There were five people in the Lewis house at the time that Missy disappeared, and no one saw her leave.
“I went back home and searched the neighborhood,” Miranda continued. “Missy’s dad called the police and sometime around eleven a.m. to eleven thirty a.m. they arrived. (I can’t remember where Missy’s dad was at this time; I think he was at the house waiting for the police to arrive.)
“My oldest son was called at work to come home; I think I went to pick him up. When the police arrived they brought a search dog. The officer with the dog and I went through the wooded area between the two houses (the Lewises’ and mine) where the kids played. I had given some of Missy’s clothes for the dog to get her scent. When we arrived at the Lewis house (up to this point the dog had not picked up Missy’s scent) I was asked to stay outside, but I could see through the screen door.
“The dog went crazy when he came to the chair where Missy was last seen sitting. The dog followed her scent to the living room door and stopped. He could not pick up her scent outside the house. [It was said that maybe so many people walking around may have hindered the dogs’ ability to pick up her scent.] The dog was led around to the back of the house, where Missy and Rhonda had picked berries the day before. He was able to pick up her scent again there, but it led nowhere.”
EVA LEWIS CLAIMED Missy was waiting for someone to pick her up. Two phone calls came in to the Jones household just about the time Eva said Missy had contacted her family.
None of the Joneses-Orville, Miranda, or any of the kids-heard any car start up outside their trailer home. Nobody heard anybody drive away. But then again, there was only a two-minute walk between the two homes.
Missy was killed by somebody in the Lewises’ home or she was walked out of their home in the middle of the night and somebody else killed her; or someone from the Jones house came over to pick her up and they knew what happened to her. Something happened at that point in time, because she was at the Lewises’, and then she was not.
I agreed with the police that the witnesses and their statements eliminated all but one of the suspects. After Missy made her phone call, someone should have been coming to get her. Orville, the dad, said he never talked to Missy and she probably started walking home in the middle of the night, even though Missy was not the sort to do that and she wasn’t feeling well. “Tommy probably killed her.”
Tommy Hime managed a restaurant and he did live close by, but it would be pretty coincidental that Missy made a phone call home and Tommy showed up. Where did he come from? The Lewis place was not on the way from Tommy’s house to her house. It couldn’t be that Tommy was just strolling by at the time, although he would have finished work around midnight. He would have to make a specific journey over that way and run into her at the exact same time she gave up waiting for her dad to come. (Tommy, incidentally, passed the lie detector test.)
Back at Missy’s home, the time line produced the same result.
Orville never said, “I went to get her, and she wasn’t there.”
What happened to Missy after she told Mrs. Lewis that someone was coming for her? When did she vanish?
It was highly unlikely at that point that she would have left with anyone else, as she knew someone was coming to get her. It was also unlikely that someone in the household would at this exact moment attempt to abduct and rape Missy, as a parent was only possibly minutes away from arrival.
The most likely scenario was that the father walked over to the Lewises’ to get her and something happened on the way home. Orville had been drinking earlier in the evening and maybe he decided it was easier to walk rather than take the car. Maybe he already had the squirrelly idea in his head that he could bring Missy into the woods and have his way with her. It’s worth noting that later, the police dogs did not follow Missy’s scent from the door. It’s possible the father picked her up and carried her. She was a twelve-year-old girl, kind of small, certainly tired. It’s also possible the dogs just weren’t any good.
She disappeared, but according to police, the person who did the least to help find her was her dad. While everybody else was out searching for Missy, he didn’t even bother. He stayed home, hanging around the house.
Orville didn’t act appropriately. Just two days after Missy went missing he started making comments like, “You are looking for her body” and “She’s dead.”
These remarks indicated he believed his daughter was already dead. He knew what happened to her. He made a similar comment to a little girl who lived next door and another to a TV news show. He referred to his daughter as “the body.” He said that the search was a waste of time. Sitting in his recliner with a smirk on his face, he looked over at his son and said, “Chuck, you killed Missy, didn’t you?” What kind of father says things like that?
His daughter had gone missing and no one knew what had happened to her. She could be a runaway-that’s how the police initially classified her because she was twelve years old and her father didn’t think the police should waste their time looking for her. Real fatherly behavior, right?
After she was found murdered, Orville went on a local TV news show and said he didn’t know if Missy was killed out of “meanness or carelessness.” The girl was found partially clothed, her hands tied with a sock and another sock stuck in her mouth, the latter of which caused her death. That could be the mark of a serial killer, a rapist, a child predator. Where would Daddy come up with the notion that it was meanness or carelessness?
ALL THESE BEHAVIORS that Orville exhibited after the fact were peculiar, which is why the police said, “There’s something fishy about this guy.”
They already knew Orville pretty well. He lived in a small town, and Orville wasn’t terribly liked by the police there. He agreed to a polygraph, which was inconclusive. He said he contacted a psychic who told him Missy was in a dark place, probably the car trunk that he knew she was in. He spouted theories of Satanism.
Where was she for two weeks? Why couldn’t they find her?
Eventually, an anonymous 911 call came in-it was not recorded because of technical difficulties-telling the police that Missy could be found in one of three places. She was found in one of them, between the two houses, the Jones house and the Lewis house, underneath a honeysuckle bush. She wasn’t there before; the area had been carefully searched and searched again. Her hair was matted and stood out from her head. Her skin was black all over except for her legs, which were orangish above the knees. She was laid down in the bush with her body pitched downward and her feet up, wearing a T-shirt decorated with kittens. Her tennis shoes, the shoelaces tied in a knot to keep the shoes together, had been tossed onto the bush and were hanging from a branch. Missy was not known to tie her shoes in that manner.
Her hands were loosely tied with one of her socks. The other sock was stuffed in her mouth and had hardened there. Missy’s black jeans and underwear were wadded up and lying under her. Her shirt was on her torso but it, too, was rolled up. No bra, but she didn’t wear one. It appeared to be a sexual assault but there was no visible evidence of it.
If she were there for two weeks, searchers would have found her, because they clearly searched between the two houses.
“A few days before Missy’s body was found,” according to Miranda Jones, “Rhonda Lewis’s oldest sister picked berries at that spot and said she saw nothing. My mom and I searched that area, too; we stood next to the honeysuckle bush where her body was later found and we saw nothing.