When it debuted in the fall of 2011, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story blurred the line between fiction and reality with its allusions to real-life cases such as mass nurse murderer Richard Speck, the Black Dahlia case, and the slayings at Amityville manor. But just a year before the series dropped, there was a different high-profile homicide less than two hours from Murphy’s hometown of Indianapolis involving a huge brick mansion and an ominous rubber suit—eerie similarities to the first season of the FX series. Now that case is the subject of a new HBO docuseries helmed by two other iconic filmmakers: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the directors/producers behind RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, and Party Monster, 2003’s dramatic adaptation of the Michael Alig manslaughter case.

The crime at the heart of Murder in Glitterball City, which premieres on February 19, shares some themes with Party Monster; both involve drugs, gay men, and homicide. And with both projects, Barbato tells Vanity Fair, their goal as filmmakers wasn’t to further sensationalize an already lurid crime. Instead, they sought compassion for all the subjects in both stories, even the least sympathetic ones. “We’re empathetic people,” Barbato says. “We’re all about what we have in common and humanity of people.”

This goal might seem insurmountable when you hear the bare bones of Glitterball City’s central crime. After moving to Louisville, Kentucky, for a well-paid tech job, Jeffrey Mundt purchased the Richard Robinson house, a 113-year-old brick mansion that, in the early 1900s, had been the site of a sanatorium operated by a doctor whose license was revoked after multiple allegations of misconduct. The home was the site of multiple violent incidents in the years since, author David Dominé writes in his 2021 book A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City, on which Bailey and Barbato’s documentary is based. (Glitter Ball City is one of Louisville’s many nicknames: During the disco era, it was the world’s biggest producer of those nightclub mainstays.)

Soon after his move to Louisville, Mundt met Joseph Banis on gay dating site Adam4Adam, and the two swiftly fell in love. The son of a prominent local plastic surgeon, Banis was well known on the local scene as a bartender with a complicated past, including prison stints for drug and theft offenses. He moved into the mansion soon after. In late 2009, both men say, they engaged in group sex with Jamie Carroll, a former hair salon owner, drag performer, and meth dealer. During their encounter, Carroll was fatally stabbed and shot—Banis says by Mundt, and Mundt says by Banis.

Both men agree that they stuffed Carroll’s body into a Rubbermaid storage bin and buried it in their wine cellar, where it remained until June of 2010. In the meantime, the pair remained in “this incredibly intimate, dynamic relationship,” as Barbato puts it. That is, until Mundt called 911 claiming Banis was about to attack him. When police took Banis from the home, he told officers about the body in the basement.