In my second and less flippant reply to your post, LOL:
It may not have been such a weirdly long interview. I imagine a group of reporters standing around waiting for something to happen, finding few to talk to who aren't either not connected at all or too busy/close-mouthed to talk to the media at that moment, might keep running the camera and then later pick out their soundbite.
Remember -- when it first aired locally, they only used a tiny clip of the long interview we later saw. (A kind of tricky clip, too, because it was shortly after the reporter disclosed that a body had been found, when SM was still looking "distraught" as Patterson would later say, yet there was no explanation about this accompanying the clip, that the interview had begun as a talk with a neighbor about a missing person and in the middle switched to a reveal that a body had been found.)
In this brief first look at SM, he was saying something about "we pulled up her email", but there was no real explanation about the group of friends going in her apartment as a group, looking for her, checking on her. I remember thinking, "You read her emails...?!!" And of course that kind of left a strange impression, what with no explanation of the circumstances.
It was quite a spell before the full-length interview was even made public, remember? I think, by that time, it was nearly impossible for anyone to watch it with a totally open mind. JMO
