Y’old “knock knock”, “who’s there”, “nobody”, “ahh ok, let’s just pin it on the mother”
IMO if this happened in a town with better policing they may have identified CB early & we wouldn’t even be debating it now. IMO if they made the crime scene really big and worked their way inwards, then they may have found thinks like discarded cigarette butts. CB was a smoker.
Unfortunately I don’t think they’d have found the perpetrator if this had happened to any of other child in that region at that time either. Evidently it seems very clear that the local force weren’t able to deal with the major crimes happening in their area. They weren’t all bad apples they just weren’t run correctly. The crime in that area needed a premiership team of skilled people, but IMO they were a local league team not good enough to handle the crime in that area.