A few things....
county by county I imagine the procedure is different for bringing inmates to court on VOP matters. In Indy, I rarely see leg irons... but there are lots of inmates and it would take time and money to affix them to each defendant on court day then take them off. In Carroll county leg irons may be standard. Still, thats a lot of escort for an old drunk with DUI VOP. Also, it is very unusual to keep a defendant locked up with no bond this long on a VOP.
So my thinking is that the cops suspect that RL has some info into the murders. Which is why they set up the VOP and the search of his house and car. Lock him up, deprive him of alcohol, maybe get him to talk. Does Clinton county have medical facilities? If so, maybe that's why they sent him there to deal with DTs. Who knows.
My own hunch is that the cops (who I seem to recall having said at some point that thus was a "convoluted" case) have an idea of several folks who may have been involved... what happened.....and maybe even why. I bet Local scuttlebutt has similar suspicions. I think they have several ideas who the BG photo is.... but cant pinpoint it because of the quality of the photo. BTW, it wasn't altered or manipulated. This was an image from Libby's phone. It was probably a small part of a frame, taken from a distance when she was recording something else. It was blown up and hence the quality is not good. But LE has said that these two images are the best they have of this subject.... so it may have been a panning shot that captured this guy walking the bridge.
My guess is that the guy whose house was searched (JM) is on the cops radar as BG or a participant. I think DL or another L is on their radar. I remember a family member that first week said on FB that either DL was covering for JM (or vice versa). This is, btw, the same family member that said within 2 hours of the bodies' discovery that they were found in a shed.
Recall a couple times a cop has said that they are looking for a small piece or pieces of info that would complete the puzzle, or something like that. This adds to my thinking that they may very well have the general contours of what happened and why... and that RL either was involved in some way or knows something about what happened and who else was involved. The guy is a drunk... he is in withdrawal.... the cops probably think he is the guy that they can break among the several people they think are involved in this. Just keep in jail long enough.... eff with him long enough.... maybe find something in his house or truck that they can tell him implicates him (even if they don't have anything) and they hope he'll break unlike others they have questioned.
Was JD part of the deal? Maybe. He's kinda far away in Kokomo though. And I think that there is plenty local stuff to provide the personnel and motivation for this to happen.
Also, don't get bogged down with assumptions. "Down the hill" may not have been a command. It may have been part of a declarative sentence. As in "I want you to see something down the hill". or anything like that.
Cops did Make it sound as if Libby purposely turned on her recording as opposed to it just being on or being turned on accidentally. They could be right or wrong about that.
My belief is that more than one person was involved in this. That the deaths were possibly unplanned and something that got out of hand with one person. Recall the Carmel murders in 1994 when three guys went to rob a house. when they got inside one of them went nuts and slit the throats of the three victims... a 23 yo man, an 18 yo man, and a 14yo girl. The other two guys were themselves horrified... did not expect this... did nothing to stop it.... and each pled to LWOP to murder. Plenty of motivation for the Delphi guys to keep their mouths shut if there was more than one on the scene. Strong rumors and info from PMS from family members of searchers and folks in attendance at the wake indicate that their throats were cut. To me, that says execution. That says to me that they were probably bound somewhere.... maybe for a while. Could it have been a sexual motivation? maybe. LE has never said whether that happened. Strong rumor from the same types of sources plus family on TV says at least one of the victims fought hard. Guy PMed me the first week and said that they were taken down (presumably from the north end of the bridge) to the north side of the creek and taken along the creek to where they were found and that they had extensive defensive wounds on their hands and arms.
These small towns... with their eccentrics, their drugs, their scandals (sexual, criminal, financial etc), backbiting, gossips, and dramas that start in high schools and continue till they are 80 years old... a veritable Peyton Place of people and motives for stupid mind bending actions that many of us wouldn't even comprehend.
yeah I BET what happened is convoluted. Soap operas and criminal enterprises usually are. A lot of people with bits and pieces of involvement and everyone afraid of a few crazies.
Explains why the cops have never felt the need to warn anyone in the area of a killer in their midst or on the loose.
