Trigger warning: This article contains Trigger warning: this 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 victims and killers in happier times. Murder is never in soft focus. There was nothing glamorous or theatrical about the way my sister was executed.

Purported experts in suits sit in front of authority-lending bookshelves, describing events no one witnessed, offering commentary on the internal dialogue of dead people they never met. The story is packaged slickly and the reveal saved for the final minutes, though the police reports and news accounts have long been public record.

Purported experts in suits sit in front of authority-lending bookshelves, describing events no one witnessed, offering commentary on the internal dialogue of dead people they never met.

The kind medical examiner advised me to not view my sister’s body for identification. I never looked at the pictures from the crime scene, but the Discovery Channel has. They aired these blurred images for the world’s entertainment.

The real reality

My family has lived with the reality of my sister’s murder since that horrible call. The details are seared in our brains and the facts are not in dispute. It wasn’t about a bar flirtation or a love triangle gone wrong. It was about substance abuse, domestic violence and access to a gun: the recipe for most domestic murders in this country.

My sister’s killer was an unstable, depressive alcoholic with a history of violence and suicidal tendencies. She didn’t value her own life, and when my sister had enough, her killer put a bullet in her head rather than let her leave. Then she killed herself with the same gun and left us with no hope of justice.

We couldn’t control the media frenzy then, and we can’t control the continued exploitation of our sister’s life and death by people who make their living on the backs of others’ pain. All we can do is tell the truth, and the truth isn’t even close to the segment being aired. That is so far from the truth only the names carry any resemblance to actual events. Yet viewers recognize those names and think they know something about my family.

All we can do is tell the truth, and the truth isn’t even close to the segment being aired.

Jessie’s murder occurred on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. A neighbor heard a commotion but didn’t investigate or call police. Later, he would claim to the press they “fought like cats and dogs.” There were few signs of a struggle, a single broken plate, several empty liquor bottles, and a gun.

Happy to be together, circa 2010. Photo credit: F. Griffo

A gun that should have been there…

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