Not so true in a "suburb" that's only 135 people, near a town that's only 5000. Everyone knows everybody. I have no opinion about whether the Morphews were known to LE for any particular reason, but even one call out to the house would probably be talked about extensively at morning report in a small town PD.
We're all just throwing things out to try and explain why, in this "missing person" case, there is no entry into NAMUS, no "last seen" or "last heard from," or any attempt whatsoever to alert the public as to what to look for in terms of finding Suzanne (except her age and some images that are apparently more than a year old).
We're also trying to explain the nature of the searches/warrant activity.
At this point, almost any hypothesis is as good as any other. For whatever reason, LE has said they don't think this is a suicide or an animal attack, but didn't rule out "runaway wife" or "husband did it" or "stranger abduction."
They simply aren't treating it as a stranger abduction, though. Not in terms of past norms regarding other suspected stranger abductions/murders.
I don't see why it's far-fetched in particular to think that the Morphews could have been known to LE, any more than it's far-fetched to think that maybe Suzanne ran away. Outlier theories are sometimes right, because we're dealing with real crimes and no two are alike. Whatever happened to Suzanne, it has an element of the strange or bizarre.
However, some of us think this may have been a household where one person exercised an undesired amount of control over the other person. That's completely a hunch, but if it's true, it probably didn't start on Mother's Day. We just don't know.
Small towns often produce some of the strangest true crime cases, perhaps because so many people do know nearly everyone in town, at least by sight. And people have opinions. I can only imagine what conversations are taking place among friends and neighbors in both Salida and Mayville.