In some ways, this case reminds me of Shauna Howe's murder. Shauna was an 11 yo in a small, Pennsylvanian town who was abducted and murdered walking home after a Halloween party. It was a tiny town that didn't have a lot of crime and it rocked the population to the core. Basically everyone in town became a suspect. Talk about a Peyton Place-secrets came out about the townspeople that nobody thought would see the light of day. LE took DNA samples from over 100 people in town. They released as much info as they could, but they had to hold back a lot because they were afraid it would hurt the trial (if there ever was one). Townspeople got really upset with LE because they thought LE should've released more. LE made the same comments with that case that they do with this one: we have a lot of pieces and are just waiting for that ONE tip, he's probably local, be aware of what your kids are doing, we need the public's help in identifying this sketch, etc. All pretty standard things for them to say. Later, though, they also said that they thought they might have been onto something earlier in the investigation so they wanted to start over.
Despite their work, the case went cold. When they were FINALLY able to solve it, about 12 years later, it wound up being three men that they'd looked at in that first week after her murder. Those men had been excluded early on because the DNA didn't match Ted and Jim/Tim O'brien weren't tested because they were incarcerated at the time of the crime so they had an alibi. As it turned out, they'd bonded out earlier that day and NOBODY working the case had been aware of that. The DNA test was done on them and there was a match. Ted, the third man, was also convicted.
So, at the end of the day, the detectives had actually solved the case in the very beginning. They'd just made the mistake of not following through with the alibi. You hear someone's in jail, you look at the records and see that they were there, that's a pretty good alibi. They'd just never seen the part about them bonding out later that same day...People had also identified Ted from the sketch early on, but his DNA hadn't matched so he was excluded. It didn't match because he hadn't participated in the SA, but he WAS a big part in the abduction.
That's where I think LE may be at now. I think they were onto something in the beginning, but something happened to make the cross that guy off. A strong alibi, no DNA match, etc. I think they had a pretty good idea of what happened early on, but that theory was shot when it didn't fit the evidence. Perhaps they need to look at that evidence and that person again.
