and Katie gave up the health food store and moved back to Manhattan and into a Penthouse apartment owned by his father. They also bought a small weekend house on Lake Truesdale outside New York City. He began working at the Durst Organization. Katie became pregnant and, under pressure from Robert who did not want to have children, had an abortion. Giving up her hope of becoming a mother, Katie went back to school near the lake house to study nursing. After graduating from nursing school, Katie was accepted at the prestigious Albert Einstein School of Medicine and begins medical school. By 1980, Kathie began to talk with friends of a troubled marriage and domestic abuse. In 1981, Kathie Durst hired a divorce lawyer, though a divorce was never filed. On Sunday, January 31, 1982, Kathie Durst was seen for the last time at a party in Connecticut where she told several people she was afraid of what her husband might do to her. She spoke by phone with her husband that evening and he asked her to meet him at the couple's weekend house on Lake Truesdale. Neighbors saw her car pull up to the lake cottage that evening. She was never heard from again. Four days later, Robert walked into an Upper West Side police station and reported his wife missing, saying they'd had an argument and he'd dropped her off in Katonah to take the train into the City, and had spoken to her later that night when she arrived at their penthouse apartment. Though doormen reported seeing her at the apartment that night and the next morning, getting into a taxi, Robert told police he did not hear from her again. Train conductors interviewed later said that they had not seen her on the un-crowded train. The investigation at the time was limited primarily to New York City, since that is where Durst said his wife had last been seen. The case was treated as a missing persons case. Kathie's family describes that their efforts to enlist the Durst family in helping to locate her were rebuffed. The case is still considered open and unsolved, though Kathie was declared legally deceased in 2001. Despite the reopening of the investigation into the role of Durst, he has never been charged with her murder. In 1994, Robert's younger brother Douglas was appointed as his father's successor, and Robert stopped going to the Durst offices. Robert continued living in Manhattan until 2000, when the investigation was re-opened by Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, based on a tip from a man arrested for exposing himself to women on the Bedford riding trails. As the investigation was publicized, Robert fled to Galveston, Texas, and changed his identity, posing as a mute woman. On Christmas Eve, 2000, days before Robert's life-long friend, the flamboyant journalist Susan Berman, was scheduled to talk to police about the Kathie Durst case as part of the new investigation, she was found murdered in her Benedict Canyon home, with a single bullet to the back of the head. There was no sign of forced entry, suggesting she knew her killer. Durst, who had recently been in contact with Berman and had sent her two checks for $25,000, was considered a suspect, but was never pursued because Los Angeles Police were investigating her manager, though that investigation led nowhere. The crime has never been solved, and Durst has never been charged. Robert was arrested in 2001 in Texas after dismembered parts of his neighbor, 71 year-old Morris Black, were discovered floating in Galveston Bay. He then failed to appear at his initial hearing, evading police for seven weeks as he travelled back to visit places from his past, including the lake house he shared with his former wife Kathie. He was ultimately apprehended in Pennsylvania after shoplifting a chicken sandwich and a Band-Aid. A search of Robert's car revealed that, in addition to two guns and $37,000 in cash, he had used Black's driver's license to rent the car. Robert Durst went on trial for the murder of Morris Black in Texas in 2003. Durst claimed Black's death was an accident and result of self-defense after Black, known as a loner and drifter, broke into his apartment and they tussled over a gun. He also admitted to cutting up Black's body with a hacksaw and a paring knife, but lawyers argued he did so because he became irrational after the shock of Black's accidental death, and was afraid that given his history, no one would believe he had not murdered his neighbor. In November of 2003 a Texas jury acquitted Robert of the murder charges. Members of the jury reported not having been convinced by prosecutors that the killing was premeditated. In 2004, Durst was found guilty of bond jumping and illegal disposal of a body. He was given a sentence of five years, but was paroled in 2005, having served only nine months. In 2006, Durst was returned to jail