All of the following is JMO, and not intended to be a shoot down. I'm just giving a detailed response to a detailed response. This will be the only time that I will give my commentary on this theory.
First - by 'thuggish', I mean unsophisticated & brutally straightforward, relying on raw force, as evidenced by what little we know of what was inflicted upon poor Morgan. This is also the nature of most violent criminals - they really aren't the smartest bunch around, and usually get away with stuff through pure, dumb luck & a certain amount of animal cunning.
Second - note that I said serial offender, not serial killer. Two different things. And we do know that he is a serial offender, as he has committed a violent, sexual crime separate from Morgan's murder.
IMO, most of those odd 'coincidences' show all of the signs of interpreting the evidence (along with items that are not evidence at all) in order to fit them to a predetermined conclusion.
Thank you for clarifying your point about serial offender.
However, there was no pre-existing conclusion. No one has an interest in the perps being a group rather than a single individual. Two possibilities: individual or group. Logically, we need to consider both.
We don't know that the shirt was 'planted', we don't know how it became separated from her, or when. Most sexual murderers do not bother with stealing from their victims after the act, even if that was their original intent.
Read The Hook description. The UVA student who found the tee shirt on the bush in a very busy student neighborhood stated that he had passed the same way earlier that day, and he had not seen the tee there before. The manner in which the shirt was spread out on a bush carefully suggests that someone wanted it to be found. The shirt was therefore definitely "planted" one way or another, but you are right that we don't know by whom. That the perps were trying to move the investigation back towards the center of Charlottesville is conjecture.
On the other hand, a random street criminal would not see any significance in a
vintage tee shirt with the name and logo of the band Pantera. Could suggest that the person planting the shirt had a sense of the college music scene. This person had possession of the shirt and thought it was important for some reason. If they had been caught planting this tee, they would have cast a great deal of suspicion on themselves.
There is no evidence to point towards her phone going dead at the point that she entered the car - heck, we still don't even know when she did enter the car!
We know the cell phone became disconnected from its base at 9:30 pm that night.
Following is the time line suggested by The Hook:
[The timeline suggested by the recent Hook article would seem to suggest that Morgan was not robbed or assaulted in the RV lot before her last sighting on the bridge.
All quotes from link:
http://www.readthehook.com/88650/hes-still-here-and-other-revelations-harrington-case ]
According to Cappuzzo, sometime around 9pm, two separate groups of students--- whom the Hook has previously reported to be members of the men's basketball team--- left John Paul Jones Arena. One group left through a side door, another through the main front doors. Morgan began walking with the side-door group as they traversed Massie Road and walked through the parking lots on the west side of U-Hall, on their way to the RV lot, where student-athletes park when the Arena is busy.
[Probably took at least 10 minutes to get to the RV lot, esp. since Morgan was supposedly so drunk that she could hardly walk. Then the men and Morgan engaged in limited conversation. The time the students departed would probably be about 9:12 pm at the earliest].
After the students departed, Morgan walked along the fence that separates the lot from the UVA track, according to Cappuzzo, who says her trail was picked up by the bloodhound, which stopped near a small line of portable toilets at the lot's rear.
[9:15 pm?] Cappuzzo says two non-student witnesses driving down a road that leads from the baseball stadium to the RV lot reported seeing Morgan in that area-- and recalled yet another unusual behavior for a young woman alone on a dark rainy night.
"She curtsied," says Cappuzzo, but she didn't attempt to flag them down.
[9:17 pm -9:20 pm]
[Then, Morgan walked from the lots rear where the port-o-potties were, all the way to the bridge. At about 9:20 pm, the witnesses saw her on the bridge. These distances may not actually be very far apart, but an intoxicated person would likely have difficulty moving quickly.]
The father [who witnessed Morgan on the bridge], whose identity has not been revealed, dropped his daughter off at her dorm, Cappuzzo says, a few minutes after the bridge crossing. Her electronic key was logged at 9:23pm by her dorm's security system.
