We lost our first chicken

and I cried a lot. I felt terrible and responsible because I got in the habit of letting them go free range while I was at work. Dave came home and found it and instead of burying it, he threw it in the trash can! NOT a proper country burial but he is from town so I guess he never had the number of back yard funerals we had growing up. I was not about to go dig through our giant trashcan so I let it go...I am letting it go. So the thing that was the saddest to me was that when I checked the coops to see which bird it was, I was missing Ms. Prissy. The cool thing about free range chickens is that they can go free range all day and at dusk, they put themselves in their appropriate house very reliably. So I was sad b/c Ms. Prissy was the first bird we had and she is special and we think about 5 years old. Unheard of in the poultry industry. I told everyone about Ms. Prissy's murderous departure and yesterday I let the chickens out and noticed that one of the chickens had something on their leg (Ms. Prissy wore a metal leg band-she came with it). I looked closer and it WAS Ms. Prissy and her leg band. I had erroneously identified the chicken that was killed. So after a little detective work, here is what happened:

Dave came home from work and found all of the chickens (but one) under the porch. :(
I checked the coops and noticed Ms. Prissy was not in the coop she lives in (She is a silkie and goes in the coop with two older birds that do not look like her). When I saw three silkies in one coop and the two birds that do not look like the Silkies sans Ms Prissy, I assumed that Ms. Prissy was the victim. So what has happened, was one of the younger Silkies (I think it was Fuzzward) was killed and Ms. Prissy moved into the coop of chickens that looked like her. I have has these birds for over a year, Was MS.Prissy looking for a vacancy to open up so she could be among birds that looked like her? I wish I had a chicken behavioral expert to analyze this for me.