PH told her mom she was meeting her coworkers/friends to see a band that started at 1100, yet she allegedly left the bar with strangers at 1045? As I’ve stated before the police did not confirm nor deny PH being in the bar or if she left with anyone only that the ‘two unknown men’ were not in the videos.
For some reason, this did not stick out to me until now, but I feel like this almost makes
more sense. As someone who partied maybe a bit too hard in college, goes to a lot of shows, and used to hide my partying from parents, this all made a lot of sense to me. This is of course just speculation, and I apologize in advance if this angle has been discussed before.
Anyway, people at shows (bars, wherever) obviously do drugs. But getting drugs in these environments can be risky and you don't know what you're getting if its from a stranger. I would not find it odd at all if, shortly before the show started, she left the bar to buy from a dealer. I can't even tell you all the amount of times I have had friends do this. If this happened, it is entirely possible that the connects she met up with were friends of the person who said they saw her leave with "two husky black men". The person could know she met up with two husky black men, but doesn't want to get in trouble, so they could have lied to the police about how they knew she was with them (hence why they were never seen on the cameras). Finally, her dropping the credit card on the floor of the bar does not seem weird to me. When I was a bartender, we had a stack of left-over credit cards that was as thick as a dictionary.
Anyway, this is of course all speculation and my own opinion, but I wanted to introduce a theory that I had not seen mentioned before. Rest in Peace, Paighton. Hopefully they will discover what happened soon and can bring you justice.
ETA: This of course does not explain how she ended up in a ditch, but it could kind of connect two pieces of the story that don't seem to fit in well anywhere else.
ETA (again): I forgot to add that I do not mean to blame this on drugs just because she was in recovery. Again, just thinking of another explanation.