2

Can we solve the Elizabeth Collins / Lyric Cook abduction-murder case?

You may know a little bit about this case, but if you don’t, here’s some basic info: the two girls (Elizabeth Collins and Lyric Cook) were cousins. They disappeared on July 13, 2012. Their bodies were (sadly) discovered on December 5, 2012. Here’s the distance between disappearance (Meyers Lake) and where they were found (Seven Bridges Wildlife Area):

Just recently, there’s been a dedicated website launched for this case, which remains unsolved. Here’s a direct link to the website.

They brought in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (that’s what you see on Criminal Minds) to do some suspect profiling in this case, and the bigger takeaway is fairly logical: likely a local person who knows the area well, and likely used “quiet coercion” to get the girls to go with him (her?) on the initial abduction.

Couple of key points:

If you tie everything together on this case, the most likely scenarios are:

There’s a fairly big gap in time between mid-July and early-December, just in general, and since the public doesn’t have information about the bodies or their conditions, you need to wonder about the timeline here. Was there a captivity element, or was the murder done within a few hours of the abduction and it just took the bodies longer to be discovered? Obviously if there was some type of captivity element, you’re looking for a different type of person — it’s one thing to kill a person within a few hours if you’re a psychopath, but it’s quite another to keep them locked up, etc. (Plus, you need more physical space, and likely in a semi-remote area.)

Hoping that new website leads to some closure here — it seems like this is a case that, even two years out, could be solved.

 

Ted Bauer

2 Comments

  1. Ted, doyou know whether they’ve checked the cell phone records, assuming that the police can get access to the same? For what I mean:

    http://www.deadcellzones.com/Iowa.html#.VfD2J9lgSCg

    if the perp had an active cell phone, his phone rather likely like pinged cell towers all along the way. If they could get the data and know how to use Excel…. Oh, and I know what some parents think and there is indeed is a downside, but if either or both of these kids had a cellphone in their pockets, their phones might well have pinged some cell towers along the way as well.

Comments are closed.