I'm not saying motive is irrelevant. I'm saying there is no use in us making up motives when we have nothing to base our opinion on.
Steve Thomas was looking at a severe head injury. There is reason to speculate that there might have been an accidental "rage" injury. I don't particularly go for this explanation, but it does make a modicum of sense.
You are attempting to analyze the R's "inner world", by which I take it that you mean their psychological state, by claiming that "surface details" tell us something about the R's motivation. But they don't.
The only solid thing in that paragraph is the chronic vaginal injuries. That's the whole point I'm making - none of the stuff you mention (except the vaginal injuries) indicates anything at all. You want to paint a picture, so you paint one, but it's w/o substance. Pageants and house tours do not combine to paint a picture of what happened that night, much less why. We want badly to make sense of this case and we must guard against making up stuff. I've been guilty of doing some amateur "psychoanalysis" of the Rs too, at various times. It's hard to resist. We want to get inside their heads and figure out what they were thinking and why they did what they did. But it's best not to go too far down that road, and just let the evidence point us.
House tours are house tours. You can accuse them of being show-offs, but that's about it. Pageants are pageants. I find the idea of child beauty pageants sickening, but then I find it sickening when a dad constantly pushes his son to be an athlete. No doubt PR was taking the pageant thing way too seriously, but it had been a great thing in her life, so it makes some sense. More to the point, it tells us absolutely nothing about the psychological state of the Rs on that fateful night. JRs traumas also tell us nothing.
Chronic vaginal injuries tell us that JB might have been sexually abused, and not just the night of her death.
