David Dominé: A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City: Murder, Secrets, and Scandal in Old Louisville

crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. I love a good murder story set in the South, and this is a pretty intense one. It centers on a vicious murder in a crumbling Kentucky mansion and a killer who managed to cover it up for months. Author David Domine writes about it in his book A Dark Room in Glitterball City, Murder, Secrets, and scandal in Old Louisville. You are someone after my

heart because you love a good ghost story. Tell me about how you found the story to begin with. I've read about it.

fell in love with one part of the town. It's called Old Louisville. It's one of the largest historic preservation districts in the country. There's forty five scare blocks of old houses, roughly fourteen hundred old homes and mansions, mostly from the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and so that area just kind of sucked me in. Well. In nineteen ninety nine, I had a chance to buy a house in that neighborhood, and my partner and I lived

there for eight years. But right before we moved into this house, the previous owner just casually mentioned that the house was haunted and we moved in, we'd be getting a resident polter guys named Lucy, and so I just kind of, you know, pooh poohed her warnings and we moved in, and sure enough, all the crazy stuff she said what happened began to happen. And long story short, I never saw that ghost that was I was hoping to see to kind of make me a true believer.

But all these other things of a paranormal nature people would say began happening in the house. And that's when I began to discover more about the neighborhood, and I'd found out more about the house, and I discovered you can use ghost stories and hauntings as vehicles for more than just talking about the pair ofanormal And there's history and there's architecture. So I got into writing about the neighborhood.

And when we moved out in two thousand and eight from that house, I was a food writer and I heard right around the corner a new house had come on the market a house that hadn't been for sale in years. It was called the Richard Robinson House and it was massive. It was like twelve bedrooms over ten

thousand square feet. But I heard they had the original wine cellar from when the family built in eighteen ninety eight, and I got into my head somehow, if you're going to be a food rid, you have to have a wine cellar. So I made an appointment to go look at the house and it was huge. It was just too much work. I could tell right away, right when

I walked in. Despite the grand stairs and the beautiful parquet in lay on the hardwood floors and the beautiful molding and stained glass windows, I knew it was going to be too much work. But I thought, well, go look at the wine cellar. You know you're looking at the house because you're interested in the wine cellar. So went down to the basement, worked our way through this maze like warrn of little rooms, and finally found the

wine cellar. And it was a disaster. Like much of the house, it had a dirt floor, but previous tenants had just thrown boxes of you know, trash in there, and you could only tell it was a wine cellar because of the shadows the outlines of the shelves that had been on the brick wall at one time but then had been removed over time, and so that was kind of the nail in the coffin. I thought, no, don't need to do this, and so said thank you

to the real estate agent. And as we were going out the front door and down the walkway to the sidewalk out in front of the house, a man was rushing up the stairs and it turns out he had the appointment right after we did, and he kind of bumped into me and didn't say excuse me. I thought that was kind of, you know, rude, but I didn't really think anything of it, and we went on with the rest of the day and that was that, or so I thought. Two years later, it was the morning

of June eighteenth, twenty ten. I teach at a local university. I was up drinking my coffee, getting ready to go teach, and I had one of the local stations on, and all of a sudden, there was kind of a newsflash and a big, boxy, red brick house popped up on the screen and there were police out front that had caution tape all around it. And I saw the house and I thought, well, that house looks awfully familiar. And I thought, well, probably down in old Louisville where all

the old Victorian houses are. And then a mug shot popped up, and I stared at that mugshot, and I thought, who is he? I know that guy, you know? I thought maybe just from the neighborhood or something. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me that was the guy who had the appointment with the real estate agent that morning.

a time. He was working at Northwestern Universities in charge of their big technology overhaul and he had had other jobs as well. Joey Bannis, on the other hand, he was more of a ne'er do well. He was a deadhead for a while and worked in restaurants, supposedly as a ski instructor. He had designs of opening his own club in town. He claimed to have already opened a club, but some people dispute that. But he was known in the community for being kind of a colorful figure at

the local clubs. He bartended very often and he would often have like his hair done in a bright blue neon mohawk. He had body painting, and he really stood out. And so Jeffreymont, according to his story, had just moved back to Louisville from Chicago. He said his then boyfriend had dumped him by text and he was kind of coming back home to lick his wounds, and that's when he met Joey Bannis in an online chat room and

they kind of hooked up and they started going out together. Eventually, Joey moved himself into the house on four Street, and when he moved in, he had had several hookups with Jamie Carroll. They met online and Jamie Carroll was a drug dealer. Joey Bannis was a drug dealer as well, but they had also kind of dated on and off, and so the three of them kind of hooked up.

