Thanks for your thoughts on
this @J.M. Bee. If indeed LE found the bike and it was before BM got home, who reported to him? I can see LE saying to him when he arrived on the scene, “We’ve found your wife’s bike, but we haven’t found her yet.” I can’t see them telling him that they really screwed up, that they trampled all over the scene, and oh by the way, “we let ten people touch it”.
If I arrived there and it was my wife I would be asking, “Are you sure she’s not there?, Have you searched all around here?”
My thoughts on why it may be important who found the bike: If Barry found it that close to the home, when he got back from Denver after dark and after LE had already been searching for a couple of hours, it would be suspect to me. If LE found it but didn’t tell him all the particulars, how did he know how and where it was found as well as the position? Was it possibly because he left it there? His hesitation and cutoff sentence during the interview with TD made me think, oops, he slipped up. He knows things he shouldn’t know. Also his statement, “We had cars there”..... who’s we?
If it wasn’t BM and it wasn’t LE who found the bike, where was it and what were the circumstances? Were some of the neighbors, like the one who made the 911 call, searching at that time?
I often wonder why BM’s nephew TN urged the public to ask LE in what condition was the bike found. What would he deduct from that information? If the bike had been hit by a vehicle, either by accident or as part of an abduction, there would be paint chips. By now we would have had a request for information on a ___ colored (year, make & model) seen in the area on that date.
BM’s statement to TD regarding LE’s ineptitude really seemed contrived to me. It was a bit manic and over-hyped. If LE was that careless, what a relief it must have been to BM that they didn’t find evidence if it was he who placed the bike there.
There was a lot of discussion during the Gannon Stauch case as to why LE didn’t immediately do this or that. The thing is, when LE gets a call for some type of incident, they arrive on the scene prepared to initially handle the incident as it was reported. In Gannon’s case, he was reported as a runaway. In Suzanne’s case it was reported that she didn’t return from a bike ride. I’m sure when LE arrived on the scene, they asked if SM had a regular bike route. They would have asked when she was seen and how the neighbor knew she was on a bike ride. They would know they had only a couple of hours of daylight left so they probably started looking along the route for any signs of her or her bike. We know that that evening the sheriff called in other agencies and tracking dogs. Was that before or after they found the bike? Once the bike was found, LE would spread out in a circumference around it and work outwards to see if she was laying injured nearby. They probably were calling her name and looking for signs. They may have not even touched the bike at that point. They may have visually examined it for clues as to how it ended up in that location. It may have been fingerprinted and photographed before it was moved. The point is, we don’t know anything about the bike and LE has chosen to keep all that they know to themselves. They have also chosen not to talk about the other “personal items” they found several days later?
For whatever reason, LE decided to bring in both the CBI and the FBI within the first couple of days of her disappearance. This is around the time they ruled out animal attack, accident, etc. This tells me that what they found, (or didn’t find), led them to certain conclusions. It may take minutes, several hours, or several days before it becomes apparent that something just doesn’t add up in a case.
Sorry for the long ramble. I think most of us here keep playing out this case in our heads trying to figure out the rhyme or reason for Suzanne’s disappearance.
ET correct spelling.
