I live in SA and despite what it may seem like reading these boards, there has been very little coverage of this case in the media here.
I saw a friend last Friday who asked what I had been doing and I told him I was absorbed by the Wynarka case.
He didn't know what I meant until I said "the girl found on the side of the road" and then he asked "haven't the police solved it yet?".
He had seen nothing on TV news since the report of the find.
I told him some details and about the man seen carrying the suitcase, which he had not heard about.
Now, this man is married with kids, eats dinner with the TV news on, listens to the radio on the way to work and uses his phone for Facebook, Messenger etc, yet he knew nothing of an appeal for a man seen in Wynarka to come forward.
Yes, I do remember you saying this before, Jane , and it does make sense to me. I used to be very involved in the Madeleine McCann case - before burnout! - and at that time I used to forget that there were people in this world who were not familiar with the case in all its minutiae. And as we all know, the levels of publicity there were unprecedented, and global.
So I can well believe that someone who may not spend an excessive amount of time on social media, and who is not necessarily watching every news bulletin, may well have missed the snippets that have appeared on TV.
Having said all that, with the passage of time, the likelihood of a person never hearing about the case and the suspect police mention every time they are on the air becomes less and less.
Added to that is the fact that police have doorknocked so many people, and have distributed leaflets very widely. If this is a local crime - as police have hinted at, and they haven't hinted at much else - then the chances of suitcase man being local are also high. Perhaps police have reason to believe he is local and that is what they are getting at.
That's speculation, of course. But overall, I think that in today's world, the chances of someone never hearing of a particular news story which is repeated and repeated over time - and police aren't going to give up on this one - becomes slim.
There is another aspect to it as well, namely the fact that suitcase man was really there in Wynarka. A place which a person visited on probably several occasions, according to what seems to be coming through, is bound to ring bells in a person's head if they catch something about it on TV. I think that if the TV was switched on and suitcase man was watching, then guilty or innocent, his ears would prick up and he would listen.
Or at least if someone used his cell phone at that location, date and time.
