What a frustrating case lol.
I want to consider 4 scenarios for discussion:
1) No foul play: Barbara leaves town and asks Jim to never tell a soul
2) No foul play: Barbara jumps off the bluff when Jim's back is turned
3) Foul Play: Jim kills Barbara very early in their trip before he gets to the hiking area.
4) Foul Play: Jim kills Barbara at the hiking area at the peak by throwing her over the bluff shortly after Barbara and Jim encounter the two young men.
None of these make me feel confident enough to say that they're for sure what happened but to some degree one or two of them in particular seem more feasible than the other two.
The only other scenario not mentioned here would involve the two young men killing or at least abducting Barbara without Jim knowing somehow and without the work crew seeing them take her or transport her body. I just don't see how this is possible as I understand the path from the hiking entrance to the cliff was very straightforward and there wasn't much by way of an alternative route into or out of the trail location. If someone knows the area well and can tell us otherwise please do.
1) No Foul Play: Barbara leaves town and asks Jim to never tell a soul:
I mean based on what we know in terms of evidence left behind this might seem like an appealing answer, however, when you consider if she did this, she may have left too much evidence behind for it to be realistic (passport, funds, beloved pets, etc) it just doesn't seem very likely. I mean you could make the argument here that if someone wanted to disappear badly enough they might justify giving up their possessions and identity but even then it puts Jim in a really bad spot. Why would he agree to something like that when it could and most likely would ruin his life? Hard to envision.
2) No foul play: Barbara jumps off the bluff when Jim's back is turned:
For a number of reasons I give this scenario a higher likelihood of being possible than most probably would or apparently do. First, in terms of what we know or at least we're told from Jim we either believe him or we don't. If we don't trust Jim and we think he's lying then there's a whole list of questions we'll get to because as someone once told me, a lie is as good as the truth if you know what to look for. So if Jim is lying he's doing it in a particular way that would point us in the direction of the truth. If he's not lying however then we're talking Jim at his word and when he says she was 30 feet behind him he turned his back and she was gone she had to have jumped, because the shale on the mountain made too much noise for any of the proposed scenarios. If an animal had attacked her, you'd hear her scream, you'd have blood and her items left behind etc. Same with her being abducted somehow, at the very least you're going to hear her being walked off by her assailant(s.) There's simply no way Jim misses any of these scenarios. However, Barbara was only a few feet away from jumping which would only require a number of steps (potentially not as much noise), and all the problems that are posed by the other scenarios if we are to assume Jim is being honest, are addressed. As to why her body was never recovered, that's anyone's guess. It could have been dragged to a different location at the base of the mountain after the fact by animals. It also could simply have been missed. I know they put a lot of effort and resources into searching the area and I don't think they didn't try, it seems they absolutely did. However, if there's one thing I've learned from things like this is, unless you're an expert on a given matter yourself, don't just assume when someone says something was done, the fact that it was done is proof of a result one way or another. In other words, I'm not sure what a search like that entails, so I'm just not comfortable with saying "they searched everywhere and found nothing, therefore she wasn't there." I am only going to assume "they searched for her and found nothing."
Additional information regarding Barbara's mh (which we are not entitled to nor should we be) would be helpful in this regard. Donna, Carl's cousin seemed to believe that Barbara could have in fact done something to cause her own demise that day apparently. What was her reasoning for thinking this? Was she depressed? Was she on medication for depression? If so were there any recent changes? Carl seemed to immediately refute the notion that she was depressed but I have to laugh at the explanations provided to support "she was learning to ski and was planning a trip to Mexico." That means nothing. While it may be a little inappropriate to speculate on Barbara, you can't help but wonder if this was to be the scenario, similar to the previous one, Barbara chosing to do this would undoubtedly put Jim in an awfully unfair circumstance. If Barb had decided to do this, why not just do it on a day by herself? Why decide to do end your life and simultaneously potentially destroy someone else's and traumatize them? Because of this I feel that this scenario while it works for a number of reasons is nonetheless still unlikely.
3) Foul Play: Jim kills Barbara very early in their trip before he gets to the hiking area.
While I recognize that many people believe this theory has legs, and LE themselves even allude to the idea that nobody outside of Jim can actually prove Barbara was there at the hiking trail that day, I actually rank this one even below the previous two mentioned scenarios thus far. If this is what indeed happened then, obviously Jim is lying. If Jim is lying than it kinda sorta implies he's good at it (going on 2 decades now, w/o arrest for Barbara's murder and largely off LE's radar) and in conjunction with his planning or at least reacting, he's a skilled enough liar and killer to where his behavior and actions in those regards should at least make logical sense. This idea that he kills her very early on and then goes to the trail to potentially be seen alone doesn't make logical sense in terms of the limitations in the timeline nor in terms of the thought process from someone who is arguably good at it. I think if he's lying it's only after the point where he sees the two young men.
