FACT: Only people with absolutely no intelligence think it was staged.

"Well, Aaron looks like he's lying on his initial interview. Although I'm no expert, I'm pretty sure that all behavioural experts would agree with me on this. And also listening to her proof of life message and seeing her door-cam footage when she comes home , you have to admit looks and sounds very unlikely to be coming from a person who's been kidnapped."

I agree with all of that, but the evidence indicates otherwise. Do you agree or not?

Aaron would only look like he's lying to people with no critical thinking skills.

Yes, it totally makes sense to accuse him, because it is true for most cases (look e.g. on other docu series on Netflix). But without any proof, I don't see why they basically directly moved to "tell us where you buried her". If he killed her, they will anyway get him, so no need to pressure him and if not, they just lose (in this case 2.5m USD). There was no evidence he would run (why would he come up with the kidnapping in that case anyway), so it was just stupid investigation.

My finely tuned critical thinking skills kept me from thinking it was staged.

For one thing, you have the benefit of hindsight - now, I'm not defending these people, but the unusual nature of this incident clearly indicates the difficulty in investigating what are known as "unequivocal crimes" and not even considering that aspect, especially very early on, shows exactly your lack of knowledge about such things.

One thing that I don't think they touched on was testing the boyfriend for substances early on to verify he had been drugged. That would have been helpful to start piecing together that the boyfriend was telling the truth, which could have explained the low-key 911 call he made.

Not only that, I believe if you played this documentary to quite a few investigators and only showed the first episode, (the first episode was so well crafted to indicate a staged crime for the purpose of building tension in the documentary), that the majority of them would lean toward a staging just because of the unusual nature of the initial start of this crime.

I think this documentary also revealed the inexperience of a possibly boutique type police agency more apt at investigating lesser crimes and not the more serious and complex investigations.