Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (28 page)

A
S THE DEFENSE TRIED TO
cloud Kronk in suspicion, the main counternarrative they stuck to was that the body had been planted. As they laid it out, this premise was based on the fact that in the weeks after Caylee was reported missing, the area where the body was found had supposedly been thoroughly searched, but the remains had not been found. Therefore, they concluded, when the body was found in December within a quarter mile of the Anthony home, it must have been hauled there and planted. Roy Kronk was now their best scapegoat for such an action. Of course, there was no evidence to implicate Kronk beyond his questionable behavior upon finding the body, but the defense’s story did highlight an important question that the discovery of Caylee’s body revealed: how could her remains have gone unnoticed for so long in an area so close to the Anthonys’ home?

Rife with the prerequisites for a good place to hide a body—such as an almost impenetrable air potato curtain obscuring the site from the road—the swamp off Suburban Drive should have been one of the first places checked. It had near-perfect conditions to promote decay, not to mention that its unappealing landscape was scattered with its share of household toss-offs—from old paint cans and beer bottles, to a half-submerged television, to various car parts, hubcaps, and batteries. Amid this mess of artifacts, the laundry bag shrouding the tiny body was in perfect suburban camouflage. Still, it should have been found, because the area should have been searched. But it wasn’t. In the end, Murphy’s Law prevailed: everyone assumed that someone else had searched there, but in fact no one actually had.

One of the first groups to face scrutiny following Kronk’s discovery was Texas EquuSearch, the volunteer search and rescue organization founded by a man named Tim Miller and based in Dickinson, Texas. EquuSearch had dedicated a huge share of its resources to the Find Caylee Marie operation, sending more than forty-two hundred workers and volunteers to Orlando and eating up close to half its annual budget. According to the mission statement of the volunteer group, “We are committed to providing experienced, organized and ethical volunteer search efforts for missing persons, utilizing the most suitable and up-to-date technologies and methodologies.” Beginning in late August 2008 and again in November, three months later, teams from this organization were actively searching vast areas of Orange and Osceola Counties. I recall seeing footage of their efforts on the news in early September of 2008.

EquuSearch hadn’t been able to get their initial teams set up until a week or so after August 20, 2008, when a huge rain maker, Tropical Storm Fay, dumped massive amounts of water on us. When they finally began in late August 2008, there were certain areas that they simply could not search because of the standing water. I recall Miller saying in an interview that they were going to search those areas at a later date. In my opinion, those eleven inches of rain worked in Casey’s favor. Sometimes even bad people have a guardian angel, for whatever reason, and I think Casey had one in that circumstance. When EquuSearch came back, they scoured different areas altogether and never returned to Suburban Drive. And furthermore, nobody knew that was the case. Everyone, including law enforcement, assumed that the most obvious place had to have been combed and given the all clear—which just goes to prove the old adage about what happens when you assume. Everybody ended up looking like an ass and a nation spent an extra four months searching around the country for a lost little girl who was a quarter mile from home.

The sheriff’s office was equally piecemeal in their efforts. They totally botched Roy Kronk’s three calls. His third call had gone so far up the tip line that it had reached Yuri Melich himself. A Detective White, who had the role of reviewing the tips as they came in and passing them along, brought the Suburban Drive tip from Kronk to Melich’s desk, but Melich told him that the searchers had already completed a sweep of that area. The sheriff’s office was relying on the expertise of Texas EquuSearch, but not actually checking up on them. We all assumed that EquuSearch’s record keeping was better than it was, but they were only volunteers doing the best they could. The case had begun as a missing child investigation, with the sheriff’s office looking for a living child. When they switched the effort from rescue to recovery, the sheriff’s office investigators worked with tips, not grid searches or sweeps. In hindsight, relying solely on a volunteer organization for field searches was probably not the best idea.

Still, a fierce debate began to rage about whether EquuSearch had in fact searched and cleared that area. The stakes were high, because the defense was trying to substantiate their claim that the body had been placed there while Casey was in jail. If, in fact, EquuSearch had swept that area and okayed it while Casey was in custody, it would lend credence to the defense. Shortly after Caylee’s remains were identified, the defense began an attempt to obtain the records of EquuSearch. By this point, Tim Miller was represented by Mark NeJame, who had previously represented the Anthonys. Initially, Baez wanted the names and personal information of every single searcher who had volunteered in this pursuit. NeJame thought that request was too broad and offered to provide the information related to the swamp area in question, which was initially agreeable to all parties.

Later on, in August of 2009, the defense would go on to boldly announce, for the benefit of the press, that they had found a hundred people who had searched that area off Suburban Drive while Casey was in jail and had not found Caylee’s remains. A week later, we called their bluff and filed a motion asking the court to require them to produce the list of witnesses. We didn’t mind if the list fell short of a hundred people; we just wanted names so that we could depose them. The court granted the motion and set a February 2010 deadline for the defense to provide it. That deadline came and went, but we didn’t start to get names until late that year.

In the months following the discovery of Caylee, the defense began to contact some of the searchers for interviews. Shortly after Caylee’s body was found, a searcher named Joe Jordan e-mailed the sheriff’s office to say that he had searched an area on Suburban Drive, and she had not been there. That e-mail was not followed up on initially, but later investigators would learn that the area Jordan referred to in his e-mail was different from the one where Caylee was found. Regardless, the defense contacted Mr. Jordan for an interview, and a date was set.

