I really don't usually get into the tiny nits of conversations in looking at true crime stuff - people speak so casually that minor oddities rarely mean much. And that goes doubly so of a reported (not recorded) conversation given by a person who finds himself suddenly answering press calls and giving interviews in a high-profile homicide/ fugitive situation.
That said, this guy says he said to "BL" that he could take I-40 to California, and that "BL" said (paraphrasing from memory except the bolded and beyond), "I'm just going to take this road
into California."
"Into" is not how anyone refers to going to a state (
exception - maybe occasionally, when referring to going to a neighboring state to do a specific activity, to distinguish from doing it in your state); we say "to" x state.
However, we quite often say "into" with respect to towns or cities.
This may be a regionalism (
It certainly exists in Southern parlance. I had a bf once who thought it was amusing once when he called me at home and my (Southern) father said I'd "gone into town.". My parents used that phrasing all the time, despite our living in a medium-populated area of sprawl with many towns running one into another; the colloquialism was from my father's upbringing in a small town with one main shopping drag, aka, grocery store, bank, etc.)
Following on that line, the phrasing would make more sense, too, then, if "BL" were actually a local boy, with the Southern /rural phrasing.
But again, the conversation is retold by a person who seems kind of amped up (understandably) by the encounter, so I don't put much on it at all.
In other news, that engineer guy's pic looks like half the men suggested to me on dating apps.
