It really is sick. You build a beautiful life, two beautiful children, buy a house, and get murdered and then your house goes on the market like nothing happened.
New family moves in and it’s like you never existed. Damn that’s hitting me hard at the moment.
A house is “a thing”. When people die, lots of things are left after them. Sometimes seeing small items - a bottle of perfume, a dress, a pair of glasses - would be more saddening because they look as if waiting for their master, and there is no one to come. A house is a reusable “box” where the inner things can be removed, rearranged, rebuilt.
This case is so mean. The house is important in that it was the Tepe’s first one and they started a family in it. But really, everything pales in comparison with this vileness of stealing two people’s lives. The jealousy, the anger, the viciousness of the murder. The fact that the killer felt in the right to judge this couple, and mete out punishment, and “mercifully” spare the kids, this hubris of McKee makes one so angry. He was weighing in who was guilty and who wasn’t.
I guess McKee was always like this. People adopted him, giving him a chance in life, and when he found out about it, he stopped communicating with them. Monique gave him, and herself, a chance of having a family and a partnership, and on realizing that it would not work out, she left. Objectively, it was an easy divorce. I feel that he punished her not for leaving him, but for daring to be happy with another man much later.
I hope his parents don’t blame themselves nor feel any connection to him.