The missing phone mystery is something very odd and intriguing.
However, for the sake of the integrity of this trial, I think it is important to note that none of the data submitted as evidence, is data that could have been tampered with. What was submitted related to the 5th phone?
Phone call records: These are not in the phone. They are provided by the telephone company.
I read a suggestion that Team OP may have wanted to delete a suspicious call OP may have made. This is not possible. The phone company still has the full call log.
What's App messages: As much a three months worth of OP-RS messages were put into evidence. These are not native to the iPhone. The thread of messages could have come from Reeva's What's App account, from OP's account...either. They exist on both.
In short, neither of these types of 5th phone data evidence require the physical iphone handset, nor could they be deleted.
In fact, even if the phone was never found, they would have been able to submit this evidence. They knew the phone number from Reeva's phone contacts
What could have been deleted from the returned phone? Photos, an incoming voice message (though company phone logs would still show the incoming call), records of internet searches on the iphone, text messages using the iphone text function.
Among those, something incriminating certainly could have been theoretically lost. However, I expect the Apple geniuses visited in CA would have been able to recover some of it anyway. In addition, with these smartphones, so little of the data is uniquely located on the physical phone. It is often synced to other devices, backed up in iCloud etc
So, while I think the 5th phone disappearance is worth investigating, I am not yet convinced that it is the smoking gun.
But I still want to know who took it and why.
fftobed: