Just to avoid retreading endlessly over things that have already been covered, and to spark some discussion, I’ll just share where I am in my thinking of the case.
In the time since I’ve really been looking at it, I’ve lurched between several different scenarios, from ETJ doing it through an intermediary, to a kind of beta male from the club or school getting obsessed with her and deciding to surprise her at home, to where I am now, which is thinking it was a random male who lived close to her at the apartment complex.
Acknowledging that police have repeatedly say they don’t think that’s the case, I think that makes the most sense for two reasons.
The first is that, as wide as the investigation spread, they never were able to connect the DNA evidence with anyone in her social circle or several levels beyond it. Even if this person wasn’t someone with an immediately obvious connection to her, at some point, in some interview, someone who knew her would have looked at the DNA phenotype picture and said “Oh, I know him, he was the guy Faith knew through (whatever).” That’s apparently never happened, or if it did, the lead turned out to be false.
The second reason is because, of all the trails the investigation followed, it seems the one LE put the least stock in was “random killer who did not know the victim.” And honestly, that made sense at the time. One suspect had directly threatened to kill her; another had a disturbing history of stalking her; another was an on and off again hometown boyfriend who had reason to be jealous; one was her roommate who had engaged in suspicious behavior the night she died; and beyond all of those, there was the fact that she’d visited a rowdy club hours before she died, so who knows what attention she may have attracted there?
If you look at the history of the investigation, you see a lot of attention on the obvious suspects at first (ETJ, TM, Alex), then a shift to the less obvious ones (JB, several of the club guys) about six months later. But one of the Gaspo blog posts mentions that they didn’t seriously interview the people in the complex until a full year later. That was a lot of time for the trail to go cold.
At this point, I really think there’s a simple answer here. That night, some sketchy guy was awake and out and about in the complex. He was probably just staying with someone there short term. He might not have even been thinking about committing a crime, or if he was, I seriously doubt he had murder on his mind. I think maybe he was nearby and noticed when KR and JM left, so he decided to go try the door; finding it unlocked, went in to see what he could steal. He grabbed a couple of bottles of alcohol from the kitchen, maybe a few other things, then went into the bedroom to see what he could steal there. I think he was shocked to see Faith there, and she either woke up or started to, and he panicked and attacked her with what was in his hand, the Bacardi bottle.
I don’t think the assault lasted long or made much noise, and I don’t think she fought him beyond instinctively trying to fend off the bottle with her hands, which is where the injuries to her fingers and hands come from. Once she was dead, he ejaculated on her either as a sign of disrespect or even to suggest a motive that wasn’t there. He wrote the note on the first thing he saw (the Time Out bag) for the same two reasons. Not wanting his true motive (burglary) to be obvious, he didn’t take anything with him. He was probably out of the apartment less than ten minutes after Faith was dead.
I think he was probably gone the next day, and whoever he was staying with probably didn’t think anything of it, both because he was never supposed to be there permanently, and because it was widely assumed early on, by both the immediate neighbors and police, that ETJ had committed the murder.
So… go ahead, tear my theory to shreds. If there’s something inconsistent with the facts as we know them, or you find some aspect of it totally implausible, point it out. Convince me I’m wrong!
