I'm beginning to question the offender being local. Delphi only has 3k? only 40 percent or so of the males are in the target age ranges <20,30,40s>, then there's what, 5 or 6 hundred men in the local pool, tops. I imagine that is a smallish data base for le, especially with all the fbi & homeland security tech support. What do we know about killers' preferred distances from their home and work?
Not sure about being "local", but I feel pretty strongly that he knew that particular trail/area well. Lafayette is less than 30 minutes away and numbers jump up quite a bit when you count that and some of the other cities within a relatively small radius.