Talk:Penpal/@comment-25160124-20140710000917/@comment-24831604-20140801044924

1. & 2. The narrator's new location was either unknown to the man, or too hard/risky to access. So he settled for Josh (who still lived in the same area) as a "replacement" and tried for two years to turn Josh into the narrator. Eventually he realized that it wasn't enough, but either the narrator was too big to kidnap at that point, or had matured enought that the man was no longer attracted to him. However, he still "loved" the narrator, so he spent his last few weeks pretending to be Veronica so he could have a relationship with him. After going on the "date", he may have realized that he was just deluding himself and that he would never get the object of his desire, so he opted to commit murder-suicide. He may have originally intended to bury himself with the narrator, but for whatever reason that didn't work so he went with the closest he could get to the real thing.

3. That's a matter of opinion, so there really isn't anything I can say to it.

4. RobbMarley already covered that.

5. I don't know what the police could actually do in that situation. Sure, you have evidence that there was someone there at one point, but since the man had left there would be no way to actually find him. The mother likely realized this, but she didn't know who was living there, whether they were a threat, or (more importantly) whether they were going to come back - therefore it would make sense for her first priority to be getting her child to a safer place. She would have no way of knowing that this was the man who had murdered their neighbor, and while she may have suspected she had no way to tell for sure if this was the same guy who had been taking the pictures of her kid. It could have easily just been a drifter.