were an unconventional couple living life to the fullest.
It was the definition of opposites attract.
[David] He was madly in love with him,
and was happy they had finally found the true love of his life.
[Narrator] But with one disturbing call,
everything they had built would come crashing down.
[Narrator] As police try to make sense of
a complicated relationship,
a horrific discovery will propel the case
into deadly territory.
He said he knew where a body was buried.
The odor of a decomposing body, that hit me right away.
He had been shot in the back of the head,
almost execution-style.
[Narrator] The ensuing battle between lovers
will cast a dark shadow over
their seemingly loving relationship...
[Narrator] And will leave detectives questioning
who to believe.
[Collin] You had these two individuals
that had a love-hate, anger filled relationship.
You put them together and it's just a deadly combination.
[music]
[Narrator] Home to the renowned Kentucky Derby
and famed for its bourbon soaked nightlife,
Louisville, Kentucky is a modern city
with a storied history.
[Angelique] Louisville is super unique.
It's a city with so much history,
a little something for everybody.
Definitely very welcoming, very friendly.
[Narrator] Louisville is also the city where Jeffrey Mundt
was born and raised.
A smart and determined individual,
Jeffrey dreamed of success from a young age.
He got a college scholarship
and went to Indiana University in Bloomington.
He got into computers,
and soon, he was getting very high paying jobs.
Jeffrey Mundt presented himself
as buttoned up, straight-laced, very proper.
Preppy, if you will.
[Darren] He truly was a techie,
and he was a person that would work on computers all day
and troubleshoot things.
[David] He lived in Washington, D.C. for a time.
He worked at Northwestern University in Chicago,
where he was in charge of their big IT overhaul
called Project Café.
And he had a long term boyfriend in Chicago.
[Narrator] Jeffrey seemed to have it all:
A lucrative career, a loving partner,
and a lively social life.
[Jason] Mundt went to the ballet.
He went to nice restaurants.
He wanted to be seen in kind of an upper echelon high society.
[Narrator] In his mid 30s, however,
Jeffrey's life in Chicago was upended
when his boyfriend suddenly broke up with him.
Supposedly he broke up by text. So, Jeffrey was suffering.
That was one of the reasons he came back to Louisville.
[Narrator] Jeffrey had a sizeable nest egg...
And chose to use it to buy property in
a historic section of Louisvile in 2008.
Old Louisville is the first suburb, actually,
of Louisville Proper as the downtown area.
Each block is totally different.
[David] It's where the tobacco titans
built their mansions,
the bourbon barons, the racetrack royalty.
[Narrator] When Jeffrey found a red brick mansion
on Fourth Avenue,
he thought it was the perfect place
to start over.
[David] The house needed a lot of work.
The kitchen looked like it had been bombed out
and the carriage house was falling apart.
Jeffrey set in to slowly restoring the house.
He got a job at the University of Louisville,
and he got a very lucrative IT consulting job.
He was making over a quarter million dollars a year.
So, he had a good lifestyle.
[Narrator] In the fall of 2009,
Jeffery met the man who would change his life forever...
38 year old Louisville native, Joey Banis.
Joey and Jeff Mundt met through an internet dating app.
It was the definition of opposites attract.
[David] Mr. Mundt's background was, was in sharp contrast
to the background of Mr. Banis.
[Steven] Joey used to run a nightclub called Fusion.
It was a, a, a queer bar,
but it was kind of like the, the fringe people,
like the gothic folk, the, like, people who were into
industrial music, the alternative scene.
He was very charismatic. He was very friendly.
Always a smile on his face.
He went all out in attire and makeup
and paint and all that kinda stuff.
[David] He often would wear just a pair of jeans,
and his upper torso would be painted in
all these elaborate patterns.
He's got tattoos, a mohawk.
He looks a little rougher around the edges.
Joey did present himself as a bit of a bad boy.
[music]
[Narrator] For a straight-laced computer tech like Jeffrey,
Joey was a breath of fresh air.
