Clipped by me for focus.
Thank you so much for your response grannygates!
I 100% agree with you that ritualistic, for LE, means any kind of scene that includes some element of a ritual. EG: redressing a victim PM, staging a body etc.
As it was said during the pretrial hearings (MS podcast, 3d day of pre-trial hearings
The Delphi Murders: Three Days of Pretrial Hearings: Day Three ) the FBI opined that the ritualistic element of the staging pointed towards Undoing and not Religious sacrifice ( some very pertinent info here:
"Undoing" (or Symbolic Reversal) at Homicide Crime Scenes - PubMed )
If we all agree that the ritualistic element of the murders was leaning more towards the wider LE definition of Undoing, vs a specific Odinist ritual that follows any known modern-day Viking animal sacrifice 'guidebook', then how did Dawn Perlmutter reach the conclusion that it is a ritual sacrifice? IMO and according to the FBI and according to
Mark Mirabello's opinion in Nancy Grace's interview (youtube.com/watch?v=1izU3hytz2Y), it did not resemble what one would expect from a Pagan sacrifice.
Now that's not to say that TC's opinion that Abby and Libby happened upon a gathering and were summarily murdered for whatever reason (sorry to sound flippant, I personally do not believe the 'making fun' argument has been well established) gets immediately disproven with the lack of an Odinist sacrifice 'evidence'.
In fact IMO the idea that the girls happened upon anything illegal, CSAM related, drug related, etc and were murdered as a result is much more likely than the idea of a spontaneous and yet unorthodox ritual in an area without any previous ritualistic markers.
Which brings me to the question: Why would the DT go with the Odinism human sacrifice theory, when a) Todd Click does not support it b) The FBI analysis does not support it c) Experts such as Mark Mirabello don't support it d) there is no precedent that we know of?
Isn't it easier to meet burden of proof by following Todd Click's theory? IMO / JMO etc it feels like going for the human sacrifice is betting RA's life on a losing hand in poker - as in you have no colors, no pairs, no threes, no face cards and no aces and you just hope the other players have worse cards, which is a statistical impossibility.
TL;DR - if we all agree (MOO) that the scene is only ritualistic in the more general meaning of the word, then why go with the hardest possible to prove theory, if the only thing you want to prove is that SODDI???
(ETA: link to the NG interview)