Newton

Not long after documentary filmmaker Rachel Mason began looking into the gruesome 1990 cold-case murder of gay porn actor Bill Newton in Hollywood, Newton’s former boyfriend, Marc Rabins, showed her a gay newspaper from the time, full of obituaries.

There was Newton’s young, handsome face, but also the faces of other young men, all of whom had died of AIDS.

“AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, murder,” Mason said in a recent interview with The Times. “I was so disgusted. Like, no, you can’t have a murder in this sea of people already dying — that’s not right, not fair. We can’t let this go.”

And she didn’t.

Instead, Mason helped convene a team of amateur sleuths to doggedly investigate the case, and in a stunning twist perfect for the true-crime documentary she was filming all along the way, helped lead Los Angeles police detectives to a new suspect — who confessed to killing Newton, who went by “Billy London” in films, before his head and feet were found in a dumpster.

“It’s pretty astounding,” Mason said. Others clearly agree.

On Wednesday, organizers of the SXSW Film and TV Festival announced that Mason’s documentary — titled “My Brother’s Killer” and featuring a chilling on-camera interview with the confessed killer — will world premiere at SXSW in March.

“The unsolved murder of Billy London, a gay adult film performer brutally killed in West Hollywood, was an urban legend for 33 years. A documentary intended to honor his life took an unexpected turn when members of the community joined forces to uncover overlooked clues, and seek a resolution to the mystery of who killed him,” the festival announcement teased.

“Drawing on a rare trove of VHS and personal footage,” the announcement added, “the film reveals a chilling overlap between the victim and some of the suspects who were captured on camera in films made in the narrow window of Billy’s death.”

Mason said she is thrilled with the festival’s selection of her film, just as she was by The Times chronicling the sleuths cracking the case in a front-page story in 2023, which the film highlights.

Before then, Newton’s story had only really been told in smaller gay publications, Mason said. Now, it’s being featured at a “major, mainstream festival” at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack across the country, which is “a big deal.”

“The larger picture of this film is, if anything, a point of optimism, you know? A beacon of hope in some dark times,” she said. “A community solving a murder!”

A killer film

Mason is known in part for a previous Netflix documentary she made called “Circus of Books,” about the adult bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard where her parents spent years selling gay porn and LGBTQ+ literature.

That film was in part an ode to West Hollywood, and so is “My Brother’s Killer,” which talks about Los Angeles’ gayborhood with both reverence and a dose of reality — acknowledging its role as a safe haven for gay people facing discrimination and its seedier side as a drug-heavy party scene in decades past.

Rachel Mason in 2023 in Hollywood.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The film captures Newton’s struggles with that scene, including with methamphetamine, but also his sweet side, featuring interviews with family and friends who recalled a kind but unsettled 25-year-old who’d faced rejection at home in Wisconsin and run away as a teen to find acceptance. It also captures what the gay porn industry was like in West Hollywood as AIDS ravaged and stigmatized the community.

The film introduces various members of Mason’s investigative squad, including Clark Williams, a stay-at-home dad with a background in social work who also hailed from Wisconsin. Williams developed the lead that convinced LAPD detectives to head to an Oklahoma penitentiary in search of answers from their new suspect, DarraLynn Madden.

And it is with the introduction of Madden — a former gay porn actor and skinhead in Hollywood and now a transgender inmate serving a life sentence for killing another gay man years after Newton’s murder — that the film really hits its stride.

First, lead detective John Lamberti discusses securing a confession from her.

“We initially just said that we were there to talk about an old case from L.A., and it was Madden who actually brought up Billy first, and said, ‘Oh well yeah, and there was this one case where somebody’s head and feet got found in a dumpster,’” Lamberti says in the film. “And I’m just sitting there trying to keep a poker face: ‘Oh, OK, tell me more.’”

“The fact that I walked out of there with a confession was just mind-blowing,” he says.

Then Madden recounts in harrowing detail the killing in an on-camera interview Mason arranged after striking up a written correspondence with her.

Bill Newton, a.k.a. Billy London, was a Wisconsin transplant to L.A. and gay porn actor whose head and feet were found in a Hollywood dumpster in 1990.

(Marc Rabins)

Madden tells Mason that she and some skinhead friends saw Newton “in a place us skins frequented to hunt and to perform acts of violence,” and that she “laid the plan down to get out, put my arm around him and let him know this is what we’re gonna do — or else. We’re going to walk to this car and we’re just going to take a ride.”

Madden describes the group punching, kicking and elbowing Newton — “He was kind of like a prize pinata at the time. I know that sounds horrible” — and taunting him for being gay and high. She then describes strangling him with a cord, and deciding to cut up his body.

“The only thing we could think of to get out of the apartment as clandestine as we possibly could was to dismember Billy, which was not an easy task,” Madden says.

Full circle for sleuths

Mason’s film — which she made independently with editor and producer Dion Labriola — gives substantial time to her fellow sleuths, including Williams and Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, who have pored over the case on their podcast “The Dinner Party Show.”

After watching Mason’s interview with Madden, Rice says in the film, “I always harbored a suspicion that maybe it was a false confession, but that’s not a false confession.”

Rice also contemplates Madden’s own troubled upbringing, her struggling in a world where both gay and transgender people face tremendous discrimination, and what he sees as Madden projecting her own self-loathing onto Newton.

“Yes, the queer community has villains, we have people who are seeking to oppress us,” Rice says in the film. “But if we indulge our own self-loathing, it can go down a road as dark and twisted as this.”

Rabins, Newton’s boyfriend who police once suspected of being the killer, says in the film that hearing Madden’s confession marked a turning point in his mourning process: “Up until that moment, I always felt Bill’s presence around me. And after that, I feel like he’s flying free.”

Prosecutors declined to bring charges against Madden, citing a lack of evidence beyond the confession and Madden already being behind bars for life in Oklahoma. Madden could not be reached for comment.

Williams has since worked on a dozen other cold-case homicides across the country and helped prosecutors build a case against a new suspect in a 1991 murder in Michigan. That suspect is now headed to trial for murder.

Rachel Mason with Clark Williams in 2023, shortly after the LAPD announced they were closing the investigation into Billy Newton’s murder after securing a confession.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Williams said he was able to crack Newton’s killing by completely immersing himself in Newton’s life, and that Newton really came alive for him through that process. “Billy became a person to me that I knew and loved,” he said.

Because of that, he is a little apprehensive about Madden appearing in Mason’s film, he said.

“I understand why she’s a cinematic figure, but I don’t like DarraLynn Madden,” He said. “In fact, I loathe DarraLynn Madden.”

That said, Williams said he trusts Mason to do the story justice, and is excited to see the film.

“I’ve always believed that Billy Newton reflects a whole generation — my generation — of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 90s,” Williams said. “I’m really happy that that story gets to be told.”