The mum-of-two was murdered hours after the show was aired
SITTING in a Boston bar, Ralf Panitz became increasingly agitated by an episode of The Jerry Springer Show being screened on television.
Known for its on-screen conflict – bringing together love cheats and exposing secrets for a jeering studio audience – this particular episode, filmed a few months earlier, made for painful viewing.
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Jerry Springer hosted the controversial showCredit: Getty
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Eleanor Panitz (centre) confronts Nancy as a grinning Ralf looks onCredit: AP
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The mum-of-two was murdered hours after the show was broadcast
It featured Panitz, 40, himself, his new wife, Eleanor, and Nancy Campbell-Panitz – the ex-wife he cheated on.
Angry after Nancy, 50, won sole ownership of the house they shared and obtained a restraining order against him, Ralf muttered to a fellow drinker, “I’m going to kill her.”
A few hours later he went to the house in Sarasota, Florida, and brutally beat Nancy to death.
In a two-part Netflix documentary, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, airing on 7 January, Nancy’s son, Jeffrey Campbell talks about how the show “ambushed” and lied to his mother in order to persuade her to be a guest and expresses his anger at how no one associated with the show – including Springer himself, who died in 2023 – ever admitted any guilt for his mum’s murder.
“When he was asked by reporters about it, Jerry Springer just blew it off as, ‘What do I know about it?’ How disrespectful can you be?” says Jeffrey.
But while the executive producer of the show, Richard Dominick, continues to be unrepentant, some of his hands-on producers, including Toby Yoshimura, admit to deep misgivings about the way they manipulated vulnerable guests and their shocking backstage ‘rehearsals’ with them.
“You were playing with people’s psyche until you got a result,” says Yoshimura.
‘Being Springered’
When The Jerry Springer Show first aired on daytime TV in 1991, focussing on reuniting loved ones who had not seen each other for years it was, as one critic commented, “unremarkable.”
As ratings slumped a new executive producer was brought in – Richard Dominick, who had a tabloid newspaper background and was notorious for coming up with such crazy headlines as ‘Two-headed Man Sings in Stereo’ and ‘My Wild Affair with Big Foot: I’m Having his Love Child.’
“I thought the show was boring,” he says. “When I took over, the vision that I had was to take a talk show and turn it upside down. Let’s make it wild and sexy.”
I was on Jerry Springer – the whole show was a lie but I made an eye-watering amount of money
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Ralf lured ex Nancy onto the showCredit: AP
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Ralf appears in court accused of Nancy’s murderCredit: Alamy
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Jeffrey says there was no duty of care towards his mother
But no one could have imagined quite how provocative it would become.
The audience was whipped into a frenzy to chant, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” as Springer walked on to meet guests that would include strippers, love cheats, adult babies in nappies and a man who had married his Shetland pony!
This last one was greeted with wide condemnation for using bestiality as public entertainment but the ratings were some of the highest ever. When Springer even toppled the seemingly invincible Oprah Winfrey as Queen of the daytime chat show, he appeared untouchable.
I would throw the door of the green room open, pick up a chair and hurl it and start screaming…You rev them up to tornado level and then send them out on stage
Toby Yoshimura, producer
“I knew that we had to keep changing the show to make it work,” says Richard Dominick, described by some staff as “scary” and others as “like a Mafia don.”
“The pressure I had was to please him,” says Yoshimura. “You’d be living in the office six days a week, days and nights working for 10, 12, 14 hours a day. And that sort of pressure cooker was really difficult because there are some stories that probably went too far. If the show did not contain fighting it didn’t rate.
“These were big fights. Teeth were knocked out, some people literally lost chunks of scalp. Women would pull each other’s nails off. They were brutal. Like, to the death fights. We started pushing the needle ever so slowly towards red. It was like, ‘Let’s see how far we can push this.’”
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The judge said the show put ‘ratings’ before human life
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Toby Yoshimura reveals the sick tactics to maximise drama
In contrast, everyone loved Jerry’s laid-back, good humoured nature but in the studio green room, where guests were held before walking on stage, they were shamelessly incited to anger by producers, rehearsing possible scenes with them.
“The guests get their energy level from you as the producer,” says Yoshimura. “It’s called ‘being Springered.’ You’re being produced.
