Just thinking about Sandra's disappearance today. I would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on these ideas.
For someone Sandra's age, what are the reasons one could disappear without a trace?
1. Some kind of accident (the lack of a car limits this somewhat but I guess she might have been hit by a car while walking or suffered a medical incident while walking. I think she would have been found by now though).
2. She wants to be gone from her current life to start a new one and she didn't want anyone to know about her plan. My gut tells me it's not this one, mainly because her bank accounts weren't touched and her car wasn't accessible when this happened.
3. Suicide. I think this is a definite possibility, but not sure how she would have achieved it. If it ends up being this, I think it's possible she didn't want Laina or the grandchildren to discover her dead in the home.
4. Domestic violence/manslaughter/murder by person known to her. I would lump into this possibility any family or friends who had a close relationship with her, and include any type of murder for gain/self preservation or because they were angry at her or abusive to her. This could include a manslaughter scenario where she died by accident and the person with her panicked or covered it up. If murder or manslaughter by someone who is known to her, we need to think why they would remove the body instead of doing some other type of staging. What about the body was evidentiary? Who benefits if her body is not found right away? In fact I think this may be the most important question to solving what happened here. Who benefits if she is never found, or at least not found for a long time?
5. Murder by person unknown to her. So this would be a stranger abduction/murder. I consider this the least likely scenario because I see no reason for this type of criminal to remove her or her body from the scene. There is nothing to link the perpetrator to her and she lived alone so no one will interrupt the crime. Unless this was a sexual assault...but I keep going back to crime statistics and I just don't think she's in a group where there's a high risk of this. Certainly it could happen, though. If it's this one, this may never be resolved.