As can be seen on the maps, there are nearly continuous open space lands west of Jessica’s neighborhood, bordered by 82nd Avenue on the south, Marshall Road on the north, Highway 93 on the west and McCaslin Boulevard and Indiana Street on the east.
From Jessica’s neighborhood, both 82nd Avenue going west and McCaslin Boulevard going north fall along natural transportation corridors away from the neighborhood and possible home area of the killer. Both the body and the backpack were found along these transportation corridors, near the edge of these open lands. The body was located along an uninhabited section of 82nd Avenue, just about a half-mile from where that road would have connected to the more heavily traveled (and therefore less desirable) Highway 93. The body’s location was just 5.25 miles, as the crow flies, from Jessica’s point of abduction, which occurred somewhere in a 650-foot stretch of Moore Street between her home and Chelsea Park, where she was supposed to meet a friend before walking to school. The backpack was found four miles from Jessica’s point of abduction, just a block off of McCaslin Boulevard, on the east side of these same open lands. The subdivision where the backpack was found may have offered a more private setting for the killer to throw the pack from a vehicle, or it may have been placed carefully where it was found because child murderers are sick individuals and often seek to mislead or even taunt the law enforcement officers trying to track them down.
What matters in this case is that the research of other child abduction murder cases places the highest probabilities on the assumptions that both 82nd Avenue and McCaslin Boulevard are likely transportation corridors used by the killer because they are within his awareness space. Of course, these are all assumptions based on profiling, and may well turn out to be incorrect in Jessica’s murder case, but it does give insight into how investigations move forward with little to go on, and it also helps to explain which other criminal acts investigators will be looking into to find potential connections to this case.
