Warning!! Sheer speculation ahead!! Skip this post if you don't like meandering thoughts!
While it's totally possible that there's not much beneath the surface details of this case--that two somewhat socially awkward college students decided to lure a child to her death, just for kicks, the end--there are so many weird little mysteries here, the biggest of which is,
what the HECK were they thinking?
I think that the people who feel there's something "off" with DE and the people who don't are both correct. He comes across as very focused and controlled and pretty full of himself, which could be a sign that he's keeping some out-of-control emotions under wraps. My son's the same age, and most kids this age that I know are just huge bags of confusion: who am I? what should I become? Who loves me? And it's all over their faces all the time. This kid, though. His coldness and arrogance would either isolate him or make him a part of a pretty small group of similarly ambitious kids who don't mix with the rest of them (my own goofball son included). Still, there are *many* weirder-seeming kids.
And it's not an unusual type in certain college majors. My suspicion is that he actually had grander ambitions than VT (which is an excellent school, don't get me wrong, and he should be counting his lucky stars) and expected a full-ride scholarship to MIT or something. In that news clip *everyone* says just how darned special he is. So, I bet he's angry and disappointed. Possibly WAY angrier than he lets on.
The young woman, NK, is also angry. The engineering track might even be something she felt pressured to go into by her family--if she needed math help from DE already, first semester in, she probably feels totally overwhelmed. She reportedly also likes theater, but if her performance on her video is any indication, she had no hope of getting very far with that, either.
So, two entitled-feeling suburban kids who are just now facing the cold realities of their averageness find each other.
It is SO WEIRD to me that college freshmen would get involved in any way with a local middle schooler. I live in a college town, and except for tutoring, the two worlds never collide. I can only think that DE and NK retreated into a virtual fantasy life of sorts and got some kind of validation from the attentions of little NL.
But still: making the jump to actually killing the child--and importantly,
NOT covering their tracks in any way--makes me think of that kind of insanity that inflicts two people at once, "folie a deux." (BTW, they could have been back on campus as early as Jan 4, since VT has a short winter term, but not a mandatory one, I don't think.) I suspect they didn't really believe they were going to kill her, they were just playing out some grotesque fantasy about it, until they actually did it.
I kind of hate it when the media pay more attention to the perpetrators rather than the victims of a crime, which is what I'm doing. Still, little NL's motives for getting involved with these older people make total sense: she was lonely and sad. It's the perps' motives here that are so freaking weird and out of touch with reality.
I'm not totally discounting the possible involvement of drugs, either. Comparing the police logs to other similar-sized schools, VT has a serious drug problem.
The "truth will set me free" line could just be BS or it might refer to something that he thinks is significant: maybe the whole thing was NK's idea, or maybe she wielded the knife (do we know why they believe it was him?). Or, depending on what evidence they have, maybe it's possible that he was totally set up/cat-fished by NK (I doubt it).
Anyway. Carry on.