The first two seasons of this podcast explored the trial of Robert Durst, who was convicted in 2021 of the murder of his good friend and confidante, Susan Berman.
This Bonus fifth season of Jury Duty is a special deep dive back into that case.
In Jury Duty: The Robert Durst Prosecutor Speaks, we have secured a series of exclusive interviews with LA Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, the lead prosecutor in that trial. We will present our conversations with John by tracking his journey from the very beginning of his involvement with the case, through the trial, and through the death of Robert Durst on January 10th, 2022.
Today we begin our conversation with Prosecutor Lewin about that journey.
This is from Kary’s introduction to the first episode of Jury Duty: The Robert Durst Prosecutor Speaks:
“I first met Deputy District Attorney John Lewin a little over three years ago as we began covering the Robert Durst trial for our website crimestory,com.
“On initial impression, Lewin can seem more like a police detective than a prosecutor. Specifically his buzz haircut and his “just the facts” persona seems to fit the mold of fictional Los Angeles Detective Sergeant Joe Friday from the hit 1960s television series Dragnet.
“But after spending just a bit of time observing John Lewin in court, it became clear that the Joe Friday Persona actually masked an acerbic but self-deprecating wit, a strategically employed temper and an impatience for dishonesty and ignorance.
“Lewin’s relentless pursuit of Durst for the better part of a decade came to remind me another fictional character, Porfiry Pertrovich, the driving force behind the murder investigation in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and the chief tormentor of the murderer and protagonist of the novel, Rodion Raskolnikov.
“So after Robert Durst died early this year, I started talking to John about conducting an unprecedented and exclusive series of interviews to cover his entire journey in his investigation of Robert Durst from its very beginnings to its end with the death of Durst on January 10, 2022. And on February 9 of this year we began a series of what became 17 conversations, all conducted by phone, during Lewin’s non-working hours, usually while he was walking or hiking, sometimes with and sometimes without his beloved dogs.”
