This is not aimed at anyone in particular but just a general observation. When people say we only have Leah's family word that there was a relationship with X...why would her family say it if it weren't true? They have no reason to lie.
rsbmff
This is a more complicated question than it looks, and there are lots of possible answers to it, one of which of course may be that you are quite right, they have no reason and everything they say is true and correct.
At the other end of the spectrum, another possibility is that they were involved in her disappearance or whatever harm has perhaps befallen her, either in the sense of causing it themselves, or in the sense of her having left voluntarily in response to an event or situation at home. As far as we know, Leah’s family were the last people to spend time with her, they reported her disappearance, and statistically when bad things happen to women, whoever they lived with is likely to be involved, so imo it’s appropriate to consider that as a possibility, and by extension to consider the possibility that the things they have said about X are untrue, exaggerated or designed to deflect attention. Afaik, the police investigated them (certainly their home was searched) and found no evidence of harm to Leah, but then, the police also investigated X and found no evidence of harm to Leah – and yet a lot of people still don’t accept that that was a thorough or conclusive process, or feel that a lack of evidence can’t be taken as proof of innocence. If you think that’s a valid position, then I think you have to keep an open mind about Leah’s family too.
However, between these two black and white extremes, there’s a whole load of grey. When someone goes missing there’s a lot of guilt and self-recrimination: Why didn’t we see this coming? Why didn’t she talk to us? Why couldn’t we keep her safe? And, both as a result and separately, a desire to make sense of events and have someone to blame: Leah wouldn’t do this to us, someone else must have coerced or harmed her; Leah never lied to us until she met him; this is what happens when you start mixing with people who don’t share our values, etc.
I think the idea that she was known to be in a relationship with X, that they were concerned about it (either because of his faith/culture/skin or because of his ambiguous marital status or for some other reason), that Leah had changed since meeting him and was moody/secretive, and that they viewed him as a prime suspect from day 1 is very much belied by the way things played out immediately after her disappearance. If all that was really the case, there are various things that would have happened that did not:
- The fact that she was supposedly in a relationship would have come out, and his name would probably have become public long before it did.
- The idea that it was supposedly a ‘secret’ relationship would have been tested by trying to find out if anyone else knew about it, what they knew and what could be proven.
- The night away in a hotel would have taken on new significance and the police would have been alerted to it promptly (albeit that at first they would have been looking at the wrong hotel), the friends she was supposed to be with would have been questioned, and the CCTV would have been viewed in time to learn something from it. (In fact, if they were so worried about X before she disappeared, I refuse to believe that they didn’t have suspicions about the hotel stay at the time – and yet they say they didn’t and don’t seem to have thought about it even after she was gone.)
- They would not have told the police and media that things were completely normal, she was happy and unstressed, and her disappearance was a total mystery.
The fact that this narrative has changed greatly over the last two years imo bespeaks a process of adjustment that can be interpreted as a coping mechanism. By reframing X as a force of nature who corrupted Leah and turned her from a happy girl who was close to her family into a stressed and moody girl who told lies and eventually ran into trouble, they can cope with the feelings of guilt and helplessness that having a child go missing almost universally induces. Blaming the police for failing to evidence all these allegations and suppositions is another layer of self-protection.
So I think it’s simplistic to feel that people are accusing the Crouchers of ‘lying’, but I also think it’s demonstrable that two years on they are putting a gloss on the facts for their own purposes (ably abetted by the MK Courier, whose ulterior motive is their use of Leah's case as enduring clickbait).
That they might do so is completely understandable, but if we think that we have any value here at WS and any hope of getting to the truth when the police have apparently failed, then imo we do them a disservice if we allow ourselves to get sucked into uncritically repeating their assertions as if they were proven facts, when in reality most of them are not.
JMO
