Maybe. The average homicide clearance rate in the US is only around 60%. But that includes a lot of killings where nobody really cares about anyone involved. This was a much higher profile crime so it would get a lot more attention. But there are high profile cases that get a lot of (at least local) attention that don't ever get solved either.
It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.
Sorry, to make my point more clear: They knew the identity of the killer, and this is part of how they found his dead body. If he hadn't killed himself, they would have found him regardless, since they knew who he was, and knew the license plate of the car he was driving.
I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS.
I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.
Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.
I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely.
You could figure it out, but if you're the one getting sued, it's going to cost you a lot of money to pay their lawyers to prove that you didn't have the rights, and someone else did.
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