Episode 158:
She Confessed Her Secrets on Live Show, then She was Found Buried 20 feet Deep in a Well
On July 7, 2012, a new television show premiered in Peru called "The Value of the Truth." Contestants were connected to a lie detector and asked twenty-one questions. Every truthful answer added to the prize, up to about $15,000. The catch was in how the questions were chosen. Before the taping, producers ran each contestant through a fifty-question polygraph session, then picked the twenty-one that would do the most damage, and saved the worst for last.
The first contestant was 19-year-old Ruth Thalía Sayas. Born to an indigenous family in the Andes, she had moved to Lima as a child. Her parents sold fruit from before dawn to put two daughters through college, and Ruth, an accounting student, wanted to repay them and open her own beauty salon. She had been auditioning for TV shows for a while. In the front row sat her parents and her boyfriend, Bryan Romero, a 20-year-old mototaxi driver from her neighborhood whom her family had never much liked.
Twenty-One Questions
The early questions were light, and Ruth answered them with a smile. Then they sharpened. Had she ever been ashamed of her parents? Yes. Would she leave Bryan if a better man came along? Yes. The camera caught his face hardening. She did not actually work at a call center but as a nightclub dancer, did she? Yes. She had needed money for school and living costs and couldn't tell her family. The eighteenth question asked whether she had ever accepted money for sex. After a long pause she said yes, and the machine confirmed it. She tried to explain that it had happened twice, out of desperation, and never would again. With three questions left, she looked at her family in tears, apologized to Bryan, and stopped. She had won about $4,500. The credits rolled over Ruth on her knees in front of her mother, begging forgiveness.
After the Broadcast
The show became the most-watched program in Peru, and Ruth was on every front page. In a follow-up interview she said she felt lighter for having told her secrets. At home it was different. Neighbors and relatives gossiped and criticized until the family could barely leave the house, and she and Bryan broke up. Bryan, mocked in the street even by schoolchildren, went to the TV station demanding compensation and was thrown out. He had been promised about $450 for appearing. He told Ruth she owed him all of her winnings. Around that time someone broke into her home and took a laptop, a phone, and cash. Her family suspected him, and records show she filed a complaint against him and then withdrew it out of fear. On the night of September 11, 2012, two months after the broadcast, Ruth vanished on her way home from college by bus. The next morning her mother went to Bryan, who said he knew nothing and consoled her. Police showed little interest in a missing girl from a poor neighborhood until the press learned who she was. Then the story led the national news, some outlets calling her "the prostitute from The Value of Truth."
The Well on His Uncle's Land
On September 22, searchers found a young woman's body in a vacant lot on the outskirts of the city, at the bottom of a well about six meters deep that had been filled over with rocks and concrete. Ruth's father identified her. She had been strangled. She had also been drugged and beaten so badly that her collarbone and spine were broken. The lot belonged to Ledy Leyva, Bryan Romero's uncle. Police searched Bryan's room and his mototaxi and found traces of Ruth's blood in both. He denied it, then confessed, claiming they had met by chance, had drinks, slept together, and that he had choked her in a sudden rage when she called him a poor mototaxi driver. The autopsy did not fit that story, and neither did a teenage boy from the neighborhood, who told police that Bryan had paid him to report the moment Ruth got off her bus, and that he had watched Bryan and another man force her onto the mototaxi. Phone records placed Bryan and his uncle in contact near the well when the body was buried.
Final Thoughts
Prosecutors argued that Bryan and his uncle had planned to take Ruth's prize money and had beaten and killed her to get her bank password, and they charged the two with robbery-murder. On February 27, 2014, both were sentenced to life in prison and ordered to pay her family about $210,000. They appealed repeatedly, and in 2021 the sentences were reduced to 33 and 30 years. None of the compensation has been paid. Ruth's parents have continued to protest for a harsher punishment. Ruth went on television because she wanted to start over and to give something back to the people who raised her. She answered every question honestly, and what that cost her was decided by other people.
The show's producers screened Ruth with fifty questions beforehand and chose the ones that would hurt most, then aired her answers to the whole country. Her killers are responsible for her death, but how much responsibility do you think a program like that carries for what happens to its contestants afterward?
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YOU DECIDE.
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