It was certainly not the run-of-the mill homicide, and we see a lot of the insane “tentacles” that touched this case… from KAK and Anthony Shots to Odinist symbolism and potential cult sacrifices. I 100% understand why he described the case as he did.
At the end of the day, though, it still seems way more likely that a mistake was made versus everyone involved with the case overlooking the appearance of some pants and disappearance of other pants. Especially the defense that leaves no straw ungrasped.
I still waffle back and forth over whether I think there could have been another person, or people. I wish we knew more, but sadly, that’s not reality right now. What I do know is that even if another person was involved, them transporting another pair of pants (that was owned by one of the girls, nonetheless) to the abduction and murder makes next to no sense and would also seem to imply someone with very close access to the girls was involved, which is, frankly, gross and a pretty fringe theory at this point.
JMO
Well said, and would add that DC's mind may have been particularly alive to the potency of some of the religious/quasi-religious symbolism he saw in the case, especially during the (mercifully) brief "Shack" period of pressers.
It has long been a case whose sensational aspects -- images and audio of the killer, pair of young friends vanishing, the almost gothic setting of the high bridge, etc -- have seemed to overwhelm the murdered girls at its centre, and the viciousness of the acts that left them there. I'd argue also that the investigation itself at times played on these elements, with a sort of gnomic side-commentary on its horrors, bizarreness, ritualistic furniture and the power of the secrets that might someday be revealed about it -- that fabled day when "you will know what we know."
IMO, this will be seen as one of the foundational cases for this era of what we might call the "new-new true crime economy," just previous cases were in their own times, with its front-and-centre characters of investigators, legal figures, commentators, document dumpers, leakers, righteous (and not so righteous) podcasters, and so on, even as family members are left mostly offstage to mourn and wait.
So whilst not much now surprises (or exercises) me about this case, I will be shocked if at the end it doesn't turn out to be the work of a man whose anger and possibly long-held fantasies boiled over on a day unseasonably warm when, as on other days he was ready to act out, and happened to find someone to act out on who fit those fantasies or that anger (or both) in some of the ways he had hoped for.
After that, everything is explicable, even the crazy coincidences (KAK) or the baffling incompetence of parts of the investigation, and RA's years in the shadows will be down to, as always, some combination of specific circumstances, poor protocols and luck.
The rest, I fear, is noise. And as with most such noise, it will diminish but never quite disappear, so long as it is fascinating, useful, profitable, or case-relevant.
Anyway, MOO, IMO, etc.