“I would throw the door of the green room open, pick up a chair and hurl it and start screaming. You’ve got to wake them up.
“You had to reach into their brain and tap on the thing that would make them laugh, cry, scream or fight. You rev them up to tornado level and then send them out on stage.”
Bitter love triangle
But these increasingly dark practices of the show were to have tragic consequences.
In early 2000, Nancy Campbell-Panitz, was surprised when she received a call from her ex-husband Ralf, 40, who she had divorced a year earlier, after he had been physically violent with her.
“She was a really good mother,” recalls Jeffrey. “My dad died when I was just a toddler, so she raised me and my brother by herself. She was strong, independent and just a great person.
“A friend of hers had introduced her to an online chat room and that was when she met Ralf and they started speaking together and a year later he had emigrated from Germany to the US and they got married shortly after that.
“But it wasn’t long before there was a domestic issue. He had thrown her around the floor and she had hit her head. After that, she left and filed for divorce. All of a sudden she was in a big house alone and I think she was lonely and that’s why she went on the show, to get him back, basically.”
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Jeffrey appears in the documentary
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Richard Dominick ran a ‘pressure cooker’ show
Nancy was led to believe the show was going to pay for Ralf’s travel back to America from where she thought he was, in Germany, and that they would get back together.
“She was basically lied to because that never happened,” says Jeffrey.
“I don’t think my mother had any idea what she was walking into. It’s pretty obvious that they were there to ambush her.”
Unbeknownst to her, Ralf was actually living in the States and had married his new girlfriend Eleanor, who Nancy knew he had been seeing.
Believing that Nancy was a threat to their relationship, Eleanor had contacted The Jerry Springer Show in response to a “teaser” question: “If there is somebody who wants to disturb your relationship, call Jerry.”
Ralf Panitz then lured Nancy onto the show by promising a public reconciliation, according to the later lawsuit.
Instead, she was met with Ralf and a confrontational Eleanor, 45, and the revelation that they had married in March despite Nancy and Ralf having slept together the night before the show.
Painted as a jealous stalker and humiliated in front of a taunting crowd, devastated Nancy walked off stage.
Frantic producers tried to coax her back on, saying they would not pay for her flight back home to Florida id she didn’t return, but she refused and walked out into the rain-lashed streets of Chicago, where the show was produced at the NBC tower.
“She found her way to the bus stop but didn’t have anywhere to go,” says Jeffrey.
“She was crying and a good Samaritan saw her and bought her a bus ticket home. As strong as she was, I’m sure she felt confused and didn’t understand what had happened. Afterwards, no one from The Jerry Springer Show contacted her to check up on her to see where she was.”
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One shocking show features a man who married his Shetland ponyCredit: YouTube
Drunken rage
But, bizarrely, the love triangle re-formed. Within a couple of months, Nancy, Eleanor and Ralf were all sharing a house together in Sarasota. But when he became abusive again, Nancy knew that she had to end her relationship with him for good.
“Ralf had actually kicked Nancy out of the house,” says Lisa Kleinberg, an attorney who represented Nancy in her domestic violence injunction against him. “She was displaced and basically living in her car.”
The judge granted her sole ownership of the home and a restraining order against Ralf.
“Ralf walked out of the courtroom fairly calmly and seemed resigned to the ruling,” says Kleinberg.
“But a few months later, at a bar, he watched the entire (episode of) The Jerry Springer Show he had been part of, getting drunk, and I think that is what really pushed Ralf because at some point, he said to somebody in the bar, ‘I’m going to kill her.’”
Hours later her body was found badly beaten on the floor of her home.
“I was at work and a family member turned up and said that I needed to call a detective in Florida,” says Jeffrey.
“They told me that someone had attacked my mum, choked her, pushed her down on the floor and stomped on her head. That was her death.”
With a police search for Ralf Panitz underway, he handed himself in and was later given a life sentence for murder.
Nancy Donnellan, the judge who jailed him, condemned the show’s role in the tragic drama.
“The judge had harsh words to say about The Jerry Springer Show, saying the trio were manipulated to increase the humiliation and that it was reprehensible,” says Kleinberg.
“She added, ‘To Jerry Springer and his producers, I ask you, ‘Are ratings more important than the dignity of human life?’ Shame on you.”
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is on Netflix from Tuesday, January 7
