A Woman Appeared on The Jerry Springer Show with Her Ex and His Mistress. Then She Was Murdered.

Nancy Campbell-Panitz was not the typical Jerry Springer Show guest.

A mild-mannered single mother who didn’t even like having her picture taken, she was offered the opportunity to reunite with her ex-husband, Ralf Panitz, along with his mistress, on national television.

But Campbell-Panitz walked off the stage upon realizing what the producers wanted from the program’s guests: a heated, salacious fight in front of a live audience.

“To see her up there on stage looking like a deer caught in the headlights,” Jeffrey recalls in a new documentary. “I just wish I could go back and say, ‘Don’t do it.’”

Several weeks later, on the day the episode finally aired on TV, she was murdered by her ex. Ralf went over to Nancy’s home, just after she had been granted a restraining order against him, and beat and strangled her to death.

The murder of Campbell-Panitz was perhaps the most notorious incident involving guests on the infamous — and groundbreaking — Jerry Springer Show, which often brought on guests entwined in lurid real-life scenarios, and encouraged heated verbal arguments and even physical altercations across its 27-season syndicated run spanning thousands of episodes.

The murder is covered in depth on a new two-art documentary on Netflix, Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, which premiered on Jan. 7.

The docuseries details the brash program’s rise to the top of the ratings in the late-1990s while being helmed by executive producer Richard Dominick, as he and host Jerry Springer pioneered “trash TV” that would begin to dominate the airwaves. At its peak, the series would manage to topple even the queen of daytime TV, Oprah Winfrey, in the ratings. 

“The legacy of the Jerry Springer Show is that there are no guardrails anymore,” says longtime Chicago media critic Robert Feder, who covered the show during its run, in an interview with PEOPLE. “That makes the show one of the most influential shows that’s ever been on television.”

The Jerry Springer Show began in 1991 and originally resembled the more mild-mannered daytime talk format viewers had grown accustomed to, similar to the likes of Winfrey and Phil Donahue. Springer, the eponymous host who died in 2023 — five years after the show ended for good — had served as mayor of Cincinnati in the 1970s and had run for governor of Ohio before his political career fizzled out.

In the 80s, Springer pivoted to broadcasting, becoming an award-winning TV commentator before moving to Chicago to host a talk show. But it wasn’t until Dominick, who oversaw the show’s evolution into a tabloid-style show — featuring a wide range of guests from people involved in love triangles to Ku Klux Klan members — that the ratings took off.

“TV Guide named The Jerry Springer Show the worst television show of all time,” says Feder. “They started to identify with that. They used that as a badge of honor.”

Tobias Yoshimura, a producer on Springer for several years featured prominently in the documentary, tells PEOPLE it’s no secret that producers would often coach their guests to prepare for the “gladiator arena” that was the show.

Yoshimura recalls storming into the green room and throwing chairs as a way to get guests amped up before appearing onstage. He also said it was important to treat guests well, in order to get the best out of them.

“A guest once told me, ‘I know what you want and I got you, you bought me the greatest rack of ribs last night for dinner and I’m going to take care of you,” Yoshimura recalls. “They called him out and it was the biggest knock-down-drag-out fist fight all season and it got me promoted.”

By 2000, the show had already been the subject of years-worth of negative press stemming from several controversial episodes. But the show’s reputation took a particular hit when Campbell-Panitz was murdered in July of that year.

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Ralf Panitz would ultimately be convicted of the murder. When sentencing Panitz to life in prison, a judge referenced the Springer show, chastising both its host and producers.

Separately, Jeffrey sued Springer and the producers of the show, but dropped the case without a monetary settlement; that came after the estate of another homicide victim, Scott Amedure, lost a suit against another “trash TV” program, The Jenny Jones Show, on which he had appeared before his death.

Yoshimura, who left Springer in 2003 after saying it was “killing him” and Dominick both deny in the documentary that the show had anything to do with the murder. Jeffrey, on the other hand, believes that his mother was misled prior to appearing on the show.

“I don’t think they’ve ever been held accountable for anything,” Jeffrey says. “People just watching this show and think. ‘Oh this is normal.’ It’s not.”