[David] They would go out to dinner to nice restaurants
and go to concerts afterwards.
They liked to be seen together as a couple.
[music]
[Narrator] Only a few weeks into their relationship,
Jeffrey asked Joey to move into his old Victorian home...
And Joey happily accepted.
[David] Joey saw Jeffrey as his soulmate.
He was madly in love with him,
and was happy they had finally found, you know,
the true love of his life.
[Darren] In June of 2010,
they had been living together for roughly 6 months.
[Narrator] But at 9:30 P.M. on June 17th, 2010,
after more than six months of living together,
Jeffrey and Joey's whirlwind romance
would come to a disturbing end.
[David] The caller identified himself as Jeffrey Mundt.
His boyfriend, he said, was trying to murder him.
Jeffrey Mundt was barricaded in a bedroom on the second floor,
and Joey Banis was out in the hallway with a hammer.
[Jason] Mundt was panicked.
He was scared that Banis was gonna bash through the door,
and you could hear in the background the pounding.
[Jason] He was fearful he was gonna be killed.
[Narrator] Coming up.
With one man's life in danger,
police race to apprehend a violent criminal.
He was attempting to escape down the front stairs.
They don't know how dangerous this person might be.
[Narrator] And a shocking revelation
will lead police to uncover a terrifying crime.
You have two evil people here
that just meshed well and become one evil person.
[music]
isville, Kentucky,
police are responding to the home of
38-year-old Jeffrey Mundt...
Jeffrey is the one on the line with dispatchers,
reporting that his partner, Joey Banis,
is trying to kill him.
When they get there, Banis is running down the stairs.
Joey Banis was attempting to escape down the,
the front stairs, the grand stairs of the mansion,
and they caught him.
He had a backpack over his shoulder.
In the backpack, they found drug paraphernalia.
At that time, Joey was arrested for the domestic dispute.
[David] They went up to the second floor bedroom
where Jeffrey Mundt was still barricaded,
and they got him to open the door and he came out.
He was emotionally distraught and teary-eyed and crying.
But Jeffrey Mundt showed no signs of being hurt.
One of the officers took Joey down to the squad car
that was outside the house on Fourth Street,
put him in the backseat,
and prepared to question him
while the other officer remained with Jeffrey inside the house
to question him.
And that's standard procedure.
[Narrator] Inside, Jeffrey tells the officer
that his boyfriend had threatened to kill him.
[Justin] Jeffrey Mundt and Joey Banis
had been involved in a domestic dispute,
which started as a verbal argument.
The domestic dispute turned physical.
[David] Jeffrey said they had had some tempestuous arguments,
and had some drag-out fights and things like that.
But this was the first time
the police were ever called in this capacity.
He was terrified of Joey Banis.
[Narrator] From the back seat of the squad car, however,
Joey Banis offers a completely different story.
He was telling the officers that
Jeffrey Mundt had killed someone.
[Jason] This is seemingly a crazy claim to make,
and police don't believe it.
They just think he's trying to shift the focus off himself.
They just assumed that this new piece of information
was being utilized by Mr. Banis to, in essence,
get him out of what would be a Class B misdemeanor charge.
[Narrator] While Jeffrey stays on scene,
Joey is transported
to police headquarters for questioning.
[Collin] He's claimin' that the murder
happened back in December.
And looking up James Carroll,
we can't find a missing person report on him.
Traditionally, people that have
some sort of family or work history,
somebody's gonna file a missing person report on 'em
if they even heard from 'em in a week or two.
And Jeffrey Mundt, who's been accused of this,
but he was very well-educated, very well-spoken, well-kept,
put together individual.
So kinda like, on the fence in believing Joey's story.
[David] Jamie wanted to kinda party,
and they did drugs and other things all night.
But somewhere in the process when they saw that
Jamie had cash with him from his previous drug deals that day,
Joey said that Jeffrey floated the idea of killing him
and keeping the money and drugs
to kinda keep them going for a couple months.
