This is getting to be a true labor of love, this book. My family has been unbelievably helpful, understanding when I need to take the car out and retrace steps on back roads to figure some detail out. The neighbors on Estates Drive, the place in Ben Lomond where Asha's car was found, must think I am the crazy lady in the yellow Volkswagen who likes their street a lot. At some point, probably tomorrow, I am going to take a walk from the store to where Asha's car was found and see if McClish could have driven it to the place it was found, then retrieved his truck somehow.
There are some problems with this scenario. First, the store was still open on the Saturday night Asha disappeared; by Sunday, she had not shown up for work and people began to get worried about her. If her car were still in the parking lot when the store opened, it would have been noted by people who worked there. Could McClish have somehow moved it the day after the murder? He went to the dump around 8 am that day, and it is presumed he also dumped the murder weapon and the tarp there. It is doubtful to me that he would have gone over to the market that Sunday and moved Asha's car at the same time, because the market opens at seven a.m.
Residents of Estates Drive told law enforcement that the car had been parked there (Estates and Brookside drives) since people woke up on Sunday morning. Curiously, I don't know if anything in the missing persons fliers mentioned her car (you'd think they'd mention something like that...the car was not found by law enforcement until Tuesday). My question is how McClish got the car over to Brookside and Estates, presumably that night (his DNA was found on the wheel and he pointedly made a statement from jail to his wife that he drove Asha's car the day she went missing, to put air in its tires, probably an alibi). The Ben Lomond Market was open til ten Saturday night, at least an hour after the murder, and the risk of someone seeing him fetch the car from the lot would be too great. McClish was home that night well before the market closed.
This is a small mystery I've been thinking about. The scenarios I have are thus:
1) McClish slipped out of his house somehow after his family was asleep and moved the car in the very early morning hours on Sunday (he could easily have parked someplace and walked over to the market--presumably he had been able to get a key to Asha's car somehow, though they found one with her discarded backpack--he may have stolen the spare key).
2) Somehow Asha was coerced or otherwise drove the car herself to Brookside and Estates--but it is one of the most inconvenient places to park in that area, with barely any turnouts. Besides, McClish's DNA was found on the steering wheel. I would think the only reason she would have gotten into her car would be to get the hell away from McClish and she sure as heck would not have ended up in such an unlikely spot. It's heavily populated with houses everywhere; an altercation would have been heard. No blood was found in the car.
3) McClish somehow, in the hour and fifteen minutes he had to do what he did to Asha, wherever he did that, go up and down Love Creek Road, used some bit of that time to park near the market, park his truck (presumably where it would not be found, and by this time, it was full of DNA evidence from Asha, by the way), get in Asha's car, move it to Brookside, then hike back to his truck, all around eight-thirty pm on a Saturday night in the San Lorenzo Valley. with traffic on Highway Nine, the market still open, etc. I've been to the market around that time when there's no one around, but still, it seems nearly impossible that nobody would see him.
4) He had an accomplice who moved her car (somewhat plausible if he swore a friend or relative to secrecy and that person absolutely wore gloves)--I think this is not totally implausible, but surely it would have ruined the DNA evidence they found.
Of all these, I think some scenario around option one likely happened. If my readers have any other ideas, feel free to chime in. This part is important because it helps me establish a clear timeline for the murder and most especially, where exactly this man took Asha to end her life.
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