People who do horrible things to other people normally don’t like to leave evidence of their presence at the scene of the crime for obvious reasons. They will make sure to take anything they brought with them, put anything back that they moved and will generally attempt to leave the scene the way they found it, or at least the way it should look, given the scenario they’re trying to push. If someone did murder these students, then the obvious scenario they were going for was that the students’ death was the result of an accident or nature. Hence, an abandoned tent, sitting on the side of the mountain for several weeks, was the most believable scenario and least nefarious one they could recreate. Why they would go leaving their shoes behind or placing a flashlight on a pile on snow on the top of the tent, which would create questions in anyone’s mind, is beyond me. And they had weeks to clean up after themselves. Furthermore, even if people were there, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they had anything to do with what happened. There are other reasons a person may have found the tent and not said anything about it.
For instance, I will admit that the guide telling Sharavin about this place with a steep cliff or something and then Sharavin and his companion going to find it only to discover the tent when they did, sounds very contrived, as if the man knew it was there, and was wanting Sharavin to find it without revealing that he already knew about it. Of course, that’s just my “read” on the situation. Even if true, though, it does sort of make sense that he would engineer such a scenario to deflect suspicion from himself, even if he wasn’t involved in the hikers’ death at all. Sharavin was a friend of the Dyatlov group, or at least an acquaintance who was concerned. Also, his time between when the group disappeared and they found the tent was probably better accounted for, meaning he had a better alibi. And he probably didn’t have a criminal record. The same might not be able to be said for the guide, or indeed many of the other people who might have come across the tent in the three weeks it sat there. The authorities were already suspicious of the Mansi, and that’s even before they really had anything to be suspicious about.
And if you’re argument against that is that it’s callous and selfish to not report an abandoned tent to the authorities the moment you find it because people’s lives are at stake, well, I hate to break it to you, but there are far more callous and selfish people in this world than there are murderers and rapists. Of course, I’m not implying that any specific person is like that or even that it was a factor in this case. I’ve never seen any evidence that’s convinced me that anyone found the tent and didn’t report it. And Sharavan’s vaguely suspicious story about the guide doesn’t count as evidence either. It’s just that for some reason, not only do people tend to fail to take the logistics of the whole thing into consideration, but they immediately decide on the most nefarious and sometimes fantastic scenario possible before ruling out the mundane and the common. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There just isn’t that in this case for would-be attackers leaving ice picks, flashlights, and footwear all over the place when they had three weeks to make sure they didn’t do that.
As for Luda’s underwear, it doesn’t really follow naturally that she was raped. Despite the arguments to the contrary, I’m still of the opinion that her main problem on the trip was PMS. Women can sometimes have the symptoms of a menstruation cycle without little to no discharge, and it’s a highly underreported problem among female athletes that their menstruation cycles are anything but normal or regular. That would also explain the discharge in her vagina.