Banis tells detectives that Mundt had recently lost his job
and needed money to continue this drug habit.
And when Jamie made it back to the house,
he probably wasn't expecting what was waiting for him.
At that time, there was a...
Scream like no one had ever heard.
When he wheeled around,
he saw Jeffrey Mundt armed with a knife,
stabbing and slicing at Jamie over and over and over again.
[Narrator] According to Joey,
Jeffrey gave neither man time to act.
[Narrator] Joey says Jeffrey immediately began
to cover his tracks.
[David] They took the body down to the wine cellar.
One of the few rooms in the basement
that still had a dirt floor.
And he was forced to dig a hole.
[Collin] It's not every day that you have somebody come in
and give you this information just free will.
They go ahead, and they draft up
a, a search warrant for the house.
[Narrator] While skeptical of Joey's story,
detectives return to the mansion...
Where Jeffrey is waiting.
[Collin] We explained to Jeffrey Mundt at that time
what the allegations were.
That there was potentially a dead body in his basement.
He was astonished.
"Oh no, what? Are you kidding me?"
We had no reason to suspect all these allegations,
but we still had get that statement with him.
I asked him if he would accompany me back to the,
the police station.
He wasn't under arrest.
I told him I'd bring him right back.
And we went down to the headquarters.
[Narrator] Meanwhile, a search team
descends into the basement.
[Justin] It is a dirt floor basement.
Well underneath the bowels of the house.
[Kevin] So, we started diggin' a hole.
We had two shovels with three of us takin' turns.
[David] They dug for hours and hours.
And eventually the, the shovel hit something hard.
And as they cleared away the dirt,
they saw it was the top of a Rubbermaid storage container.
The inside of the lid had the spray foam insulation around it.
But when I hit it with the shovel and broke the insulation,
the smell, odor of a decomposing body,
that hit me right away.
At that point, I was 100% sure
Banis was not makin' up a story about a body.
[music]
anis's
harrowing story of murder,
police in Louisville, Kentucky have unearthed
a terrible secret buried in the basement of
his boyfriend Jeffrey Mundt's historic mansion.
[Justin] Upon the finding of this makeshift grave,
this container,
the body was taken to
the Louisville Metro Medical Examiner's Office
for identification purposes.
[Narrator] Detectives continue their search of the house,
zeroing in on the bedroom
where the murder allegedly occurred six months prior.
[Kevin] During all the search warrants, everything,
we collect any sort of computers, phones,
look for evidence on those.
They did find a, a hole that looked like
it could've been made by a bullet.
[Collin] We did another search warrant there
for the luminol to show where they cleaned the blood off.
With a stab wound, there would be
an excessive amount of, of blood.
There wasn't a whole lot in the bedroom.
But there was, there was quite a bit in the drain,
and also around the bathtub where they had washed the body.
[Narrator] At the station,
Detective King sits down with Jeffrey Mundt,
eager to hear his side of the story.
[Narrator] When pressed about his knowledge of the crime,
Jeffrey is adamant his has non.
Instead, he tells detectives that his partner Joey
is entirely capable of murder.
[Collin] Joey Banis had a long criminal history.
Drugs, I think, he had some violent stuff, some burglary.
[David] He ended up in prison several times.
So, when he met Jeffrey,
he had just come out of prison and really didn't have a job.
[Narrator] Jeffrey claims that leading up to the 911 call
earlier that night,
Joey's violent tendencies had erupted...
When Jeffrey had tried to end things once and for all.
[Jason] Mundt had threatened to leave Banis,
and that is what led to the argument...
That ended up with
Banis allegedly threatening to assault him.
Jeffrey continuously talked about how in fear he was
of, of Joey,
and you almost feel sympathetic to him as the victim.
We had no reason not to believe him.
[Kevin] Mundt had a clean record.
He works in computers, worked for universities.
He was the more clean cut of the two by far.
I'm kinda like, "Man, this poor guy."
