It appeared to me that the issue was TH hated Kyron and simply wanted him gone. I think that was her motivation. She was tired of caring for him and felt he was a drain. Evidence?
1. She wrote posts about Kyron that were slightly suggestive of dislike, on social media.
2. In one photo, she centered her daughter, K, as the focus with Kyron's school mates around her. Kyyon was not present. No attempt to wait for him or retake the photo.
3. She wrote emails indicated she hated Kyron.
4. She asked Kyron's mom if she would take custody of Kyron.
5. She was coming down hard on Kyron in the time prior to his disappearance, asking that the teacher's report any minor infraction and punishing him for slight issues.
If TH was a step-father rather than a step-mother, I do not believe there would be as many questions about her potential involvement. I agree that males are more likely to commit violence than females. It is a testosterone thing in part. But many women have committed horrible assaults against and murders of spouses and children - pushing them off bridges, drowning them, starving them, torturing them to death, allowing another to do so to their kids, etc.
I mean we hear cases of violence on the part of women against children in their care, every year. Zahra Baker. Genshawn Cooper. Billy Hunter Jr. Tyler Raines. Alexis Morris. Charlie Bothell. Myls Dobson. Eric Dean. All kids killed or harmed horribly by their step-mothers, for example. And most pepetrated the violence totally on their own: And then there's the stats on child abuse and homicides. And step-children:
According to a report titled "Homicide Trends in the U.S.," issued by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, of all children under age five murdered between 1976 and 2005, 31 percent were killed by fathers and 29 percent were killed by mothers.
A
2000 study conducted by Marlene Dalley, Ph.D., analyzed trends in Canadian child murders and concluded that "Both mothers and fathers kill infant children at the same frequency, though when all (victim) age groups are considered mothers and step-mothers killed more children than fathers and step-fathers."
A
2003 study reported in the
Journal of the American Medical Association found that of 34 North Carolina newborns who were killed or left to die, at least 85 percent of them were killed by their mothers (usually through strangulation or drowning).
http://news.discovery.com/human/mother-killer-murder-child.htm
Psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, coined the term "Cinderella effect" to describe their finding that stepchildren living with a biological parent and a stepparent were seven times more likely to be abused than children living with two biological parents. In instances where abused children were killed, stepchildren were 100 times more likely to be killed than children living with two biological parents.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/238324-what-are-the-causes-of-stepchild-abuse/
Women can be violent. Hatred is motive enough to harm a child, unfortunately.