The Juliette Society (21 page)

They run the video, without any commentary or voiceover. And I have to say, it’s pretty damning. Kirstin doesn’t go as far as naming names. But she makes it pretty obvious. Who pushed her into it. Who was responsible.

Bundy.

The video is shot in Kirstin’s bedroom. Through the webcam on her laptop. She’s sitting at her desk and, behind her, everything is white and pink, and My Little Pony, and either fluffy or lace. It looks like a child’s bedroom that’s been outfitted with no expense spared.

But a child’s bedroom inhabited by an adult.

She’s all made-up and wearing her favorite clothes. She looks really, really pretty. So innocent and sweet. She looks like someone’s daughter. Not someone’s one night stand. She looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And try as I might, I just can’t imagine her mouth wrapped around Bundy’s penis and his semen lying on her tongue. It just doesn’t seem right. Which is the whole point of this little exercise, I guess.

It’s a silent video – in the age of the internet and the smartphone, as if talkies were never invented – with a Nickelback song as the soundtrack. Kirstin holds up a series of cards that she’s already prepared from a pile in front of her. These are the things that she wants to say, that she wants the world to know. These are all her secrets. Written neatly in black marker pen – all caps – on eight by ten pieces of white card, albeit with no regard for grammar, punctuation, or spelling. I wonder how a girl could reach her early twenties and still be writing like a ten-year-old. And I’d hate to be the guy who had to mark her term paper.

As she holds up each card, she acts out an emoticon that seems like it might be appropriate – as if she’s playing a game of charades, where everyone knows the answer before they see the mime.

She holds up the first card.

I MET A GUY

And the next:

HE WAS RILLY CUTE

She gives the thumbs-up sign and a big cheesy grin.

HE HAD A KRISPY KREME DO-NUT TATTOO UNDER HIS EYE

Couldn’t really be anyone else but Bundy.

LOL

She mimes a belly laugh.

I THOUGHT HE LOVED ME

I THOUGHT WEED BE 2GETHER 4EVER

She makes a heart with the finger and thumb of each hand, presses it against her chest and grins again.

AND HED TAKE CARE OF ME

I LET HIM TAKE PICTURES

She shakes her head to mime regret.

HE SAID THEY WERE JUST 4 US

She bites her lower lip and nods.

SO WEED REMEMBER R 1ST TIME 2GETHER

AND LOOK BACK AT THEM WHEN WE WERE RILLY RILLY OLD

AND REMEMBER HOW WE WERE

AND I BELEVED HIM

BUT IT WASNT TRUE

Kirstin shakes her head solemnly.

HE PUT THEM ON A WEBSITE

I NEVER FOUND OUT

UNTIL IT WAS 2 LATE

She frowns and nods her head again – slowly, a can-you-believe-it nod.

UNTIL MY BEST FREND TOLD ME

HER BROTHA HAD SEEN THEM

AND HAD THEM ON HIS FONE

HE TXTD THEM TO ALL HIS FRIENDS

THEN EVERYONE NEW

AND THEY WERE ALL TALKING ABOUT ME ON FACEBOOK

TAGGING MY NAME SO ID SEE IT

She’s given up miming along. Now she’s just throwing the cards up as quickly as she can, because she just wants this to be over. Because it’s really embarrassing airing this stuff in a public forum. Her face is a mask of regret.

THEY SAID TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME

THEY CALLED ME A SLUT

AND A HORE

SAID I WAS A DRUGY.

It seems like the more emotionally devastating the story gets, the more her spelling fails her.

AND I WISH IT NEVER HAPPENED.

THAT ID NEVER MET HIM.

That’s where the video ends. I think back to the night I spent out with Bundy and Anna, watching him at work, and I decide she’s missing out the details, blurring others, to protect her dignity. Only half of it sounds like Bundy. The really bad bits. And I’m not cheapening what she went through, what she felt she had to do, but the rest of it’s a pretty clear-cut case of cyber-bullying, and who really knows which part was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Forrester Sachs is solemnly recounting Kirstin’s final hours, with all the gravitas he might employ if relating the death of a much-loved head of state. And he begins to intone the names of all the other girls who appeared on Bundy’s websites then ended up dead.

