For all the reasons already given, I'm somewhere around 70/30 towards SA's guilt.
What's missing for me, and what would tilt my opinion all the way over to guilty is a cohesive narrative and timeline that ties all the evidence in together to give a credible account of what actually happened.
The framing theory just doesn't do it for me. Too complex, the logistics of it don't make sense nor does the motivation. And it relies on too many coincidences - something had to have happened to TH on a day when she'd been to visit SA, when he just happened to be having a bonfire and conveniently decided to clean up an area of floor in his garage. Having said that, I cannot discount the possibility that some evidence may have been tampered with in order to strengthen the case against SA.
The story put forward in BD's confession doesn't work for me either though. I'm undecided about the extent of his involvement, but there's no doubt in my mind that he was fed a particular narrative and that version of events just doesn't make sense to me. In particular I struggle with the stabbing and slashing taking place on the bed not being backed up with at least some blood evidence.
The one thing I'd love to know is whether there's any evidence of how recent the damage to the front of TH's RAV4 was.
There's a particular line of thought that I just can't help my mind from going down at the moment and some more information on that would help me to either dismiss it altogether or decide it's worth further thought.
If that damage to her car was recent, I can't help wondering whether perhaps the job want as normal, but she had a minor accident on leaving the junk yard.
Not enough to disable the car, but sufficient that she didn't want to continue her journey without it being checked out.
If phone reception was patchy, what would be more logical than returning to a nearby place where they work on cars to seek assistance from somebody she knows?
A routine photography job, followed by a return visit would tie up a lot of loose ends for me and present a more logical version of what may have happened.
> It fits with the propane guy's potential sighting of the car leaving and the bus driver seeing her performing the job.
> It would make SA's actions opportunist rather than pre-planned - which IMO fits better with his personality and IQ.
I'll willingly accept that he may have been obsessing over Teresa or at the very least had a bit of a 'thing' for her - there's enough out there to suggest that he had a history of that sort of behaviour and I see no reason to doubt the 'towel' story.
However, the idea that he'd planned all of this out or would be stupid enough to attack somebody on his own property when plenty of people knew that she'd be there has never sat right with me.
An unexpected return would give him the opportunity to act on impulse and perhaps even foster the belief that she'd checked in to say she'd left the junkyard and nobody knew she had gone back.
> The lack of blood evidence in the garage becomes less of an issue for me if he'd perhaps lured her in there under the pretext of working on her car.
I'm convinced that a clean up occurred in the garage, but what if the clean up was to cover evidence that a car had recently been worked on in there and not to get rid of blood at all?
(This version of events kind of leads me to him lulling her into a false sense of security while he worked on the car and then restraining her or coercing her back into the car with the killing itself occurring somewhere other than on his immediate property - perhaps elsewhere on the junkyard???)