Something else that puzzles me about the police belief in Mr Kipper is that in one obvious respect, HR's claimed sighting was clearly mistaken. HR said he heard a door slam and saw a couple coming out of 37SR. The door being closed was the only reason he noticed anything happening at 37SR at all. The woman was blonde, and was assumed by the police to have been SJL even though HR never said this and saw only the back of her head.
If this account is true, and this was SJL, then HR is unequivocally saying she went inside 37SR. The police assumed both points in their first reconstruction, in which they showed their SJL stand-in entering and leaving. It was this that prompted others to come forward claiming to have seen the same thing.
The police later fingerprinted the house, however, and found no sign she had ever been inside. Let's leave aside the contentious point of whether SJL even had the keys. Even if she did indeed have them, how did she manage to enter and walk around 37SR, conducting a viewing, without touching a single door, door handle, banister rail, kitchen cupboard knob, or anything else at all?
Answer (IMO): she didn't. SJL never went into 37SR. HR's claim to have seen a woman leaving 37SR is either total fiction, made up God knows why - perhaps as something to do; or he is describing an actual visit, but by implication, at a different time by different people. SF with MG, for example, fit the physical descriptions given and the actions described. They may have had keys, may have looked inside, came out again. They just didn't do it at 1pm.
It seems to me that no further credence at all should have been given to HR's sighting once the house was fingerprinted. He claims to have seen something that the fingerprint evidence completely debunks, yet his sighting continues to be relied on and cited as evidence that SJL really went there.
And hence I am back to wondering where SJL really went when she left the office.
