Unless there was a reason to believe they were related, I wouldn't apologize to a broken clock.

There are two types of broken clocks. One is always suspicious, the other thinks nothing ever happens. One is more often right than the other, but both are equally broken.

The arguments against seemed to show the weakness of frequentists in practical deduction.. It certainly could have been a domestic where the police already knew but weren't communicating it but otherwise most suggestions didn't match the statistics of the specific demographic/locations to compete with the anomaly of a total AWOL with good luck, nothing to lose and a connection to top academia who wasn't dead or in jail.