Sometimes rosy ideas about the world are shattered by a cruel reality. These people began their trips with enthusiasm and faith in a wonderful tomorrow, but they were met with a tragic result — violence and death.
1. An eccentric artist died during a peace march in a wedding dress.
In the spring of 2008, 33-year—old Italian artist Pippa Bacca (real name – Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo) dressed up in a wedding dress, a symbol of peace and love, and went hitchhiking in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Italian woman began her journey on March 8 in the company of her friend Silvia Moro, who also decided to join this peacekeeping campaign “Brides on the way”.
Women in white dresses hitchhiked from Milan to Tel Aviv, stopping in cities and organizing various actions to awaken love and kindness in people. The idea of this peace march came about thanks to a song by the Italian bard Fabrizio De Andre:
“We are already so tired of wars. Isn’t it time to go back to work in a bridesmaid’s dress or something else, white?”
The Italian woman was in contact with her relatives throughout the trip, passing through Italy, the Balkan countries and reaching Turkey. During her journey, she blogged online and kept in touch with the Italian media, which closely followed her unusual action.
However, on March 31, the girl disappeared from view. It became known that a few days before the disappearance, Giuseppina quarreled with her friend and continued her journey alone.
As it became known later, the artist was picked up on Turkish territory by a 38-year-old local resident, who first decided to rob her and then raped her. Previously convicted of theft, unemployed Murat Kartas got scared and strangled his victim to cover his tracks.
The police got on the trail of the killer after he used the SIM card of the murdered Italian woman. The arrested man immediately confessed to what he had done and showed where he had hidden the corpse. The body of the artist in white, covered with earth and branches, was discovered in a forest near Istanbul.
2. The cycling trip of an American couple broke off in the mountains of Tajikistan.
“There is some kind of magic in this huge, beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin, a 29-year—old American who traveled the world for 369 days with his beloved Lauren Johegen Geigan. The couple left the States and went around the world on bicycles in July 2017.
They went to South Africa, and then to Morocco, traveled through Eastern Europe, reached Tajikistan, and through East Asia, Australia, they wanted to return home to America, but their plans did not come true.
The couple called their journey, which brought Americans to Tajikistan, “Dreams come true” on their blog. For the sake of this dream, they gave up their jobs, a self-built mobile home and a familiar lifestyle.
Their journey was fascinating. The couple blogged about the stories that happened to them along the way. The cyclists described there not only the positive side of the journey, but also the troubles that happened to them on the way. But at the same time, Austin wrote that the main revelation of this journey is that people in general are very kind and responsive.
“If you read the newspapers, you get the feeling that the world is a huge creepy place, and people can’t be trusted. Supposedly people are bad, people are evil,” Austin wrote. — I’m not falling for it. Evil is a concept that we came up with to explain to ourselves why other people and their values are so different from ours. In general, people are kind. Yes, sometimes they are fixated on themselves, sometimes they are limited, but they are kind, generous and beautiful.”
The couple blogged a chronology of their travels, sharing their impressions. So on the 319th day of the trip, an unknown Kazakh stopped a truck and treated the Americans to ice cream. On day 342, a family stopped in a meadow next to them, carrying stringed instruments and arranged a concert for the travelers. And then came the 369th day, when this couple was traveling with several other tourists along a very picturesque road in southeastern Tajikistan.
On July 29, at about 15:30 local time, on the Kulyab-Dushanbe highway, on the territory of the Dangara district, a Leganza car deliberately hit them and other tourists. Then, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tajikistan, the criminals got out of the car and began to finish off the tourists with knives and axes. As a result, four foreigners were killed and two were injured. Jay Austin and Lauren Johegen Geigan are among the four dead. Three more were injured of varying severity.
Initially, the Tajik police considered the incident a traffic accident, but then came to the conclusion that the tourists were victims of a brutal crime. Immediately after, one suspect was arrested, and two more were killed while trying to resist during the arrest. All of them are local villagers born in 1992-99.
Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men attacking cyclists who were sitting in front of an ISIS flag. They looked directly into the lens and uttered the words of an oath: to kill “infidels.”
3. The end of the journey: the tourist was killed in the first country.
The third story took place in the summer of 2018, and her heroine was only at the very beginning of her journey, having managed to visit only one country out of many planned ones.
Maria Matus Tenorio, 25, from Mexico, decided to go on a trip to share her music with the world. The girl played keyboards and wrote music, and her rosy plans included a trip around the world. But during her first trip to Costa Rica, the young singer was raped and killed.
From Mexico, Maria went to Costa Rica, where she met a tourist from Britain. The friends traveled around the country together. On one of the Costa Rican beaches, two local men approached attractive girls. They behaved aggressively. Initially, the criminals planned to rob the travelers, but everything went much further. Maria’s friend broke away and tried to call for help. Tenorio herself could not escape. The men raped her, dragging her to a remote part of the beach where no one could hear the girl’s screams. Fearing that Maria would turn them over to the police, they decided to drown the girl on the same beach where they had been raped before.
Soon Maria’s body was found by the police. Suspects in the murder of the girl Esquivel Cerdas and Benavides Mendoza were detained by law enforcement officers, an investigation is underway.
The tragic fate of a self-taught Mexican singer has shocked local residents who are seriously concerned about the situation in Costa Rica. According to the UN report, the number of cases of gender-based violence in this country is increasing year by year.
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