I have the Today Show on in the background while I’m getting ready for work in the morning and they are absolutely obsessed about this story. Apparently, a local shop owner had a surveillance tape of mom and some unidentified dude buying wine 6 hours before the kid went missing.
Uh oh. That doesn’t sound good.
She was also buying baby food, apparently. Whether or not that helps her case, I do not know. This was also immediately after a short period where the police announced that the parents stopped cooperating with the investigation. . . then a few days later, the parents changed their minds.
Unidentified man?
Uh-oh.
The woman was hanging out with some dude–not her husband–and got wasted.
While she was supposed to be watching her kids.
All on the night when her baby up and disappears. First time her husband works the night shift.
Yeah, not seeing why anyone would be a jerk for being suspicious. This smells really bad.
While the odds are still not in the mother’s favor, the admission that she was drunk does offer another plausible explanation for why the door was unlocked (i.e., mom was too drunk to lock it) and why she didn’t hear anyone entering or leaving the house.
I don’t know. I think that story might have been told too late.
I’m pretty sure the man has been identified as the wife’s brother.
The store clerk who sold the mother the baby stuff and the wine said that she’d seen the man who was accompanying her before, with the mom, or with the couple. So this guy is someone known to both the husband and wife, not just some suspicious stranger.
She still shouldn’t have been drinking like that while in charge of the kids.
Not her husband NOR the man she is engaged to who was working his first night shift.
While I’m not convinced of the mother’s innocence, I am also struck by how many people buy into whatever crap the police spokesperson “reveals.” Right from the start, they wanted to pin it on the mother, but apparently they don’t have anything on her. So they let slip that she failed a polygraph test–you know, those things that aren’t admissible in court because of their unreliability. I would think that a hysterical mother would make getting an accurate reading difficult. And then they said that the parents were no longer cooperating. The parents counter that they never stopped cooperating, but the police are in their home flat-out accusing the mother of killing her child–don’t know about you, but I’m not likely to cooperate with someone who is calling me a murderer. I would probably get a lawyer too. Then they leak this bogus story about Mom out with ANOTHER MAN!!! Except the other man turns out to be her brother. She’s gone from being a liar, to an uncooperative liar, to an uncooperative lying slut, and now she’s an uncooperative lying drunk slut.
All the while the FBI is searching fields and abandoned houses and abandoned wells…and then there was that one quiet little report of a baby suddenly appearing in California matching the description. That little blip faded quickly as the next load from the police spokesperson came down. Maybe Mom did kill her baby, but we just don’t know what happened yet. We used to believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty. I realize that the cops’ job is to get a confession and wrap this up, but slandering a woman without hard evidence USED to be against the code.
I heard she kissed the handyman behind the gym during lunch. She must be guilty.
Have you a link?
Thanks
From the USA Today article:
:dubious:
So… her fear is that she’ll never know what happened, but she doesn’t want to ask perhaps the only two people in the world who might have some idea what happened… because she doesn’t want to “put them through anything else”.
Okay.
I mean, I can understand that she wouldn’t want to traumatize her kids by subjecting them to police questioning. But why can’t she ask? The kids say, “Mommy, we heard stuff that night,” and she can’t say, “Oh? When?” Personally, I think it would be more traumatizing for a kid to *want *to tell what they know and be ignored, than to be asked some gentle, non-intrusive questions by their own mom, especially if they’re reassured that there’s no right or wrong answer, and it’s okay to say “I don’t remember”, etc. They don’t need to testify in court, for pete’s sake, but if they can lend any credence to what she’s said, I’d think she’d jump at the chance.
It’s just not plausible to me. What is plausible is that she wants to claim that someone other than her can back up her story, but also wants to make that claim unverifiable. Hence, she says her kids heard something, but no one can find out whether they actually said that, and if so, exactly what they heard.
ETA: To be clear, I’m not saying she’s guilty. I’m saying that I think she’s probably making up the bit about her other kids hearing something so that she can look less guilty.
I really hope theres a Gone Baby Gone situation happening here and a relative or someone this waste of life mother knows took the kid to protect it.
No, I don’t. It was a radio report during the first few days. It went away quietly and wasn’t mentioned again. Maybe it checked out as nothing, I don’t know. It just struck me at the time that, although very improbable I’m sure, it was just as plausible as that this very ordinary-looking mother in a quiet neighborhood suddenly killed her sweet, clearly well-loved little baby. She could be guilty as sin, or someone could have come into their house and taken the baby. No one knows.
On top of that, this whole area north of the Missouri river is a very quiet, low-crime part of town. Police officers working this area see drug abuse and domestic violence occasionally, but not kidnappings. Vandalism (mostly involving mailboxes), not hi-tech burglaries. Maybe they’re totally on top of this case, but then again, maybe a stranger abduction is so far out of their expertise that they’d just rather it be Mom. I’d rather hear hard evidence, not slander. And the whole thing with the “boyfriend” who turned out to be her brother was reprehensible.
Isn’t this what happened in the Elizabeth Smart case? I don’t understand it either. In the Smart case the younger daughter eventually revealed the identity of the kidnapper. I don’t see any reason she couldn’t have done that earlier. In this case, at least for a few days it may have been difficult to create a stress free situation to talk to the kids, but by now I wonder myself. But this is not evidence of guilt.
The reason the younger sister (Mary Katherine) didn’t report the identity of her sister’s kidnapper is because she couldn’t remember who the voice of her sister’s kidnapper belonged to even though she knew she recognized the voice from somewhere. Per wikipedia:
And it still took them several months to track down Elizabeth Smart after “Emmanuel” was identified.
Apparently she could remember.
:rolleyes: Maybe I wasn’t clear: She recognized the voice but didn’t put it together with the owner; it took her several months to realize the voice belonged to “Emanuel”. If you go back and take a look at the Wikipedia article and read some of Mary Katherine’s interviews she and her family were very cooperative and I believe Mary Katherine was interviewed. In fact in the same Wikipedia article there is a brief mention of the fact that the family had to try and convince the police investigators to follow up on the lead Mary Katherine provided.
I only mentioned it to clarify that the Smart family’s (specifically Mary Katherine’s) participation in the investigation of Elizabeth’s kidnapping seems very different from the family and siblings involved in this case.
I’m sure these families aren’t very similar. And I’m not really making a comparison between the cases so much as a comparison of the way the media covers these stories. There seemed to be an unusual level of protection around Mary Katherine, when she had been a witness to the events, based on the statements made on national television.
So the actual events don’t matter, it’s the appearance of the circumstances based on media reporting that I’m talking about.
Now I would think most young children would only recognize in any way a small number of adults, but maybe not in this case. And it’s generally considered in investigations that a person’s recollection does not improve over time, but maybe that would not apply to a 9 year old child either.
In any event, I don’t believe in either of these cases, or most others, that you can use the actions and words of the parents and family to determine their involvement, unless they tell blatant lies material to the abduction, or make an admission. But it would have been easy to make the Smart family look like suspects if the media or police wanted to.