He's a very, very likeable guy.
Very articulate. Very well-educated.
[Narrator] Police decide to keep both Jeffrey Mundt
and Joey Banis at the station
until they can learn more about the victim.
[Collin] We started diggin' a little bit.
In looking up James Carroll, we find out his car,
it had been impounded, I think,
out of one of alleys near the location.
It got picked up three weeks after what we believe
to be the date of the homicide at that time.
[Narrator] Jamie Carroll's identity
is confirmed at autopsy.
[Kevin] There was a tattoo that was not decomposed.
Detective Lesher,
who was able to speak with some family members
and confirm that that was Jamie Carroll's tattoo.
[David] Jamie Carroll had been shot one time.
The medical examiner did find a .38 caliber bullet
lodged in his chin.
It appeared that he had been shot in the back of the head,
kind of almost execution-style.
Things started to match what Joey was telling the detectives.
[Narrator] But in the six months since Jamie Carroll's murder,
why had no one reported him missing?
When detectives speak to Jamie's mother,
she assumed her son was in prison on a drug charge.
[Collin] She hadn't seen him for awhile,
but had talked to him around Thanksgiving.
So, a few weeks before the murder happened.
[Narrator] According to his mother,
Jamie had ambitions that outgrw his small town
and eventually led him to Louisville.
Jamie grew up in eastern Kentucky,
around the Prestonsburg, Paintsville area.
Jamie was very creative when it came to hairstyling
and with makeup.
He just had that creative talent in him.
Jamie Carroll became interested in drag queens.
And he started performing as a drag queen.
And he took the stage name Ronica Reed, The Pageant Queen.
[Barry] When I first met Jamie,
it was hard for me to believe that there was a man underneath
that long blonde mane and all that beautiful makeup.
[David] Things were going well for him.
He was performing.
But somewhere along the line he got into drugs,
and he began dealing drugs.
[Narrator] Jamie's side hustle in the Louisville club scene
led to an arrest in 2009.
After being released on bail,
detectives learn he was expectd to be sentenced
on December 15th, 2009.
But Jamie never made it to the hearing.
He had had a court date he had not shown up for.
And we couldn't find any record of him from that point on.
[Narrator] Now, nearly six months later,
detectives believe that Joey Banis
is responsible for Jamie's murder.
So they sit down with him for a second interview.
[Narrator] Joey agrees to tell his story again...
But this time, he drops a telling detail
about his relationship with Jamie Carroll.
[Jason] Banis met Jamie Carroll
on an online dating service in 2009,
and they began a relationship.
And this sort of bled into the same time that
he met and started having a relationship with Mundt.
[Justin] Joey and Jamie Carroll were lovers.
They had had a relationship.
The odd man out in that room, that night was Jeffrey Mundt.
Mr. Banis stated that the motive was clearly jealousy.
We didn't know what to believe.
[music]
le, Kentucky
have just learned that murder victim Jamie Carroll
had a long standing sexual relationship
with Joey Banis...
Giving his boyfriend, Jeffrey Mundt,
a motive to kill Jamie in a jealous rampage.
Joey and Jamie had been in regular contact
for sexual reasons, for drug reasons.
And then, Jeffrey came into the picture.
Jeffrey insisted that he give up Jamie, and he wouldn't do that.
[Jason] Banis says that Mundt
was jealous of this relationship.
So now Banis has given a motive
for Mundt to kill Jamie Carroll.
[Narrator] According to Joey,
after Jeffrey killed Jamie in their bedroom,
he learned just how ruthless his boyfriend could be.
[David] Jamie Carroll's body was rigid.
They weren't able to fit it into
the size container they had purchased.
[Narrator] Detectives still have doubts that someone like Jeffry
could be capable of such a heinous act...
They sit down with him for a second interview,
hoping to clear things up.
[Collin] Jeffrey Mundt never went home.
He was still there the whole time.
