Mr. Ballin

Hayward nodded.

He had seen the note.

The BYU police had given it to him.

It did seem to be from Barbara, telling her roommates she was leaving town to be with people who she fit in with.

But the note was kind of vague, and Hayward really wasn't sure what to make of it just yet.

You know, it could be a suicide note, or it could be something entirely ordinary.

And the truth was, he wasn't actually even sure that Barbara had really written the letter.

Maybe her killer had written the letter.

Maybe whoever murdered Barbara was attempting to make her disappearance look like a suicide or maybe imply that she had run away in the hopes that police would never find her body.

And so Hayward had sent the letter off to a handwriting expert to see what they thought.

Now, Hayward asked Jerry about his relationship with Barbara, and Jerry explained that the two of them hung out a ton and she had gravitated towards him since she felt sort of unwelcome at school and around her roommates, who didn't really like her because she wasn't religious like they were.

Jerry also told Hayward that Barbara had made the conflict with her roommates much worse by intentionally saying sacrilegious things in order to freak them out.

So he said there was a lot of tension between them, and it had gotten so bad that at one point he had tried to find Barbara another place to live.

This made Hayward perk up.

I mean, knowing that Barbara had a potential domestic conflict was an interesting lead.

Even though a group of young, devout Mormon women were not necessarily obvious murder suspects, it was definitely worth looking into.

Maybe one of them had been so horrified and outraged by Barbara's teasing that they had snapped and tried to hurt her.

Hayward didn't have any other questions for Jerry, so he stood up and told him he could go.

He wasn't ready to eliminate anybody as a suspect just yet, but so far, Jerry seemed pretty unlikely.

He had an alibi, and he was also the one who reported Barbara missing.