The videos are very interesting. She [Casey, the adoptive mother] pretty much looks and speaks directly to the person interviewing her except for when she was asked if she thought that Jamie may have been abusing Erica while she was in the hospital. She says no but her eyes get busy and won't stay in one place.
Camille, what you noticed dovetails with a gut reaction I had about James Parsons. For some reason, as I read about all the weird things James was doing (biting a 3-year-old, threatening a baby with a knife, hitting his mother with a baseball bat), it occurred to me that maybe he was the one who killed Erica and his parents were trying to protect him. Then when you said that Casey was asked if James may have abused Erica, I realized that James was a danger to Erica both physically and sexually.
What if the parents were trying to hide Erica from James because they knew all too well that he would try to rape and/or kill her because she is so tiny and defenseless? What they didn't count on was the deviousness with which James might try to ferret Erica out: he would accuse the parents of killing her in order to get the world to do his bidding and flush her out of hiding.
If James was so out of control and was such a danger to Erica, that could very well explain why he was simply told she went to live with other family members. The difficulty in finding Irene "Nan" Goodman might have been entirely intentional, so that James Parsons would not be able to find Erica and harm her. What if these people are innocent and doing their best to protect Erica? The prying eyes of the world would make their job virtually impossible in such an extremely dangerous and difficult situation.
The public is very prone to jump to conclusions with almost nothing to go on, fabricating stories out of thin air, as even I have just done. But at least I have come up with a unique angle that explains a lot of things. All that domestic violence? Doesn't the evidence on the police records already show that it is James Parsons who is the wild man? He is the one who needs help, and fast. But our system (which is not preventative) is set up so that nothing can be done until something terrible happens.
How can any parents deal with such a stressful life? Casey spirited Erica away (perhaps to safety), and Sandy ultimately had to lock James out of the house for hitting his mother. Why hasn't anybody asked why James hit his mother? When Casey says James reported Erica missing to get revenge for being kicked out, she may not be revealing another possible reason James reported Erica missing. What if it was so that he could have help in finding her in order to victimize her? I'm not saying I believe this is true, but I'm open to more than one interpretation of this whole scenario.
Take the polygraph test that Sandy Parsons failed. It doesn't "prove" anything, because all it proves is that either the test was faulty (which is why NC doesn't allow lie detector test results as evidence) or simply that Sandy's not telling all that he knows. Perhaps he knows that Erica is being hidden from James and he helped hide her. In that case, when he is asked, "Did you have anything to do with Erica's disappearance," the correct answer is "Yes," but his dilemma would be how to avoid saying "Yes" so that her hideaway (from James) is not revealed.
Don't rush to judgment before all the facts are in. If the parents are guilty of murder, it may become evident. But they are still innocent until proven guilty. That's what makes America great.
