Otto I'm in the same boat! Not one certain anything except for that video.
One thing did strike me watching that super-excellent video of the drive
to 7-Bridges or whatever its called... look at the amount of time it took
for that man who knew where he was going to get into the place
near where the bodies were found. Much much more time than I supposed
having never been there. And in htis matter, TIME = RISK to whoever
had the nerve to drive those girls there, plus whatever amount of time
he spent there with the girls. Farms visible from the road in! Maybe if the
girls were taken there at night it's less risk? It just strikes me that the
perp took risk, maybe great risk of exposure by one means or another,
and that to my mind equals super-crazy or guts!
Like the gentleman in the movie said: "no feelings". Such a person might have
a record for animal abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse .... and the like? Someone
literally (as the gentleman said) with "no feelings". Or someone with his life at stake
in some way, because of these girls, and something they may have wandered into
and seen on their ride?
Georger, I don't know why I'm laughing but I am. Maybe it's because to get to my house from the nearest tiny town involves a lot more gravel than that and to get to my house from the next nearest small town also involves a lot more gravel than that. That's just what it is like to live out in the country.
The video is deceptive in that last summer, the whole area would have been green on green on green with lush growth. That little gravel road into the park would have seemed like a tunnel arched over with tree limbs. I think to someone not familiar with the upper Mississippi basin, the landscape in that video probably looks desolate but to me, it looks peaceful and calm. All summer, everything grows so fast and the land is so active and then in late fall, the land sort of takes a deep breath and goes to sleep for a few months.
I didn't go back to look on the video but I seem to recall that it looked like the field they were walking next to had been in corn last year (lots of debris on the ground to cut down on wind erosion). In the middle of last July, the corn would have been 5-7 feet high, which would provide plenty of cover for a vehicle driven in there.
If the video was at the correct spot (which I'm not sure of because it seemed to me like they'd gotten further from the river), Mr M was correct in pointing out that someone could have driven a vehicle down the conservation strip where the group was video'd walking. At that point, the first cutting of hay would have been down and then growth slowed radically due to heat and drought. Normally, first cut of hay can be done about the middle of June and then second cut would be sometime in the last half of July.
But last spring was warm and mild, so first cut of hay was a month early(!!!). And then the extreme heat and drought delayed hay growth to the point where some fields didn't get a second cut of hay until late August or early September (which is when third cut is usually done) and some fields never did come back well enough to be worth doing a second cut.
The ground in that conservation strip would have been quite firm and easily driven over. The corn would have hidden a vehicle, even most SUVs.
Nighttime would have actually been higher risk than during the day because vehicle lights would be easily seen and would look out of place. Even if someone turned off their headlights, their taillights would flash every time they stepped on the brake. If someone saw red taillights without corresponding headlights, they would have been more likely to go out and look because that's just a dead giveaway of someone up to no good.
