If you go back to the very first post that started the very first Delphi thread, this was the article that was cited:
Two 13-year-old Carroll County girls are missing after they were dropped off to go hiking Monday afternoon.
www.wrtv.com
And that article was posted by the news station at 10:29 pm on February 13th with the information that the girls had been on the High Bridge before disappearing. I would think word around Delphi would have been spreading way before that time, though, that the Bridge was a place that they had been.
JMO.
For context: the conversation regarding RA placing himself on the Monon High Bridge wasn’t about whether the girls were thought to be in the area of the Monon High Bridge (MHB) on Feb. 13 — LE and the search team knew where the girls were dropped off and where they were supposed to be picked up.
The question was when — and WHY — RA would have told the state Conservation Officer (CO) that he had been on the Monon High Bridge. That alone SHOULD have rocketed him to the top of a suspect list … but it seemingly did not.
It’s unclear from media reports whether the date provided (Feb 13) in the article regarding the RA statement referred to when the girls were murdered (which was not known Feb 13; they were missing Feb 13) and/or when RA spoke with the CO and said he had been on MHB.
IMHO, RA had this conversation on Feb 13 between 5:30 - 11:59 pm— probably earlier in the evening rather than later for the reasons below.
The article you linked doesn’t refer to the girls being on the MHB proper. The trailhead where they were dropped off is for the Monon High Bridge Trail, and the article refers a few times to the girls having been in that area but not necessarily on the MHB itself:
Carroll County Sheriff Toby Leazenby said Abigail "Abby" Williams and Liberty "Libby" German were last seen around 1 p.m. when they were dropped off near an abandoned railroad bridge known as "Monon High Bridge," east of Delphi.
(RSBM)
Technically, MHB itself was closed and not part of the trail system. The closure was clearly not enforced, but the decrepit state of MHB meant that many (if not most) visitors chose not to cross it because you could easily fall between planks and injure yourself if not fall to your death in places. Those new to the case were astonished that RA would place himself on MHB because it is astonishing: the already limited foot traffic on a February Monday afternoon would be even more limited on MHB itself!
The reason(s) IMO that RA made his statement to the CO early-to-mid evening on 2-13:
1). RA would have been hyper-aware of any potential that he had been spotted in the area (IMHO he was and he knew it).
2). RA knew the murder scene / final location of the bodies was away from the MHB.
3). RA knew the bodies would be found soon. They were off-trail but apparently not well hidden. It would be logical for searchers to focus on the immediate area where the bodies were found.
4). RA was NOT aware when he spoke with the CO of Libby’s snapchat photos — posted 2:07 pm on Feb 13 — placing the girls on MHB proper.
5). Considering #1-4, RA thought proper establishing a reason for being on the MHB earlier rather than later (after the bodies were found) would give him a better cover story if he had indeed been seen in the area.
RA would NOT have spoken to the CO about being on MHB proper IMO if he had any idea that LE would unravel that MHB was the initial physical encounter between the killer (“Bridge Guy”) and the girls. He was trying to cover himself, not implicate himself.
I appreciated the posts about RA being so brazen that he couldn’t help but insert himself into the search before they knew it was a murder investigation. The murders were brazen! He comped the funeral photos as a concerned local citizen. Perhaps we’ll learn that he attended vigils and services and donated to the ballpark to maintain a connection to these murders.
I agree the statement gave him a major rush on top of the thrill of the murders and DID make him the smartest guy in town. His sense of self-preservation was even higher, though, and he would not have placed himself in the vanishingly small subset of folks on MHB proper during the timeframe of the murders if he had known then what LE would soon learn (to paraphrase Doug Carter).
(The above assumes for discussion purposes that RA is BG and the murderer. None of this has been proven in a court of law.)
JMO.