I don’t think they said “foul play” until she was arrested. On Wednesday or Thursday that first week the search was changed from “runaway” to “missing endangered” due to his age and his needing medication. They maintained pretty much up to the day she was arrested that this was a search for a boy, not a body, even though everything they were doing screamed otherwise.
MSM cooperated by not using the term, but as soon as the arrest was made, KOAA published its own timeline of what it knew when, stating:
January 29: News 5 Investigates receives a credible tip from law enforcement sources, alerting us that Gannon was not a runaway child and foul play is suspected. Our sources disclosed that Gannon's stepmom was considered a prime suspect.
So while we, the public, did not know this, KOAA knew it and decided not to publish this at the time. LE was maintaining publicly that it was not a criminal case, and while KOAA says it knew that LE suspected foul play on the 29th, they stayed quiet to aid the investigation.
This means that some LE were suspecting TS on the 29th, which was the point a couple of us were discussing above. If they suspected her on the 27th, they did a poor job of keeping her under surveillance. I believe it was only after talking to AS and LH that they realized what exactly they were dealing with (and what had happened in the home).
I think this suspicion came up on the 28th, when she rented a car and failed to stay at the family home while AS and LH were arriving, giving interviews, and wanting, more than anything, to ask TS a boatload of questions.
IOW, "they" maintained that it was not a criminal case to us, but some LE gave MSM a different story.