Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (21 page)

When Detective Cawn examined this part of the Anthony family’s home computer, she found repeated references to the word “chloroform,” but that was as far as her software and her experience could take her. She turned to her boss, mentor, and teacher, Sergeant Kevin Stenger, and using more sophisticated software—even some that was still in development—Stenger was able to determine that on two afternoons in March someone had performed searches for information about chloroform.  In one of the searches, someone had actually typed in the query “how to make chloroform.”

Given the dates listed on the chloroform searches, Detective Melich wanted to be sure who had access to the computer those afternoons. He thought Cindy and George had probably been out of the house, and subpoenaed their work records to see if they were at their places of employment at the time the searches on chloroform were being done. Cindy’s work records showed she was working both those days at those times. George’s work records showed he was not actively employed that month, but worked a ten-hour day on one of the afternoons the searches had been done.

Finding chloroform in the trunk and in the search history of the computer added a new layer of suspicion to the case. These, along with the results from Dr. Vass’s odor tests, point toward foul play of some kind.

Useful as all this was, it wouldn’t do us much good if we couldn’t convince the court to accept the science behind it. In other words, the time would come when we would have to establish the admissibility of Dr. Vass’s work and the opinions derived from it. When the time came for the Frye hearing, it would be my job to convince the court that this new science of Dr. Vass’s had a firm foundation in established science. After all, that was why I’d been brought on the case in the first place.

I
NTRIGUING AS THE POSSIBILITIES WERE
with the odor, they were only one part of the forensic evidence in our possession. My second forensic project was the hair collected from the trunk of the Pontiac. We wanted to establish that it was Caylee’s hair, but more specifically, we wanted to determine whether the hair had come from someone living or dead.

The person I called was Karen Lowe, a senior analyst in the Trace Analysis Unit of the FBI Crime Laboratory Division in Quantico, Virginia. Lowe was a scientist with eleven years’ experience at the lab. I read her report on the examination of the hair found in the trunk, and our conversation about her findings was professional and to the point, as you would expect. In her examination of the hairs, she discovered that one of them, a nine-inch light brown hair, had an unusual dark band at a particular point near the root. She explained to me that, while science has yet to understand precisely why this banding occurs, it has only been found in hairs taken from decomposing bodies. The banding was first documented in the scientific literature in the late 1980s and has been documented in numerous studies since. She noted that she had personally seen it hundreds of times in case work while examining hair known to have been taken from dead bodies, but that this was the first time she had seen it in a scene sample where the body had not been found. In the conservative fashion typical of FBI reports, she could only describe the banding as “apparent decomposition,” but with the explanations she was able to give me, I felt we had a bombshell.

The next issue was proving that it was Caylee’s hair. Lowe had examined the hair under a microscope and compared it with hair taken from a brush that the Anthonys said was Caylee’s. Hair comparisons aren’t like fingerprints; no expert can ever say with certainty that two hairs have come from the same person. By looking at the microscopic features of a hair, however, a scientist can eliminate some possibilities. Lowe explained that her comparison revealed that the hair with the banding was similar in length, color, and all other microscopic features to the hair taken from Caylee’s brush. She also compared it to samples of Casey’s, and she was able to say with confidence that the hair could not have been Casey’s, because her hair was colored with dye and too short. We knew that Cindy’s hair was dyed, usually blond, and kept short, and Lee’s hair was too short as well. In order to be as certain as possible, the hairs were passed on to the DNA section of the lab.

Now, because DNA can only be extracted from a living cell, ordinary DNA testing doesn’t work on a hair. Because the only living part of a hair is the root, decomposition makes the chances of successful regular DNA testing of hair slim to none. However, there is another kind of DNA test that can work on hair, a test that examines the DNA found in the hair’s mitochondria. The DNA in the mitochondria is much heartier than ordinary DNA, and therefore it exists even in the dead cells of hair. The downside of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is that it is passed on only from mother to child; there is no contribution from the father. Your mtDNA is identical to that of all your brothers and sisters, your mother, all of her siblings, your grandmother, and all of her siblings. In other words, if there is an unbroken maternal connection, then the mtDNA is a match.

The results of the mitochondrial DNA tests were a match. This match, combined with the fact that we’d already microscopically eliminated Casey, Cindy, and Lee by length and color, made me pretty confident that the hair with the “death band,” as the media would come to call it, was Caylee’s. With Dr. Vass’s findings and the other evidence of the smell, it seemed a sad but inescapable conclusion that Caylee was dead.

Still, the challenges to all these forensics would be many. The Frye hearings would be a monster. No doubt the defense would be digging up opposing experts, who were often attracted to big cases for the notoriety it would bring them. There would be requests for examinations of the same samples, logistics surrounding transporting those samples—not to mention depositions, travel, and more time for me spent away from home. And then, assuming we made it past the Frye hearings, there was the difficulty of presenting this cutting-edge science in such a way that the jury might actually understand it.

It was going to be a busy couple of years.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

TRACKING DOWN LEADS

T
he forensics may have been coming together, but we still couldn’t treat this solely as a homicide. Throughout August and into the early fall, the police continued to chase after leads connected to both a possible kidnapping and a possible murder, while interviewing everyone with a link to Casey and of course trying, without success, to get more information from Casey herself.

At the Anthony home, the public was going nuts, with news trucks on their street night and day. Any time Cindy or George left the house, protesters would scream hateful and often ignorant things at them. One woman in front of their house had a child holding up a sign reading
WOULD YOU KILL ME?
I was disgusted by some of the things they were doing. I’d been around big trials before, but this was something else altogether.

