I made a lengthy poster earlier (several months ago) but avoided commenting again because there was never really any new information. I knew Chyenne, and I never would have said the stepfather killed her. I would have said she left because of her stepfather's mistreatment. I don't know the type of problems she faced in that house, but I know that I would see her around East Dubuque no matter what time of the day as long as it was daylight, and it wasn't school time..
Rain, shine, hot, cold....from the time I first saw her when she was probably around 10, she avoided going home like the plague. She talked to everybody....I don't know how many people were total strangers when she started talking to them, but I felt she probably chatted it up with someone and decided to leave town with them. Maybe she did and that is why she wrote the note, but her plan was intercepted. The state crime lab would presumably have someone who can detect distress in a writing within a pretty slim margin of error. It is also possible she was conned into writing the note and then killed.
It is hard to say if she was killed as part of a larger, escalated altercation or because she decided not to continue in the situation she was living in and the stepfather was afraid of the consequences. Strangulation isn't like tossing something across the room at your stepdaughter and accidentally killing her in a moment of anger. Chyenne wasn't a small girl. She was of average height and a bit meaty. She would have fought back to some extent after she realized what was happening if he didn't incapacitate her beforehand. He had to think about her dying the whole time he did that. To my untrained eye that indicates fear because of punishment for something done beforehand or a sustained period of anger.
Even without what I gathered from seeing her avoid home and what I heard from other people after she went missing (they also believed she ran away to escape), I would say that someone who could be angry long enough to strangle someone has probably been angry to an unseemly level previously. In short, he may have been the murderer, but there was a household climate of acceptance beforehand. People have reasons that make sense in their own heads but that doesn't make them right.
I feel guilty for not calling CPS and reporting a child running around all the time without supervision. I always thought nobody would listen to someone who wasn't a friend, a family member, or in a position of authority -- like a teacher. But maybe they would have listened or it would have added that little something extra needed to other information. I can't imagine the guilt on the shoulders of others more intimately involved. I just can't believe this final act of violence was an isolated incident.
I feel so sorry for her two brothers and the other relatives she had (step-siblings I believe). I remember the older but don't think I ever saw the younger around town with Chyenne. It will be hard for a child so young to deal with the death of his sister (if he remembers her), and doubly so as he gets older and realizes that his father was responsible and the level to which he was.
When I went to the TH website this morning, I never expected to see that Chyenne was dead, and it breaks my heart. I will always remember her. I can't believe her earthly light has been extinguished forever.