When he gets to ‘Daisy Taylor’ the penny drops. Daisy, the girl who worked with Jack in the campaign office. I’m not sure why I didn’t make the connection before. Maybe because things you see on TV never seem real, never seem to have any connection to your own life. They just seem like all the other things you see on TV that are just pretending to be real, pretending to be about real people and real events.

But this isn’t just about Bundy now, it’s about Jack. I look at Jack, he’s staring at the screen, stony-faced. I put a hand on his back to let him know I’m there, for him and with him. He doesn’t acknowledge me, but he also doesn’t move away. He’s fixed to the screen, because Forrester Sachs hasn’t finished yet. He’s still got a few more nails to put in Bundy’s coffin.

Sachs reveals something else about Bundy that I never knew. That if any of the girls who ended up on his website regretted it later; if they made a complaint, if they begged and pleaded for him to take down the photos, he said he would. But only if they paid him.

Bundy’s full of surprises
, said Anna. He sure is.

Photographer. Pornographer. Pimp. Extortionist. All-round creep.

It’s at this point that Jack’s just about had enough. He says, ‘This guy’s a fucking jerk,’ with such vitriol that I’m almost afraid, because I’ve never seen him so angry. I never knew he had it in him. ‘Why are we watching this shit?’

I have to remind him that it’s his favorite show.

He wants to change the channel. I tell him I want to watch it all, because Bundy’s a friend of Anna’s.

‘Anna should pick her friends more carefully,’ he says. ‘Have you ever met him?’

‘No,’ the lie comes to me quickly, ‘but I’ve heard her talk about him.’

If only Jack knew the half of it. If he knew that Bundy tried to turn me, his girlfriend, into a high-class whore, he’d do more than just curse at the TV and try to change the channel.

That’s why he can never know.

The TV cameras have tracked down Kirsten’s parents, Gil and Patty, to say their piece. Gil’s an oil executive. Patty’s a housewife. They’re standing together in the driveway of their mansion, putting on a show of strength, despite being locked in a bitter divorce battle.

‘My little girl would never do the things they said she did,’ says Gil. ‘I’m going to take this up in Congress. They should censor the entire internet. Clean it of all of this filth, erase those images that pervert took of my little girl.’

He pauses, then decides he hasn’t made a strong enough case, and adds, ‘So her little brother never sees them.’

It doesn’t sound like Gil knows what the internet is. He’s an oil executive who’s completely out of touch with the real world, whose secretary handles all his emails and even switches on his computer, which he doesn’t know how to use anyway and just sits there like a large, ugly black plastic desk lamp that makes a lot of noise.

It’s as if he doesn’t comprehend something quite fundamental about the internet: one stupid mistake and it will stay with you.

And Kirstin apparently didn’t know that either – even though she used to spend eighty percent of her waking life browsing, texting, messaging, uploading – which is how she got into this mess in the first place. She met Bundy online, agreed to meet him at a bar. The rest is internet history.

Now, she’s no longer Kirstin. She’s ‘Dirty Blonde Cocksucker #23’ on Filthy Rich Bitches. She’s fifteen million uniques alone during the second ad break of Forrester Sachs Presents. Kirstin has just become instant jerk-off material for several million sleazy guys who would never have linked her face to a name if Forrester Sachs hadn’t done all the hard work for them. Not just in America, but all over the world. Hotlinked and reposted to porn blogs from Azerbaijan to the Cayman Isles. And it’s not just Bundy’s brand that’s gone global, his website spiked so hard that his server temporarily went down and his ad revenue soared.

This poor girl is dead. Bundy’s rich.

Life is so unfair. It really fucking sucks.

But Bundy, he’s gone to ground. He’s disappeared and no one can find him. And because Forrester Sachs can’t get to him for an exclusive interview, his producers convince someone else to talk for Bundy.

