Greetings sleuthers.
I think we're reading too much into the sharpies. I'm thinking they either had, ahem, matter on them or they were taken from the house to determine whether they were used in writing the note the Mel.
Andres, I am having a terrible time trying to keep up. I get overly busy with my startup and end up needing to stay away for a few days. When I return, there are 20 more pages of messages
So I hope you'll forgive me asking: how do we know that the letter/note was to Mel? I know there was speculation that her father might have left a note for her with Sam, but has that been established beyond mere speculation? Maybe we are thinking of different notes, though I admit it is very likely that I missed a followup message after the first post mentioning the note/letter. On the other hand, there is certainly nothing wrong with speculation!
I ask because
I was speculating otherwise :-D One possible explanation for (one of?) the handwritten note(s) was that Sam wrote it as part of a bumbling attempt at alibi. He mentioned to some driver or another that he waited for his girlfriend to fall asleep and left before she awoke. Perhaps that conversation combined with a phony goodbye note, ala "Sorry Emma, I love you but it's not working out. I had to leave thx for the hospitality <333333333" was meant to introduce reasonable doubt regarding his involvement in her murder.
Some have already speculated that his call to the police about spooky sounds in the basement might have been an attempt at misdirection as well. To be clear, I am not insinuating that this would be a sensible move; rather, it seems a pretty hopeless act. But he was almost certainly desperate at one point or another, and he might have become convinced that "it's just like I told that driver" + "scary sounds in the basement, after all if I murdered them OF COURSE I wouldn't call the cops" + "see, I even left a bittersweet goodbye note" was better than nothing.
If the police wanted to show that the note (and, perhaps by implication, his other attempts at establishing doubt) should be not given credence, they might want to link the note to the sharpies that were found, especially if said sharpies might be linked to trace blood evidence. Should they be able to establish such a link, it would evidence the theory that he wrote the note only after the poor victims had been murdered.
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All, a side note regarding the opiates found on the scene:
People often forget that oxycodone is a very, very common opiate that is found in many different strengths and configurations. The street term "oxies" almost always refers to either 30mg immediate release oxycodone (often called "blues" because of the color and/or "roxies" after the most common brand name) or 80mg time-released oxycodone (aka "oxycontin", also a brand eponym.) The pills mentioned in the report are less likely to result in a "extreme" addiction and/or abuse because they were: 1) <= 10mg methinks, and -- more importantly -- 2) mixed with large amounts of tylenol. The tylenol (err acetaminophen, damn these brand eponyms!)
frustrates abuse in several ways, among the most effective of which are: 1) they make it far more difficult to ingest the substance using a more short-acting and potent (ergo, more addictive) delivery system (eg, smoking or injecting; even snorting a pile of tylenol should be far more difficult than snorting a few mg of oxycodone), and 2) when taken orally in sufficiently high quantity and over large periods of time they can do significant damage to the liver and kidneys, and even cause organ pain shortly after intake, which of course serves to disincentivize significant overuse.
All that said, people
do sometimes abuse and develop dependency and/or addiction to 10mg and even 5mg percocets (another brand eponym; ie, oxycodone + acetaminophen.) But that is not what most people mean when they use the term "oxies", and, eg, it should definitely not be surprising to learn that a patient was driving while using percocet (or even 30mg oxycodone for that matter, depending on circumstances). Their use should not suggest the presence of addiction or a "drug problem", per se.
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All, thanks for all of the interesting hypothesizing and speculation. I feel like I am reading a (great, sad, thrilling) novel when I visit this site. I just hope that the truth is soon uncovered and that those responsible suffer the proper and just punishment for their crimes.
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p.s. Let me go ahead and ruin an otherwise perfectly fine post by mentioning that I've never seen that acronym "IANAL" before. I looked it up and now know its meaning, so thanks for that, but am I the only person above the age of 12 that chortles when I see it because I can't help but to imagine an Apple ad for a new and interesting mac peripheral?