I get a distinctly ‘online world drama’ feel from this whole case. Some thoughts:
* I think it’s very personal. You don’t take time standing out in public to explain why you’re killing someone if you’re just the hired shooter. It’s inefficient to add unnecessary time and potential for noise/her reaction. This person took time to speak to them, they needed to convey something. It was emotional.
* It’s possible that she did know the shooter but did not recognise them. If she spent a lot of time operating in online groups and forums you can come to know of people without actually knowing them in person. I wondered if the movement with the non-shooting hand was showing her something to demonstrate or prove an online identity that she’d recognise. This might also explain why she didn’t greet them but they had to make sure she was definitely deceased to the point of making that final shot to the head and even returning to check.
* There’s loads of things you can learn about people without stepping foot in their hone. We all know that, we find out things all the time when sleuthing. What would it take to know where to stand to avoid being captured on their Ring device? You’d maybe only need to have seen a clip they’d shared - perhaps about another incident at their home but completely unrelated to this. People do that a lot on social media. Maybe they’d also mentioned it being the only camera they had. Or maybe they had visited the home to check it out in the days or weeks prior to carrying out the shooting, under the guise of delivering something entirely unremarkable. Maybe they appear on Ring some other time.
* The comments earlier in the thread about these communities and the types of personalities that populate them really stuck out to me. I don’t know much about this specific community but I do know others in which people become involved to an obsessive extent. Whole lives, intense relationships and dramas play out with real world feelings and consequences. A slight or some sort of rejection makes absolute sense to me. Maybe she took action which excluded them in some way, caused rejection of them or their costumes, or maybe it’s more explicit and she found something out about someone which threatened their continued involvement in the community if revealed. Maybe she knew something which threatened or had an impact on a relationship this person had with someone else. I would love to be a fly on the wall in their groups, I bet they’ve been going mad with theories of their own in various corners of the internet.
* I think the shooter is a male. A relatively young(ish) male - smart but also perhaps obsessive with difficulty separating online and real life. I very much see hints of male movement disguised with deliberately feminine gestures in walk up to Liz, then quite distinct male movement as they shoot and then make an escape. I wonder if they’re perhaps more effeminate than masculine on a day to day basis anyway.
I can’t help but feel the online cosplay community will have the answers. I’d put money on some of them having suspicions. The costume and theatrical/elaborate nature of the scenario plus need to convey some sort of message to her totally fits with that, for me.
Long post but I’ve been gathering many thoughts as I read through the threads!
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