Dayum. Y'all have some very vivid imaginations. Sounds like a career in crime fiction is up your alley. I follow a lot of out-of-state cases because I don't get much info on them in California. But, slogging through pages and pages of personal theories just to try to find any actual news event can be tiring. And, those theories constantly morph as news is dropped. The theories being pushed now look nothing like the theories people started with.
I just don't think like that. I feel that if I try to develop a "theory" I dimiss facts that don't agree with it and overlook facts I should have noticed. Yeah, I get impatient, but me making up some story not based on fact doesn't help the victim.
I read every link posted and watch every video, and I just don't see what a lot of people claim. I see no bandage at all in thes step-mom's video. None. But since someone said they did, now there's people making guesses about it's source and claiming that the white thing in the car video is her using her beanie for a bandage. It looked like a beanie to me, and if used as a bandage (when I did not see a bandage in the other video), why was it just flopping around as if she was just holding it?
I have no doubt the stepmother is behind this, but I like to adhere to Occam's razor. At the time she did the interview she was getting death threats. At that point, LE was still identifying it as a runaway situation. So it seems the logical reason for her to wear sunglasses and be filmed from behind was to not encourage others to identify her and make it worse. She didn't have her daughter filmed, either. What doesn't make sense is people armchair psychoanalyzing and diagnosing her as NPD and then make up a bunch of scenarios based on that. I had an NPD birth-mother for 6 years until I was adopted. I was married to an NPD for 10 years and went through a 6-year ugly divorce/custody case. I know NPD. And, I would never couch-diagnose some of that based on a short video from behind. Fact is, plenty of liars are not NPD. And, just because someone has personality faults you don't like, or you think they've done something bad, does not automatically qualify them as being NPD. I know that my BM and my ex are, because they went through professional assessment that diagnosed them as such. I a not a psychiatrist, and I would never try to diagnose a stranger, or even someone I know as having mental issues. That's a slippery slope. The majority of criminals are not diagnosed with any mental illness at all.
If one of my children went missing and their step-mother was interviewed, I doubt she'd show any emotion, either. She never bonded with my children. Never even tried. She made it clear from day one that my children were the burden she took on in exchange for marrying my rich ex-narcissist. Doesn't make her a bad person, just perhaps not capable of love to any children other than her own.
What's my point? Most of the time, the simplest, if not the most easy to understand explanation is what is true. Ideas about how Gannon could be in sex-trafficking, or the SM had been poisoning him... you think LE doesn't have info that would rule that out? None of the neighbors have claimed any kind of conflict in the family, AFAWK. That would seem to be the first thing that comes out in investigations like this. Speculation about how the "NPD SM was resentful about parenting alone and needed some "drama" to bring the husband back makes no sense. AS was not gone all the time. And, he was at home enough to where he would have seen any abuse going on. That has not been reported. Even in the social media comments that clarify the relationship between the BM, SM, and BD, and what allegedly went down with them, there is no accusation of abuse by the SM.
Sorry I condensed a lot of my thoughts in one post, but I'm not one to constantly post. Better to do it all in one. I'm not going to make a guess about what happened, because to me, that seems really game-show. Like people throwing out their theories and adjusted theories, in the hopes that they'll be the one who was correct. I don't care if I'm right or not. I just want a conclusion.