Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (14 page)

At 12:30 the next afternoon, June 18, Casey called her parents’ house from Tony’s. The length of the call indicated that no one answered the phone, leading investigators to speculate that Casey was calling to confirm that the house was empty. An hour later, the same neighbor noticed Casey’s Pontiac again backed into the garage. Sometime between 1:30
P.M
. and 2:30
P.M
., Casey borrowed the neighbor’s shovel, saying that she needed it to dig up some bamboo in her backyard. Less than an hour later she returned the shovel, but it did not appear to have been used. After she was done at her parent’s house, Casey went back to Tony’s, where she spent her third consecutive night, once again confirmed by phone records.

That evening Casey began spinning bigger and more elaborate lies. She called Cindy to tell her that she had to attend a work-related conference at Busch Gardens Theme Park in Tampa. Since Casey had been leading her parents to believe that she was an event planner at Universal Studios for some time, the trip made sense to them. As Casey explained it, she was taking Zanny, Zanny’s friend Juliette Lewis, Juliette’s daughter, Annabelle, and Caylee to Tampa with her. Annabelle was Caylee’s age, and would therefore be a perfect playmate for her. She told her mother that the group would be there until Friday, June 20.

Putting aside the scene with the detectives at Universal Studios, it was clear from these early stories alone that Casey was a skilled, habitual liar. Whatever her audience, she would pad the lie with elements that would appeal to that person. In telling Cindy that Caylee would have a playmate in Tampa, she knew her mother would be much more amenable to the idea. In adding Juliette, she would eliminate questions about why Zanny would want to travel all the way to Tampa. As I would come to see, most of Casey’s lies were packed with these kinds of specific details, which made her stories more believable but also demonstrated that she was always plotting them with her audience in mind.

Any con man will tell you that the true skill in crafting a great lie is finding what the mark wants to believe and giving it to him. Her fabrications centered on promoting herself as a responsible working mother, dedicated to both her job and Caylee. Whether the lie involved adding another day of work to her job, or making Zanny the Mary Poppins of Orlando, one lie seemed to flow effortlessly into the next. Casey could explain a discrepancy in a series of lies with a small, convincing tweak that would satisfy the most doubtful audience.

Since her mother had been falling for the Zanny lie for over a year, Casey knew that Cindy would follow along in this instance, too, so she made Zanny a crucial part of the story. Zanny seemed like such a too-good-to-be-true, warm, generous babysitter that anyone who would complain about her had to be nasty, no good, jealous, and selfish. At the same time, what mother wouldn’t want to see her daughter advancing at work? At Cindy’s removed distance, her daughter appeared so vital to the company that her employer was paying to send her out of town to a conference. It was enough to make a mother proud or, in this case, keep her from getting suspicious.

While Cindy believed that Casey was in Tampa, phone records indicated that Casey spent the next day, Thursday, June 19, in Tony’s neighborhood, where the two of them hunted for an apartment. At the time, Tony had been sharing an apartment with a bunch of roommates, and he wanted to get his own place. By 9:20
P.M
., they were back at Tony’s. Throughout this time, whenever Tony asked about Caylee, Casey lied to him. As far as Tony knew, Caylee was either home with Cindy and George or with the babysitter.

In their discussions with the police, the friends in Casey’s gang said that she was enjoying her stay at Tony’s. She was the model housemother to Tony and his roommates, cooking all the meals, cleaning, doing laundry, and sleeping with Tony, while telling different people different stories about where Caylee was if the question arose. When Casey called her mother that night, she continued her lie, telling Cindy that she and Caylee were still at the conference at Busch Gardens. Even though Casey was lying constantly to her mom, she was also checking in with Cindy every day like clockwork so as not to arouse suspicion.

The night of Friday, June 20, was originally the night when Casey had told her mother she would return home with Caylee, but instead, Casey was partying with many of her friends at Fusian, the club where Tony worked. Fridays at the club were geared toward college kids, and Tony was trying to do business as a club promoter, getting people in the door through social media and using “shot girls” to sell booze. That Friday night, Fusian hosted a “hot body” contest, and Casey spent the evening showing off her body and managing the shot girls. Photos of the event show Casey in pure delight, wearing a short blue dress and high black boots, grinding and dancing with others on the dance floor.

