Yep. there've really only ever been three plausible possibilities:
1. She was abducted from 37SR
2. She was ambushed at the PoW, by CV or someone else
3. She was abducted from elsewhere.
DV has debunked (IMHO) #1, and has settled on #2. At the very least it is worth searching the PoW and embankment simply to eliminate this possibility, because there's evidence she needed and intended to go there. If this were to happen and nothing found, then we're left with the last - the mystery abductor, of whom she has left absolutely no trace.
It's worth pointing out - and consistent with
@TimFisher1965 's comment - that
whichever you think happened (or is later proved to have happened),
you have to dismiss the majority of the evidence and "witness" sightings.
37SR
If she really did go to 37SR you then have to overlook that she had no keys to get in, and that HR apparently totally failed to notice or mention MG and SF banging much more noisily on the door later. Between this, that the various supposed sketches and efits of "Mr Kipper" are not of the same man, and the fact that nobody's ever been put onto an identity parade, the well-known likeness of the supposed Mr Kipper is almost certainly spurious. All we can really say about it is that MG clearly made a big impression on HR.
Her car was
- at Stevenage Road by 12.30 (from WJ, which is before she even left Sturgis), then
- in Stevenage Road by 2pm (cabbie sighting), then
- in the FPR by BW at 2.30pm,
- back in Stevenage Road by 3pm (James Galway man sighting), or
- after 4pm (departure of the BT engineers), or
- by 5.15PM (owner of the garage returns).
No more than two of those six can be right at the same time.
The calls made by her to the PoW arranging a visit that evening cannot have happened because she wasn't free that evening. She can't have been going there sooner because she was at SR. The calls from a man and woman to the pub asking when she was expected cannot have happened because she wasn't going there.
The PoW story
If you buy the PoW story, then four of the six car sightings are wrong and so is all the evidence and sightings that suggest a visit to 37SR took place.
Mystery abductor
If you buy the mystery abductor hypothesis, then all the sightings and evidence relating to the other two possibilities are wrong
except the BW sighting, which suggests she was being abducted while driving her own car.
The police focus on 37SR means there's more "evidence" of that than anything else, but that's because they instantly believed it and did not seek evidence for anything else, not because it's the most likely. If they had said on TV that she had been abducted by a bloke dressed as a clown in a red Noddy car, there would undoubtedly have been confirmatory sightings of him, too.
The torpedo under the waterline here for me is that when, a year on, CV changed his story, the police just assumed that the two otherwise reliable officers who'd talked to him a year before had messed up, and that he had not in fact changed his story, they had just got it wrong before. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that CV's story change would suggest that other people knew where she was going (so someone else could have intercepted her), and that it gave him an alibi for not being 'James Galway', since he'd supposedly been at the pub all day.
If I had to assign percentage likelihoods to the three possibilities above, mine would be something like:
1. 2%
2. 90%
3. 8%
but the middle one would plummet if a search of the PoW and embankment were undertaken and found nothing.
Are there any other possibilities? What are others' rankings compared to mine?
