Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (26 page)

Roberts said that when he arrived, Kronk was leaning against his truck, smoking a cigarette, and Robinson was sitting in the truck but didn’t want to get out. Only Kronk had gone into the swamp, and he was excited when he told Roberts that the reward for information leading to Caylee’s discovery would be his. “Alex, I just hit the lottery.”

T
HE REMAINS HAD CLEARLY BEEN
in that location a long time. It would have been very difficult to get into the swamp, let alone see something in there, underwater, in very dark conditions. There was a little gap in the air potato curtain, and ironically, there was a discarded yellow sign with black lettering for a day care center just at that opening. But that was the only access point to the woods. You could have walked five feet to the left or right and never seen it, but once the vines and overhanging vegetation were pulled back, the whole gruesome picture became disturbingly clear.

The skull and one of the leg bones were close to the bag. The skull was just behind a log, not quite under it. When Kronk had taken the first officer to show him, they actually walked past it and had to come back. The skull had a hair mat around it, the majority of the hair having fallen to the back of the skull. From above looking down, the hair looked like a halo all around the head, with a few strands stubbornly clinging to the top of the skull along with a few decomposing leaves. The mat of hair and leaf debris surrounded the skull, burying it to about the level of the bottom of the eye sockets. The skull was tilted very slightly upward. A small amount of the hair that had fallen forward collected at the area that had been the nose. Even before the skull was removed, a length of shining gray plastic duct tape, about half an inch from the face of the skull, could be seen through the leaf debris. At first glance, there appeared to be more than one piece.

The rest of the skeleton was extremely scattered, having been distributed by animals as well as Central Florida’s summer rains and flooding. Every summer during the rainy season, low-lying swampy areas and recesses take on an extra four or five feet of standing water, which slowly dries up in the late autumn. Decomposition causes the bones of the body to separate, and the effects of animal activity and flooding led to an overall dispersal of the bones. That made it difficult for the crime scene investigators, though it was not at all startling or unexpected. Over the next ten days they would find that the torso and most of the ribs had been pulled to a secondary location, and the vertebrae had been pulled to a third place. One specific bone, a hip bone, was buried in four inches of muck. This type of accumulation of muck could have occurred only through the movement of water over and around the bone once it had been moved to that location by an animal scavenging. Thus we were able to determine that the body had fully decomposed prior to the rainy season in July and Tropical Storm Faye, which hit in mid-August.

Beyond the actual bones, there was other physical evidence that had been buried along with the body. It appeared that the body had been wrapped in a baby blanket that had a Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet pattern on it, and then stuffed in two garbage bags, one inside the other for extra strength, and all of that inside a laundry bag. About a foot to the left of the skull was a pair of shorts, size 24 months, with a kind of a striped pattern on them. Everything was pretty shredded up.

The obvious pieces were dealt with first. The medical examiner’s investigator, Stephen Hansen, collected the skull with the tape, as well as the leaf debris immediately around it, as one item. Trying as best as he could to keep all the items in their original position, he also collected the bags, clothing remnants, and other debris in the immediate vicinity of the skull. Everything from the scene not collected by Hansen—from the shreds of the garbage bags to the tatters of clothes—was photographed and collected separately by the CSIs and later taken to the crime lab.

As the search expanded to try and locate the other remains, the entire crime scene was cordoned off and set up like an archaeological site. The search area started small, about twenty feet by twenty feet, and expanded as the investigators found more bones. It ended up about eighty feet by forty feet, extending back into the woods. The CSIs would scrape down three or four inches and sift the earth looking for remains. They had a lot of people out there doing it, including people from the sheriff’s office, detectives from the FBI, civilian technicians, and crime scene investigators. The objective was to recover every possible bone of the little girl’s body.

