I must admit, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, that I'm struggling to keep up with these threads. You go away for a couple of hours and suddenly there are five more pages! It's great, obviously, that so many people want to help, don't get me wrong, I'm just owning up personally to not being able to keep up! Real life gets in the way sometimes.
So I thought I would have another little chat with myself, to try and get straight what I think we now know, or at least what I think I now know. Please forgive me if I perpetrate any inaccuracies and please feel free to put me straight. I won't be offended. I gave up being offended about anything in 1986 and you'd be amazed how much paperwork is saved by not giving a monkey's!
So the police have got to the stage where the suspect and LS are in the playing fields together and he admitted an encounter which he said was consensual. Then left the playing fields later on his own. It seems to me that the police will have to prove, to get a conviction for murder, that he intended to kill her, ie it wasn't just something that got out of hand, and that he actually did it. Of course, there may well be a smoking gun in the form of CCTV, witness statements, forensic evidence, etc, that the police are holding back in order to clobber the defence with it when the time comes for formal charges to be laid.
But as it stands, I can't see what is to stop him saying that she ran off after the encounter on the park bench and that was the last he saw of her.
As far as the body going into the River Hull, I am still rather like Shakespeare's description of "the cat i' the adage, letting I dare not wait upon I would". On the one hand, if he did suddenly end up with a dead body on his hands, then yes, the easiest way of disposing of it and also, probably, obfuscating any forensics, would be to dump it into the River Hull. Hat-tip to whoever it was who mentioned Occam's Razor - the simplest solution is often the best.
But I still boggle that from then on it travelled down river to the confluence and thence to the estuary without once being seen, or snagging on anything. Especially at low tide.
Are there any plausible alternatives?
Assuming the suspect had the presence of mind to hide the body somewhere and then return at a later time, wrap it in something, put it in his car and transport it elsewhere, then yes. He could have disposed of it further downstream where the River Hull is less claggy and there was less chance of discovery, or he could have found somewhere along the waterfront of Hull with the River Humber and dropped it in there. However, such places with sufficient deep water close inshore are not manifold, and there is always CCTV. Although having said that, in places like Wincolmlee, the CCTV would most likely be private businesses each safeguarding their own patch, which would make it more difficult for the police to a) obtain it and b) go through it and of course some people just overwrite it every week anyway...
One other option has occurred to me, although it is less likely, I am the first to admit. That LS's encounter with the suspect wasn't the last encounter she had that night. If she did indeed manage to evade him after his alleged assault on her, who is to say where she might have wandered off to or ended up. I agree the chances of there being more than one predatory stalker on the loose might be vanishingly small, but if she did meet her ultimate fate somewhere where the perpetrator had the wherewithal to conceal the evidence, and a vehicle unknown to police because they have been concentrating on the existing suspect, then all bets are off. He could indeed have taken her somewhere like the disused fish dock and put her in the Humber there (for locals, I'm thinking of the bit near the old Lord Line building.) In which case she may not have been in the water as long as some people surmise.
At the end of the day, until and unless the full story comes out at trial (assuming someone is charged and pleads not guilty) we just won't know.
I think that's more or less where I've got to.
By the way - this thing about new members - I'm sorry if I've been guilty of posting stuff where I perhaps should have looked it up but it is often simply a case of lack of time. I actually joined in 2015 and posted on the Claudia Lawrence threads because I was thinking of writing something about her, but the ground has been so thoroughly covered, indeed stomped, that in the end I didn't bother. By the way, though, the Ouse in York is a much better bet for the disposal of bodies than the River Hull. In fact I believe there have been a couple of tragedies in the last few years where youngsters coming home from pubs and clubs have ended up in the River Ouse. If you had that in mind when you were thinking of the River Hull, then they are in fact two quite different things.
