So, someone mentioned near the end of the last thread that it's peculiar indeed that BK didn't go in and talk to the police about his Elantra, before the PCA.
I mean, I bet other people had turned his Elantra in to campus police and Moscow PD. I bet they got a few mentions of that car, looked him up, had his name and then put the pressure on - that most of us will remember. "Will whoever has a White Elantra in the area please come and talk to us." An innocent person would come in and talk.
LEO's that I know say that this raises a big red flag: when a fairly small area is told over and over to please contact LE about a White Elantra (and we all know that only a handful of people can tell the year of the car by looking at it - so I imagine a ton of Elantras of all ages were photographed and sent to LE among those 12,000 or more tips).
So they knew the name of the criminology grad student (criminology!) who was 10 miles away, had an Elantra but did NOT contact police. They may even have figured out that the case was being discussed in his actual classes. And he STILL did NOT do what LE expects an innocent person to do (come in and clear themselves).
That made them look much harder at him, which was the intent of the whole exercise. Then, of course, they had the pings from his phone by the time (Dec 7) that they announced about the Elantra. I believe they had his name by that time.
What they didn't have yet was the kind of DNA analysis that was convincing. Or all the video analyzed. All in all, really a rapidly processed case, considering it appears to be a stranger who killed these four lovely people in cold blood. Or near stranger. I am not into the theory that he actually approached and was rejected by any of the young women until there's evidence of that.
I think he was a marginal loner who couldn't fit in at WSU with his grad student cohort (most of whom already had significant others, spouses or friends), didn't have close friends back home to chat with online, etc. He knew his social skills weren't the best, and resented people whose social skills were better. His internal desire to kill is similar to that of serial killers, so by studying them, he felt a little kinship.