Bundy’s mom, Charmaine.

‘After the break… ’ says Sachs.

‘We talk to Bundy Tremayne’s mother…

‘To hear what she has to say about her son.’

During the commercial, I fetch Jack a beer, and while I’m in the kitchen, I call Anna. She doesn’t pick up. I text her instead.

BUNDY. WTF!

She doesn’t text back in the time it takes me to pull the beer from the refrigerator, so I leave my phone on the counter and lock it, in case Jack wanders in.

I bring him in his beer just in time to see Charmaine standing on the balcony of her beachside condo. The condo that Bundy bought for her. The condo that will be repossessed if he doesn’t keep up the monthly payments – because Charmaine doesn’t have an income of her own. So I’m sure she jumped at the chance to appear on primetime TV to beg for Bundy’s return.

After Bundy was born, Charmaine cleaned up and felt in need of something to fill the void in her life where the narcotics had been. Anna told me she turned to religion, but treated religion like everything else in her life, like being a compulsive shopper or experimenting with different combinations of pills and powders. And now, she thinks she’s tried them all.

New Age, Christian, Judaism, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim.

Every time she found a new religion, she couldn’t quite bring herself to drop the old one. So she added to it instead, adopting new rituals, superstitions and icons. They’ve each left their mark on her person. She has henna tattoos on her hands, Native American charms around her wrists, and a Jesus piece around her neck. She practices yoga, chants, goes to confession, observes the Sabbath and takes the fast. She’s a walking contradiction of God’s word. As if she believes in all religions and none at the same time.

Anna had also told me about Bundy’s dad, Richard Savoy Tremayne, how he took a similar but slightly deviated path. He kicked drugs, got out of banking and set up a self-help group to assist others who wanted to do the same. Without realizing it, just like Kubrick, he hit upon a rich seam of need in the financial sector. His business thrived. Junkie bankers flocked to his door, all looking to Richard for support and advice. The self-help group grew into a sect, made up of former crackhead account managers, heroin-addicted CFOs and tweaker traders, with Richard as their figurehead and guru, and Charmaine at his side. Bundy was raised in the sect, until he reached puberty and started to rebel.

Around the same time, Charmaine briefly converted to Islam and took a Muslim name – Leila. She came to the realization that she’d only married Richard for his name because it so rhymed nicely with hers. So she left him. And he cut her off and left her without an income.

Watching her on the TV, I can tell by the look on Charmaine’s face that she really doesn’t get enough sex, or the right kind of sex. She’s like one of those female office supervisors who’s so uptight and stiff that she drives her male colleagues to distraction, and behind her back, they all say, ‘she just needs a good fucking’.

And they all think they’re the ones to give it to her. They’re probably right, she probably does just need a good fucking. But at the same time, I’m not sure if it’s quite that simple. I think starving yourself of sex breeds an insanity that rots your body and your mind – from the inside out – like syphilis, and eventually it shows on your face, in your skin, your behavior and your entire manner of being.

Charmaine Tremayne has sacrificed her soul for her son. But she’s only agreed to appear on Forrester Sachs to save her condo from foreclosure. What Charmaine doesn’t know is that she’s at a distinct disadvantage. All she knows is that Bundy is missing. She thinks she’s on the show to play the grieving mother, like all the rest, pining for the return of her baby boy. When she’s really there to play the scapegoat.

‘I’m proud of my son,’ says Charmaine. She must have had a few drinks to steel her nerves before this because her eyes are a little glassy and her diction’s pretty shaky. ‘He’s a businessman. A self-made man. He’s a success.’

‘He’s a sex predator, Charmaine,’ says Sachs. And the words ‘sex predator’ roll off his tongue so beautifully that he was probably up all night rehearsing how to say them with casual indifference, just a dash of righteousness and no apparent malice.

‘No,’ she says, ‘No.’ Like she’s not quite convinced of her denial. If we could see Charmaine’s feet now they’d be unsteady.