Depresshocking

My friend and I used to have a running contest: weave the most morally reprehensible story imaginable. The one and only time we did this we started with a kidnapped child and ended with a serial killer-voyeur-cannibal with every imaginable STD. Don't ask why we started this contest in the first place. We were bored...it was the suburbs... Mostly it was also disturbing to know we'd inevitably borrowed subconsciously from the real news, sometimes presaging it. Uncanny, I tell you.

And that's pretty much what it felt like reading this news item:

Performance artist dons wedding gown and hitch-hikes through Eastern Europe as a statement of peace in regions of strife: the Balkans, rural Turkey, Israel. Somewhere along the way some nut job kidnaps, rapes, strangles, kills, then dumps her body in the woods, and uses her now stolen phone to call friends.

Each detail comes at you like that "how can we make this worse?" game. I mean what makes this really really disgusting, is his stealing her phone to call friends. It proves he's a pathological monster. Can you imagine? "Hey Tom. I got into kind of a mess. Need to shower, but I'll be there for kickoff...yeah...yeah bra. Save me a brewskie." Nothing like my cannibalistic pedophile with chlamiderrherpaids.