I think the prosecution, at this time, is doing the right thing. They need to be confident that they have the last nail for this coffin, otherwise, if they M's go to court on murder charges and they are not convicted, then the courts are done with it. The court would never be able to bring murder charges against them. At least this way, they can always come back and file charges again.
Hopefully, someone will crack under pressure... maybe if they take the stand during the trial for the kidnapping charges. Maybe have a slip of the tongue under oath.
My concerns/questions involve the kidnapping charges. I wonder what could they possibly have to prove that HE had been kidnapped... taken and held against her will?
But the state is working backwards. Given the NP, they clearly did not have anything that would yield a murder conviction in the first place. For the state to now decide to get them on the kidnapping charge and hope it leads to more is an example of the state simply not knowing what happened to Heather, how it happened, and awaiting another charge to build a bridge back to a murder charge.
LE and the state have always said that their case is strictly circumstantial. So what they have is what they've always had - phones talking to one another and vehicles traveling toward the same place at the same time, with Heather's car being the only one that was there for certain. How are they going to prove that any contact between Heather and the M's was against Heather's will, if she drove there?
We have to remember that the defense is not going to give up its clients to the state. Something we can't see keeps the NP from happening with the kidnapping charges, but it could just as well be that the state and the defense can't agree just yet on what's happening with the remainder of the charges.
What bothers me so much is that whether these two criminals pay for this or not (through conviction), Heather is likely to never receive her dignified and deserved laying to rest, nor will her family have the peace of seeing her recovered.
At least it seems highly unlikely, and not because of the passage of time. I think these two had help and I think this crime was well hidden.
The state was wise to finally NP the murder charges that were going nowhere and benefit from a without prejudice status, but the two sides have been going back and forth for a long while and the deals and negotiations are not over. The NP is a card that was played for the benefit of both sides. I highly doubt that the defense was sitting this one out while the state came to its senses on its own. The parties probably had quite a time at the roundtable over what led to the NP on the murder charges. JMO
