Pure speculation on my part, but in addition to pcb55’s suggestion of possible footage of SE trying to flee for help from a neighbouring house, I have similarly started to wonder if the perpetrator was not only briefly visible, but was perhaps caught on camera lurking in someone’s garden/drive/behind a wall or hedge, so he could jump out and have the element of surprise. May be a little cliche-horror-movie-esque to set a scene of ‘the evil man lurking in the shadows’, but sadly it is probably quite an effective way of incapacitating a victim quickly and bundling them away, with less chance of witnesses/a discussion ensuing than trying a stop based on COVID or any other flimsy excuse, especially if the car was in the same driveway or parked a few feet away round a corner.
We only tend to check footage if we notice the notifications and/or it’s an odd time/something has happened that causes us to go back through it/rare occasions police have asked us to check during door to door enquiries. Most people, like us, probably silence notifications because they can be a distraction (especially at work) so won’t necessarily pick the footage up live. Also to note - Ring cams sometimes have a little flip out when you try and load live from a notification and refuse to connect. The quickest thing is to close the app, reopen, try live view again, if it’s still slow loading then the previous clip may have had time to buffer so you can back and forward until that comes up in history to check the trigger event footage. This usually take 1-2 minutes. If it keeps hanging I usually give up and wait 5-10 minutes for it to self-resolve its sudden wonky WiFi connection and try again or (more usually) get on with what I was doing and forget all about it. In my experience, when it goes wonky on connection whoever was there has usually been and gone by the time the footage has buffered and is available to view/you have managed to connect live.
We’ve had loads of randoms in at all hours of the day and night doing all sorts - for that reason if I was watching footage back and saw someone come in and crouch down for a short time and dash off I would assume they were having a wee (or something more gross to clean up - it’s happened!), and wouldn’t look more closely/would close the clip. Even if I’d checked the footage fairly quickly unless it was super clear what was happening I probably wouldn’t have put 2+2 together until I saw the news and SE’s last known route/location. All JMO, of course.