POST: And, in the Petit case, IIRC, one of the perps followed one of the victims home. Does that make it "random" or "targeted"??
I think the OP, Fred, who stated that perps had no inside info meant that in that case, the perps had no inside link to the household, and did not know anything about its security or routine except what was visible through a brief casing of the outside. I don't think the OP refutes that the family was targeted.
Now we truly do not know if this horrendous crime involves more than superficial casing, whether an hour or two before, a day before, or minutes before. LE originally suggested, as did NG, that the perpetrator/s had "inside" info, that there was a link to someone within the company. We could have been misled. I believe it was a DC prosecutor who stated that there was a "link" and implied a deeper knowledge of the household and the business than would be attained through lusting after and following female members to the house that they had first encountered at a supermarket or mall shopping center and then noticing a window was ajar planned to return that night.
I don't think we will ever know for sure in that case. I believe JMO that the two cretinous perps covered up the fact that they went to the house in part to rape and terrorize the women by saying the plan only included getting money and one or the other of them urged his accomplice on to the mayhem and murder.
I don't think we yet know with any certainty what LE's current theory is about HOW/why SS household targeted or what evidence they have ever had, if any, to suggest "inside" knowledge or a longer-term observation of house routines.
There is planning over the longer term and then there is trolling for victims and following them home, disabling the male in the house and letting things unfold from there.
Neither cases, truly, fit the description of totally random as in a perp is in the hood and tries the doors until he finds someone's unlocked with no prior knowledge of his/her victims. In a random case, any house that potentially offers what the perp fancies will do--could be a single woman, a child, a family with valuables, or just a darkened house that offers "potential." Earlier on in his hideous career, one of the Petit perps liked to enter random houses in the dark when people were preferably home and enjoyed iirc watching them sleep as he burgled them. Forget if he had infar-red or flashlight. But this experience alone thrilled him, not so much the trinkets he would nick.
I see definite similarities between the Petit crime and this one. We tend to assume the main lure here was money. LE said "partly money" or words to that effect. In both cases, fire. In both cases, a child. In the Petit case though the perps were readily apprehended and there was no suspicion of Mr. Petit or his wife's position/company being linked to the crimes.
Mr. Petit though did not have numerous employees, huge wealth, was not a CEO, had never employed a violent criminal and his cousin.
I should add, as well, that in the Petit case, only immediate victims and bank involved--no flurry of phone calls, pick uppers and deliverers, company personnel, house cleaners at the scene, incoming and outgoing phone texts and msgs. JMO this case is more complicated because of its various "players," as well as the fact that one of the suspects has already been linked to the company and been discovered in a convoy with others who at least had knowledge of the money, though perhaps not where it came from.
