At the beginning I honestly thought he was murdered, considering the rumors of a hookup. But it's clear the police used all their resources and more for the digital investigation and it didn't reveal anything. If it was murder, the murderer would have to be very knowledgeable about digital footprints.
Or the murderer had no need of digital footprints at all because that's not why/how the encounter transpired. JMO.
Don't get me wrong. I don't
need or
want to believe that Caleb Harris was murdered. I'm not invested in that being the only outcome. But it absolutely strains credulity to have to accept the alternative because it is just so astronomically unlikely, IMO.
When I was a kid, a boy down the road from my rural home was pulled into a metal shredder in his family's professional junkyard. It was a freak accident that reverberated for years in our small town. A year or so later, another young boy was killed when playing under a two-lane bridge that crossed a thin creek. He wasn't found for some time because it took however long for LE to determine that he had been smothered beneath by a cascade of wet, muddy dirt that had been dislodged by a large truck that had exceeded weight limits. That was another freak accident that lingered, for sure.
So I do understand and accept that freak accidents happen, and some of them have no witnesses at all, yet can be fully solved, in time, with reverse engineering. What I really cannot fathom here are the odds of the following:
Caleb and his phone accidentally fell into that crop field manhole,
and he was injured in the fall to the extent that he could not cry out or dial out,
and he remained inert in that manhole until decomposition made it possible for his remains to drift (weeks?, months?),
and that field had been searched,
and he and his phone and that manhole were missed again and again until April 18th, when LE responded to the report of the open manhole,
and no evidence of him or his phone were then found there,
and he ended up passing through narrow pipes into a well some distance away but then couldn't pass beyond it into outgoing pipes and instead remained there, suspended in liquid, eventually hanging up on the pump and triggering the alarm which prompted discovery.
Are the odds of all of that really lower than that of an opportunistic predator noticing a barefoot young man apparently loitering near a foggy bridge at 3:00 in the morning? IMO, they're not.