Know I’ve posted a lot about this case in the last couple of days, but I wanted to give an additional thought on this:
I’m new posting on this forum, but one thing I’ve noticed is that Websleuths often has the same “very online” biases as Reddit, X, etc etc. What I mean by this is a tendency to lean towards really fictionalized/objectively “interesting” (from a narrative perspective) theories of what happens in these various cases. The Shannan Gilbert case comes immediately to mind, for example.
And while sometimes these quite dramatic/interwoven theories can end up having a kernel or more of truth, really occum’s razor tends to win out the majority of the time.
Which brings me back to this case. At this point, coming up on a decade since the event and with what we know, it feels very probable that this was a situation where a random event (weirdo playing make believe in an empty church) had the unlikely outcome of a homicide.
In a country of 300m people (and really in a world of 8b), weird things occur every day. Churches (especially empty churches) tend to inherently attract these sort of things.
Let’s say statistically you have 100 bizarro things like this happen in various places across America every day. Most days, none of these weird events would result in a homicide. But, like getting hit by lightening, every once in a while it does. That’s how I currently view this.
Because this case appears isolated, the idea of random dude overreacting to getting caught doing weird things seems, well, unsatisfying. But, stepping away from your keyboard for a moment, turning off Netflix and touching grass, nothing we’ve seen with this perp really jives with premeditated murder.