I'm confused about this too. If the father is simply keeping the child from his family, friends, school and normal activities, then Dylan has to be either chained up somewhere or in agreement with disappearing. That simply makes no sense.
This seemed like a hitch hiking abduction to me from the beginning. That's the one plausible explanation that makes sense for Dylan's disappearance.
Here are the setbacks to that theory however otto...
Dylan did not reach out to contact anyone after either 8:15pm or 9:37pm Sunday night, depending on whether we can rely on the newswoman actually getting confirmation from LE that a text was sent from an electronic device that only Dylan had access to at that time. His mother has indicated that his cell phone records show the last communication just after 8pm.
It has not been established, to my knowledge, that Dylan was ever at the home on Sunday night. He had his own bedroom there but did not use it. He apparently also did not unpack anything from his backpack or if he did he packed it all back up again to go into town for the day without notifying either his father or the child he was to meet. Nothing was left behind, not even a sock. His mother had to turn around and go back to her home while she was on the way to Bayfield to pick up scent items. She apparently did this at the request of LE.
According to MR, he found an empty, used cereal bowl beside the sink, the television was tuned to Nickelodeon and Dylan was not there when he got home at 11:30am. None of the programming on Nickelodeon for either the night before or the next morning are programs that a 13yr old boy would appear to be interested in. Because LE treated this as a possible runaway situation for the first few days, I assume that the supposed used cereal bowl was not still beside the sink when they did their search warrant 10 days after he went missing.
MR tried to contact Dylan via text during the course of the morning while he was in town apparently to talk about their plans for the week and to find out if he needed to pick anything up. He did this knowing that there was sporadic cell service at his home. He did not get a response from Dylan and he did not try to call the cell phone or the home landline where he would have been sure that the call would go through.
I'm not sure if it's even been established that MR was at the house on Sunday night. There doesn't appear to be any witnesses to seeing either him or Dylan there that evening. Requests for video surveillance of the road between Durango and Vallecito seem to have come up empty.
MR claims he went to bed at 10:30pm Sunday night. He got up at 6-6:30am. He left at 7:30am to go to Durango. He returned at 11:30am where he proceeded to send off a couple more texts to Dylan and take a nap until 2:30pm. That's a lot of sleep in a 16hr period.
His father has indicated that Dylan's fishing pole is missing. While he was to meet with friends in Bayfield early Monday morning according to the last texts to his friend on Sunday night, I have heard nothing about plans for them to go fishing in late November. Seems kind of cumbersome to be taking everything you brought with you for a week's stay and a fishing pole to go off hitchhiking to a friend's house for the day.
There are a few different variations of what supposedly transpired on Monday morning between Dylan and MR before MR left to "run his errands". All of the variations are attributed to words that MR himself have said to various reporters.
Posters here have picked up on a few discrepancies in MR's version of events between early media interviews and reports and later media interviews and reports. Actually his story is very vague. And does not include anything that Dylan actually said. Just vague "indications" and "suggestions" of what their conversation was.
Dylan, to my knowledge, has never attempted to hitch hike to Bayfield from his father's home in the 6 plus years that his father has lived there. Nor has there been any proof that he hitched anywhere other than once with a group of friends in a snowstorm. Dylan also had a pair of running shoes with very distinctive tread on the bottom. There were no footprints in the dirt in front of the house or along the shoulder of the road with that distinct tread that I'm aware of.
MR's house is near the end of a dead end road. At the end of the road is a trailer park that was closed for the season. The only people who should be driving up or down that road are locals who live north of MR and any delivery people, postal...newspaper etc. So if Dylan was hitchhiking, no one other than whomever picked him up and abducted him was on that road at the time he would have been because no one saw Dylan either in front of the house or on that road. So we would have to believe that a random preditor/abductor just happened to be driving along a dead end road in a very secluded area with not many children living in the vicinity sometime after 7:30am and before 11:00am on a Monday morning. The odds on that must be pretty high. Not impossible but improbable.
MOO