Needless to say, this was not the story she’d given Cindy. In Casey’s nightly phone call to Cindy, Casey was all work, explaining that she was still in Tampa because her conference had gone an extra day, but it would be over on Saturday. That same night, however, Casey told a friend, Maria Kissh, that Caylee and the nanny were at the beach. And all the while she continued to shack up with Tony.

By Sunday, June 22, her story for Cindy changed again. This time Casey said they were staying another night at Busch Gardens because she had been so busy with work that none of them had even gone to the amusement park to enjoy the rides. Of course, as Casey told Cindy, that hadn’t stopped Caylee and Annabelle from having a great time.

The next day, Casey was at Tony’s until 1:41
P.M
., when she left in the Pontiac. She soon called him to say that she had run out of gas and asked him to come get her. Rather than buy gas, she directed him to the Anthony home, where Tony broke the lock on her father’s shed so that Casey could take two red portable gas cans. They took the gas cans back to her car, poured their contents into the tank, started the car, and drove back to Tony’s in their separate vehicles.

Casey’s call to Cindy that night contained bad news: on the way back from Tampa, she had been in a car accident. Zanny was hurt and had been taken to the hospital. She, Caylee, Juliette, and Annabelle would stay in Tampa so Casey could tend to Zanny in the hospital.

In reality, a week had passed since anyone had laid eyes on little Caylee Marie Anthony.

O
N THE MORNING OF
T
UESDAY,
June 24, George Anthony had been planning to mow his lawn when he discovered the broken lock on his shed and two missing gas cans. Casey had stolen his gas cans before, and though he suspected her in this instance as well, he called the police because he didn’t know for sure. He reported two stolen gas cans holding fifty dollars’ worth of gas, and fifty dollars in damages from the broken lock.

That afternoon, Casey returned to the house to find George still at home. It was the first time either of her parents had seen her in more than a week, and her reaction made it look as though she had not been expecting him to be there. According to George, his daughter rushed past him to her bedroom, claiming that she needed to retrieve some insurance papers because of the accident.

As I was reading this account from George to the police, I was amazed how effortlessly Casey was able to adjust her lie to accommodate the situation. In an instant, she had built on her original lie in a way that was both plausible and fitting. Her mental agility was incredibly impressive. Nevertheless, George’s suspicions were far from allayed.

Still suspecting that Casey had stolen the gas cans, George pretended to need something from the trunk of the Pontiac. As he was heading for the car, Casey beat him to it, grabbed the two containers from the trunk, shouted, “Here are your fucking gas cans!” shoved them at his chest, and drove off. Because of the way she was standing, he didn’t get a good look inside the Pontiac’s trunk, and at that point had no reason to try.

Records showed that not twenty minutes had gone by when Casey started calling her mother. She called five times with medical updates on Zanny, telling Cindy that there were complications with Zanny’s injuries and the nanny would have to stay in the hospital for a few more days. She also told her mother about going home to get the insurance papers, making sure to repeat the story she had told her father.

The deceptions seemed to move fluidly from one day to the next, evolving and compounding each other. On Wednesday, June 25, Casey called Amy. During the conversation, she mentioned a smell in her car, which she said was the result of her running over a squirrel. Casey again spent the day at Tony’s, but told Cindy in her nightly contact that they were still in Tampa. The next day, Casey told her mother that Zanny had been released from the hospital, but it was so late that they would spend one more night in the Tampa area. In reality, she was again at Tony’s.

Phone records from the following day, Friday, June 27, indicated that Casey traveled from Tony’s apartment to the vicinity of the Anthony house. At 11:30
A.M
., she texted Amy about the smell in her car, saying that a dead animal was “plastered to the frame.” Seventeen minutes later, she called Tony to pick her up at the Amscot check cashing store at the intersection of East Colonial and Goldenrod in Orlando, because she had run out of gas again. When Tony got there, he offered to put gas in the car, but Casey said her father would take care of it. Even though two gas stations were immediately adjacent to the Amscot store, they left the Pontiac in the parking lot next to a Dumpster and went back to Tony’s. As it was a Friday night, they again spent the evening partying at Fusian.