And so the night in question, June seventeen, twenty ten, Jamie Carroll was in town and he had some outstanding warrants and the idea was he had come to town with the plan of turning himself in the next day. He was going to go to jail and try to do his time and come out and be on the straight and narrow, you know, get a fresh start. But before he turned himself in that next day, he wanted

one last night out on the town. And when Joey found out that he was in town, he said, come on over to the house and bring lots of drugs and Jeffrey and I will party with you. We'll send you off with a bang. And Jamie arrived and they started doing crystal meth and other things. And supposedly after they ran through the first batch of drugs, Jamie left went back to his hotel room to get more drugs.

And in that window of time that's where whoever you believe Jeffrey floated the idea or Joey floated the idea of killing Jamie and keeping his drugs and money because Jeffrey and Joey were having major financial issues. Jeffrey had been working at the University of Louisville as an IT consultant. He was making over a quarter million dollars a year, but he started missing work and showing up Hie, so they let him go, so no money was coming in to pay the bills. Jamie did come back, and Jamie

was a hairdresser. He had a shop in Lexington, and he had a checkered pass. You know, he had been a drug dealer, and some people described him as ruthless, but a lot of people said he was charming in high school and he was out in the nineties in eastern Kentucky and said he was very confident being a gay man. And some said he didn't look like he

had a care in the world. But when he came back, the three of them were in bed and they took a little break from things, and depending on who you believe, Jeffrey got out of the bed, left Jamie and Joey on the bed. When he went to pull up the laptop and look at some porn and he heard a scuffle and turned around and found Jamie yelling for help, and there was Joey stabbing him. If you believe Joey, he's the one that got out of bed. He heard the scuffle at the computer, turned around and he saw

Jeffrey attacking Jamie. But whatever happened, Jamie ended up on the floor or kind of cowering in a corner. He was bleeding profusely. He had fallen into like a glass shelf, and there was blood all over the place. And then one of the two guys took a pistol and shot him in the head, kind of execution style, and then they took his body down to the basement and that's when they proceeded to bury him. And it took well

over the course of a day. You know, they were planning what to do and stuff, but they ended up down in the basement. And it took him hours to dig the pit where Jamie was buried, because he was well over four feet into the ground. And yeah, whoever you believe, Joey said he was terrified of Jeffrey. He said Jeffrey had gone into kind of commando mode, ripped out all the SIM cards in Jamie's phone and like he had done stuff like this before. Jeffrey said, no,

that's what Joey did. And then this is where it's really interesting when the trials finally did take place, because they were both arrested charged with murder. In the end, they both admitted to covering up the body, but they each insisted they had only done this because each had been living in fear of the other for the previous seven months. And so in the first trial, Joey went

on trial first, separately. Several months later, in twenty thirteen, Jeffrey went on trial, and originally the death penalty would have been an option, but the prosecutor agreed to take it off the table if they each agreed to testify against the other. So when Joey was on the stand first, it came out that one of the reasons he was terrified of Jeffreymont is because Jeffreymont had worked for the CIA as an assassin and I killed over thirty some people. Okay,

that's why he was terrified. And everyone in the courtroom just kind of rolled their eyes. When Jeffrey was brought to the stand and kind of asked about that, he said, no, I never have been an assassin, but he said Joey and Jeffrey they had like role playing games for sex and stuff, and one of their role plays was that Jeffrey liked to play that he was an assassin from

the CIA. So no one really put too much store in any of that until later on some weird things came out and all of a sudden, people wondered if maybe Jeffrey Wont wasn't working for the CIA, because they found out he's an expert in different European languages, Eastern European languages. There were pages and pages of text messages and transcripts from emails in Russian and German that never

made it back from the translators in time. And what was interesting is when the murder was found out on June eighteen, two thousand and ten, Joey and Jeffrey were already out on bond from another crime in April of that year, twenty ten. They were up in Chicago when they were arrested, so this was when Jamie's body was down in the ground. They were arrested because they had been counterfeiting money the whole time in the house on four Street, the second floor. They kind of turned into

a counterfeit money operation. They were taking dollar bills, they were bleaching them ands and then restamping those cleaned papers as higher denomination bills as fifteen hundred dollar bills. So that weekend in April of twenty ten, they went up. They checked into the Highatt Regency in downtown Chicago. I'm assuming the idea was they were going up to see how good they were, how much fake money they could pass.

