Dating back to at least August 9, 2009, Barbie.avi is the story of a young man who goes to a party in a largely abandoned industrial neighborhood. After being awoken early in the morning by something being thrown into a dumpster, he finds a discarded computer tower that he hopes to restore. Looking through the hard drive, he finds a video file labeled “Barbie.avi.” It’s a video of a woman apparently being interviewed, but it’s impossible to hear what she’s saying over the static. It seems the woman is being verbally abused, with “skin” being the only word the protagonist thinks he can read on her lips.
After 40 minutes of watching, he’s convinced something horrible happened to her. In a shot lasting a few seconds at the end of the video, there’s an abandoned home near some railroad tracks a few miles away. He and a friend go to investigate. They don’t find any trace of the woman in the building. However, more significantly, they do realize that there is running water at this decrepit house out in the middle of nowhere. What could have been covered up?
As hard as it is to believe that people might leave evidence of a murder on their computers before carelessly throwing them out, there are cases of people apparently being even more actively self-destructive with their murder evidence. For example, on Thanksgiving in 2012, a man in Little Falls, Minnesota outfitted his house with a large array of cameras and microphones to capture him tormenting and then murdering two young people that broke into his house. Barbie.avi with its ambiguity and subtlety is actually much more believable than real incidents like that.
