The disappearance of the teenager Rayna Rison started as a missing person case of some urgency, but after a month became a murder investigation when what was left of her was found in water where her body had initially been held down by a couple of logs.
The case dragged on interminably, and as often happens there were promising leads that turned out to be blind alleys, but here there were two extraordinary ones, in particular the arrest of a transient who confessed to her murder, and then the arrest of an older family member who'd been a mite too close to her when she was just thirteen. Incredibly, although the willing confessor had in his possession newspaper cuttings and what appeared to be a personalised tablet container, he turned out to be totally unconnected to the crime, although he was charged with the murder of another woman but was convicted only of her kidnapping. The family member spent fifteen months on remand until a new prosecutor decided they didn't have enough for a conviction.
It took fifteen years to bring the real killer to book, someone who had been a tenuous suspect, and he was put in the frame by someone who at the time of the killing was fourteen years old, doing something he shouldn't have been doing, and witnessed Jason Tibbs with an associate and the body in the trunk of a car. Truly amazing, throw Occam's razor out of the window guys, because often the simplest answer is precisely that: the simplest. And dead wrong.
The case dragged on interminably, and as often happens there were promising leads that turned out to be blind alleys, but here there were two extraordinary ones, in particular the arrest of a transient who confessed to her murder, and then the arrest of an older family member who'd been a mite too close to her when she was just thirteen. Incredibly, although the willing confessor had in his possession newspaper cuttings and what appeared to be a personalised tablet container, he turned out to be totally unconnected to the crime, although he was charged with the murder of another woman but was convicted only of her kidnapping. The family member spent fifteen months on remand until a new prosecutor decided they didn't have enough for a conviction.
It took fifteen years to bring the real killer to book, someone who had been a tenuous suspect, and he was put in the frame by someone who at the time of the killing was fourteen years old, doing something he shouldn't have been doing, and witnessed Jason Tibbs with an associate and the body in the trunk of a car. Truly amazing, throw Occam's razor out of the window guys, because often the simplest answer is precisely that: the simplest. And dead wrong.