LOUISVILLE, Ky. (LEX 18) — A crumbling Victorian mansion in Louisville's historic Old Louisville neighborhood became the backdrop for a shocking murder case that has now inspired a new HBO original documentary. The two-part documentary, "Murder in Glitterball City," retraces the sordid twists and turns from a 2010 crime that claimed the life of a Lexington man.
The property at 1435 South Fourth Street, owned by Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend Joseph "Joey" Banis, turned into a crime scene on June 17, 2010.
"The two guys were fighting, the police thought they were responding to a domestic disturbance, one of them ratted out the other and told the police to go down to the basement and dig a dead body out of the wine cellar floor," said David Domine, author of "A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City," the book that inspired the HBO documentary.
Louisville Metro Police found the body of 37-year-old James "Jamie" Carroll, a Martin and Allen County native who had most recently been living in Lexington. Carroll worked as a well-known hair salon owner and drag performer.
"They think he died around Thanksgiving of 2009. For seven months, he was in the basement. They buried him in a Rubbermaid storage bin four feet below the surface of the floor," Domine said.
Three years later, Domine found himself in a coutroom, taking notes on both Mundt and Banis' trials.
"Three years later, we had the most scandalous murder trial here in the state. They called it the trial of 'he-said, he-said' because they both kind of pointed the finger at each other," said Domine.
This wasn't the first time Mundt and Banis had found themselves in trouble with the law. The pair had been arrested before for counterfeiting money.
"They were counterfeiting money on the premises," Domine said. "They had been arrested in April of 2010 in Chicago with $54,000 in counterfeit money."
Domine has spent more than a decade researching Carroll's murder, but the story almost found him. He had nearly moved into the South Fourth Street mansion two years before the tragedy and remembered briefly seeing Jeffrey Mundt during a house tour.
"I didn't really know much about him until two years later, I turned on the news on one morning, there the house was with police out front, caution tape all around, all of a sudden a mug shot popped up. It was Jeffrey Mundt," Domine said.
Taking him 10 years to write, Domine attended every day of both Banis' and Mundt's trials for Carroll's murder.
"They were both charged with murder, and they could've faced the death penalty, but they took that off the table in exchange for each testifying against each other. They were charged on exactly the same counts, Joey Banis was the one actually convicted of the murder," Domine said.
The documentary will offer new twists, turns and details beyond what was covered in the book.
"Some people assume that this is going to be a direct adaptation of the book. And it's not. The series is more inspired by the book and it encapsulates the whole murder and trials and everything but it kind of picks up where the book left off. As is often the case, after the book came out, more people began coming out of the woodwork," Domine said.
"Murder in Glitterball City" premieres on HBO February 19.
If you'd like to learn more about Domine's work, click here.
