This case is frightening to me - so little evidence presented beyond the testimony of someone who is a) clearly mentally messed-up and b) directly benefits by accusing the defendant. It seemed like the detective had a hard time believing the girl could commit such a brutal crime and set out to prove something more happened. There's nothing remotely damning in the text messages. He spent the money from the life insurance? So what. I bet if he hadn't the detective would've said "see, he doesn't want the insurance investigators looking into the murder because he killed her!" As for the witnesses, well to start with, the child welfare advocate has a clear interest in the guy being involved, as it absolves her of guilt: if the girl acted alone then the case worker basically caused this woman's death by placing the girl in that home, but if the guy made her do it, then it's on the father. I'm not even talking from a legal sense, necessarily, but just psychologically, it makes her less culpable. And beyond that, she's worked on behalf of the girl, knows her back story, her difficulties, so of course she's going to be protective of her. As to her feelings that it would be, well, like most witnesses, she doesn't actually say it would be inappropriate, she just sort of suggests it would be off or wrong somehow, that the dad would take the 17 yr old to live with him, because if a man lives with a teenage girl he is not biologically related to, even if he's a parental figure, he WILL have sex with her (is the implication the case worker isn't courageous enough to make.) And at that point the show doesn't bring up the fact that we know from earlier segments, that the mom didn't want her anymore, so if they split it was either the girl living with the dad or getting put back into the system. As for the teacher, his testimony is beyond worthless, he saw something that made him think "really?" Wow, devastating. Also, this is what he's saying now, no evidence of his thoughts from the time, you know, before the prosecution came to him soliciting testimony to help jail a guy they're sure is a murderer ('...you know come to think of it, he did sit like a murderer...') Also, this is apparently the MOST inappropriate thing they can get any teacher to attest to. Marginal, subjective, after-the-fact testimony like this shouldn't even be allowed in our courts. As for the girl's friend, well, she's clearly a bit troubled herself and now the prosecution or detectives come to her to get her to give them something to help out her friend, maybe they threatened her with jail if she didn't cooperate, maybe there were other incentives, but I have no difficulty believing she made her whole story up (and/or was manipulating to believing that story by the foster girl.) Perhaps most telling, they set up a sting to catch the guy admitting something nefarious, it fails utterly, but the detective sees it as evidence that he's right, anyways, because the father doesn't react a certain way (and because to this detective, everything is evidence of the guy's guilt.)
Is the dad guilty? I don't know, but I know that what I saw presented was a joke. Did he have a relationship with the girl? Not based on any evidence, although the fact that one of the first pictures of the girl is a shot of her cleavage, it's clear Dateline wants us to suspect that.
