I think there are a lot of red herring's that make this case more mysterious than it probably actually is.
If you tell people the basic details of the case, their immediate thought is "he was groomed into meeting someone who turned out to be not who they said they were, then something bad happened." Once you look into the case further there are a couple of red herring's that make you doubt it, but I think it's far and away the most likely theory.
One thing I don't ever recall reading, which I'm surprised isn't one of the main theories now that I think about it, is the consideration that he was meeting who he thought was a girl who turned out to be someone more sinister. He was 14, shy and into alternative hobbies - if he started chatting online with a "girl" he'd connected with and this person wanted to meet, I can see why he'd do something so out of character. At that age, especially if you're lacking in female attention, the allure of a girl is huge. We're also led to believe that Andrew was shy, introverted and quite naive, which would be the ideal type of qualities for a groomer to exploit.
The red herring's are that he didn't have internet access at home and the police checked the school computer's. The former I don't dispute, the latter I would, as I think that's where he talked to this person (and probably had extended chats after school, hence why he was late home on occasions). There are two reasons why I think the police checking the computer's isn't a reason to dispute the above theory. The first is that the police have been described as incompetent throughout this case, I see little reason to think that they would have been competent when checking school computer's for Andrew's online activity. The second is that the online activity of students may not have been logged to any serious degree anyway. If it was simply a case of checking browser history, then this could have been cleared by Andrew, auto-cleared by the school after a certain amount of time or even never logged at all. Incognito mode wasn't around back then, but it was possible in IE to set your history to "0 days", so it didn't log.
I think Andrew's school internet access is crucial to this case, but very little is said about it other than "the police checked". I'd be very interested to know what it was they actually checked, to what degree they checked and what logs were even kept for them to check.
If you tell people the basic details of the case, their immediate thought is "he was groomed into meeting someone who turned out to be not who they said they were, then something bad happened." Once you look into the case further there are a couple of red herring's that make you doubt it, but I think it's far and away the most likely theory.
One thing I don't ever recall reading, which I'm surprised isn't one of the main theories now that I think about it, is the consideration that he was meeting who he thought was a girl who turned out to be someone more sinister. He was 14, shy and into alternative hobbies - if he started chatting online with a "girl" he'd connected with and this person wanted to meet, I can see why he'd do something so out of character. At that age, especially if you're lacking in female attention, the allure of a girl is huge. We're also led to believe that Andrew was shy, introverted and quite naive, which would be the ideal type of qualities for a groomer to exploit.
The red herring's are that he didn't have internet access at home and the police checked the school computer's. The former I don't dispute, the latter I would, as I think that's where he talked to this person (and probably had extended chats after school, hence why he was late home on occasions). There are two reasons why I think the police checking the computer's isn't a reason to dispute the above theory. The first is that the police have been described as incompetent throughout this case, I see little reason to think that they would have been competent when checking school computer's for Andrew's online activity. The second is that the online activity of students may not have been logged to any serious degree anyway. If it was simply a case of checking browser history, then this could have been cleared by Andrew, auto-cleared by the school after a certain amount of time or even never logged at all. Incognito mode wasn't around back then, but it was possible in IE to set your history to "0 days", so it didn't log.
I think Andrew's school internet access is crucial to this case, but very little is said about it other than "the police checked". I'd be very interested to know what it was they actually checked, to what degree they checked and what logs were even kept for them to check.
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