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 one The Jerry Springer Show guest.

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

But Campbell-Panitz walked off the stage when he realized what the producers wanted from the show’s guests: a heated, delicate battle in front of a live audience.

“Seeing 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 that.'”

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 right after she got a restraining order against him and beat and strangled her to death.

The murder of Campbell-Panitz was perhaps the most infamous incident involving guests at the infamous—and ground-breaking— The Jerry Springer Show, which often featured guests embroiled in eerie 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, Actionwhich premiered on January 7.

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

“The legacy of Jerry Springer Show is that there is no longer a guard rail,” says longtime Chicago media critic Robert Feder, who covered the show during its run, in an interview with PEOPLE. “It makes the show one of the most influential shows ever to be on television.”

The The Jerry Springer Show began in 1991 and initially resembled the milder format that viewers had grown accustomed to for daytime talk, 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 ended.

In the 80s, Springer switched to broadcasting and became an award-winning television commentator before moving to Chicago to host a talk show. But it wasn’t until Dominick oversaw the show’s evolution into a tabloid show—with a wide variety 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 TV show ever,” says Feder. “They started to identify with it. They used it as a badge of honor.”

Tobias Yoshimura, a producer on Springer for several years featured 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 remembers storming into the green room and throwing chairs as a way to get the guests up before they appeared on stage. He also said it was important to treat guests well to get the best out of them.

“A guest once said to me, ‘I know what you want and I got you, you bought me the best rack of ribs last night for dinner and I have to take care of you,'” Yoshimura recalls. “They called him out and it was the biggest knock-down-drag-out fistfight all season and it got me promoted.”

By 2000, the show had already been subject to years 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. In sentencing Panitz to life in prison, a judge referred to Springer show, chastising both the host and the producers.

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

Yoshimura, who traveled Springer in 2003 after saying it “killed 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 before he appeared on the show.

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