‘A Bizarre True Crime Story’: Inside a Horrific He-Told Murder | documentary

eEveryone in old Louisville knows about the couple who killed someone. In this neighborhood of elaborate Victorian architecture and picturesque walking paths, the story of Geoffrey Munt, Joey Banes, and the 4th Street murders is a local legend that won’t go away, gossiped at happy hours and delightfully reenacted on true crime shows like Oxygen’s Snapped: Killer Couples, which ran an episode about the case two years ago.

In some ways, it’s easy to see why Mondt and Banes have become the 21st century’s Leopold and Loeb, the famous gay lovers who inspired Hitchcock’s Rope. Their 2009 trial hit nearly every box on the true crime bingo card, which included meth-fueled group sex, pathological lies that form webs of deception, intense BDSM, and a body left to rot in the basement of a haunted former asylum.

But the sad, bizarre — and bloody — murder of 46-year-old hairdresser and business owner Jimmy Carroll is also a Rubik’s Cube of a case with no clear heroes and villains. I found the new HBO documentary Murder in Glitterball City so fascinating precisely because it embraces this complexity and refuses to tie it down to a bow. “The story was told in the style of American Horror Story, featuring demonic people and with tabloid headlines,” co-director Fenton Bailey told me.

Murder in Glitterball City takes a sympathetic look even if its themes are hard to like. Panis and Mondt couldn’t seem to belong to different worlds. The former was a tattooed cyberpunk waiter, while IT consultant Mundt was poised and sometimes adopted a fake British accent to sound more “sophisticated” (sounding the social alarm). After meeting on gay dating site Adam4Adam and bonding over their interest in BDSM, the couple moved into a rundown red-brick mansion, aiming to restore the place to its former glory. They kept a low profile but were initially an affectionate couple who were content in each other’s company: home movies show them listening to Kylie Minogue’s popular album Impossible Princess and playing with their two cats.

On a Zoom call the week before the documentary’s release, British-born Billy and New Jersey-raised Randy Barbato bump into each other like a couple who’s been together forever. “We don’t agree on aaaanything“This creates a creative dynamic,” says Billy in a sharp tone. After meeting while studying at New York University in the 1980s, and performing in a new wave band called the Fabulous Pop Tarts, the duo founded the production company World of Wonder in 1991, known as the home of RuPaul’s Drag Race. But Billy and Barbato are mostly documentarians by trade, producing and directing Party Monster: The Shockumentary and Macaulay Culkin’s subsequent film, as well as the 2000 documentary Eyes Tammy Fey, who later planned the Oscar-winning biopic in 2002, directed the duet Monica in Black and White, which sought to show Monica Lewinsky with a sensitivity almost unheard of at the time.

“I think we’re drawn to complex stories or unexpected heroes,” Barbato says, before Billy chimes in. “Maybe there are also people who have a quick judgment about them or think they know them.” “Whether they are demonized, marginalized, or just judged. It’s all much more complicated than that.”

After being approached by HBO Docs to make a documentary based on David Domaine’s 2021 book about the Panis and Mondt case, the filmmakers hopped on a plane to Louisville. They quickly fell in love with the historic Old Louisville neighborhood and its people, and included several quirky characters in their film as well.

“What made it click was that this was a file gay “A true crime story,” Billy says. “Jeffrey, Jimmy, and Joey are weirdos, and Owen Myers David is a weirdo. The fact that this neighborhood exists today is because of the gay men who saved their homes from the wrecking ball. Being there and understanding that the neighborhood exists as a queer creation gave us a kind of responsibility: We have to say this right because it can be very easy to say it wrong.

After discovering the invention of the mirror ball in Louisville in 1917, the icon of disco dancing became a symbol of their approach to storytelling. “The idea of ​​one beam of light hitting a disco ball and creating all these confusing, dazzling versions… and after a while we said, ‘Okay, this is what we should portray in this story,’” Bailey says. “It’s one event in this room, but the two people who know what happened have completely different versions.”

Murder in Glitterball City is refreshingly honest about the addiction, or so-called extreme sex and violence, that can often be a part of gay life. The film trusts the viewer to know that inflicting pain on your partner’s consent in the bedroom does not mean carrying a gun, even if both of those things are true.

“It wasn’t important to purge it like we do as gay people,” Bailey says. “On the contrary, if this was a MAGA production, they might want to demonize it. By looking at this in unblinking detail, we can get as close to the story of what happened as possible. This is the reality of life. We are in this moment where we are trying to be sold on childish choices whether they are good or bad, and life is not like that.”

As the film progresses, we follow the arrest of Mendt and Banes, as they each accuse the other of committing the murder. The case turns into a “he said, he said” story, with each man having a different – and equally compelling – version of what really happened that night. “We’re still arguing about it,” says Bailey, and the film leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions.

During the search, Bailey and Barbato discovered hours of home video camera footage on a laptop. The couple filmed everything, from those cozy moments at home to the intense verbal intercourse they had while high. Ask if they have difficulty stomaching. “I don’t know if people having sex is bad enough to be worth watching,” Billy says, frowning. But the footage goes further than most blue films, showing the pair hanging and looking dead behind their eyes as they do so. “Yes, and his phone conversations are very annoying,” Barbato admits. “We went back and forth about how much there should be because it’s so dark, it’s like you’re being pulled into a crystal meth den. But it shows what it is, so it’s important.”

It’s time for my last question. “Yes!” Barbato mugs in mock fear. However, I don’t want to talk about sex or drugs. I’m more interested in how a film like this, which depicts messy, unhealthy queer lives, gets made at a time when Trump is rolling back NEA grants for LGBTQ+ arts, and Glaad reports that LGBTQ+ inclusion in film is at a three-year low.

“It’s generally difficult,” says Billy. “We do a lot of projects [at World of Wonder] So much so that we don’t even bother going out on the field. We start making them first because they are very difficult to sell. The duo has been trying to secure funding for a documentary about gay genius Liberace since before Covid, but so far, nothing has happened. “And we needs Liberace’s story.

Rather than adhering to the crucible of morality, Billy sees the murder in Glitterball City’s embrace of gray areas as a counterpoint to our moment of political polarization. “I feel like it’s almost defensive on the part of the gay community; [saying] We are real people. We are neither saints nor sinners. Refusing to respect this reality is a way to reject our vision.”

“Given how polarized times are, it’s a bit risky to become an anarchist,” Barbato adds.