Oh goodness! Still can’t bring themselves to use the word suspect. So they use the legally meaningless term “person of interest“ that has zero legal definition.
I can’t remember that term being used before the FBI’s inconclusive 2001 anthrax investigation. Can you?
“Still can’t bring themselves to use the word ‘suspect’.”
This is like a form of politically correct speech. Only stooopid people would believe the police just want to ask some innocent questions to “help” find her. Uh huh. Police get to play their role, and the suspect gets to play his role. Despite this publicly ginned up modern day obsession that things have to be wrapped up at the speed of the internet or at least in “48 hours”, there is no rule that a suspect has to help the police and make their job easier and proceed faster to collect the evidence to convict him. The police are trying to use public opinion on this guy - make it impossible for him to be out in public.
A criminal law professor who had decades of private practice experience once told me that the only people dumber than the police were the criminals... and that they weren’t too far apart.
There are tactical reasons for this which is why the POI term is used universally now. Labeling a person a “suspect” too early can be used against the state at trial.
Just speculating … but in this particular case the term “suspect” may not apply simply because the police have no evidence of a crime.
Still can’t bring themselves to use the word suspect.
Many years ago, a friend of mine bought a house where a murder occurred. Woman living alone went missing. There was blood in her house and a juvenile was found with her car maybe 50 miles away. There was some blood in the trunk. They couldn’t charge the kid with anything, even though they knew he probably killed her. There was no body, just blood, but no way to show the blood was hers. There was no complaint of a stolen car even.
They locked the kid up for other reasons they had proof of and hoped he’d confess to a cellmate. A few months later her body was found and he was charged and convicted of her murder. He killed her in the house (my friend who had bought the house ended up cleaning up the last of the blood), put her body in the trunk, dumped in a ditch along a highway and then drove to a lake to unwind where he was arrested.