Even if they don't have a single digit of the license plate, as high profile as this case is - and the monumental efforts by both law enforcement and the public to locate it - the car or occupant(s) should be known by now.
My opinion.
Unless of course the car is now underwater somewhere or abandoned on some little used forest road. It's still early for those kinds of finds to be made.
Part of me thinks they do have an idea who the owner is, but the owner is not cooperating with the investigation and is not themselves a suspect. <modsnip: quoted post removed>
Have you ever been in a neighbor war? We were. Our house was broken into on multiple occasions by our neighbor. We had camera footage (but had had a power outage caused by the same neighbors so that the timestamps were useless and LE did not even look at it). We had a witness to that neighbor hopping the fence and also going through the mail on our front porch (stole credit card numbers). I had proof that one of the fraudulent uses of our credit card was to send cellular phones to our neighbor's daughter in another state.
NONE of this made LE take notice. They told us to secure our mailbox, report the fraud to the bank, and put up cameras and make sure timestamps were accurate. I consulted a private attorney and got good advice (at my own expense) on how to proceed (first by at least making a police report and then by giving the criminal neighbor a copy of it). It was a tense time. It was actually life-changing and took 3-4 years to begin to get over, as we lived in fear. They sent relatives to our house to harass us. There was broken glass and stuff put under our car tires (and nails and screws). My work schedule is published online, so they knew when I was away and they continued to try to get into the house - always switching off our electricity, so we put a lock on the electrical box and finally, it was better. However, as you can imagine, relations were strained. After a year of not being vandalized, stolen from or harassed, it started to get better. The lawyer helped us with various tactics, and at one point, I had to ponder whether the drug house around the corner was related to these neighbors in any way (nope). I contacted other neighbors and found we weren't the only ones adjacent to these criminals who had had things stolen (I now understand why the neighbor on the other side got a pit bull-type dog and keeps that dog in her back yard - the criminal neighbor actually has visible stuff in her backyard stolen from that neighbor).
So, yeah, these things can get out of hand. If a rental is involved, anger at the landlord can be transferred to the inhabitants (noise complaints). There's probably a reason why the landlord banned dogs, as well (prior complaints?)
But the type of person who actually goes to war with a neighbor to the point of violence is not a person like you or me. I tried only legal channels of response. Period. Full stop. Other people are not so inclined. And then, some people have delusional thought disorders that cause them to be paranoid - just enough to make them what we might call insanely angry but functional.
I can imagine a scenario in which the landlord of 1122 King added onto the house in a non-permitted way, or a way that no one else in the neighborhood was permitted to use, and then went on to allow it to be a party house. A neighbor could have complained over a period of 10 years or so, and sees the students as just one long chain of the same people - and the only people on whom he can take out his anger.
This is not my favorite scenario, but it is definitely on the table. The Elantra request from LE makes me think it's not a neighbor, though.
Or, maybe it is - perhaps there was an Elantra seen frequently at the apartment building nearby and now it's gone? No one took its license plate down and no one knows who owns it?
