{"id":345392,"date":"2026-03-14T05:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T05:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/345392\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T05:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T05:00:08","slug":"doc-gives-closure-to-an-unsolved-la-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/345392\/","title":{"rendered":"Doc Gives Closure To An Unsolved LA Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRachel Mason<\/a>\u2019s excellent 2019 documentary feature Circus of Books<\/a> took us inside an ordinary mom and pop business with a difference. Starring her own mother and father, Barry and Karen, it told the story of the Masons\u2019 flagship store, a bookshop that was, for a while, at the heart of the West Hollywood gay scene, famous for its vast stock of sex toys, pornographic magazines and DVDs. Mason\u2019s film, however, went deeper than its premise might suggest; alongside the story of Barry\u2019s persecution on obscenity charges by Ronald Reagan\u2019s FBI, the doc also offered a chilling reminder of the lethal effects of the 1980s Aids crisis.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy Brother\u2019s Killer is an unofficial sequel of sorts, and it begins with Mason asking her mother about an unsolved murder that happened around the same time. Billy London (AKA William Arnold Newton), 25, a patron of the store and sometime porn actor, had gone missing in the run-up to Halloween in 1990. A few days later, his severed head and feet were found in a dumpster in the area around La Brea and Santa Monica Boulevard; the rest of him was never found.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe murder sent shockwaves through the local community, not just because Billy was well known around town but because as Chi Chi LaRue \u2014 director and new owner of the now-relocated Circus of Books \u2014 says, \u201cIt was so gruesome, so dastardly, and so macabre.\u201d The crime went unsolved for many years prompting Mason to start making this movie in the early 2000s, and the immediate conclusion to jump to is that the LAPD maybe wasn\u2019t too fussed about it. But the first (but not biggest) surprise in this riveting doc is just how much time and effort the police actually did put in, notably detectives Wendi Berndt, who never gave up hope, and John Lamberti, who reopened the investigation as a cold case.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first thing Mason does is to take us back to that incredibly volatile time, when murder rates were through the roof \u2014 LA\u2019s overall violent crime rate hit 1,758.4 per 100,000 residents in 1990, which is roughly double what it is now. Gay men were vulnerable to unprovoked attacks, and cruising was especially dangerous, which is why when Billy first disappeared it was assumed that he simply \u201cgot in the wrong car\u201d. Mason evokes the vibrant street scene vividly, with archive footage of the area\u2019s teeming bars and even a nod to the Donut Time store immortalized in Sean Baker\u2019s transgender High Noon story Tangerine.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe initial suspect was Billy\u2019s partner Marc Rabins, and to be honest, though even the investigators say they\u2019re sure he didn\u2019t do it, his guilt doesn\u2019t seem entirely out of the question, even when Jeffrey Dahmer briefly enters the frame. While exploring that very promising lead, Mason\u00a0\u2014 aided by podcasters Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn \u2014 discovers social worker and empty nester Clark Williams, who steps forward to help investigate Billy London\u2019s backstory, being of a similar age to the victim and from the same part of Wisconsin (Bronski Beat\u2019s song \u201cSmalltown Boy\u201d opens the film for a very good reason).<\/p>\n

\n\tWilliams turns out to be the film\u2019s star player, filling in the blanks of London\u2019s short, sad life, and his powers of perception lead the film to its extraordinary conclusion, smoking out a killer who was hiding in plain sight at every step of the way. Not only do Billy\u2019s remaining friends and family finally get their closure, though, My Brother\u2019s Killer is an overdue valediction for the victim, a romantic loner whose haunting and horribly prophetic poem \u201cA Piece of Me\u201d bookends the film, offering a poignant glimpse of a future that might have been but never was.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: My Brother\u2019s Killer
Festival: SXSW<\/a> (Documentary Spotlight)
Director: Rachel Mason
Sales: Submarine Entertainment\/UTA
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rachel Mason\u2019s excellent 2019 documentary feature Circus of Books took us inside an ordinary mom and pop business…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[157649,93,61,60,270,157650,563,39565],"class_list":["post-345392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-circus-of-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-rachel-mason","tag-review","tag-sxsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}