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"The dig against the church was completely out of line."

A lot of "out-of-line digs" have borne much politically-incorrect fruit in criminal investigations. We shall see when this case is resolved if the "dig" was "out-of-line." For a 9-year-old to witness her sister being taken at gunpoint and then be so obedient as to not inform her parents places the level of either fear and/or obedience to the abductor ABOVE the level the child feels for her own parents. That does NOT suggest that the intruder, if there was one, would be only a casual acquaintance.

There's still one or two pieces of dark evidence that are deeply deeply hidden in this case that will 'splain what happened and why. This is no ordinary abduction.

Michael

A lot of "out-of-line digs" have borne much politically-incorrect fruit in criminal investigations.

The dig was not out of line because it was 'politically-incorrect', it was out of line because it is a total fiction that springs from a bias that is based on incorrect information. It is disgusting that some people's first reaction is to WANT it to turn into a scandle for the Church.

My suspicion is along the same lines as yours,but with some differences.

One thing that I know about girls this age is that they scream. They seem to always be screaming -- over anything and everything and nothing. I cannot imagine that a stranger would come into these girls' bedroom with a gun and that there would not be lots of screaming. I also cannot believe that the nine year old would have sat there for as long as she says that she did before going tell her parents. I'm not buying that for a minute.

Instead of thinking that the facts point to an intruder who in the girls' mind had greater authority than their parents, I think that these facts point to the conclusion that Elizabeth was not taken against her will. She is almost certainly being held against her will (I am being an optimist here), but I cannot accept the common assumption that she was taken against her will.

I think that she "sneaked out," a time-honored tradition engaged in by teenagers for generations and especially among children of very strict parents. Except that here, something went terribly wrong, and Elizabeth didn't come back.

If this scenario is correct, then Elizabeth probably left much earlier than the younger sister has stated. That, and the fact that it wasn't a forced taking, could explain why there have been entirely no clues.

What probably happened is that the younger girl woke up and discovered that Elizabeth had been gone far longer than planned. She then made up this story to tell her parents.

I am not blaming Elizabeth for what has happened to her or trashing her. I am just saying that the story as told by the sister just does not add up, and it does not help the search for Elizabeth to proceed on a flawed assumption of how and when she came to be missing.

There's still one or two pieces of dark evidence that are deeply deeply hidden in this case that will 'splain what happened and why. This is no ordinary abduction.

I agree that this is no ordinary case. Your statement about "dark evidence" is tantalizing. What do you think it might be?

My initial intuitive hit on this girl, based on looking into her unhappy looking eyes in all of her photos, was that she left on her own volition, for which I've been flamed over and over. Now the police have "ruled it out," so obviously they were exploring that avenue. And perhaps still are. Why don't the police give a lie detector test to the younger sister?

BTW, our family has a large Mormon contingent, most of whom are pillars of community and church, but one daughter went very wrong, so I know that even in the best of families, kids do weird things. Elizabeth may not have participated in her own disappearance, but it would probably be more hopeful if she had.