This is the first time I've heard of the girls persistently asking Kelsi for a ride to the bridge and does not accord with what Becky says.
The following is an extract from my transcript of Gray Hughes' interview with Mike and Becky Patty:
Monday morning
BP: "They slept in ‘cause they were up late. When they got up it was, I don’t know, probably 10:00 or so and Derrick made them pancakes. They had pancakes, and of course Libby always wants to be on the go and she was wanting to do something but Kelsi had to work that day. I was working and Derrick took off to go take some pictures for me, and so I told Libby – she’d kind of gotten into shopping recently. She enjoyed shopping which was new for her because I used to have to drag her with me to buy her school clothes. Because Libby has started enjoying shopping, I told her that “I have some filing to do and if you girls want to do some filing for me, I’ll pay you and maybe later on today or tonight when I’m done, we could go”.
So they came out and were doing some filing – they were out with the file cabinets, filing and stuff – and Kelsi came out – see, I don’t know the exact time of that, you know, why would we have paid attention to that – but she came out – it was probably close to 1:00 and said, “Hey, I work at 4:00. I’m going to go to a friend’s house for a little bit and then, then I’m going on to work. Well, as soon as Libby heard that, Libby jumped up and said, “Hey, will you take us to the bridge?” and Kelsi said, “I don’t care”. And she looked at me and said, “Grandma, can I go?” and I said, “Well, you’ve got to have a ride home ‘cause I’m working and I can’t stop to pick you up, you know, until quitting time and I’m not – I just don’t have the time to do it”. So she said, “Well, I’ll just call my Dad”. Well, I assumed that she called her Dad. I didn’t specifically say, “Libby, did you call your Dad?” I assumed it was done. And another thing that I automatically tell kids when they have a friend over when they ask if they can do something, one of the things that I automatically say is, is it okay with their parents. You know, like that’s just – any time somebody spends the night and they want to go do something, then I’ll say, well, they have to ask their parents too. I assumed that everything was okay when she came and said, “Hey, we’re leaving”. She called her Dad on the way but it’s because she knew that he would never tell her “No”. He ne…, Derrick never told her “No” for anything, not that she ever asked for anything unrealistic but if she asked him to do something, he just, he did it. It’s just that – and if he would have said, “No”, I guess she would have come back home – Kelsi would have just brought her home – but there was no reason for him not to. He was taking these pictures, about 3 miles out of his way to swing by and pick her up. So it wasn’t big deal for him to swing by and pick her up. And they did. That’s when they left."
