Murder in Glitterball City Gets Lost in Its Own Myth
HBO’s two-part true-crime documentary leans into Old Louisville lore while sidelining the life of Jamie Carroll.
These days, there’s always a video. Some tantalizing bit of video evidence, however incriminating, is bound to turn up in a true-crime documentary like HBO’s two-part Murder in Glitterball City. Not too surprisingly, the perpetrators often shot the video themselves, as is the case with the bombshell recording that opens this engaging, if lurid, exploration of a drug-fueled gay hookup that ended in murder.
The details of the 2009 killing of Jamie Carroll lean towards the sensational. In Louisville, Kentucky’s historic, and historically gay, neighborhood of Old Louisville, then-couple Joey Banis and Jeff Mundt invited Carroll over for a night of party-n-play fun that turned fatal for one.
Whatever happened inside Mundt’s voluminous Victorian home that night, no one else would know until months later what became of Carroll. Following a domestic dispute between Mundt and Banis, and subsequent police interrogation, a search of the house uncovered Carroll’s dismembered body buried in the basement. From there, the story gets weirder.
David Dominé, author and guide to the lore of Old Louisville, and its reportedly haunted collection of Victorian homes, covered the case and high-profile trial in his 2021 book A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City. He’s among the eccentric characters on hand in the film to paint the picture of a genteel, bourgeois bohemian community utterly scandalized by the so-called Body in the Basement Trial.
The residents usher us through the play-by-play of the mounting scandal from the perspective of intrigued (nosy) neighbors who didn’t really know Mundt or Banis, and don’t seem to register Carroll as more than a body in the basement.
One neighbor, sharing how the ensuing uproar shattered their peace of convening on porches for evening cordials, mentions that some conversation had involved folks speculating what they’d do with a body in the basement.
Embracing the spooky, haunted-house history of the locale, and indulging the commercial interests of residents like tour guide Dominé, who profit from Old Louisville legends, the movie pushes too hard in its second installment to tie this case to years of strange and mysterious deaths in the area.
While the mythology adds flavor, the flavor is overwhelming at times. Of course, the movie, directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, also tackles the nuts and bolts of the case, including perspectives of the prosecutors who tried ex-lovers Banis and Mundt. The pair went to the mat pointing fingers at one another — except in that shocking video.
Facing multiple charges, they were tried separately, allowing the filmmakers to escalate suspense as it appears the two trials are headed for very different outcomes. Although no outcome at trial could bring life back to Jamie Carroll, who was also known as drag performer Ronica Reed.
You’ll learn more here about the houses in Old Louisville than you will about Carroll, but the film adds sensitivity to its portrayal of these events through interviews with Carroll’s family and his dear friend, Erika Hart.
Through them, the documentary offers a piece of a portrait of the victim. Not unlike Andre “Angel” Melendez, the victim of the club-kid murder covered in Barbato and Bailey’s 1998 “shockumentary” Party Monster, Carroll is fairly reduced to his victimhood and his worst choices here.
In local news footage shown in the film we see reporters repeatedly refer to the case as a love triangle gone wrong, an inaccurate depiction of this get-together. The film doesn’t emphasize enough that Carroll barely knew them.
Throughout both parts, though, Hart, along with other members of Louisville’s drag and nightlife community (Lexi Love, Mykul Valentine, Hurricane Summers) offers an idea of the world he inhabited, and the person he was, before one dark night in Glitterball City.
Murder in Glitterball City (★★★☆☆) is airing on HBO (check your local listings) and streaming on HBO Max. Visit hbo.com.
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