“ think they know what happened,” Elizabeth Thomas said in an exclusive interview with “20/20″ correspondent, Eva Pilgrim. Jill Cummins said he would never take her husband back, but doesn’t hate him.ĬNN’s Jamiel Lynch contributed to this report.The Tennessee girl who vanished earlier this year with former teacher Tad Cummins said that as she feared for her life while with him, the public perception of her became skewed, as people reportedly began forming opinions before truly understanding what happened. Ashley said she may someday talk to her father about what he did, but for now, “he needs to at least know that everybody is not against him.” “He was the definition of what a father should be. And what she was destroying.”Īshley, one of the couple’s daughters, said on Friday’s “Inside Edition” that she fully supports her mother but, at the same time, stands by her father. When asked if she felt the teenager betrayed her, Jill Cummins said, “I do feel slightly betrayed by her because she knew him.
Never did I think there was a romantic thing going on between the two of them. And I discussed that with him and explained to him she’s your student – we can’t be so close to her. “He was getting close to her, a father-daughter close,” she said. In a Friday interview on “Inside Edition,” Jill Cummins said she talked to her husband about the teen before he disappeared. In the days before the alleged abduction, Tad Cummins refilled a prescription for the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis, took out a loan for quick cash and made hotel reservations in another state, according to a criminal complaint. The revelation pretty much ended what she described as a “perfect … loving Christian household.” She said she believed him until she learned the teenager also was missing. Please don’t call the police… They’ll just think I’m guilty and I’m not. He called police.Ĭummins and the girl disappeared March 13 as a police investigation into their relationship was heating up.Ī high school health sciences teacher in the Tennessee town of Culleoka, Cummins had been suspended in February, less than a month after a student reported seeing him and the 15-year-old kissing in a classroom.Īt the time of his disappearance, Jill Cummins said, her husband left her a note saying, ” ‘I’m getting away to clear my head of all this crap. The pair had been in the heavily wooded area 60 miles south of the Oregon line about a week, according to Griffin Barry, who says he eventually helped police capture Cummins.Ĭummins and the teen arrived at a gas station there a week earlier, apparently on their way to visit a commune, Barry told CNN.Ĭummins told Barry he was 44, and that the teen was his 22-year-old wife, according to the cabin’s owner.Īs Barry discussed the pair with someone at a bar later, the other person found Cummins’ picture online in an Amber Alert widely distributed by authorities. He passed himself off as a down-on-his-luck Colorado man who’d just lost his job and home, according to the man who eventually tipped off police. Nikki Torres/KOBIīefore his capture April 20, Tad Cummins and the young woman he called his wife slipped into the remote Northern California community of Cecilville unrecognized.
Cummins now faces one federal count of transportation of a minor across state lines for the purpose of criminal sexual intercourse as well as state charges of sexual contact with a minor and aggravated kidnapping.Ĭummins and the teen stayed in one of these cabins, the caretaker of the California property says. I told him, I probably wouldn’t be answering the phone anymore.”Ĭummins was arrested last week outside a remote cabin in Cecilville, California, at the end of a 39-day manhunt for him and the teen, who was reported missing some 1,900 miles away, in her hometown south of Nashville. “I didn’t want any details,” she told “Inside Edition” in an interview that aired Thursday. “Yes, I did,” Tad Cummins replied, according to his wife, who has filed for divorce.
“I said, ‘Well, did you sleep with her?’ ” Jill Cummins said in an interview with “Inside Edition,” describing a jailhouse phone conversation with her husband. The wife of the former Tennessee teacher accused of running off with a 15-year-old student says she knew the answer but asked anyway.
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