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My Sister’s Murder Wasn’t Sexy!
Investigation Discovery used my family’s nightmare for ratings
Trigger warning: This article contains descriptions of graphic violence.
My sister, Jessie, decomposed in her home for four days in the Arizona summer, her bodily fluids pooling with those of her murderer and long-time partner, Dallas Augustine, who put a bullet first through my sister’s brain and then through her own.
The shot that killed my sister entered near the top of her head from inches away and exited her lower jaw — destroying her beautiful face — before lodging in her shoulder. Because her body slumped forward, the decomposition had advanced to the point she was unidentifiable without dental records. Her murderer remained upright with a single clean shot through her temple. That bullet was found in their couch.
The smell in the house was indescribable. The police removed the bodies and the evidence from the scene but left the ghastly clean-up to our family. Seemingly gallons of rotting blood soaked the floor. The professional cleaning crew couldn’t come right away, so we worked for days around that awful stain. The smell clung to our clothes and imprinted us with another level of horror.
Defiling corpses
If you see the segment about the murder on the Discovery Channel’s aptly nicknamed “murder porn” network, Investigation Discovery (ID), I’d like you to know the reality of my sister’s execution by the one who should have loved her best, versus the glossy production and whispered innuendo of love gone wrong.
My family declined to take part in Investigation Discovery’s exploitation after viewing a sample episode. It would have been an abomination.
The show, Deadly Affairs, offers a salacious soap opera format. It dramatizes extramarital affairs — stretching to include flirtations and suspicions of affairs — and twists them to culminate in a murder.
The host, a sultry, aging soap actress, attempts a seductive narrative of passion and betrayal based on all-too-real crimes. ID delivers the half-hour plots via soft-focus reenactments and often-silent overacting, likely to avoid paying SAG wages, interspersed with crime-scene photos and snapshots of…
