Based on further information Benton has gotten from the brother William, it would seem that Elisa was friendly with Theo and likely had no idea that he was obsessed with her. Apparently after he returned to Cambridge a year ago he suggested that she should come here and try to get her foot in the door as an actress. She could stay with him while she interned, and she did for several weeks, living in a back room and helping with cooking and other chores.

Then she met Chris Peabody and soon after moved in with him, in part to get away from Theo, who by all accounts she was fond of but found increasingly annoying and overbearing. She thought him peculiar but likely never imagined that he was spying on her, stalking her, becoming increasingly enraged when he saw her with the young man she’d met and was falling for.

It’s occurred to me that Theo may have been watching when Elisa rode her bicycle to the Faculty Club. I remember her kissing Chris Peabody on the sidewalk while Benton and I were there. It may very well be that Theo had been engaging in dry runs, practicing his drone maneuvers with her being none the wiser, and as she was riding through the park he may have decided to scare her. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. But he did.

He wouldn’t have shown up at the scene and taken the neckerchief or anything else from her body if he hadn’t intended to kill her. The blue paisley-printed bit of cloth was a souvenir. Maybe Theo would have taken other items had Anya and Enya not appeared, and I wonder how long he might have hidden in the bushes watching them. It wasn’t a deer that startled the twins. That’s not what they heard running away in the dark.

There’s much we’ll never know unless Theo tells all. Or maybe his many recordings will offer an explanation. Benton believes the former MIT professor had been following Elisa and Molly remotely with his airborne camera. If so, there should be graphic proof of his voyeurism, dry runs, his kills. We’ll get a peephole view into his violent sexual fantasies.

Benton and his colleagues will spend a lot of time going through boxes of carefully labeled audio-video storage devices. Apparently there are years and years of them inside Theo’s landfill of a house, and it’s a good thing he can’t resist his compulsions. That may seem strange to say since people are dead, but many more would be had he been more disciplined.