IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA, a girl named Caylee Anthony made national headlines in June 2008 when she disappeared. The story grew disproportionately large primarily because her single mother, Casey Anthony, gave a ridiculous story as to how the babysitter kidnapped her daughter. Meanwhile Casey spent her nights partying in bars.

The public was shocked when, on July 15, the press reported that Caylee’s grandparents-who couldn’t get a straight answer for weeks from Casey about her daughter’s whereabouts-picked up Casey’s car from a towing lot and were revolted by the smell emanating from the trunk.

“There’s something wrong,” Cindy Anthony said in an emergency call to 911. “I found my daughter’s car today and it smelled like there’s been a dead body in the damn car.” Later, apparently to protect her daughter, Cindy claimed the smell came from pizza that Casey had left in the trunk.

That seemed to parallel what happened in Missy Jones’s case sixteen years earlier.

There was definitely a nasty smell coming from the old sedan that Orville drove. It was something the police honed in on, investigating whether Missy had once been in the car trunk-and just as we later saw in the case of Caylee Anthony, her decomposing body was relocated to a wooded area after a period of time, leaving a smell far worse than rotting pizza.

We often wonder why people bother to put bodies in trunks, but the simple fact is they are convenient, enclosed locations you can lock and keep people from opening. They are also usefully attached to a motor vehicle that allows you to then transport a corpse out of sight of prying eyes. But trunks also keep a lot of good evidence, as well, so unless a killer really does a good job of making sure nothing escapes from the body into the trunk-a really good double or triple Hefty bag wrap for starters that keeps bodily fluids and gases contained-eagle-eyed investigators and the forensics team should easily detect clues there.

Investigators used the latest gas technology in the Caylee Anthony case, which they did not have available in the Missy Jones case.

Missy was missing for two weeks before the body was found. The family brought me in nine years later because, while the police suspected Missy’s dad, the family refused to buy into that theory. They were sure that somebody else killed her, but the time line in this case did not support that. Who was available to be involved in the crime? What things made sense in the time line? Who had the ability to commit the crime?

ON THE NIGHT she disappeared, Missy’s mother, Miranda, drove her to Rhonda Lewis’s home around six p.m. to hang out and sleep over with her friend. Missy was excited about a family trip planned for the next day. She was going to go home in the morning, pack, and take off with her parents and brothers.

Orville and his wife, Miranda, went out drinking that night, came home, and went to sleep.

At some point in the night, the phone rang twice. The first time Miranda heard the phone ring, she was in the shower. Miranda said Orville answered it and told her it was Missy wanting to come home. Miranda told him to tell her to wait until breakfast time.

Miranda thought the phone rang again. She recalled Orville telling her it was a hang-up. She didn’t remember anything more. The liquor knocked her out and all she remembered was waking up when the sun was already shining in the window.

Over at the Lewises’ house, Missy was watching television when Mrs. Lewis came down around 2:20 a.m. and said, “What are you doing down here?”

“I have a stomachache,” Missy said. “I’m going to go home. I already called home and asked them to come get me.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Lewis said, “but turn the television off, because we don’t watch television at this time of night.”

Missy, who was fully clothed, did as she was told and Mrs. Lewis went back to bed. When she woke up the next morning, Missy was gone. The Lewis family assumed Missy went home with whomever came to get her.

They assumed incorrectly.

“Between eight and nine a.m., I made a call to my sister’s house and decided not to make the trip,” Miranda Jones said. “Orville began to make coffee and fix breakfast. It was Sunday morning and no one was in a hurry. About ten a.m., Missy still hadn’t come home. I sent my youngest son over to Rhonda’s to tell Missy to come home. He came back saying she wasn’t there. I then went over to talk to Rhonda’s mother, Eva Lewis. Eva said that Missy was up in the living room sometime around two a.m., saying she wanted to go home, she was going to call her mother. Rhonda’s house was only about 150 yards through the small wooded area between [our] two houses. I think Eva stated that Missy was complaining about a stomachache. I never received a call or saw Missy that night.” (Miranda changed her story here about the phone call most likely because she didn’t want to admit she didn’t go get her daughter or that her husband actually might have.)

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.)