All episodes are now streaming.
“Text me when you’re home” is a phrase that women, in particular, are all too familiar with – used by most to ensure our friends or loved ones arrive home safely, especially after a night out.
It is also the title of a chilling true crime series, now trending on Channel 5’s streaming service. #TextMeWhenYouGetHome tells the stories of the girls – like Sarah Everard – that didn’t make it back home, and it will send a chill down your spine.
The first episode tells the horrific story of 19-year-old Kenia Monge, who gets drunk on a night out, loses her purse and eventually accepts a lift from a man with a “white creepy van” offering to take her home. But he doesn’t.
Kenia passes out in his van, then he rapes and kills her before sending a text to her phone asking if she got home safely to absolve himself and leave her family with hope. Watching the hope fade and the horrifying job of her father, Tony Lee, desperately trying to hold his family together until the moment the police tell him they have found the body before it hits the news is draining.
“I went out to my truck and sat there. I had to control myself before I could take away their hope,” he says of his wife Maria, as well as Kenia’s sister Kim. “That was the toughest thing I have ever done.”
Evil lives here – it’s the only way to describe her killer Travis Forbes, who strangled, stripped and finally buried Kenia in a shallow grave.
Before he was caught, Travis also raped and set the flat on fire of a second victim who did not wish to be named in the documentary, as he tried to destroy the evidence. She lived by throwing herself out of a window and breaking her ankle. Police suspect the two girls were not his only victims.
Kerri Lombardi, former Denver Chief District Attorney in the US, where the crimes occurred, recalled: “The case was horrifying… One minute you are young and beautiful and the next you are… One encounter with a monster and that is how your life turns out.”
All 10 episodes of the first season of #TextMeWhenYouGetHome are streaming for free on Channel 5, while all 13 episodes of the second season are available to watch on Channel 4’s streaming service.