This is probably 8, 9, 10 o'clock in the morning,
so I, you know, it was at least 24 hours that I'd been,
been awake.
So, I said, you know, "Would you...
Would you mind taking a polygraph?
That way we can be done with this,
and I can get you back home."
[Narrator] Despite his agreement to a polygraph,
Jeffrey first makes a stunning confession.
Mr. Mundt, in essence, cracked and finally admitted
that he knew more than he had been telling them.
[Collin] I mean, I was floored at the time.
Absolutely floored.
I'd been duped for six hours in wantin' to believe this guy.
When Jeffrey finally broke down and admitted he did know about
the body being in the basement,
they asked him, "What happened?"
And the story he told was very similar to the story
that had been told by Joey Banis.
[Darren] With one minor exception.
Which is that everything related to the murder was flipped.
Meaning it was Mr. Banis who actually killed Mr. Carroll,
and it was not Mr. Mundt.
[Kevin] In Mundt's story, he's the weakling.
Banis did all the bad stuff.
And he's scared of Banis and that's why he's assisting.
And Banis's story, he's scared of Mundt.
[Narrator] Now, detectives aren't sure
which story to believe.
[Collin] You have Joey, that's giving details about
this murder that happened,
and they're adding up.
And then you have Jeffrey Mundt,
he's leading us to believe that, you know,
he's telling the truth.
[Darren] If we have two people,
and there's nothing specific that's gonna tell us
which of these two actually committed the crime,
we have a problem here.
We have a quandary. What do we do now?
[Narrator] With both men in custody,
detectives attempt to verify their various allegations.
A routine background check leads to a startling discovery.
We learned that both Joey and Jeffrey were arrested
in Chicago, Illinois after Jeffrey had passed
a counterfeit hundred dollar bill to a valet at a hotel.
[Narrator] Detectives obtain a copy of the incident report..
And discover the arrests took place four months after
the murder of Jamie Carroll.
They were arrested in April of 2010.
This is when Jamie's body was still down in the basement.
What happened was they had checked into the hotel.
Jeffrey gave the doorman a hundred dollar bill.
Either as a tip or to break for change,
and the doorman noticed something wasn't right
about the hundred dollar bill.
It didn't feel right.
It felt damp and, and not the right texture.
He called the police.
They went up and went into their room,
and found 54 thousand dollars in counterfeit money.
In addition to bags and bags of date rape drugs,
forged documents, fake IDs.
[Jason] Mundt had lost his job. Banis didn't have a job.
They were desperate for money at this point.
So, they're running like, a low-level criminal operation
out of their home.
[David] The whole time they were living in the house,
Joey and Jeffrey had been counterfeiting money.
[David] They had an operation upstairs
where they were taking dollar bills,
they were bleaching them in chemicals,
and then re-stamping them as 50 and 100 dollar bills.
So, when the guys were arrested for the murder of Jamie Carroll,
they were out on bond from this big case in Chicago.
[Narrator] But designer drugs and counterfeit money
aren't the only items of interest
on the Chicago PD inventory report.
[Collin] We find out that they were arrested with guns.
One was the same caliber of gun that was used to kill Jamie.
So, we drove up to Chicago and picked up the weapon.
Ballistics testing, forensics testing
was done on that gun,
and it was proven to be the gun that killed Jamie Carroll.
The gun that, that was recovered in Chicago
belonged to Joey Banis.
But we realized, "Okay, they're both gonna continue to tell
the same story and point the finger at the other person."
It didn't really matter to us as investigators
that you stabbed him, he shot him, or vice versa on that.
They both conspired together to commit this murder.
They ended up charging both Jeffrey Mundt and Joey Banis
with the murder of Jamie Carroll.
[Jason] While police don't know exactly which person
killed Jamie Carroll, they were both there.
And they can both be sentenced to death for this.
[Darren] They both admitted that this happened.
They both admitted to being involved.
So, what did they do?
They did what they do in most cases like this,
which is put 'em both on trial.
Let the jury make that decision.
