UKGuy said:
There is no evidence of an accident, the same injuries presented in any other case would suggest an intentional homicide.
Its only unsubstantiated theories such as Lou Smit's or Steve Thomas' that offer an accident as the initial cause.
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Although I know your theory and mine don't exactly coincide, UKGuy, I do think we're kind of on the same page.
When I first got interested in this case I was more or less PDI, and I found the different accident theories plausible.
What changed it for me was the sexual wound inflicted before JBR died.
I could see a parent 'losing it' and going for a child. I could see a parent staging a crime scene to cover up that fact.
But I couldn't see a parent, for no apparent reason, inflicting a sexual wound on the child sometime between the initial assult and death, while the child is still alive!
There are only two motives possible for inflicting that wound
at that time. If it had been inflicted after she was dead it might have been staging, but it wasn't.
The first motive is that the killer wants some kind of perverse gratificaton from the act. Notice, he's still injuring a dying child--there's simply no possible way that this wound was inflicted on JBR while she was alive, as it would have been extremely painful and she would have shown signs of struggling against it, signs which are absent from her body. This motive is really only plausible in the 'unknown intruder' theory; a parent, having accidently or purposely given the child a fatal head injury, isn't going to stop for a little 'fun' when there's so much cover-up to arrange.
The second, and more likely motive, is that the killer wants to confuse and contaminate evidence of prior abuse. I tend to believe that this makes it highly likely that the abuser is the killer, but I won't go into that now.
Either way, though, it just doesn't square with most of the accident theories, and neither does the condition of the body as you described it in an earlier post on this thread.
The initial blow might not have been premeditated in the strict legal sense of the term. But I think someone was finding JBR to be an increasing 'problem,' and was actually getting quite worried about someone finding out. Maybe he'd even thought about killing her.
So when the killer found himself provoked by something JBR said or did, and struck her, it wasn't something that hadn't occurred to him before, IMO. Means were at hand, motive had been present for a while, and now there was opportunity. And he took it.