Part of this display seemed rooted in the way the media’s coverage focused on the anger at Casey. From the beginning, cable TV’s Nancy Grace was the primary person pushing this case, featuring it nightly on her Headline News (HLN)
Nancy Grace
show
.
The situation was further enflamed by Jose Baez’s decision to appear on the show himself. That Casey was not telling the truth was the headline and frustration over her lies was eagerly stoked. Soon a lot of the anger toward Casey was spilling into the front yard of the Anthony house on Hopespring Drive. The media was there to oblige the irate bystanders. Anyone who wanted to be on TV could come to the residence and start ranting.

Inside the house, the Anthonys were trying to hold it together. Cindy did most of the talking, especially after George became incensed at the protesters, even pushing someone off his lawn who called his daughter “trash.” Much as the Anthonys frustrated me, I felt for them in this situation. At the end of the day their granddaughter was missing and their daughter was accused of child abuse with the possibility of more on the way. Going through this situation was hard enough, but doing it in front of hostile protesters—well, no one deserves that.

The media frenzy became a magnet for anyone looking for a bit of limelight. With the public uniquely fixated on the case and a general sense of desperation in the search for credible information about Caylee, anyone craving a bit of media attention could grab the spotlight for a day. To that end, one of the more bizarre events of the circus surrounding those early days was Jose Baez’s decision to involve Leonard Padilla in the case. Padilla, a cowboy-hat-wearing publicity hound and “bounty hunter” from Sacramento, California, rode into the case with the purpose of arranging for Casey’s $500,000 bond.

Padilla offered to arrange the bond for the avowed purpose of getting her out and making her reveal Caylee’s true whereabouts. It always perplexed us why Jose would have allowed this character within one hundred feet of his client. Padilla’s condition for this largesse was that Casey would live at the Anthony home under the watchful eye of his associates. Casey accepted, and on August 20, Padilla’s brother, a bondsman, posted the $500,000 bond and she was released from jail to home confinement.

Needless to say, Padilla was no more successful than the police had been in getting any useful information out of Casey. Casey was rearrested on August 29, charged with check fraud and theft related to the $110 purchase she had made at Target on her friend Amy Huizenga’s checking account. However, she was immediately released after being bonded out by Padilla for a second time. Strangely enough, the following day he gave up trying to get anything out of her, revoked her bond, and delivered her back to jail.

The whole episode was an unproductive distraction, one that made me question just how well thought out the defense’s approach was. This choice seemed so reckless, so unhelpful. Perhaps the greatest irony of involving Padilla was that it made Casey seem more guilty. Ever since her arrest, she’d been saying to her parents, the police—anyone who would listen—that if only she were released, then she could help find Caylee. So what happened when she finally got released? All that happened was that more people—Padilla’s cohorts—related their personal experiences in the Anthony home to whoever would listen, adding to the general opinion that Casey was doing nothing to help find her daughter. The lack of progress upon her release demonstrated just how self-serving she really was. Not only did it make her look worse, it made the defense look as if they didn’t know what was in the best interests of their client. Jose Baez’s lack of experience was showing.

Making matters worse, Jose’s decision to include Padilla saddled us with him for the duration of the case. Like some freeloading distant cousin, once he moved in, you couldn’t get rid of him. He kept hanging around, hoping to be the one to break the case and keeping his mug in the news. He caused a stir with a media-hyped search of a small river in the area, calling a press conference when something was found, which he declared was a bag containing human remains. Turned out to be nothing. Of all the opportunistic clowns I came across in this case, he was the most offensive to me.

Not even a week after Casey was reincarcerated, an anonymous person stepped in and posted her bail. We knew who the bail bondsman was, a local guy, but we never learned who had put up the collateral for her release. There was a lot of guesswork, but nothing conclusive.

Because Casey’s release hadn’t resulted in turning up anything new, the authorities began to search for Caylee’s body in different ways. Tim Miller of the nonprofit organization Texas EquuSearch brought in his team of mounted search and recovery volunteers, and they actively searched central Florida, focusing on the area near the Anthony home. They looked in the overgrown, uninhabited areas on Suburban Drive, a street that first intersected with Hopespring Drive and eventually dead-ended a short distance away at an elementary school. Curtains of air potato vines made visibility from the road into the swamps behind virtually impossible. Not only that, but the swamps were filled with water and poisonous snakes at that time of year, and dozens of EquuSearchers were warned to stay out of areas with potentially dangerous water hazards.

Other leads came from different sources. On August 11, a meter reader for Orange County named Roy Kronk called 911 from his home to say he had been working in the Chickasaw Oaks neighborhood and, after reading all the meters on Hopespring and Suburban Drives, had entered a few feet into a vacant swampy area to relieve himself. In the swamp, not very far from the road, he saw a partially submerged, suspicious-looking gray vinyl bag with a white object nearby that resembled a human skull. The 911 operator thanked him and said she would pass on the information.

The next day, Kronk called again from his home, repeating everything about the location and his sighting. He further detailed exactly where he saw the bag. Again the operator thanked him for calling and suggested he also pass the information on to the TIPS line, as they were coordinating all kinds of details such as his.

On August 13, he called 911 for the third time. This time he said he was confirming a rendezvous with someone from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. The operator told him that if someone was planning on meeting him, to stay put and the deputy would certainly be there. He said he’d be waiting in his blue four-door Chevy Cavalier, right at the edge of the swamp. When the deputy arrived, Kronk pointed to the area where he had seen the suspicious item.