The conditions were horrendous. This area was obviously used by locals as a secluded area to dump garbage and lawn waste. The swamp was a pit of raging poison ivy, nasty insects, poisonous snakes, and disgusting muck. Many of the search team members got poison ivy, and a lot of them got sick. In the end, they recovered almost every single bone, all except two tiny bones from one tiny toe, an unbelievable success given the environment they had to work with.

T
HE DAY BEFORE THE DISCOVERY,
Cindy and George Anthony were in Los Angeles for an appearance on
Larry King Live.
Once again Cindy had been taking to the airwaves to spread her message and had spent most of her time on
Larry King
denouncing the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for their indifference to the search for Caylee as they focused instead on proving Casey’s guilt. Cindy and George were in Los Angeles International Airport, ready to board a jet for their flight back to Orlando, when their lawyer, Mark NeJame, called them with the news that a child’s body had been found not far from their home. They were devastated. Without a fraction of a doubt, it was Caylee. They made the long trip back to Florida overwhelmed by the news.

Casey got the news earlier than her parents. The body had been discovered around 9:30
A.M
. Around an hour later, the police arranged for Casey to be brought to the clinic in the jail, where they would have a chaplain tell her the news per jail policy. There is a TV in the waiting room of the clinic, and the waiting room is monitored by video surveillance, so they recorded the scene in case the story about Caylee came on. That way, they could catch Casey’s reaction.

Later on, this setup became a subject of great angst to the defense. They said it was a violation of Casey’s constitutional rights. The videotape did not show that much, and we on the prosecution team did not introduce it at trial for precisely that reason. You couldn’t see much because of the distance and the angle of the camera; perhaps most important, you could not clearly see Casey’s face. Basically, she heard a newscaster saying there was breaking news about Caylee Anthony, she looked up at the TV set, and she put her head down and started to cry. Her body language could be equally indicative of “Oh crap, I’m caught” or “Oh crap, my daughter’s dead.” So in the end it didn’t add much information either way. But apparently the defense thought differently, and they got the judge to seal it. I always thought it was amusing that their actions led the public to think the tape was so much more incriminating than it actually was.

Regardless of the videotape, investigators worked quickly to see if there was a link between what they’d found at the scene and the Anthony home. Back at the medical examiner’s office, deputy chief medical examiner Gary Utz and investigators on the scene were inventorying the canvas laundry bag. The bag had a metal reinforced top and a brand tag identifying it as a Whitney Design. Along with the bag, they itemized the collar and tag from a size 3T shirt, as well as the iron-on letters that appeared to belong to that shirt. The letters spelled out the words
BIG,
TROUBLE,
comes,
and
small.
In addition, there were the remnants of a diaper or pull-up, a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, and at least two black trash bags with yellow tie handles.

When the skull was examined more closely, the duct tape was found to be three partially overlapping pieces with the brand name Henkel and with the text “Consumer Adhesives Inc. max temp 200 f Avon Ohio 44011” stamped on the back. The three pieces spanned the area from the jaw just below the right ear to the jaw just below the left ear. Small strands of hair still adhered to the tape, and the lower edge of the lowest piece of tape was bent in slightly, as if it had been pressed under the jaw. Though the tape was not adhering to the jawbone (also known as the mandible), some strands of the tape were. Dr. Utz found it unusual that the jawbone was still in its natural position in relation to the rest of the skull. He would later explain that during decomposition, when the strands of tissue holding the jawbone to the skull decompose, it always separates from the skull. The only time the mandible and skull are found in proper position is when there is something keeping them in place throughout that process, which in this instance was the tape.

There was still a lot to comb through, but even just these pieces of physical evidence were enough for us to begin relating things back to the Anthony house. A search warrant on the home was executed that very afternoon, specifically looking for those kinds of things that had been recovered at the site: any and all varieties of garbage bags or laundry bags; adhesive tape to include duct tape; all photos and photo albums, videos or CDs containing photos; Winnie-the-Pooh clothing, towels, blankets, or similar cloth items; toothbrushes and hairbrushes; and components that could be used to make chloroform, such as bleach and acetone. Even though Dr. Vass had discovered large amounts of chloroform residue in the carpet sample taken from the Pontiac, police had not returned to the Anthony home to initiate a chloroform search. The December search turned up nothing except household bleach. No acetone was found.

