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.

“Everyone is in agreement that Missy was not there at that time, that she was killed somewhere else and her body was brought back.” It wasn’t until later that they brought in cadaver dogs and came across her body. Where did her body come from?

If she got tired of waiting to be picked up and walked home and somebody raped her on the way-like Tommy from down the street-he probably would have just left her there and run.

If somebody abducted her and dragged her off to a vehicle, she wouldn’t be there at all. So why did the body end up back by the house? Why wasn’t it there to begin with?

Earlier, Orville reportedly told Rhonda that she shouldn’t walk between the houses because bad things happen to little girls who walk in that area.

There was a theory that Orville may have actually brought Missy home and done something to her in the house, but I found that kind of unlikely. My theory is that he did something to her in those woods and then didn’t know what to do about his dead daughter lying in the middle of the patch. He had to do something with her body-after all, he might have left evidence on it-so he quickly carried her to his house and put her body in the trunk of the car; he would slip back inside and into bed and deal with “the problem” later. He hid the car keys to make sure no one else would borrow the vehicle and decide to put some groceries in the trunk.

Eventually, the car was moved. I think it was moved around quite a few times because he didn’t know what to do with it. One of the reasons her body may have ended up where it did, dumped back in the woods to be found two weeks later, was that he got tired of it all. We find this often happens with people who are involved with the killing of a family member. That’s one of the reasons we look back at the family when we see something like this. We look at the husband, the parents-whoever the victim had a close relationship with, because these people have to live day in and day out with the search, and at some point they get frustrated by it. They tire of the questioning and the wife or the husband or whoever constantly looking for the missing person and spending their entire lives doing this. They want to move on. That kid’s dead, I want to forget about it. I want to start doing stuff. I don’t want to sit here and dwell on this.

The killer will bring the body back and dump it in a location where it will be found and they can get that part over with. There’s the body. We found her. Now can we move on? Of course, they don’t think ahead to the next part, which is that the authorities will actually investigate the homicide. The perpetrator doesn’t think that far ahead.

Orville didn’t seem terribly surprised when he got the news that Missy’s body was found right near the house in the woods. He said, “Huh.” That someone might have brought her body back and dumped it in the bushes would not be a big surprise to Orville if he was the one who put it there. It is most likely that he kept Missy in the trunk until he had an opportunity to move her to another location for hiding. There was speculation that he hid the body in his mother’s barn. But, at some point, my theory continues, he wanted her to be found, and so he put her back in the trunk and brought her back to the woods by the house. He carried her body to the bush and dumped it. Then he went back to the car, looked in the trunk, and realized the shoes were still there. He grabbed them, tossed them into the bushes, and took off. The body was found, and by that time the police were looking at him.