Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s latest project is Murder in Glitterball City, a true crime two-parter that marries Party Monster, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and American Horror Story.
The crime at the heart of Murder in Glitterball City, which premieres on February 19, shares some themes with Party Monster; both involve drugs, gay men, and homicide. And with both projects, Barbato tells Vanity Fair, their goal as filmmakers wasn’t to further sensationalize an already lurid crime.
Instead, they sought compassion for all the subjects in both stories, even the least sympathetic ones. “We’re empathetic people,” Barbato says. “We’re all about what we have in common and humanity of people.” This goal might seem insurmountable when you hear the bare bones of Glitterball City’s central crime. After moving to Louisville, Kentucky, for a well-paid tech job, Jeffrey Mundt purchased the Richard Robinson house, a 113-year-old brick mansion that, in the early 1900s, had been the site of a sanatorium operated by a doctor whose license was revoked after multiple allegations of misconduct. The home was the site of multiple violent incidents in the years since, author David Dominé writes in his 2021 book A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City, on which Bailey and Barbato’s documentary is based. Soon after his move to Louisville, Mundt met Joseph Banis on gay dating site Adam4Adam, and the two swiftly fell in love. The son of a prominent local plastic surgeon, Banis was well known on the local scene as a bartender with a complicated past, including prison stints for drug and theft offenses. He moved into the mansion soon after. In late 2009, both men say, they engaged in group sex with Jamie Carroll, a former hair salon owner, drag performer, and meth dealer. During their encounter, Carroll was fatally stabbed and shot—Banis says by Mundt, and Mundt says by Banis. Both men agree that they stuffed Carroll’s body into a Rubbermaid storage bin and buried it in their wine cellar, where it remained until June of 2010. In the meantime, the pair remained in “this incredibly intimate, dynamic relationship,” as Barbato puts it. That is, until Mundt called 911 claiming Banis was about to attack him. When police took Banis from the home, he told officers about the body in the basement. Details from the case captivated Louisville, including news that Mundt was an admitted BDSM and role-play enthusiast, with a hookup site profile that included a photo of the IT worker in a distinctive rubber getup. “There was a lot of kink shaming,” Dominé says of local news coverage of the case, as well as the investigation and trial. “You saw that certain kind of indifference in the police force when it came to, you know, gay characters, gay suspects.” You can see the conundrum that Dominé—and, later, Bailey and Barbato—faced. All three men are queer storytellers; each of them is all too aware of the way crimes involving the gay community have been twisted over the years. Yet what sets apart this case—and, to be crass, makes it intriguing enough to inspire a show on HBO—are its most salacious elements, and the ones that evoke American Horror Story. Dominé’s goal was to write a book as focused on the crime itself as it was on the rich, diverse, oft-kinky population of Louisville. He took his cues from Savannah-set crime yarn Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. “I’m not the kind of journalist that can go hunting people down and knocking on their doors, especially a story like this where you have real-life characters,” the area resident says. “I let it be known I was writing a book, and I was open to talking to people if they wanted me to include them, but I didn’t go after anyone.” Bailey and Barbato’s adaptation picks up where Dominé left off. When interviewing subjects referenced in the book, we first see them read aloud how Dominé described them, with varying degrees of pride or embarrassment. But Bailey and Barbato also hustled to speak with others in Mundt, Banis, and Carroll’s circles, adding to the patchwork Dominé began. Both the book and the series defy the true crime trope that demands a solution. Banis, who was convicted of complicity to murder, maintains in a jailhouse interview that Mundt struck the fatal blows, then coerced him into hiding Carroll’s remains. Mundt, who was acquitted of murder but served a brief sentence for covering up the crime, did not speak with Dominé or the filmmakers. “Even today, I don’t know who did it, if they did it together, or if it was one or the other,” Dominé says. “I keep going back and forth every time I reread the book or go back and look at the trial tapes. I’m not quite sure.” Bailey and Barbato might have their theories, but they maintain that Murder in Glitterball City isn’t a who-actually-done-it. “This is an incredible city with an incredible story,” Barbato says. “Spending time here, we realized that we can tell this in a different way than most crime stories.” The show might be overstuffed: colorful characters, a spooky house, that rubber suit, epic amounts of meth. But Bailey and Barbato emphasize that the most important figure is the late Jaime Carroll, whose drag name was Ronicka Reed. With few social connections, it appears that no one noticed he was gone until after the tub of his remains was unearthed. As the cocreators of Drag Race, the story of a person who disappears from society’s margins hit all too close to home. “Jamie was a victim, and, you know, this incredible artist,” Bailey says. “Drag queen, drug dealer, whatever, he didn’t deserve to die. So we just thought, Is there some memory or justice we could bring?”
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