17.

This one comes from an American suburb—again. Two sisters, both that semi-ugly blond type with eighties hairdos, very high school, with big/loose college sweatshirts, videotaping themselves in their living room. There’s someone else, the boyfriend, the boyfriend of one of them. At the very beginning I couldn’t figure out if what I was seeing was a reenactment or if it was really them. Later on we find out that it really is them because everything or almost everything that’s about to happen is recorded on what I imagine is the family camera. So anyway it’s Christmas, or almost Christmas, and they, the sisters, get drunk, and a few hours later Karla, the eldest, calls a friend of hers on the phone and tells her something terrible has happened to her little sister, that she’s passed out and choked to death on her own vomit; that she passed out, and she died. I see the images from Tammy’s autopsy: she has some splotches on her face, deep purple. The voice-over says forensics says it must have been the gastric juices, that that must have messed up her face. And that she must have died of asphyxia because vomit had gotten into her lungs (like Daisy, to just take the nearest example, like Daisy). Up to this point it would be an accident, a family tragedy. Shortly after this Karla and Paul, the older sister and her boyfriend, move in together, move into one of those suburban houses. There are a couple of police reports about young girls, of rape. The identikit of a young man of twenty-five, youthful blond, regular face, face from the prep-school yearbook, from the extended window where victims and victimizers resemble one another in such horrific fashion, matches the face of Paul Bernardo, Karla’s boyfriend. The police ask him to do a DNA test, and they question him. Since Paul is so polite and obedient no one suspects anything of him, and they don’t even look into his results. So. They get married. They go on a honeymoon to somewhere or other, someplace in the Caribbean. There are pictures and videos from the wedding, from the honeymoon. Idyllic. A few days after they get back, there’s another rape in the neighborhood, but this time it’s followed by a death. They find the young lady, parts of her body, carved up and buried in cement, buried in blocks of cement and scattered around/distributed in trash dumps. They can’t find who did it. A little while later another girl is killed. Another young lady, blond, from a nice suburban neighborhood. And then at some point around then Karla can’t take it anymore and she goes to the police. She’s ready to talk. She’s tired. Her husband, Paul Bernardo, beats the shit out of her, just never lays off. She says she can’t handle it anymore, and she wants him to get what he deserves. And she starts confessing: that yes, she knows about the homicides and the rapes. And not only as an accomplice, but also as a participant, because she was also part of the rounds of violation and torture. That they have everything on tape. Everything. She negotiates turning over the videos in exchange for a lesser sentence. Isn’t the denunciation worse? Shouldn’t they augment her punishment because of that? What is the logic of commuting? Anyway, through the tapes they verify that she was indeed an active participant in the crimes. And there’s more. She confesses, she has something to confess about the death of her sister. Why is she talking now? It turns out that it was actually her, Karla, who gave her sister to Paul as a Christmas gift. Paul, her boyfriend, had expressed interest in the younger sister, and Karla had decided to let him rape her as a Christmas gift, an offering for her Paul. So they gave her alcohol to stupefy her a little bit, and then they definitively put her down with some substance they had her inhale, I don’t remember what it was.

They exhume Tammy’s cadaver. They do the relevant tests. It’s true, they find remnants of substances in her face. Paul raped her with the consent (and under the gaze?) of her sister, and that’s when she threw up, choked on her vomit, and died. And here we have what may be—at least to me—the most horrifying tidbit: among the videotapes there are some from just a few weeks after Tammy’s death where her sister dresses up as her, puts on her clothes, and performs oral sex on her boyfriend. He films it.