I just watched the video posted above four times.
For the life of me, I can't see a smirk on his face. He gets about 5 seconds of air time in an edited piece. We can't see the interviewer, who is off camera. We don't know what was said before or after, what time it is, how long he had been awake, or anything at all about the circumstances of this interview. The camera is actually moving so that we CAN"T seen his eyes or even his full face because the camera is also shooting him in profile.
"I don't know what happened. I was at work." Looked at another way, the words could be the simple truth. He doesn't know what happened. He was at work. The interviewer asks him what happened to Haleigh and he says, "I don't know what happened. I was at work." He says he only knows what he has heard from Misty and the police. What is supposed to say? If he is in fact innocent of involvement, what would an innocent man say? Those of you interested in statement analysis will know that these are simple, direct, grammatically correct sentences with none of the usual syntactic marks of deception.
How can anyone conclude that the man is guilty of murder or covering up murder based on these few seconds of video? Or the fact that a minimally educated drug user and dealer in his mid-twenties with saggy pants and a ratty t-shirt doesn't come across as a sympathetic parent of a missing child?
LE and various interviewers have talked to him for hours and we still haven't heard one word that suggests that he wasn't in fact at work. These snippets of video and the minute parsing of conversations reported by bloggers and the like who often provide no context for what was said bear ZERO resemblance to what police investigators or federal agents do when they question people involved in serious crimes--where the job is to go back, over and over, the statements made on the record to see what inconsistencies emerge. That's why LE doesn't believe Misty--not just because she failed a bazillion polygraphs (official or otherwise), but because under expert questioning, Misty's story told on the record doesn't hold up. It's inconsistent in real ways and as LE has said, on the record, her story is inconsistent with the physical record in the mobile home. So it's not just that the story is inconsistent, it doesn't match up with physical evidence. And then it's not just one story but multiple stories and none of them match each other or the physical evidence. We know all this because LE has told us, and reporters covering the story have heard that from their LE sources.
But Ron's statement about being at work? You think if LE could prove he wasn't at work during a time after Haleigh was last seen that we wouldn't know that? When we know what Tommy said about checking up on Misty and the story about the cinder block and rope and the letters sent to various Croslins? Most of these dirtbags who kills their wives and kids are on LE radar from the get-go. Often there is almost no news on a case; no POIs named, nothing. Because it's the father/husband/boyfriend/ex who is in the LE crosshairs and they just build the case, look for the body, etc. LE doesn't sling mud on a whole cast of other characters to raise reasonable doubt for the defense; they don't make plea deals with the husband or bio father who is at the heart of the case in order to pursue the terrified figures covering up for him. If LE suspects Ron Cummings, they are going about building a case against him in a way I have never seen before. When he was arrested in the drug case, I thought there might be something to the idea of his involvement. But now, with a plea deal on the drug case in the "werks," I don't see him as a suspect in LE's view. They know when Haleigh was last seen by someone other than Misty, I am sure. And they must know that Ron was at work.
) JMO
