Documentary director helped solve 35-year gruesome murder using gay porn archive
They discovered that the murderer was a fellow gay porn artist who was also a white supremacist skinhead
A brand-new documentary managed to help solve a murder from 1990 that had gone unsolved for almost four decades, eliciting an on-air confession from the murderer.
Whilst incredibly rare this is not the first time that a documentary has managed to solve a crime that left detectives stumped.
Famously HBO’s The Jinx led to Robert Durst accidentally confessed to murder in a shocking admission in which he forgot his microphone had been left on.
The documentary film My Brother, My Killer has a similarly shocking reveal, with the director not only helping find the killer but interviewing them in prison where they gave detailed information about the death.
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The doc follows the death of Billy Newton who was murdered in 1990 in a case that went unsolved ever since. Newton was a man from Midwest America who moved to California in 1984, and later would film several gay pornographic videos under the name ‘Billy London’.
In 1990 Newton was found dead in gruesome fashion, his head and feet being discovered in a dumpster.
Despite numerous attempts to revive the case no successful leads were found, until documentary-maker Rachel Mason stumbled across the case by mistake.
Mason came across the case quite literally by accident, with a newspaper clipping falling out of a stack of documents belonging to an interviewee for another documentary.
The headline read: “Cops Have No Clues in Grisly Killing of L.A. Porn Actor.”
After further investigation she found out about other amateur sleuths who were digging into the murder, including a stay-at-home dad Clark Williams who decided to investigate the case after coming across a post about it in a local Facebook page.
Williams had begun digging deep into the gay pornographic films being produced at the time. The amateur investigator came across someone who starred in several films who was also a member of a white supremacist skinhead who had admitted to carrying out a homophobic killing in Baltimore, and an unnamed one in Los Angeles.
Their name at the time
This was further confirmed in a ‘surreal’ moment in which Mason came across archival footage that showed the killer.
She said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “There’s a videotape of a memorial award show from the gay adult industry in the early ’90s.
“It’s basically a time capsule of that era. And in that footage you see someone who later became the suspected killer actually walk on stage. It’s chilling.”
The killer has since come out as a transgender woman and is known as DarraLynn Madden, with My Brother’s Killer featuring her on camera confession.
Madden was living a ‘triple life’ at the time of the killing, working as a sex worker, a gay pornstar, and also being part of a white skinhead Neo-nazi gang that would rob and attack predominantly gay people.
Speaking about the moment Madden confessed, Mason said: “It was intense. We were taken into a maximum-security unit.
“She came out in double shackles with a guard standing extremely close behind her. But what struck me most was how charismatic she was.
“The detective who interviewed her said the same thing — she’s very charming, very funny.
“Someone you could easily imagine having a conversation with over a beer. That makes it even more disturbing.”
My Brother’s Killer premieres at SXSW March 13.
Topics: True Crime, TV and Film, Film, Documentaries, Crime, US News, LGBTQ
Michael Slavin