Evidently they weren't very good, because they had just checked into the hotel and hadn't even left before they were arrested. They had given the dorman a fake hundred dollar bill and he knew right away something wasn't right. He said, it kind of felt kind of oily, and he called the police. The police came and ended up arresting Jeffrey.

They found fifty four thousand dollars in counterfeit money in their rooms, in addition to bags and bags of date rape drugs, bomb making supplies, guns forged documents, and fake IDs. They were planning a bank heist while they were up in Chicago, and so the murder trial that kind of

trumped everything. But they were supposed to be all these federal charges outstanding, you know, the counterfeit money and stuff like that, and whatever happened with those trials, no one really knows because they never made the news or anything. And some people have been floating the idea that it's because Jeffrey was involved with the CIA and they kind of got him off.

did everything together. But Jeffrey Month's defense attorney was kind of able, i think successfully to point out, no, they were only together for a few months, and he was able to bring an evidence that Joey, who had just gotten out of prison, had plans on finding a mark. He was looking for a man to live with and mooch off of and he had I mean, they had lists that he had made and one of the first things was get money for bail tracking devices on the car.

I mean, just all this crazy stuff. Was looking for machine guns, and every day the trial just kept getting more and more bizarre. They had suicide tapes that Joey had made, but then when they showed them, people suggested that they were manufactured, you know, they were fabricated. They had made those thinking that if they ever did get arrested, they would have these things to kind of throw a wrench. That's what a lot of people think happened. It's just a bizarre story, a bizarre murder trial.

things were suppressed. And so when I sat through the trials the first time, one of the things that was kind of a mystery is the defense painted it as Joey Bannis was the one who first brought up the notion of the body being buried someplace, and their whole justification was, now, if he's guilty, why is he going to bring up a body in the basement. But then it came out later on in the trials that Jeffrey Month, according to the police reports, is the one that first

brought it up. He said to the responding officer, ask him, pointing to Joey, ask him about the body and the basement, and the defense successfully had a statement suppressed. So the way the defense painted it, it did look like Joey was the one to bring up this body in the first place, and that's why so many people were confused. You know, why would he be bringing this up. He's going to, you know, bring himself down if he's you know,

pointing out this body in the basement. But it turns out esupposedly Jeffrey Munt had brought it up, and then that kind of lent more credence to the overall notion of what happened that night, And that's still kind of a big mystery. But people suspect that Jeffrey had had enough and he was probably going to go to the police and had told Joey that night, the evening of June seventeen, twenty ten, and Joey, you know, he had been to prison numerous times already, he knew that was

going to be the end for him. He was going to be going back. So he either he was high and didn't know what he was doing, or else he knew very well what he was doing and thought he'd probably take Jeffrey down with him, probably thinking, you know, if I'm going to go down, you're going to go down with me.

two assistance as well. And you just noticed by the number, you know, Jeffrey had twice as many people, you know, sitting next to him when he was at the table. And then the other thing is by that point Joey was convicted of the bulk of the crimes during that first trial, so when Jeffrey went on trial, they were able to say, we already got person. He's been convicted. And I think that really helped the defense a lot, and also I think the prosecution they got somewhat complacent

after the first trial. Much of their argument for the second trial was exactly the same. Some of their lines were verbatim, so they were just I think, kind of coasting thinking they were going to use the same defense, but by that point, Jeffrey Month's defense attorneys were able to study things, and there was just all this stuff that came out. It was two completely different trials. I mean to see the stuff that was suppressed in the first trial that was allowed to come out in the

second trial, and vice versa. And in the second trial they brought up all this stuff about Joey Bannis. One of the things that kind of impressed me during the first trial is Joey Bannis. He was always even keeled, he was soft spoken, he was articulate, he never changed his story once, and so a lot of people went into that first trial thinking, like the media had painted it, that Joey was probably more guilty of the two because he had this rap sheet and he was notoriously violent

