The actual message of the note is so vague that it’s possible to read it in a lot of different ways. At this point, since we don’t know who the perp is and anything about his relationship to Faith (if he had a prior one at all), anyone’s guess is equally as good as another’s.
So, let’s talk about the note in detail. What do we know about it for sure?
1. It’s written on a take-out bag, apparently from Time Out. Right away, why? We’ve seen the pictures of the apartment, with stuff cluttered everywhere. Also, two college students lived there. Was there not a scrap of paper for the perp to use?
2. The bag is visibly free of blood. In the podcast from December, Tom Gasparoli mentioned that there was a microscopic spot of blood on it, which is the first I’d heard of that. But nonetheless it is almost entirely clean. It was clearly not in the room when Faith was killed. We can’t know for sure when the message was written, but the bag had to have been placed after she was dead.
3. The bag, and the pen used to write it, have the killer’s DNA on it. The killer would had to have touched it with his bare hands. This shows he either a) knows nothing about crime scene forensics or b) didn’t care since he knew he’d already left too much DNA to clean up in the bedroom.
4. The killer had to have cleaned his hands before putting the note beside her. Even if he wrote it before killing her, there would surely have been enough blood on his hands for a noticeable amount to have transferred to the note, if he hadn’t cleaned up.
My own interpretation of the above is as follows:
The prep killed Faith in the bedroom without causing too much of a disturbance. He didn’t think the police were going to be arriving imminently. So he didn’t flee in a panic, but decided he’d be better off cleaning himself off before leaving the apartment. And so he took a few moments and at least cleaned off his hands.
At that point, he decided to write the note. Now, why did he do this, why did he use the bag, and why did he not at least avoid touching the pen and bag (when he could have easily found something to use as a barrier, like his shirt sleeve)?
As to why he used the bag, I think it was the first thing he saw that “fit the bill,” so to speak. He could have found something better, but even though he thought no one was coming, I think he knew he shouldn’t dawdle and waste time (and make noise) searching for something else.
Why did he not care about leaving his DNA? It’s possible he didn’t know anything about forensics, but I think it’s more likely he just knew it wasn’t going to matter, considering how much he’d already left in the bedroom.
Why did he write the note at all? That’s the hardest question. This is getting more and more speculative, but I think all of the above shows that this wasn’t an unintelligent person. I don’t think he would have left this note if its message was going to point the authorities in his direction. I more I think about this, the more I believe that either the message was something between him and Faith that would mean nothing to anyone else (see my post #103 above), or the message meant absolutely nothing at all, and was solely designed to suggest a motive for the crime that was not present.
Why would he do that, if it was he was a stranger? Well, LE has limited resources, and in this case focused like a laser on ETJ, understandably so. They probably would have done so even without the note. But even if there had not been a really obvious suspect like that, the note would have pointed LE towards a former boyfriend or someone close to the victim, at the expense of pursuing avenues related to “stranger crimes” (for instance, looking at recent break-ins in the area, or people picked up for burglaries, etc.). Maybe it was just an attempt at buying a little time, in which case, it worked better than he could have possibly hoped.
Or, of course, maybe none of the above. It’s just my attempt to explain away an intimate note in a crime where everyone with even a casual relationship with the victim has been swabbed and cleared by police.
