Just throwing this out there...
DE's family moved from WA clear across the country to MD around his junior year in high school. That's a tough time to uproot a teen with aspirations of going to college and all the pressures of the junior and senior year, SAT's, AP classes, college applications, finding someone to write rec. letters, etc. I wonder why the move? Was it a job transfer or could something have happens in WA with DE? If he had a troubled past as a juvenile would those records follow him to MD?
It just strikes me as odd to kill someone and there not be any signs from his past.
BBM
Sadly, that is not a guide even law enforcement or profilers can use. Over the years there has been heinous murders done by defendants who had no criminal history whatsoever and many of them were a lot older than DE and were very successful professionally.
I do believe DE had thought about killing someone for a very long time. It will be interesting to see where his computer searches took him beyond the predatory sites he went on that we are aware of now. Maybe he is like the thrill killer, Scott Dyleski, who was 16 and looked up to serial killers and thought they were heroes. Maybe this guy also kept a journal or had drawings depicting rapes and murders with a knife. Dyleski was also very intelligent.
Its not uncommon either for murderers to be above average intelligence.
As an aside:
I also believe Natalie Keepers was drawn to macabre fantasies as well. I don't think DE made her do anything she didn't want to do. I think she was all for the plot to murder Nicole that began to take hold on January 4th. That shows she too carefully premeditated this plot for three weeks along with DE.
I think LE has found out many things about both of them and they have evidence Keepers was in on this right along with DE. I think it will become known they both gravitated toward the same twisted ideations. Imo, LE has seen what NKs said to Nicole and how much she was a big part of this and that is why now she is charged with before and after the fact crimes. What they are learning about NKs is widening and becoming larger in scope now.
And that may change too when the forensic evidence comes back in. They may even find evidence tying her to the actual murder. I think she was up to her eyeballs in all of this. Maybe that is what DE meant when he said 'the truth will set me free.' Maybe she is the one who actually murdered Nicole. I wouldn't be the list bit surprised if she was the mastermind behind the plot. We have seen that several times where the female will talk a male into doing the actual murder for her but it was she who put the murder in motion to begin with. I think this case is fluid and will be changing in the next month or so. And if she was there when he murdered Nicole and was in the car with him when he abducted her then she really does need to be charged equally and in most states she would be. So we will see if the evidence takes them in a different direction.
Just because she happens to be a female doesn't ever make me feel she was forced to do any of this. As many trials/cases and stories I have kept up with, I know many females can be just as ruthless, cruel, viscous, and can also be a sexual deviant, along with being a murderer. In fact I feel she is like so many other females before her and she gladly teamed up willingly with a murderer.
Now will she try to blame it all on him? Of course she will, that is always predictable behavior when a female finds themselves in the criminal justice system looking at a long prison sentence. But I feel assured that the DA/LE have the evidence to disprove that repetitive excuse that women use all too often.
IMO