and volatile. Jeffrey mont had never had trouble with the law before. They made it seem like he kind of got swept up in all of this. But after that first trial, just seeing Joey maintain his composure on the stand and Jeffrey get caught in a lot of lies, a lot of people left that first trial thinking that Jeffrey probably was the more guilty of the two. But during the second trial, then they brought in all this other stuff about Joey, like how psychotic he really is psychopathic,

and just all these things that he had planned. You know, they were able to, like I said, provide these lists, and we found out a little more about some of his other crimes and stuff, and people were testifying against him. Supposedly his own family was telling people to stay away, that their brother, their son, you know, was evil. So if your own family members are talking like that, that says a lot about you know, you as a person.

was convicted of all but the two minor counts. In the second trial, Jeffrey was acquitted of all but the two minor counts, so he got eight years for his part. He had already been in prison three years by that point, so the next year, twenty fourteen, he was halfway through, so they let him go. He was out on parole, already went to a half way house, and as far as I know, he's out and he's living his best life.

know that for certain. He did have family and friends who did miss him, that's for sure. But yeah, it's kind of a tragedy that he fell through the cracks and wasn't noticed until it was too late.

for him, none of this would have likely happened. It is sad, and it brings up something that is always a challenge I think for people who write true crime, which is, how do you take a victim who is not the perfect victim? And I don't mean you know, the missing white Wooman syndrome. I mean the person who

has clearly made some questionable choices. It doesn't mean they deserve what happened, but it must have been difficult for you to tease out the really positive things about Jamie that then readers could really connect to and say, this person deserves justice just like everybody else.

the victim. He didn't deserve what happened to him. Even yes, he did have a checkered past, as was pointed out right away, but yeah, he didn't deserve to die that way. He didn't deserve to have someone execute him. So it was a challenge, and there were other challenges. You know, the whole gay aspect of the.

But then later on I was able to get the videotaped proceedings in the courtroom, and that's when it got really interesting, because when you get those videotape proceedings, you get all the stuff that you don't get to see that you're not privy to when you're sitting in the gallery in the courtroom. For example, you know, if you're in a courtroom and there's an objection or something and the judge calls both councils to the bench and they hit the white noise button and everything is blocked out.

You get to hear what that all was about once you get the tapes afterwards, and the same thing. They record all the jury polling, and so you got to see the prospective jurors on the stand being questioned. And this is where you saw, unfortunately, a lot of homophobia rear its ugly head. But it was, you know, over ten years ago that that happened, and you like to think we've come a long way since then, but I'm

not really sure about that. But it was fascinating just to see people's answers to some of these questions, and it was interesting to see how the defense and the prosecution were able to kind of weed out people they didn't want.

true crime things. And a lot of people were saying, had that not been going on, Joey and Jeffrey's trial might have been the big national story. But a lot of people, a lot of journalists weren't opting to cover it because they were afraid, I suspect, of coming across as homophobic by covering it and you know, dredging up all these sensational details.

with this story. Is there somebody you knew you had to secure, like Jamie's mom or somebody who you just thought, I don't know if the book is going to be okay if I don't if I don't get this person.

was like, you can't really do the story justice. Well, seven or eight years into that, I finally realized they're not going to talk to me, and that's when I decided to kind of go on and just build that into the story. And I did have a brief exchange with Joey at the very end right before the book

was going to press. But yeah, to this day, that's what I really wanted was to talk to those two to get their you know, take on the situation, and also to kind of find out more about what happened that night of the nine one one call, because that's you know, it's also a mystery. Did they do it together, like the prosecution argued that they conspire. Was it a joint effort or did one of them kind of take

the initiative and the other was swept up? Or did one of them take the initiative and the other wasn't swept up, he was just a bystander. You know, that's an unanswered question. And then you know what actually provoked the fight that night was Jeffrey going to go to the police and tell him about the body and the basement. You know what what sent Joey, you know, off the deep end like he went that night.

you know, this was kind of my story. You know, if you read the book, I take a first person approach, and I kind of as I was finishing things up, you know, we were going on ten years, and ten years is a lot of time you can go back and reflect. So I decided to insert myself more into the story, include a lot of quirky neighborhood flavor and characters, and I kind of made it the story about me on this journey trying to figure out what happened that night.

