he is under a lot of stress.
the thing I do not understand is how R got in the house- was the door left open for him? Did CB say "who are you and what is going on?" Did they tell him that would be part of the fantasy?
I have a lot of questions here.
Number 1 —
Does the State have evidence of an affair between the au pair and husband prior to the murders?
(The new phones are suspicious but not really hard evidence. I assume LE was still able to obtain a lot of previous phone data via subpoenas to their service carriers, Apple, Google, social media companies, etc. — location data, phone pings, call history, data stored on servers and the cloud.)
Just because they were together 8 months after the murder doesn’t mean they were together before the murders. Maybe the shared traumatic experience brought them together? Or maybe the affair started after Brendan learned his wife was hooking up with men she met online. I don’t necessarily believe that’s what happened, but I am interested to know what evidence they have to prove the affair began before the wife’s death.
Number 2 —
Do they have proof that Christine’s profile on the kink website was created by someone else? Other than friends and family saying the messages don’t sound like her, as that is far from solid evidence. I would venture to guess that she’d talk much differently to someone on a kink website than she’d talk to her friends and family. Most people keep that side of their life private. I would need more proof if I were on a jury.
Number 3 —
If the goal was to get rid of Christine, why come up with such a convoluted and complex plan that also required them to kill a complete stranger? There are so many things that would need to happen exactly as they planned but are also totally unpredictable.
Number 4 —
If Ryan was lured to the house by a fake profile under false pretenses, how did Brendan and the au pair get him upstairs with Christine? There were no signs of forced entry.
I’d find it more believable that maybe both were having an affair. The husband with the au pair and the wife with men she met online. Perhaps the first part of the story is true—the au pair left the home and returned to find an unknown car, called the wife and then the husband. Maybe the husband walked in to find his wife having sex with a stranger and shot him in a fit of rage and stabbed his wife with the knife the guy had been using during knife play. Maybe when he attempted to stage the scene as self defense, he realized Ryan was still alive and so he yelled down to the au pair to grab his other gun and shoot him again. He couldn’t do it because his story wouldn’t make sense if two different guns were used to shoot the guy and he would also get the second gun bloody if he handled it.
I realize this sounds utterly ridiculous, but no less ridiculous that the prosecution’s theory! And while this scenario would make the husband and au pair no less culpable, the mitigating circumstances would be different and would preclude premeditation. I don’t know. It’s just so hard for me to believe that they concocted this ridiculous plan to kill his wife AND A COMPLETE STRANGER by setting up a fake profile on a kink website where a million and one things could go wrong.
PS. This is slightly off-topic but not really — FTR, knife play doesn’t actually involve any sort of stabbing or physical harm when it’s done responsibly. PPS. It’s inherently dangerous to invite a complete stranger into your home to engage in risky BDSM play (just the thought of doing so nearly makes me break out in hives). And from what I understand about the BDSM community (which admittedly comes largely from reading too many smutty romance novels), that’s like BDSM 101.