JMO
Premeditated or Crime of Passion or a 3rd option which is the one I am going with. A combination of both.
I too have been flip-flopping on whether this has been premeditated and I finally settled on that I think it was a combination.
Purely speculating here but what I think happened was SM was realizing now that one of the girls was pretty much on her own and the other one was soon to follow, that SM began to realize she was not happy there in Colorado not being by any close family members of her own.
I think some smaller discussions have been brewing for a little while now and BM began to fantasize in the months prior that rather than divorce and lose 1/2 of the worth of the house in Colorado and 1/2 of whatever else was available, he began tossing around the idea of offing her to get total control of all assets.
In the beginning of those thoughts, I dont think he was all that serious, but as time went on and things looked like it might be really heading that way, then he began to think more seriously about it.
Then when the stars aligned in his eyes where the children were out of town that weekend and SM was all by herself, then maybe a serious argument verbal fight occurred and BM lost it and acted upon his prior thoughts.
So a sort of combination of preplanning but not real serious until it got serious and an argument/fight made him act on his prior thoughts.
I tend toward thinking premeditation and the time to get it done had run out because I think it was likely there was a third party with whom BM was involved who had reached her limit and told him it was time to fish or cut bait.
Why do I think that? The timing. My guess is that third party did NOT want BM spending Mother's Day honoring SM and had told him to do so would threaten his ongoing relationship with her (that third party). Thus, the arrangements: (1) to have the girls spending the days before Mother's Day away, (2) to kill SM and conceal her remains the night before Mother's Day, and (3) to distance himself hours away from Salida for nearly all of Mother's Day with conflicting stories about where exactly he was (first, a firefighter training session; and when that story failed, preparation of a job site for a crew showing up that night for work the next day) and with a plan to suggest to concerned others how SM might have fallen into danger due to her own actions in his absence.
I would be very curious to know whether the delay in the girls' return on Mother's Day was in some way orchestrated by BM so that it would be a neighbor, rather than their daughters, who would discover SM's absence in person and to whom BM might suggest the bike ride story.
I keep coming back to what Mike and Chris on Profiling Evil say about victim risk assessment. In most respects, SM was on the low risk end of the potential victim continuum: upper middle class, college-educated, longtime married to high school sweetheart with nearly full grown children, healthy extended family relationships, close personal friends, participation in community of faith, and a grateful recurrent cancer survivor.
However,
IMO, certain risk factors had recently increased and they nearly all incurred at BM's insistence and all made her more vulnerable to him in particular:
- Move away from lifetime home and family in IN;
- Move to CO, (more than 18 hours driving time away), where SM did not have her own long-established friends, family, or medical providers;
- Move into home on large property in very sparsely-populated area, with poor cellphone service and with no landline to ensure alternate and reliable means of communication;
- Despite the vulnerability associated with the home’s isolation, do not make operational the surveillance cameras that came with that home when purchased (IIRC, the guys at Profiling Evil pointed this out. There were cameras there, but they weren’t functional);
- Arrange for and support the plans of daughters – older teen and college-aged - to be away from home with a family member of BM for days prior to and on the night SM was last seen or heard from by anyone other than BM;
- Arrange for BM to be distant from home on the day after SM was last heard from by anyone other than BM and have a story that explains the need for that distance (first, the supposed firefighter training, and later, the job in Denver that needed setup on May 10);
- Suggest to the neighbor who finds SM missing from home (after checking at request of absent family members) a plausible time and means for SM to have left the home and been in an area where someone other than BM might have been involved in her disappearance (a morning bike ride on Mother’s Day). By that suggestion, BM potentially misdirects LE away from the home and ensures that LE will have to consider “the bike ride alone” a probability to be addressed among the realm of possibilities.
IMO, numbers 1 – 3 were most likely done to separate SM from the close support of her family/friend network with the plan of BM either regaining control he believed he had lost over SM or BM eventually separating from her without having to face the disappointment and potential disapproval of all those who knew and had grown up with both of them; however, 4 – 7 were done to permit and to conceal a more criminal and (self-serving) particular means of getting rid of SM, while retaining reputation as well as shared relationships and finances.