So just for purely selfish reasons, it's kind of my story, you know, my story as a writer and trying to take a journalistic approach and trying to be fair to all parties involved. But still, you know, it's so often the case you're rubbing salt and open wounds, and some

people weren't happy I was writing this story. So just on its face, it's my story, but it's a story of how I got involved in this murder and how I went after loose ends, tried to figure out what the murder was all about, what really happened, and in the process I just uncovered this interesting neighborhood and a fascinating city. So yeah, you mentioned literabal city. That's a nickname a lot of people don't know Louisville enjoys. I'm hoping the book will kind of change that though. But yeah,

I love quirky things and I love eccentric characters. So there's a lot of these quirks that pop up in all angles of the book and some one of the reviewers said, this is my love letter to Louisville. And I kind of like the conscription. It's a true crime book, but it's more than a true crime book. You know, it's not just straight true crime. It's got memoir, it's

got you know, just history and local flavor. And that's kind of what I like to do when I'm writing, you know, they say write what you like to read. So I basically wrote the book that I'd want to read, and that's all she wrote.

a different answer. But the more it happens, the more I tend to believe the prosecution was kind of on the right track. That Joey and Jeffrey they work together to a certain degree. One thing I'm convinced of is Jeffrey is not as innocent as the verdict makes him out to be. There are things in the trial that come out that are just kind of, you know, dead giveaways.

For example, one of the lawyers, they brought up all these text messages between Joey and Jeffrey, and supposedly one time they were fighting for whatever reason, but Joey sent

Jeffrey a text saying, Jeffrey, don't make me. Don't make me tell them about what's in the basement, you know, And if someone were to text that to you, if you were involved, and you were innocent, what would you say, right, say, why do I have to worry about You're the one that killed him and buried him down there, You'd say something like that. Yeah, Jeffrey Mont just totally glosses over it, you know, like so he knows, he definitely knows more.

He's more involved than the verdicts lead us to believe.

willing to talk to them. Jeffrey's family, Joey's family, and Jamie's family. So I didn't approach any of the relations directly, but I let it be known through channels that if they wanted to talk, I'd be available. But none of them wanted to talk.

of direct how it's going. But yeah, right before the book went to press, I finally got him to answer an email. And you know, I was going through different channels. I finally someone found his Tumblr page and sent me an email, and I sent it like five months from by six seven months. I thought he's not going to talk, and then all of a sudden, I got this email through the prison email system JPAL, and he's like, oh, sorry, David. I was, I've been in the hole the last six months.

And then he was really excited. He wanted to talk and and he ended up being in a prison right outside of Louisville. But he said, if we talk, then we have to do it face to face because you know, they can record, you know, phone calls and stuff like that, emails, and so I made plans to visit him. And then this is when some of the CIA stuff was coming out, and I was like, don't ask about the CIA stuff. Don't ask about the CIA stuff. Well, I couldn't keep

my mouth shut. So the day before I was supposed to go meet him, I said, so, some of the things I want to talk about tomorrow. By the way, what about all the CIA stuff? Whatever came of that? Why did you say that? And he never got back to me, and he went he wouldn't accept my visit. When I went, oh, wow, So it makes you think that maybe there was something with the CIA angle, which is so crazy. Wow, what a story.

so ultimately deadly and vile. You know, if you strip them apart, would that have ever happened? But together, particularly Jeffrey and Joey together, it's like they're emboldened to do this, And I do wonder what you think if we separated them. Is this something that would have happened if they were on their own with Jamie?

in that direction, I see that less likely. But they both had some of their dark sides revealed during the trials. And another thing that I tried to address in writing this book was yeah, like you said, and the prosecution pointed out, Joey and Jeffrey came together, it was just like this deadly mixture, you know, just they were swirled up and all this stuff and this terrible stuff happened. But yeah, they did something terrible, But does that invalidate

their whole lives? You know, people do bad things. Do we just discount them because of this one horrific thing that they were involved in? Or did they still have some value as human beings? Is there some redemp in store for them down the road?

he's got a following, and he's quite the charmer. He's meticulous in the way he dresses and in prison, uh huh, So who knows?

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words pod