Barbara and Jim left Carl's home at 0845 (ish.) It took about 60 minutes give or take to drive from his home to the Bear Creek Overlook entrance area. At some point "shortly after" Jim and Barbara arrive (latest would be 945-1000 ish) the construction crew arrives and observes Jim's rental vehicle and an older, tan colored Chevy Blazer parked at the entrance.That's really all we know for certain about Jim's whereabouts until he emerges from the Overlook and asks the workers if they saw a woman matching Barbra s description. I've never been able to find out when the construction crew arrives but we'll call it the hour of 10 am. So we can give Jim an hour and 45 minutes generously to kill Barbara and presumably dispose of her body in a manner where he has no visible scratches or scapes on his body and make it to the Overlook entrance, in an area/region he was not from nor by all accounts should he be particularly familiar with. This is very rare for killers to in fact kill outside of their areas of familiarity. People will always bring up the argument of Israel Keyes as an sk who would travel far and wide for his prey but Keyes was also notorious for traveling to these locations months and even years in advance to plan these murders, even going as far to leave "kill kits" in preparation. So as rare of a killer as Keyes was, not only is comparing him to someone who most likely is a one and done situation (if Jim is in fact guilty here), saying Keyes just randomly strolled into whatever town and just picked locations and victims on the spot without careful planning and attention is not accurate.
Furthermore, I fail to see the logic of someone in Jim's position if you assume he killed and then disposed of her prior to entering the trail himself, then wanting to actually go to the overlook, post-mutder, where he could actually be witnessed, making his way up the way up the mountain, alone. I fail to see the logic in that move. Now granted, there's nothing that says a killer has go to do every single thing by the book or in a logical manner. Many times it appears as if these types do things that make no sense at all.That's true. But this is also someone who has since evaded suspicion from LE for almost two decades. It just doesn't seem like someone who can presumably concoct these levels of effective types of lies/manipulation required to throw LE off, would decide to go to the overlook and risk being seen alone by someone on the way up, when you can't 100% predict if someone is going to be there. Its not clear to me if the two young men who the blazer belonged to were there before or after Jim's car arrived but even seeing a parked car before getting out isn't a guarantee someone didn't arrive there by foot or other means. For Jim to have risked being seen alone wether he was or wasn't seen seems too risky imo. I don't put a lot of weight into this idea that he killed her in such a short amount of time and then decided to hit the trails. What would be the purpose even? To be seen emerging alone? So conversely just like Jim couldn't predict if someone would see him on the way up alone he likewise couldn't predict if someone would see him come back down alone. When Jim arrived the construction crew was not there.
I also don't know if I put a lot of weight into Barb's scent not being picked up by the dogs, as another WS member pointed out, scent dogs can be very valuable but it really kinda depends on a number of factors, which I have no idea if they are or are not relevant but similar to not being involved with the search or knowledge of what any of that even entails, I'm not comfortable saying the full significance or implications of the dogs not finding her scent there that day.
4) Foul Play: Jim kills Barbara at the hiking area at the peak by throwing her over the bluff shortly after Barbara and Jim encounter the two young men.
As crazy as these all invariably are, if you're going with "Jim lied" this is the most plausible of these two imo and actually overall. I'll explain why. Not saying Jim killed her as a fact but if he did, he's talking about it in a particular way that could telegraph some answers.
Again, its unclear wether the two men with the black and white collie dog and Chevy Blazer mentioned by the work crew and also acknowledged by Jim were there before Barbara and he arrived or the came shortly after (but prior to the work crew arriving.) But there's no reason to believe Jim lied about his brief interaction with them which he explicitly stated was alongside Barbara, because as many people have pointed out, why would he lie and say he encountered them with Barbara only for them to potentially come forward later on and point out that he was not with Barbara when they saw him. If he is somehow lying about Barbara being with him he must be the luckiest person on earth because while they have yet to come forward, he had absolutely no way of being able to predict that would be the case. So for him to try and lie about their exchanging pleasantries seems highly unlikely imo.
Per Jim's telling of the events that occured, he gives a pretty wide range of time (1130-1300) for when Barb disappeared, which I have to say for someone who knows exactly the distance she was from him when she vanished to the degree of certainty Jim claims, to give such a broad window of time it occurred in is a little sus, if I do say so myself. But this all boils down to the shale on the mountain. Jim could be trying to say Barbara jumped off the cliff without actual saying she jumped off the cliff. It sounds so mysterious but what if Jim set this up with the expectation that they would find Barbara? Lets say he is in fact lying. Why would he still insist he was so close to her? Is it because the spot at the base of the mountain that corresponds to where he shoved her from has to be within a reasonable proximity of the place he actually knows she started her descent? If you think about it like that it starts to make more sense why he may have initially told LE she just vanished, if he has to make it appear she just erratically decided to jump. Also is the wide range timeframe Jim gives LE for her disappearance somehow related to him not being sure about the proximity of the young men after they had moved along the path? What I mean is, did something occur where maybe before she was killed if that's what happened, to where he's maybe unsure the exact positioning of the two men along the trail to where something that happened that they might have saw or heard that he wanted to give a more broad range just in case?
Also while I'm certainly not saying Jim did throw her over the cliff, similar to the theory that she may have been responsible for her own death, both these scenarios are certainly the "cleanest" in terms of being able to be swiftly executed and at the same time being capable of explaining the lack of any sound, blood, evidence (backpack) left behind with a simple shove (or if she jumped same concept.)
Thoughts?
