Based on what I saw on the ID show, I reject the idea her b/f was involved. Everything about him is consistent with your typical aspie computer geek. You can read more about
aspie love in this NYT article.
Here is why I think her b/f does not seem suspicious:
- He took a liking to her straightaway. --> She was female at a computer club meeting. *advertiser censored* or Get the F*($ Out (TOGTFO) is an acronym in the online world b/c if you go to a geek chat and say you're female you instantly get attention from the aspie hetero males. They don't mean it as crass as it sounds. They just mean don't say your female just to get attention or to get people to look at your code. The other side of this is the tech b!$ch syndrome. Hetero techie girls have no trouble finding a b/f and are often aspies on top of that, leading some people to see them as shrews. I don't condone all this. I'm just saying this is normal in geek culture.
- She wanted to break up with him, but he resisted it. --> This guy met girls on BBS in the 90s. There were very very few girls on BBSs and/or using any protocol on the Internet prior to WWW becoming the killer app that led to widespread adoption. It's crazy to think he'd just log on to the BBS and find another g/f or meet one at the computer club. This was all a few years before the time people realized we got stock options and built stuff to sell to companies with deep pockets, which brought out girls that made you long for a geek even more.
- He didn't express much emotion. --> Did he ever express emotion the way neuro-typicals (NT) do? If he was a typical geek he felt a little detached, as if talking to his contemporaries was not completely different from reading about early experiments with steam engines or even early agriculture? History doesn't repeat, but it really rhymes. When people talked about emotions, it either felt like he was expected to look deeply into strangers eyes as if he were intimate with them OR it felt like people were going through the motions of these platitudes people say, and he thought "spare me the bromides. Of course this hurts like hell. Can we please dispense with this song and dance routine that people do because I don't have strength for it right now."
- He was controlling. --> I think many parents say this about their kids' b/f's.
- He wouldn't do the polygraph. --> Techies are more suspicious of polygraph technology than the general public is.
- He didn't cooperate with police. --> I bet he had all kinds of cracked warez on his machine and some dirty pics and stories. He didn't want a bunch of strangers examining this embarrassing and potentially criminal evidence.
- They Telnetted into one another machines and had access to each other's drives. --> awww... That sounds sweet.
- Her father had a premonition something was wrong. --> I wish he had written it down or something. We're all susceptible to post hoc rationalization. I don't discount it completely, but for this to be scientific, he'd have to report his good/bad feelings about people and then compare them all to actual facts. Maybe he has bad feelings about things once or twice a week but it usually turns out to be nothing.
- He knew her debit PIN. --> By the mid 90s some places took debit cards but not credit. She also frequently hit the Tyme machine for $20 withdrawals. He was with her for over two years. It seems normal that he should have seen her enter it many times.
- He had a decent alibi of playing an online game at the time with someone who claimed to know his playing style.
Things I don't understand:
- She handed him that greeting card. --> That did strike me as odd. She had a habit of sending things late, but I would not expect her to make a special trip just to get something there by Valentine's Day. She could have just sent a message that it was coming. OTOH she disappeared over two weeks later, and police found no evidence she had another relationship going. Moreover, if the note contained bad news, wouldn't she just put it in the mail?
- The $20 ATM withdrawal. --> Someone said that was staging to delay an investigation, but it seems to me like a lot of risk that someone might see the perp given Tyme machines have cameras on and around them. That's a high price to pay for the possibility that someone will check her bank account, see the transaction, conclude she's alright, and delay investigating. If it were a criminal who made the withdrawal, I'm surprised he/she didn't clean out her account. I don't know what to make of that. Could she have been alive but hiding? Or maybe she did have another romantic relationship going, spent the night with someone, spent an extra $20 (explaining two withdrawals) on entertainment/wine/0.1oz/whatever, and met foul play from him or someone else.
I may be biased b/c I was a student and into computers around that time. But I also have a perspective that makes Suze's life seem typical. Nothing about Suze's and Rich's lives, as presented in the ID show, point to activities related to a murder or kidnapping. By default I tend to think it was a stranger. The duplicate withdrawal, though, make me wonder if it was another b/f.