Hi friend, it’s me, your favorite Marath. I know it is getting late and you are super tired already but I just wanted to come tell you that I found a badass movie about found tapes and since found footage is your thing, I knew it couldn’t wait until later, so go wash your face, brush your teeth, change into your pj’s, and jump into bed because it is time for a cozy tale titled “Cheryl and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007).”
Our story begins with 19 year-old Cheryl, Cheryl Dempsey, who lives with her parents in Reading, Pennsylvania. Cheryl was enjoying a normal happy life, until, one night, her home got broken into when she was alone with her boyfriend, Tim. You see, Tim was planning on staying over to keep her company, and so they ate something, watched something, fell asleep on the couch for a while, and before they could call it a night and go to bed upstairs, someone viciously attacked Tim from behind and then went chasing after Cheryl! And do you want to hear the most messed up thing of all? The intruder filmed it. He filmed the attack! (Ah!) He even filmed when Cheryl and Tim were previously asleep on the couch. He filmed while he was waiting for them earlier in the evening, hidden inside Cheryl’s bedroom closet. He filmed as he broke into the house, making himself at home, going through Cheryl’s underwear. This guy was a creep, a total evil pervert.
So the pervert returns to Poughkeepsie, New York where he lives at a rented house and he brings Cheryl with him. He then begins the constant and long process of torturing her in the soundproof basement. Cheryl learns quickly that in order for her to survive she needs to comply with each of her master’s vile requests. And yes, he films the abuse, hours of them, tape after tape after tape, all ending in boxes somewhere.
The years of abuse go by and Cheryl, in the process, loses her humanity little by little and becomes less and less of a slave and more and more of a thing. Meanwhile, her master’s killing spree continues all over Poughkeepsie where he is quick to change his M.O. as often as needed to keep the authorities struggling to identify him, the terrorizing serial killer, now infamously known as the Water Street Butcher, a name which he himself “helped” get after misguidedly targeting only prostitutes working on Water Street.
And guess what, my sleepy friend, guess what!? It was because of Water Street that the master got the police incriminated in the murders. It was thanks to the sex workers and their customers that he got James Foley—a detective guilty only of wanting to enjoy a good time—wrongly accused of being the Butcher, and since DNA never lies, the authorities were happy to decide they had had enough of this son of a bitch Butcher killer and soon they charged and convicted Foley for the Poughkeepsie homicides. What was that? How did the master get Foley’s DNA? Girl, come on, use your imagination ;)
Foley was sentenced in 1996 and executed on September 09, 2001. Three days later, his name was cleared after officials confirmed the Butcher was still at large—and yes, you guessed it, the master was the one “alerting” the authorities of their “mistake”—but due to 9/11, no one cared to read about it on the newspapers.
The master not only had clued officials in on his most recent victim, but also on his own exact location. I knoooow!! I did not see that coming either! And it gets weirder from there because the stunt had been planned from the beginning; the master had decided it was time to clean house and move on to the next chapter, but not without a last hooray for old times’ sake. So just imagine the S.W.A.T. team storming inside the house and finding it empty… oh, I would have been so upset if it was me because I would have taken it as a ‘Fuck you, you never caught me and now I’m gone for good,’ I mean, so infuriating… and the tapes, there were hundreds of them left behind inside boxes! And Cheryl! She was left behind inside a box too!
About the tapes, all numbered in sequence, they had a total running time of about 2,400 hours of video and well over half of it was just Cheryl’s tapes. You heard that right. Hours and hours of pain and suffering from poor old Cheryl. All of it indexed and logged, except for 27 tapes as they were missing from the boxes, presumably because they might have been either too private, or had shown the master’s face, or maybe because they had been too gruesome for sharing with the public.
At the time Cheryl was left behind by the master and found by the police, she had been in captivity for eight years. When she was admitted to the Hospital, they found not only deep cuts, broken bones, malnutrition, and internal organ damage, but also unspeakable trauma done to her genitals. While under treatment, and as time went by, the Doctors could not figure out why some of Cheryl’s injuries were not healing properly, until they finally determined she was hurting herself to self-inflict pain when they were not looking. Can you imagine? Not knowing how to exist anymore without pain? Believing you have to suffer in order to survive? My god, poor Cheryl.
Six years later, thanks to the documentary about the Water Street Butcher, Cheryl granted an interview for the very first time and in it she looked so frail and so sad and kept replying to the interviewer after each question, “I don’t know. What do you want me to say? I don’t know. What do you want me to say?” and I felt so sorry for her as I could see her sense of self had been destroyed by the master, and the saddest thing of all was, if you can believe there wasn’t anything more depressing at this point, that for a moment she got really exalted while talking about her master and said that he loved her and that she knew he was going to come back to get her.
Two weeks after the interview, Cheryl took her own life and left behind a note professing her love for her master. The End.
Oh good, you are asleep now. Sweet dreams friend, I’ll come back later.
-Marath
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