In Rachel Mason’s My Brother’s Killer, the documentary filmmaker explores the unsolved murder of gay adult film performer Billy London, who was killed in West Hollywood in 1990. Through interviews with members of his community and unexpected figures who later reopened the case from a startling new angle, Mason traces a wholly unexpected path to new information in a well-assembled and highly informative deep dive into the legacy of this man whose life was tragically cut short.
Awards Buzz spoke with Mason about the journey from her film Circus of Books to this project:
“It’s going back to the moment when I learned about the actual event that sparked everything. I was working on Circus of Books. I was actually looking for images specifically of gay porn stars gay, adult film models, who had died of AIDS, because I always feel like, in every gay movie I’ve ever seen, there’s a montage and there’s the part that gets to the AIDS section, and it is so sad and painful, but it’s also sometimes really redundant. It segues into this because an expert who I became very good friends with met with me, and he knew every single gay porn star you could imagine knowing in the nineties. His name is Mickey Skee, who now is in this film. He had opened up a notebook flipping through it just saying, ‘You can look at any of these pictures. You can have them all for your film.’ And he just sort of flipped past an article that he had written in The Advocate in 1990 and I was like, ‘Wait, can you just go back a second? What was that? It said something about a murder.’ He was a little bit casual about it. He’s like, ‘Well, yeah, no, a guy was murdered and it’s horrible. We never solved it. Gosh. Moving on.’ And I think in some ways, his sentiment about it is like, ‘Wait, what?’ And then I read a little bit of the headline in the article, and I was like ‘He wasn’t just murdered, Mickey! He was beheaded in Hollywood, like off La Brea! How has this not been solved?’ On some level, it just stuck with me from that day forward.’
Watch the video above to hear about her research process and what questions she still has about this wild story.
My Brother’s Killer makes its world premiere in the Independent TV Pilot Competition at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
