Not exactly, Devil. What the reporters for the Salt Lake Tribune are doing is painting a scenario of the night of Elizabeth's disappearance. Let's take a look at what that article actually says.....
The Salt Lake Tribune has pieced together the following scenario based on interviews with more than a dozen investigators on the case:
Ricci, 48, whose criminal history dates back three decades, was a hard-core heroin addict with a costly habit. In need of easy cash, he targeted the Smart home, where he had worked odd jobs for the family a year or so earlier......
(At this point, the writers continue their speculation on how Ricci might have carried out the burglary/abduction)......
But the problem with the above scenario is that no physical evidence has been found to back it up. All police have is Ricci's past behavior and suspicious alibi......
In fact, a minority of police investigators interviewed by The Tribune expressed skepticism over this scenario."
Once again, Devil, what has been requested by several posters is documentation that Ricci was using/addicted to drugs at the time of Elizabeth's disappearance. The Salt Lake Tribune writers were simply providing a speculative scenario, based upon interviews with investigators. They acknowledge that their speculation is based upon Ricci's PAST behavior.
Interviews with more than a dozen investigators in this case? That's not good enough for you? Do you claim to know more than the investigators in this case? Why are you spinning your wheels and our wheels with this small question, which seems to depend on whether Ricci actually had a syringe stuck in his arm when the police came to arrest him?
Yes, heaven forbid we would speculate based on someone's PAST behavior. It's better to speculate based on that than to speculate based on some strange dislike for the Smarts b/c they are too "white" or too "perfect-looking" or too "wholesome-acting." (I'm SPECULATING about what the motive might be for the preference for Ricci over the Smarts.)
And better, I guess, to speculate based on some strange attachment to a low-life, dirtball, repeat-criminal who used his wife, used his employer Smart, used his employer Mitchell (for example, wonder whose posthole digger that was), used the memory of his little dead son (when the boy's mother Robin White said on TV that Ricci never paid a bit of attention to the boy when he was alive, and certainly didn't support him), used his running buddy Remington (convenient name to give police about Federal Hgts. jobs, to take heat off himself), and used his mechanic (bill still unpaid as of Moul's interviews). Why do you, an intelligent person, go to such lengths to defend the memory of this man? Do you really think you could have trusted this man in any scenario btw you and him, especially the proverbial dark alley? I worry about you. This guy was not Jean Valjean. He wasn't even Al Gore.