And was it not Jodi's idea to meet up with him?
That was never ascertained and, like every other facet of this case, there is some ambiguity about what happened or what was supposed to happen. Luke claimed that Jodi was coming to over to Newbattle to meet him (which I don’t believe), but the Joneses said that Jodi indicated that she and Luke would be ‘mucking about up there/here’ (the inference being that they would be in Easthouses). I think the general consensus is that they normally would meet halfway on the Roan’s Dyke Path or that Luke would meet her at Easthouses and then they’d go wherever they had planned to go. Judith had stipulated that Jodi hadn’t to walk the path due to its seclusion, so it stands to reason that Luke likely met her at the Easthouses end so as to put her out of harm’s way (it was common knowledge that Jodi still sometimes walked the path on her own, despite her mother’s warnings). The thing that bamboozles me is that there doesn’t appear to have been any attempts made by either the defence or prosecution to obtain Luke & Jodi’s text exchanges between 1638 and up until she died. The text exchanges were deleted, but mobile phone operators retained the info for a year before completely erasing them so there was ample opportunity for the police and Luke’s legal team to do so (admittedly either of them had only about 2 months to obtain the texts and not a year, since Luke wasn’t arrested until April 2004, but given the potential evedential importance of the messages, then, it is surprising they never did this). Or maybe they did, but the it didn’t yield any results. Another bone of contention was the lack of cell site analysis, but, again, perhaps the police had done this and there were no conclusive results as the data couldn’t pinpoint exactly where a person was at a given time (the technology back then could only locate a person to the nearest few miles, which was useless); also, unfortunately, technology back in 2003/04 didn’t have GPS. (In the case of the defence, they were denied cell site analysis because the Legal Aid Board said it was too expensive.)