I enjoy all of the posts here and they really make me stop and think BUT in my opinion I don't this this case will ever be solved. I hope I am wrong.
People like us, who are (for whatever reason) interested in crime and what not, seem to focus on the minutiae of a case. We debate this or that clue, scraps of evidence, single words, odd looks, DNA and now even fragments of DNA, and we try to make sense of all these micro bits of data. Knowing peoples love of mysteries and puzzles, the media and fiction plays this up. Sherlock Holmes used his crime fighting powers of observation and logic to solve impossible mysteries. CSI programs create the illusion that modern forensic scientists fight crime and crack cases in their laboratories better than the cops on the beat. Following "Silence of the Lambs," Hollywood and the major book publishers unleashed a tsunami of crime fiction starring heroic women psycological profilers cracking cases (and glass ceilings) using nothing more than their keen intuition and psychological savy.
There is nothing wrong with this of course -- it's human nature.
But I can say (from experience in the case of this assertion) that real crimes are generally pretty simple. And further, that these micro scraps we discuss are nothing more than official fictions. By this I mean: people report things, they describe events, and those events enter the official record and are debated. However, in the real world even events so horrific and shocking that you know they will stay in your mind forever, are usually remembered with a whole lot less detail then the reports suggest -- even when those reports are written mere minutes after the event by people trained in the art of paying attention and used to traumatic incidents.
People usually forget or fail to notice all kinds of things. They don't know the exact time, or how long; they don't know exactly who said what; they often do not even know who it was that was standing two feet away. But every one of those details are eventually filled into the reports, and they become the official fiction I mentioned above.
The one thing people do know is WHAT HAPPENED. They know the important big picture.
In law enforcement this is certainly the case. Unlike in the movies, in real life the evidence is usually right there -- and you probably don't even need to be Sherlock Holmes or a CSI guy to see it. The killer is usually the guy standing there covered with blood trying to hide his chainsaw, or the ex-boyfriend with the restraining order, no alibi, and the victims blood in his car. And when it's not, well, you have problems.
That's where the 40% of so of unsolved murders come from -- the cases where there was no trail of blood, no ex-boyfriend, no witnesses. Even when the police are pretty sure they know who did it, they don't have the proof, and unlike the movies the CSI stuff works a whole lot better at confirming suspicions and winning cases than discovering who did it in the first place.
I had hoped that in this case the police had something solid. It appears now that they probably do not.
DISCLAIMER: The above is my OPINION only. Unless stated otherwise, I neither claim nor imply any inside knowlege or expert opinion about any subject I happen to be discussing. The reader assumes full responsibility for any conclusions my writing might have led them to reach. Do not read while operating heavy machinery.
