Interesting article sure to bump now with the length of this....
By Art Harris, The Bald Truth
(c)
www.artharris.com, all rights reserved
SATSUMA, Fla., March 16–The 17-year-old babysitter who was sleeping in the same room with Haleigh Cummings when the five year old vanished says she doesn’t need a lawyer.
“Lawyers are for guilty people, I have nothing to hide,” Misty Cummings tells me in an exclusive interview the day after coming home from New York City and a Today Show interview with her day old husband Ronald, that critics say raises more troubling questions about the story she’s told police.
Misty wore blue jean shorts, and a t shirt as she climbed out of her new husband’s white pickup emblazoned with the slogan, “Only God Can Judge Me.”
Her new mother in law, Teresa Neves, gushed with praise for how much Haleigh and her baby brother, Ronald, Jr., aka Junior, loved Misty and how they couldn’t wait for her to marry her son, Ronald.
He was working the night shift at a nearby plant when he says he got a chilling call from Misty: she couldn’t find Haleigh anywhere, and the back door was wide open, propped open by a brick.
For her part, Misty said they called her “stepmom,” and claimed the children prefered her over their own mother, Crystal Sheffield, 23, who lost custody in 2005 when a magistrate ruled the children would enjoy a higher standard of living with the father.
He also cited Crystal’s admission she’d done cocaine. Ronald denied he did any drugs, despite a lengthy record of arrests, but no apparent convictions.
Crystal told me in an exclusive interview that she was afraid to tell the judge where she’d gotten the drugs–Ronald, allegedly– as he stared a hole through her in court, she says. “I was afraid of him,” she said in our interview, describing partying that began with pot, then pills and cocaine.
Her lawyer, Kim L. Picazio, a veteran family lawyer and mother of three, says Ronald began feeding her drugs shortly after he started dating her at 14. He would certainly deny it.
While I spoke with Misty and her new mother in law, Teresa Neves on Sunday, a colorful, pro bono private investigator from Broward County named William Staubs, aka Cobra, put his arm around Ronald, and wandered around the corner at the CITGO for a heart-to-heart.
Cobra, a six foot, 250 pound self proclaimed “hillbilly” who counts over 8,000 fugitives, 200 child molesters and one terrorist he’s brought in, tells me he assured the skinny, grieving father his only mission was to find Haleigh, or “the scumbag who took her.”
While a task force of state, federal and local police, lead by the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department runs down tips anjd leads, Cobra says he’s been hearing from locals who have been providing him with confidential information they just “dont’ feel comfortable telling a cop.”
By Monday night, he counted 100 tips he’d either chased down and dismissed or was still actively working. And as he was refueling at a local convenience store, a weeping Teresa Neves, Ronald’s mother, pulled up in her red pick-up and pleaded with him to search a swampy area leading to the lake behind his trailer, and off they went to tromp in the woods. Neves said she’d spent four hours looking around, and became unnerved when she spied what looked like an underground pen that appeared to be a “tiny jail.”
After an hour following Haleigh’s grandmother through forest thick with palmettos, cotton mouth snakes, black recluse spiders and black mud black mud that made a sucking sound when Mrs. Neves made a wrong step in her sandals and white jeans, we became separated and found her down a long dirt road. She said she’d spied a long cotton mouth snake and made a run for it.
We emerged at the house of an ex-Marine who said we were lucky he’d unloaded his gun. He didn’t like strangers in his backyard, and asked if we’d seen the no tresspassing signs. He said law enforcement had searched his home and others in the area several times, and sent divers into the murky lake behind him that’s thick with alligators.
As for the underground “jail” Neves described, he said they were hog pens, and totally innocent. “I’m just here to find Haleigh,” Cobra explained, “so we got to check out any credible lead.”
In our interview, Misty told me she believed she’d been cleared as a possible suspect after a polygraph examiner told her she’d passed her lie detector test. But police refused to confirm it, and sources close to case told me no one had been ruled out and that they were looking at several individuals, closing no doors.
In fact, sources tell me they may want to speak with Misty again to clear up timelines from the night Haleigh vanished, and other areas of interest, including one relative the family says they consider their number one suspect.
http://www.artharris.com/2009/03/17/i-dont-need-a-lawyer-lawyers-are-for-guilty-people-misty-cummings-exclusive/
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Sue and NELLIE
...All is good this morning...waiting on Judy to call so I can get the day started and have all of my running done....Then I am fixing Mom Corned Beef and Cabbage and me polish sausage and fried cabbage...while that is cooking I am going to rest and chill...I hope every has a great St. Patrick's Day....Hugs!!!!
DUDE
We are due...aren't we?