[A Citizen Reporter]

This is what I've been able to determine from a variety of local media. (I'm watching another interview with the father on KSDK) The parents were estranged. Family friends have been working with them on reconciling. The father was staying with friends in a home across the street. According to an interview I saw with the mother, the kids wanted are very close to their father, and wanted to stay where he was, so that the kids and the mother all spent the night in these friends house across the street. The father was sleeping in the same room with Cassie. She woke up and asked for a bowl of cereal. The father says that the red-headed man was sleeping on the couch in the living room (family has named him as Johnny Johnson, which the PD is not too happy that his name is out there.)

Father says that Cassie was in the kitchen, Johnson in living room when he went to the bathroom. When he came out of the bathroom they were both gone. The PD found Johnson coming out of Meramec River, and he said that he had been swimming. He was or currently is being questioned, however the PD insists that he is not a suspect. The Williamson family apparently does not know this Johnson person well.

[Lyndal]

Sorry, I don't buy swimming in the Meramec from Valley Park downstream anytime, much less early in the AM. Have you looked at that water closely.

[buffyt]

The suspicious man is a homeless man they let sleep at their house a couple of nights. When cops found him, he was coming out of river with shirt off and he was dripping wet, claiming he went for a swim. Cop they interviewed said he thought the homeless man's story was a bunch of crap -- on the news just now.