Everyone in Old Louisville knows about the couple who killed someone. In this neighborhood of elaborate Victorian architecture and genteel walking courts, the story of Jeffrey Mundt and Joey Banis and the murder on 4th Street is a local legend that won’t go away, gossiped about at happy hours and garishly re-enacted on true crime shows like Oxygen’s Snapped: Killer Couples, which ran an episode on the case two years ago.
In some ways it’s easy to see why Mundt and Banis have become a 21st-century Leopold and Loeb, the famous gay lovers who inspired Hitchcock’s Rope. Their 2009 trial hit almost every square on the true-crime bingo card, involving meth-fueled group sex, pathological lies forming webs of deceit, intense BDSM, and a body left to rot in the basement of a haunted former sanatorium.
