Regarding BBM
I do think the original 2 POIs know exactly what happened but I do remember a rumor of why this case may not have been pursued like it should have.
The rumor was that someone either in LE or close to LE may have been involved in some serious illegal activity related to what was found on the computer. If the rumor was true then it meant that these individuals did not have motivation to solve this case as it may get themselves in trouble.
It made some sense at the time since this case seemed like it was never aggressively pursued.
If there was such a rumor, it was complete nonsense. HD's disappearance was initially investigated by Mitchel county, but the computer contents were under the jurisdiction of Mitchell county. Different sheriffs, they are not going to protect relatives of the other (or their subordinates). Also, the two local sheriffs did not find the child *advertiser censored*, it was found by the FBI during later analysis. The FBI have no motive to protect either of the two sheriffs departments if someone associated with them was involved in serious wrongdoing. The Texas Rangers were involved in the investigation as well, and it would be within their mandate to step in if it became apparent that local LE were covering stuff up. After HD's remains were found, the Scurry sheriff got jurisdiction. So at least five different LE agencies would have looked at what was on the computer. There is no way that there would have been some sort of cover up.
And in any case the alleged child *advertiser censored* on the computer was "apparent", meaning that it probably depicted individuals who looked young but could have been adults. There is lots of such material on the internet. We know that no charges came from what was found, which means that it was not particularly extreme. And in any case, whoever downloaded the *advertiser censored* would have been someone living at the house, and that wasn't SA. IIRC SA had a teenage (at the time) brother who lived there, along with his mother and her partner (perhaps others too). The mother owned the computer but IMO the person most likely to have downloaded the *advertiser censored* would have been the teenager, and that would have had nothing to do with HD at all.
The whole *advertiser censored* thing was just a salacious side show, with the added twist that it was subverted to provide a reason to carry out searches in the hope of accidently getting lucky on the HD case (which they otherwise would not have grounds to do).
It is entirely possible that someone in local LE was pointing the investigation in the wrong direction to divert attention from what really happened, but if that were so it would have to be someone in Mitchell county and it couldn't have had anything to do with the *advertiser censored* found in Howard county.
I think the truth about what happened to HD is much more mundane and happens to kids that age all the time. My personal opinion of this case is that HD took off that evening to party with a few other local kids and they headed out to the lake where they could do their thing without fear of being disturbed by adults. And in the course of that something happened to HD. Perhaps experimentation with drugs and she accidently ODed, or she wandered off into the bush drunk, something like that, and died. In that sort of situation the other kids would have kept very quite about it since there would have been extremely serious repercussions for them (felony murder, for example). If there was any sort of local cover up going on, it would have been in the context of something like that.
I think that she may have been at her fathers house sometime that day, perhaps even after she left the house when SA arrived home unexpectedly. Given his legal history I imagine that CD would have been very reticent about being the last person to have seen her since it would have made him prime suspect and he would have known that. After that she likely left and he didn't know what happened to her beyond that. My guess is that she went to her friends house, then to the vicinity of the local hotel to meet up with boys, and after that who knows. IMO that might explain the really odd behavior by a lot of people subsequent to her disappearance. The big problem in this case I think is that people know that they were not responsible for what happened to her, but they were concerned that other people would not believe them, so they went with the flow when the local sheriff started pointing fingers at SA and have not been super forthcoming with everything they know for fear of being accused of something.
