Very well said.
In addition to this, I would bet quite a large amount that absolutely none of these burglars were decked out head to toe in SWAT gear (with helmet) at 4am.
I would also wager these burglars also did not walk around leisurely.
"Burglars" (actual ones, not murders staging a burglary) would bring SOME kind of loot bag with them, right? Or am I just a crazy person for thinking these logical thoughts?
Someone intent upon robbing the "collections" would attempt to open the safe and take out the bank bags holding the currency and checks (at our church, there would be a separate bag for each weekend service at which collections were gathered). Those bags are what the thief would use to walk out with the cash.
I used to volunteer in our church's collection count (in fact I wrote my parish's procedures and internal controls for the processing and counting of the collections). One of the things I considered unwise was that our parish published the amount of the prior week's collections in the next week's parish bulletin. I thought this a risk because it might invite theft and could potentially endanger those who arrived earliest in the office on Monday morning (as a thief might presume they could access the safe). However, those in favor of publishing it did so for what they considered a valid reason: so that our parish members would be aware of the level of our collections and whether they appeared adequate to fund the parish needs and for the various ministries.
Eventually, my parish did stop publishing the information in the publicly available weekly bulletin (I didn't notice when, but probably when the bulletin started being published online). However, before that change was made, anyone - member or not - who came into our church and grabbed a freely available bulletin would be aware of the typical amount of cash receipts that might be stored in our parish safe each Sunday night. Receipts typically included currency as well as handwritten checks which reflected the bank routing and account numbers of the account holders. Both can be valuable to a thief. A collection of say, $50,000 could be worth even more if a thief used or sold the routing and account information printed on members' checks.
I don't know what they did at Creekside Church, but I wonder if they did something similar.
My own experience as a collection counter and the person who considered the risks associated with that, the awareness that this murder occurred very early on a Monday morning, the disguise to avoid camera-assisted detection of who this person was, and the odd way this person wandered around opening one door after another when no one else was around is why I think it possible this person was there to rob the church of the collections. A person could make a pretty sizable and easy to carry haul.
I assume the person was either a member OR had visited the church before, so was aware the church used cameras for protection, and that was the reason for the disguise. If the church property was used for MB's exercise classes, it was also likely used for other community classes or gatherings, so any person attending any of those could get a sense of the place and the onsite security measures without being a member.
If this person was there to steal the collections, it is possible they did not know where the safe was, just as we don't know. It may have been in the church office, OR it may have been in a locked usher's closet, OR it may have been in a locked office of a clergy member or key administrator. Wandering around opening doors when no one else is expected to be around seems a good way to find out. And a hammer and a pry bar seem like the kind of tools such a person might carry to get into any locked rooms, and ultimately the safe itself.
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