The son of a woman killed by her ex-husband after they appeared on the Jerry Springer Show has revealed it ruined his life as well as ending his mother’s. Jeffrey Campbell speaks out on Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action on Netflix, which goes behind the scenes of the hyped up US talk show similar to ITV ’s The Jeremy Kyle Show.
Ralf Panitz appeared on the show with his wife Eleanor and ex-wife Nancy Campbell-Panitz, Jeffrey’s mother, in 2000. But just hours after it aired on TV, Panitz beat 52-year-old Nancy to death in her Sarasota home in Florida. Jeffrey said: “I was pretty surprised when she told me about going on the show. She didn’t like having her pictures taken much. She always had to hide her face or hide behind something, so to see her up there on the stage, just looking like a deer caught in the headlights, like what is going on here? I just wish I could go back and say ‘don’t do it’.”.
Panitz and Nancy met online when she was a widow bringing up two children. He emigrated to the US from Germany and they married shortly afterwards, but there were domestic abuse issues and Nancy left him and filed for divorce. The pair were seemingly in touch again ahead of The Jerry Springer show appearance although unbeknown to Nancy, Panitz had remarried.
Jeffrey said: “My mother believed that Ralf had been deported to Germany, and that the show was going to pay for his travel back to America, and that they would reconcile, and that he would tell his new girlfriend that he wanted to be with my mother. But she was basically lied to, because that never happened.”.
