MelmothTheLost
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Maybe he bashed her head in and she went to lie down, then he freaks out thinking she's dead and strangles her just to be sure she's dead?
I looked back at the DN entry quoted at the beginning of this thread, and noted it says:
"Homicide by strangulation, she also had suffered blows to the head and neck"
So no mention then of the liver injury. This makes me wonder if it had no bearing on her death and may have been inflicted post-mortem. From cursory reading on the subject it seems that liver lacerations are typically blunt trauma injuries so it's possible it was inflicted as a dismissive kick in the back when her body was dumped.
I wonder if this took place in a hotel room, since she wasn't wearing shoes and wasn't local.
In a hotel room or, as has been previously suggested, she took her shoes off while in a vehicle. The other possibility is that they were kept by her killer as some sort of trophy, but that seems less likely in view of the lack of sexual assault.
One argument against a hotel room as the place of death is that the killer would have run some risk in removing her body. No doubt there was much less CCTV in 1980 but there was always the danger that someone would see something out of the ordinary and question it.
Maybe she was a truck driver or had a truck driver boyfriend and traveled with him, so she spent long periods of time in the truck without shoes. I still don't think she was hitchhiking or on a random truck, and I do believe it was domestic violence.
If she was a truck driver herself that would place her towards the upper limit of the estimated age range. Two questions come to mind:
1. How common were female truck drivers in 1980; and
2. Was there a minimum age for truck driving at that time?
The truck driver boyfriend seems more likely, but wouldn't he/they have slept in the truck rather than a hotel/motel?
I agree about the domestic violence thing. It seems unlikely that a random killer truck driver would not have raped her.
Given her travels between the SW and the NE, including urban areas, have we discussed the possibility that she and her killer were running drugs across country?