MOO.
I am surprised so many folks are convinced that the tow truck driver’s account is legitimate, but think he must have just been there on a different day.
Call me crazy, but my spidey sense (a.k.a. MOO) feels that his whole story is suspect. They begin his interview by saying he is a long-time supporter of AWP. That right there is just kind of odd (he’s supposedly offering a tip, but also reinforcing that they’re famous… just a thing that makes me stroke my chin questioningly).
But the thing that really leapt out at me is the level of detail he is supposedly able to remember about that service call, but also the things he is not able to recall. He referred to his work by saying he works for a roadside assistance program. Would that be a roadside assistance company? A towing company? He didn’t say the name of the company (which they would then redact/bleep out—he was careful not to name them… so he was coached prior to his taped interview.) Program is a weird word choice, to my ear (MOO).
Next, we have to talk about how the people he described helping were wearing the exact clothing that Jagger and Kate were wearing in their interview with MSM (the one where Jagger says he expects Kiely will be found safe, and Kate says everything was normal, and that she and KR made créme brûlée that day). He goes so far as to describe the black flat top San Francisco baseball cap with brown hair sticking out the sides, and the female as wearing a light grey sweatshirt.
My issues are twofold:
1) this guy is delivering all of this information to the AWP Crew (in the Best Buy parking lot, no less) about 2 weeks after the fact, he could easily have seen the MSM interview and then just made up the story. We have no log of the call, no video, and no acknowledgement from LE that this “tip” was ever called in. MOO/YMMV, but it smells fishy to me.
2) If I were AWP in fact most interested in the truth above all else, and I want to be sensitive to all involved, I’d want to run down the facts of that interview and double check with LE to make damn sure it all happened exactly as he said it did before using it as the opening hook in my mini-documentary on the search & recovery effort. After watching the video again, I think this is the sticking point for me (this and the recorded phone call from when they informed the family). They seem to want to err on the side that favors “murder?” and clicks, rather on ensuring accuracy and in publicizing what is most likely to be true. That bugs me.
I’ll walk back some of my (admittedly sharp) criticism and say that had they left out this sus-as-heck tow truck driver interview and the informing-the-family call, the remainder of the film was actually OK. Sorry if I offended folks with my criticism of AWP—I’m glad they found her and laud their work, even if I object to some of their tactics.
(I still find it impossible to believe that he called in a whopper of a tip like this to LE and that they somehow overlooked it.)
Again, MOO.
