I really wish we had more go on in this case. I so want closure for LS and her parents. One thought I've had of late concerns that odor in Martinsville on June 19th. Here's the link:
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/fresh-leads-send-spierer-search-to-martinsville
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I find the location mentioned in this anonymous tip to be meaningful. My hunch about this case at this point is that Lauren was a casualty of a drug market connecting Indianapolis and Bloomington. Indianapolis has plenty of criminals; and Bloomington has plenty of young, rich cocaine users.
Myself, I grew up in Terre Haute, and I used to drive between Terre Haute and Bloomington a lot. It seems to me, if I were in Bloomington one night, and I suddenly had a body I had to get rid of, I would just start driving toward Terre Haute (simply because that's the route I'm most familiar with), and dump the body somewhere between here and there, whenever a suitable-looking spot presented itself. If, then, as I suspect, the people getting rid of Lauren's body were from Indy, then it makes perfect sense, according to this way of thinking, that the body would end up in Martinsville.
I remember hearing of one case, where two young boys lured their friend out into the woods, murdered him, and buried him under some logs. Extensive search parties scoured the woods, and they just somehow missed the body. If wasn't until a cold-case detective years later noticed some strange things in the transcripts of the boys' original interview that he went back to interrogate them, and got a confession. One of the boys lead him to where the body (now bones) had been buried, and it was right there in woods, in a spot that just happened to be missed.
So, maybe Lauren's body is still just south of Martinsville, off of 37. Think about this: how many people notice a smell when driving down the highway? The article doesn't mention the police detecting the smell themselves, once they got there. Maybe the smell wasn't coming from the ground at all, but from the anonymous tipster's own tortured consciousness.