That weekend, Casey’s nightly calls to Cindy took her lies in a strikingly new direction. Knowing that she had reached the end of the story with Zanny, her story now contained the deception that Casey was back in town but wouldn’t be home because she was staying at Universal’s Hard Rock Hotel with a friend. The version she gave her mom was that her friend, Jeff Hopkins from Jacksonville, was visiting. He had a son, Zack, the same age as Caylee, and he had invited Casey and Caylee to stay with them at the hotel. In Casey’s telling, Jeff was wealthy and had a trust fund. Furthermore, he was a single dad, his wife having passed away, and he was interested in her. This story resonated in part because Cindy had heard the name Jeff Hopkins before. A year or so earlier, Casey had told Cindy that Jeff was the person who had introduced her to Zanny. Building on that older lie had made Jeff seem like a recurring, and therefore more plausible, character.

Yet for all that her mother seemed to be taking Casey at her word, some of the lies were beginning to crumble. By Sunday, the Pontiac had been at the Amscot parking lot for two days. Casey had told Tony that her father was going to pick it up, so Tony didn’t think too much about it. In the meantime, however, the owner of the lot had taken note of the abandoned vehicle. The next day the car was towed, putting into motion the events that would lead to Cindy’s 911 phone call.

Of all the lies that Casey had been telling, I found myself most drawn to her decision to abandon the car. If ever something was bound to reveal her bizarre behavior, it was the car. Nothing seemed to add up about it. This move demonstrated such an apparent lack of planning, such an absence of consideration for the consequences, that it seemed like a spur-of-the-moment decision. Was that the case with all these lies? Was she really just making them up as she went along, elaborating on older lies and dusting them off to suit her ends? Did she have a long-term strategy? Abandoning the car at the Amscot lot was playing with fire. And yet she had enough forethought to park the car next to a Dumpster, an act that could have been designed to hide the odor that George Anthony would discover a few days later. One possibility was that she was hoping to leave it there to air out without drawing attention. That way she could return to it in the future, gas it up, and drive away. Hopefully by then the smell would be gone. The fact that George missed the notice of a certified letter on his door certainly was a lucky break for Casey, since her next big lie a few days later—that she and Caylee were headed for Jacksonville—depended on her car not being discovered in Orlando.

The day the Pontiac was being towed from the parking lot, Monday, June 30, was a busy one for Casey. She went shopping with Amy, then drove Tony to the airport in his Jeep for a flight he was taking home to New York. She was supposed to return the vehicle to his apartment, but she continued to use it while he was gone. With Tony away, she started staying with Amy and Amy’s roommate, Ricardo Morales, who was an old boyfriend of Casey’s. As Casey transitioned from Tony’s place to Amy’s, her lies transitioned as well. Cindy was informed that Jeff Hopkins wanted Casey and the gang to stay at the hotel until July 3. No one had seen Caylee for two weeks.

Shortly thereafter, Casey stopped calling her mother nightly, which in turn only frustrated Cindy more. For weeks, Cindy had been planning on taking a vacation around the Fourth of July holiday and hoping to spend time with Caylee. As Cindy’s vacation began, Caylee was nowhere to be found. Though Cindy was desperately trying to reach her daughter, Casey continually ignored her calls. When Casey finally replied to a text from her mother, she said that Caylee was at Universal Studios with Jennifer Rosa, Zanny’s roommate.

On Wednesday, July 2, Casey made an appointment to get a tattoo the next day. She ate lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, shopped, and went out clubbing in the evening. She decided to spend the night at Amy and Ricardo’s. When Amy asked where Caylee was, Casey said she was with the nanny. By midnight, Cindy was becoming frustrated and infuriated. She called Casey eight times in the twenty-four minutes between 12:13
A.M
. and 12:37
A.M
., but nobody answered.