The brutal 1990 murder of a gay porn star was solved with the help of an old Advocate article

“Initially, my goal was to make a film which would humanize and memorialize Billy so he would be known not just as the victim of a murder, in the hopes that when the film would come out, it could help spark leads for the investigation,” she said. “I absolutely hoped that my efforts would help, but I couldn’t have imagined that we would solve it while making the film.”

But Mason didn’t just help to solve the case, she befriended DarraLynn Madden — a transgender woman who allegedly murdered and dismembered London prior to transitioning — while she was serving time for a different crime and convinced her to confess on camera.

During an in-depth interview at a maximum security prison, Madden admitted that in 1990, she was working as a gay porn star by day and committing gay bashings with a group of skinheads by night — and it was while searching for new victims that she stumbled upon London and ultimately took his life.

“DarraLynn has talked to me about many other crimes, so I have access to her that is very rare,” Mason said. “But in some ways it’s because I chose to engage with her in an open way to understand her rather than a hostile way."

Not only is the confession shocking, but it is also unnerving to discover that Madden and London lived remarkably similar lives, though their paths clearly diverged. They both worked in the gay porn industry and came to West Hollywood after running from homophobic family members.

“You can see the actual footage and say, ‘Wow, DarraLynn and Billy were walking the same street, they both came from rural areas in America, which weren’t friendly to gay people, and they both had really intense childhoods,” Mason said. "I think it’s very clear that poverty was a big factor in their childhood experiences.”

This also meant that they likely crossed paths, a fact that Madden said contributed to her need to kill London.

“She said, ‘I recognized Billy at the time,’ and that’s why DarraLynn had to be sure to inflict as much violence as possible,” Mason said. “That could be a very strong reason for it, that Billy could have outed DarraLynn to DarraLynn’s skinhead members.”

London’s chosen profession meant it would have been easy for his death to be written off as a side effect of working in the adult film industry, but Mason and the investigators who helped her gave London the respect he deserved.

“You got glimpses of him through all of these people, and I think without them we wouldn’t know those details about what Billy was really like,” she said. “I mean, we can all have a fantasy version of what Billy was like in our minds — and all of us do. And I think in some ways, all of us, meaning all the people that contributed to the solving of Billy’s murder, we all got to feel like we could know some part of him.”

The feeling of getting to know London posthumously isn’t just shared by the people behind the camera, but by everyone who watches the film, and that’s reflected in the title of the documentary.

“The film came together in this almost miraculous way, as did the solving of his murder,” Mason said. “And so with that, I’ve had this feeling that we are on the right path, and that’s why I called it My Brother’s Killer, by the way. Billy, people have said, ‘Well, he’s not your actual brother,’ but I started to feel like he was my brother. He was everyone’s brother. He was all of our brother.”

My Brother's Killer premiered at SXSW in March, but a wide release date has yet to be announced.