[music]
the murder of Jamie Carroll becomes a media sensation
after Jeffrey Mundt
and Joey Banis are arrested for the crime.
[Reporter] A night of drugs and sex
inside this old Louisville home
is what everyone agrees led to Jamie Carroll's death.
But, "Who is responsible?"
Is the question jurors have to answer.
[Angelique] The neighborhood was just on pins and needles.
People were freaking out this happened so nearby.
[David] It was almost three years later
before the trials took place.
I think the prosecution realized they really needed the testimony
of the guys against each other to get a conviction.
because other than that, there wasn't a lot of evidence,
other than a lot of circumstantial evidence.
So, in the end, they decided to try them separately,
in exchange for the death penalty being dropped.
And that way, each one would testify against the other.
The prosecution decided to try Joey Banis first.
[Narrator] In their opening arguments on
February 26, 2013,
prosecutors contend that both Joey Banis and Jeffrey Mundt
are culpable for Jamie Carroll's death.
Prosecutors painted these two guys as a, as a, quote,
"twisted" couple who murdered this guy for money
and bludgeoned his body.
Put him in a container, buried him in the basement.
[Collin] Their relationship was just such a ball of dysfunction.
You have two evil people here
that just meshed well and become one evil person.
[Narrator] When Jeffrey Mundt takes the stand,
he denies ever being jealous of Joey's relationship with Jamie
and paints Joey as an abusive and manipulative boyfriend.
[Narrator] When it's their turn,
Joey's defense attorneys argue that Jeffrey's proclivities
for BDSM support their theory
that Jeffrey was the crime's true mastermind.
During all the search warrants, Detective Lesher was examining
one of the computers and goin' through...
Found some personal videos,
and there was a sex video between Jeffrey Mundt
and Joseph Banis.
In that video, Jeffrey Mundt is
the dominant person in the relationship.
[Darren] Jeffrey was into some seriously different...
Sexual activity,
which involved pain and the infliction of pain.
[Jason] While it was compelling evidence,
just because you are into BDSM
does not mean you're a murderer.
This was consensual sex between these two people.
The jury verdict came back and Joey was found guilty of murder.
[Jason] They gave him 20 to life,
which means he would serve at least 20 years and possibly
spend the rest of his life in prison.
[Narrator] Nine weeks later, on May 12, 2013,
Jeffrey Mundt's trial begins.
[Narrator] But Jeffrey's attorneys
counter with a new piece of home video evidence
that surprises everyone in the courtroom.
Attorneys recovered a video from Banis's computer,
and it was labeled as "the suicide tape."
In that video was a confession from Joey regarding
the murder of Jamie Carroll.
[Darren] It was powerful.
I mean, it's powerful enough to have been placed in
the opening argument by the defense counsel.
That video that was there was 100%, in my opinion,
staged and fake.
I believe the video was orchestrated.
That was something that was produced
at the direction of Mr. Mundt.
[Justin] Myself, my co-counsel, and of course, Joey...
We know that that confession was made under duress.
It was made under threat of death.
[Narrator] When Joey Banis takes the stand,
he maintains that his ex-boyfriend
had killed Jamie Carroll in a jealous rage.
[Narrator] It's compelling testimony,
but will it be enough to sway the jury?
On May 29, 2013, the verdict is returned.
[David] He was convicted of the two minor counts:
tampering with evidence and robbery.
When sentencing came,
he only got eight years for his part.
And that shocked a lot of people,
because they thought he was more guilty.
The 911 call I think helped to sway the jury as well,
because he sounds scared to death on it.
Today, even still, I'm not 100% certain
if one killed Jamie Carroll and the other helped,
or if they both did it together as the prosecution argued.
[Barry] There's only three people
who truly know what happened in that room that night,
and only two of them came out alive.
[David] Jamie Carroll, he was the innocent victim
in this case.
He was so young,
and he did plan on kind of turning his life around.
It's a shame he never got that chance.
[music]