During the search, detectives found a number of items that connected to the crime scene. A laundry bag of the same Whitney Design brand as the one with Caylee’s remains was found in the garage. Whitney Design was a Target product, and the canvas bags lined with coated plastic were sold in sets of two, one rectangular and one cylindrical. Caylee’s remains were in a cylindrical one. A rectangular one was found in the house. Cindy would later acknowledge having purchased the cylindrical bag as well. She said that a neighbor, Brian Burner, had given her a whole bunch of plastic balls for a ball crawl for Caylee, and Cindy had used the bag for the balls. However, now she couldn’t say where it was.

Moving to the shed in the backyard, they found boxes of trash bags like the ones at the crime scene: giant-size standard black trash bags. Although they were the same kind, the product was so common that it would have been impossible to say definitely that the ones at the crime scene had come from the home. Perhaps more definitive was that they found the same brand of duct tape that had been attached to Caylee’s skull. The tape from the crime scene had been Henkel, not a common brand, and the words stamped on the back made it fairly easy to match. This same information and logo appeared on a swatch of duct tape that was stuck to the vent hole on one of the two red gas cans in the Anthonys’ back shed—the gas cans that Casey had taken from George when her car ran out of gas.

Venturing back to the house, the search warrant specifically singled out items with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, based on the blanket found around the skeleton. The identical pattern of the two characters was in numerous places in Caylee’s room, from her curtains to the bolster on her bed. Cindy would later acknowledge that a blanket that went with the bed set was missing.

The detectives left the Anthony house with bags and bags of evidence, not only items linking the two scenes, but also samples for fluid and DNA testing.

L
INDA AND
I
HAD DECIDED
not to attempt going to the crime scene for the first few days. We wanted to let the CSIs do their jobs, and there was enough craziness out there without having us in the way. But finally, on Wednesday, December 17, Linda, Frank, and I decided to go. We came to work in our jeans and headed over in one of the detective’s cars. When we arrived, we were greeted by a horde of news trucks. The restricted zone had been moved back a hundred yards or so to the intersection with Hopespring Drive to keep the media and the curious at bay. The primary crime scene had largely been cleared of debris. Deputies were clearing additional areas, as dictated by the discovery of bones. A blue canopy had been erected over the primary dump site, as well as over the shifting area where technicians picked through debris in search of bones no larger than a dime. An RV, used as a command center, was parked on the road nearby.

An old homicide detective buddy of mine, Dave Clark, was there wielding a chain saw as he cleared away debris. Another, Don Knight, who had been a CSI years ago and now was a court deputy, was also out digging. It appeared that all hands were on deck for this one. A sifting station was off to the right, as well as an ever-increasing pile of debris. Though it had not rained since the day of the discovery, the ground was still moist. Surveying the landscape, it struck me just what a mess this place must have been during the rainy season. It didn’t surprise me at all that it had taken this long to find anything out here.

We walked down the incline so that detectives could show us exactly where the remains had been found. Even though it was mid-December, it was still a little warm. Dave Clark was soaked in sweat. Linda and I stood for a time talking to Nick Savage from the FBI about the progress of the evidence that had been sent to the lab. Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist we had enlisted, showed up at the scene shortly thereafter. Dr. Haskell had looked at insect evidence from the car and issued some preliminary findings. By coincidence, we had been planning for a few weeks to ask him to come down this week to inspect the car. It was fortunate that he could be here to see the scene firsthand. We had never met but had spoken on the phone several times and he seemed very likable. He was a barrel of a man, standing six feet two, with a broad smile and an enduring fascination with bugs. He looked every bit the Indiana farmboy that in fact he was.