Okay, so let's look at this list.
If you hike regularly, you will see SAR in action sooner or later. It happens. People go missing and have accidents in the mountains a lot.
It is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that people think she meant this literally. She was looking towards France. He was in France. It's not unusual or mysterious, it's normal to say, "teehee I can see you from here!" I've sent similar messages to friends in Mallorca when hiking. This did not lead them to swim to the peninsula and murder me.
This is particularly clear when she did this TWICE - once on social media, once in a Whatsapp message. We can be certain that the first time she was NOT literally able to see him, which indicates that using "I can see you" to mean looking from a distance in your general direction was something she did.
Irrelevant.
In fact, if you were going to hatch a cunning plan to acquire transport from...somewhere, sneak across France under lockdown, speedwalk up a mountain, murder your partner, speedwalk back down and sneak back to your previous location, you'd probably NOT want to draw the attention of the media in advance, right?
Because he thought she was on a 3-day hike.
This is not the smoking gun people think it is. Innocent people fearing the worst also use the past tense.
This is an oxymoron - either he was searching alone or he was leading SAR on a wild goose chase, but both cannot be true.
a) They're a charity, not a PR firm. They're not "controlling the narrative" (this thread's favourite phrase).
b) The claim that they were on a break comes from a single source, Laura Adomaityte. It could be true - or it could have been lost in translation; between English and Spanish, it is easy to mistake "we're [physically] apart, and I don't know when I'm [physically] going back to him" (true at the time) and "we're [emotionally] apart, and I don't know when I'm [emotionally] going back to him".
In contrast to Laura Adomaityte's statement, we have the words of Esther's aunt, speaking on behalf of her father, who said Esther had phoned her dad to tell him she would soon be going home to Dan; we have the words of Esther's long-term close friend Phil Ash, who said she told him the same; we have Esther's own social media posts, thanking Dan for helping her become more confident and imagining him alongside her; we have a selection of Esther's Whatsapp messages to Dan, full of "love you" and "xx". Notably, these were all AFTER her conversation with Laura Adomaityte.
NO OTHER WITNESS has said they had broken up. All witnesses report that she was happy and in good spirits.
Deliberately placed...by an animal or snowmelt. Not remotely unusual in the mountains.
Dan found her body because he was looking for it. The SAR operation happened in winter; realistically, it was not going to involve combing every centimetre of the area, due to weather conditions and the sad fact that if you have an accident alone in the Pyrenees in winter, you will die quickly. SAR focus their efforts on the living.
Dan continued to search the mountains for months. Nobody else was searching at that time.
Maybe she stashed them somewhere, deciding she didn't need them and wanted to lighten her load. Maybe they were dislodged when she fell or after she died. Those tents fold up very small. Could be wedged down the side of a rock, in a crevasse, etc.
...for a charity. In memory of Esther. A charity she had previously raised funds for. How the duck is this considered a red flag?
Finally, as for the much-discussed quote about hatred and loathing...it was in the context of telling a story that ran, essentially, "we were stressed and miserable, and then we bought a camper van and became happy and fell in love with each other again."
I get that this thread is just endless searching for examples of confirmation bias to support your pet theory, but come on.