On his way back to his hotel, the father stopped at the 7-11 convenience store on Ivy Road, says Cappuzzo. There, another time-stamp---
this one in the form of a register receipt--- provided police with another objective time mark around 9:30pm. When the father left the 7-11 and returned over the bridge no more than a minute or two later, Cappuzzo says, he remembered the young woman standing with short sleeves and no umbrella in the chilly drizzle. She was gone.
[9:20 pm 9:32 pm Morgan vanished. ]
There are myriad examples of killers finding very obscure hiding places completely at random, and it has been demonstrated that AF is more easily accessible than was originally thought.
But it was also late at night, on the night of new moon, with mist and rain.
Also, we have yet to see any evidence that ties the DNA that LE already has (DNA of an individual who has already committed a very similar crime) with any hippies/stoners/cultists (or anyone else for that matter),
We cannot rule it out either. We do not know the identity of the perpetrator of the 2005 attack on the woman from Sri Lanka.
or any indications that Morgan or her family were the objects of any form of jealousy (such things tend to be discovered by LE and/or the media by this point in a murder investigation).
We know that the motive was not robbery or revenge. Jealousy is probably a factor in almost crimes motivated by personal animus.
Yes, statistics do not make for certainty in individual scenarios, but they do make for a good guide for investigation.
If we were discussing a large group of missing persons, your generalizations would be true; but one is small sample size.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you're looking at it), crime is almost universally a very banal thing, committed by stupid, dull, uninteresting individuals for stupid, simple reasons (sex, money, rage, control etc). Sadly, Morgan almost certainly died for the same pointless reasons that so many, many other women & children have died for - the very temporary gratification of the urges of a sick individual with no self-control.
You seem very sure that the perp was a lone individual. In my opinion, a lone perp would have trouble driving the car while restraining MH. And, how would he get her cell phone away from her to begin with? A fight roadside or inside a car in a UVA student area would be noticed, (remember the bridge witnesses were a student and her father) and the bridge would take them through a busy section of town on Saturday night. Did the perp drive the whole way through Charlottesville and not get stopped at a light even once? If MH had escaped the car or other vehicle at a stop light, she could have gotten the plate number, and he would have been quickly apprehended for some very serious felonies. That would be quite a risk.
Outside of comics & novels, there are no Bond Villains, no Lex Luthors, no secret snuff film studios, no Satanic child-molester societies & no ritual-murdering mystical Manson hippie cults(no matter how much Italian Prosecutor Mignini might think otherwise).
Sad to say, snuff films are real.
I didn't follow the Italian case.
Manson obviously really did exist.
A sick group rather than a single perp is not impossible.
I'm sorry, but the conspiracy theory stuff went past my ability work with it a long, long time ago. Not only does it rely on chaining together 'evidence' that is completely unrelated to the case & largely grabbed from private social media, but it relies on stereotypes that I honestly find offensive. On top of all of that, it violates the 'KISS' principal like crazy.
If you go back and review The Hook, you will find that the tee shirt, the cell phone and the location of AF are all related to the case.
A conspiracy just means that two or more people worked together. The lone perp theory (Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, the recent murders of Afghani civilians) is often more doubtful than a possible conspiracy, but draw your own conclusions.
Now, that's just my personal take on it, and does not mean that I don't enjoy seeing the creativity & resourcefulness that has been demonstrated in the course of that theory's development. I'm just explaining the chain of logic that has led me to personally discount the theory. I do look forward to seeing your outside the box thinking in these threads, and I do not wish to discourage you.
Again, this is all JMO, and is not intended to be taken as anything except my personal viewpoint on the matter.
Your theory could be correct, but we can't rule out some weird group yet. The word "" comes from Thuggee which was a cult in India known for robbing and murdering travelers as ritual sacrifice to Kali. Ironically, MH was abducted and possibly also murdered on the night of the West Bengali Kali Puja.
In any case, thank you for your thoughtful comments.