I think to say that she was LYING would be a very simplistic explanation as to why IMO, I think it is most probable that the guy isn't a viable lead and/or doesn't exist. Here are some things that make me go hmm:
1. Though LE has ruled nothing out entirely, stranger abduction is the least likely scenario. From my perspective, LE has ONE motive and that is to find the toddler. I am not buying into any of the spec that the sheriff is stupid, cavalier or mishandled the case. For reasons stated here and likely for other reasons that we are not privy to, he does not believe abduction is a real possibility.
2. Though the parents believed that DeOrr was abducted, they didn't think to mention the one suspicious person creepily staring at their son just a couple hours before he went missing. UNTIL the PI came in trying to prove out their abduction theory.
3. We don't know what JM said to the PI. We know how the PI, on a mission to prove out abduction, relayed her story.
3. There is such thing as magical thinking. If the parents' last hope for finding the toddler alive requires him to have been abducted, their minds might be playing tricks on them. They might want desperately to make some guy who glanced at the family be THE ONE.
4. They have been under undue pressure from crazy backwards-recording SM people claiming that they did terrible things to their son. It might be human nature to try to distract the glare of the public eye by highlighting another possibility--abduction--and it is helpful to have a lead.
5. It is completely improbable that the PI, once uncovering the staring incident at Leadore, the ONE abductor lead, wouldn't have asked what car the guy might have been driving. BUT, this is exactly what would have had to happen for the PI to have waited until the Swan Valley description came in, with vehicle description, prompting him after all this time to ask DK what car the Leadore guy could have been driving--and DK at that time remembered the car, and it was the same one. Again, this is the PI's story of what happened, not DK's. And I'm not buying it.
6. There is not a sketch. Assuming, as I do, that neither LE nor the FBI are morons or trying to pull the wool over taxpayers' eyes and genuinely (probably even desperately) want to find this boy, there would have been a sketch and Amber Alert of a Rubicon if this was a real lead. This tells me that the staring man/men have been ruled out, whether that's because it is KNOWN that something other than abduction happened to DeOrr, whether the person who served fries said there was no guy there, OR said, yes, there was a guy there and gave LE his name and they checked him out and cleared him.
7. There is NOTHING pointing to a connection between the Leadore staring man and the Swan Valley staring man. People give me the creeps all the time. Doesn't mean that one person who gives me the creeps is the same person who gives someone somewhere else the creeps.
8. IMO, there is like a .00000000000000001% chance that this guy exists and is a viable lead and yet has been ignored by LE and the FBI. If it is true that this staring man was at the fries restaurant, corroborated by a sales person, other patrons or video, or receipt, and his alibi for the 10 mins that DeOrr was left alone unattended doesn't check out, then this sketch will help people identify him and remind the sales person of him. They can check receipts. Did he use a debit card? And maybe they will find that he followed the family back to the campsite and pounced when GGP went into the trailer, yet the family forgot even seeing this guy or mentioning him until the PI came into play. But I expect pigs to fly before that, really.
Hoping it's worth all the hype! Thanks for the link and reminder!
