Months before her death, Nancy Campbell-Panitz went on "The Jerry Springer Show" with her ex-husband and his new wife thinking they would reconcile. The show's producers had other plans.
They wanted the Sarasota trio with a history of domestic violence to fight on camera, according to investigative records released today.
"Actually we didn't even do a good job," Eleanor Panitz, murder suspect Ralf Panitz's second wife, told investigators in August, the documents show. "They wanted yelling and screaming and to lunge at each other."
Campbell-Panitz, who spent the night before the Springer taping with her ex-husband, walked off the stage in the episode, called "Secret Mistresses Confronted."
In the limousine to the airport with other guests later, Eleanor Panitz wished aloud her romantic rival was dead, the guests later reported to authorities.
The show was billed as "Secret Mistresses Confronted!", hinting at all the vital ingredients of the Jerry Springer Show: sex, humiliation, pain and sensation. Life lived by exclamation mark, until the strain was too much to bear. The show's schedule promised: "Eleanor says her husband's ex-wife, Nan, won't take no for an answer. Nan has stalked them so severely that they had to go into hiding. Today, Nan will learn that her ex-husband is actually married to Eleanor!"
The self-styled "ringmaster", Jerry Springer, has frequently been accused of staging its dramas, but Nancy Campbell-Panitz seems to have had no idea what was waiting for her when her former husband, Ralf, called her from Chicago in May to ask her to appear on the show.
After three years of fights, breaking up and making up, often punctuated by violence, Nancy apparently believed she was going to get Ralf back. They slept together the night before the show and she went to the studio confident that the other woman, Eleanor, was in for a shock.
She was wrong. When Nancy walked on to the stage, she was jeered by the audience, to whom she had been portrayed as an unhinged, jealous stalker. Worse was to come. Ralf and Eleanor announced the news of their own marriage and took turns centre-stage taunting the jilted 52-year-old.
Campbell-Panitz, 52, was found strangled and beaten to death in her Sarasota home the day the Springer show aired and hours after a judge barred Panitz from her home.
www.theguardian.com
