MOO and thoughts-- I've wondered if the killer took any cell phone with him, and think perhaps they didn't. I don't know if using just the flashlight would bounce off a tower, probably not, but holding a phone and a knife makes it harder to attack, more chance of dropping it. Wish the killer did lost an item at the scene that could be traced.
I took @slanda's advice and read up on the Danny Rolling murders and in one he thought he left his wallet at the crime scene. When he went back to look for it, he mutilated the body of his victim in an unspeakable way for me to describe here. (too graphic)
Yeah. The Rollings murders are horrific. The movie Scream was based off of them, actually.
What’s odd about Rollings (among all the other oddities) is that his first murders was that of a Family Annihilator while stalking a younger woman. He killed 4 then…
After that atrocity, and becoming a poly drug user, he lived a vagrant lifestyle near Gainesville and randomly chose his victims during his murder spree that spanned three days… And it was truly awful and terrifying.
Then, he robbed a bank and got caught by the police where he I think eventually admitted to everything and blaming his murders on an alternate personality.
My point is: this despicable human committed so many crimes and no one put them together until he talked, basically. His profile and MO was all over the place. I think maybe he’d have been a little more organized if he wasn’t a poly substance abuser. He said he murdered the girls he targeted (one at a restaurant and two at the local convenience store) because they resembled his ex wife and obviously found them by chance— and two of the people he killed during that spree were basically “just in the way.”
I thought of him because his first victims were sleeping when he jimmied a sliding glass door and walked past his target, who was asleep on the couch to murder her sleeping roommate upstairs, which he did. He was armed with a knife and a gun (for control) and he covered her mouth with duct tape and killed her with a Ka-Bar so his target wouldn’t wake up and hear him because he wanted his time in his disgusting fantasy world to be with her.
(The first murders In Gainesville is the reason I specifically thought of Rollings because it’s hard to figure out how someone would accomplish what the Idaho killer did— and besides Bundy, he fit that description for me.)
That’s why the police were baffled and hauled away the wrong person because Rollings’ MO was totally random and really reckless and difficult to understand.
And it’s a good example of how profiles sometimes do and don’t match and how random brutal crimes do sometimes occur to purely innocent victims and how sometimes the motive of these really awful crimes aren’t ever known unless the murderer is caught and explains it. It’s just really difficult on so many levels to try and get into these people’s brains to understand how they could do this to four innocent people.
Obviously, it could very well be someone even in their friend group that did this. I just think with so many eyes around that people would notice if the perpetrator was acting different, or funny, or something? I would think everyone is looking at each other with a little hesitation, and after three weeks and the longer it takes, it gets harder to solve as more people get ruled out.
**Edited for clarity
