http://www.websleuths.com/forums/member.php?48609-mom2six
Warning, I'm about to project my life experiences onto AJ! Just so you know in advance.
Here's is why I am currently leaning toward the Gone Girl scenario. I previously posted a few weeks back about my own situation with my parents' divorce and how I felt torn in the middle. There was a lot more to it. I ended up living with my father, but it was far from healthy. My father wanted to play "let's pretend" that he was not a divorced man with children, remarried. He wanted to place my step-mother and his relationship with her as his primary relationship. As a daughter, I felt that his primary allegiance should be to my sister and I. What was worse, she was actively out to get me and do whatever she could to further cause separation between my father and me. She was an all around horrible person, who in the end wound up pregnant with another man's child and my father raised that child until she was 2 and DNA tests showed the truth. So, I am not overblowing what was chaotic and awful.
Putting the new spouse relationship ahead of the children is not at all unusual. We see the terrible fruit of it every day in this forum. We know that JH and WH were having marital friction. Perhaps JH was waffling. Perhaps AJ was astounded it took JH so long to act. Whatever, I don't know, but maybe it was apparent to AJ that mom was not looking out for the other children in the way that she should have been. She's disgusted, has had enough, and knows she can solve her own problem and put her sisters into a better position to be protected by leaving. She knows WH history and has an idea of how to permanently get him out of her life and try to protect her sisters from WH and further chaos.
She knows she needs help, and she knows someone who will do anything for her, but would be unlikely to be JH and WH first instinct of who she might turn to. She contacts Texty, and he helps her get outta dodge because he likes her and is somewhat gullible. She gives him her phone, unlocked, so he can buy her some time. She cuts up the card and leaves it as a signal. She disposes of the clothing to frame WH. Texty leaves before everything really blows up, maybe even tosses the phone out a vehicle window.
WH, unexpectedly, does figure out Texty helped her. Because of his irrational behavior, this ends up doing more to cast suspicion and implicate him than anything AJ could do. He thought Texty had her phone and was searching for that. Instead he stumbles on a jacket that AJ may have left, or maybe wasn't even AJ's at all.
It is true that AJ has left her college behind, but it isn't that hard to get started again. There are a lot of options. I don't know if the full scholarship is factual. If it is not, leaving would be an additional kick in the teeth to her mom and WH on the financial front.
Where would AJ have gone? Anywhere she thinks might be the last place anyone would look, but she still had some kind of connection would be my bet. It is a big, bad world for such a young woman to be all on her own, so I think there would have to be a little bit of a connection. Not having a phone, she may not have great access to the internet. This case hasn't hit the national media too much, either, so she may not be aware of everything that has happened. She might be avoiding looking for news so that she isn't discovered. And we all know it is possible that she has fallen in harms way. But I think it is too early yet to give up hope.
WH has acted suspiciously, but I think a lot of that has been trying to cover for his drug habit, keep the marital nonsense under wraps, and hide his record. When he talks of wanting to find her, he seems believable to me.
I think my scenario fits and makes sense of a lot of the weirdness. I almost enacted this in my own life back then. I'm glad I did not because it would have been my own husband with the felonious restraint on his record, since he was of age then, and I was not. I was too fearful of the unknown, and I did not have a way to protect my sister, so in the end we did not leave.
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Yes to this. Trying to catch up. Didn't know how to quote on closed thread.