Good post. The one thing that bothers me about that scenario is IF the person staging the scene is BM, it's odd that the initial narrative being shared (per the email from the church in Indiana)
‘They can’t find her’: Message to church group shows desperate plea in early days of search for missing Colorado mom Suzanne Morphew [REPORT] was centered around a mountain lion. That story later (by the time BM shoots his FB video plea) changes to an "abduction". I agree that if the bike was staged, the almost certainly the personal item was, too, and it fits the abduction theory and not the mountain lion theory. So, IMO, if BM was responsible for both the staging and the mountain lion narrative that leaves a couple of options:
a) The original intent was to stage an abduction. However, when BM showed up after getting back from Denver and learned that a mountain lion had been spotted in the area recently, he quickly grabbed that narrative and made sure it was perpetuated in the email to the Indiana church. Once LE(quickly) dismissed that as a credible possibility, BM went back to the original abduction narrative and used the FB video to get it "out there".
b) The original intent was to stage a mountain lion attack. However, when that was dismissed by LE, BM
later planted the personal item and tried to make it look like an abduction.
I lean toward A being more of a possibility than B (B seems risky - BM would have had to have held onto that item for a few days and toss it during the investigation), but those are the only two reasonable explanations I can come up with that make sense IF BM planted the bike and personal item and also was responsible for the email to the Indiana church. JMO, MOO.