Jordan was apprehensive, however. He later told police he’d been hearing rumors from other searchers that a private investigator hired by the defense to look into the records of the searchers was pressuring people to remember things the way he wanted them to. With this in mind, when Jordan agreed to meet with the defense investigators, it was at the office of a local attorney he’d hired, Kelly Sims. This was probably a smart move on his part, but his next decision was not so smart. Without telling even his own lawyer, he brought a concealed tape recorder into the interview and recorded the entire session. The only problem was that by doing so he was unwittingly committing a felony.

After the interview, Jordan contacted Corporal Eric Edwards at the sheriff’s office, and during their discussion he volunteered the information that he had recorded the interview secretly. Realizing that Jordan had just confessed to a crime, Edwards told him to retain the tape and moved on to the content of the interview. Jordan told Edwards that at the meeting the investigator for the defense, Mortimer Smith, had shown Jordan a document purporting to be an EquuSearch form that supposedly demonstrated his participation in a search of the area off Suburban Drive near where Caylee was found. The document listed the team leader’s name as Laura Buchanan. Jordan informed Edwards that in his opinion the document was not genuine and that the search it purported to document never happened. He also related that he had received a phone call earlier from a woman claiming to be in law enforcement in Kentucky who identified herself as Laura Buchanan. She insisted to him that she had searched the area where Caylee was found and found nothing and that he had been involved with her in the search.

The recording complicated that case a bit for us. Since it was illegal, we were not permitted by law to listen to it or know its contents. The detective could listen to it as part of his investigation into that offense, but we did not feel that we could. Investigators wanted very badly to inform us of the contents of the tape or to have us review it, because they felt it revealed something important about the defense’s tactics, but we would not permit them to discuss it in our presence. To this day we have no idea what the tape contains. All parties involved in the conversation declined to prosecute Mr. Jordan, so the case was not pursued. The defense then took the position that they wanted to review the tape, but we informed them that if we let them do so, we would be committing a felony as well. They repeatedly attempted to get the court to order us to release it to them, but the judge read the statute the same way we did and it remained unheard.

As investigators and the defense moved on from Jordan, Laura Buchanan became the center of scrutiny. Buchanan was the Texas EquuSearch team leader who Jordan said had called him. At the time of the search, Buchanan, actually a housewife from Kentucky, had been in Orlando with her husband who was on a business trip, and she had volunteered with EquuSearch in the late August searches. She injected herself into the case having followed it on the news and not having much to do in Orlando while her husband was at his meetings. She said she was in possession of field documents proving that she had searched the Suburban Drive area on or around September 1, 2008. She had also searched Blanchard Park, where, according to Casey, Zanny and Caylee had been frequent visitors. Buchanan went so far as to say that she and Jordan had searched together. She claimed that they agreed that no one had sent them, but they decided to search there on their own. When Jordan was later shown a photograph of Buchanan, he did not recognize her.

With all of this back-and-forth, it was clear we needed to get Buchanan on the record. She was set for deposition in New Jersey, where she had recently moved. We were attempting to utilize some new technology that would enable us to take depositions over the Internet, so Buchanan was in the office of her attorney while the rest of us were in Florida. During the deposition the witness referenced the EquuSearch document that she claimed to have given to the defense’s investigator, which listed all the people who had searched the area off Suburban Drive. She also referred to a photograph on which the investigator claimed she’d marked the spot she searched.

As usual, the defense had not provided either the document or the photograph to us. Buchanan and her attorney tried to fax the document, but the copy was so poor it was illegible. Buchanan went on to make the claim that she had seen the area where Caylee was found on TV and remembered searching that area, but her exact description of the area was a little vague, and precision was hampered by the technology we were using.

We agreed that she would have to be deposed again. During the period between the first and second depositions, we obtained a good copy of the document in question. The detectives then began investigating and speaking to the people on the list. Some of them told the police that while they did volunteer for EquuSearch, it was not on that day. Others said they remembered searching with Buchanan but not at Suburban Drive. Still another remembered searching Suburban Drive, but only the portion near the school—not where Caylee was found—because it was underwater at the time.

It was beginning to appear from the witnesses’ statements that the field document Buchanan had produced had been altered, which commenced a criminal investigation against her. She was under scrutiny for perjury and interfering with a homicide investigation. The second deposition was reset at our offices in Orlando, and she appeared in person and represented by a new attorney. This time her attitude was far different. In reference to the EquuSearch document, her story was that she had found it under the seat of her car months after the search, and when the investigator, Mortimer Smith, called for an interview, she’d made notes on the document of people she thought were with her. She claimed that she gave it to Smith without telling him she had altered it.

Though we found the explanation a bit hard to swallow, at least the defense’s balloon had been burst. Not only did they not have a list of people who’d searched that area, but Buchanan also testified that while she had been in the area off Suburban Drive, she had not searched the exact area where Caylee had been found. Just like all the defense’s theories, this one began to unravel as well. Ultimately, based upon her statements at her second deposition and the police investigation, no charges were brought against Buchanan.

Linda continued to depose other searchers that the defense had listed. The defense said that each had given a statement saying they had searched the area and found nothing, but as Linda spoke to them, all but one acknowledged that the area in question was underwater and was not searched. The only one who didn’t fold completely was a gentleman who said that after a night of socializing at a sports bar he’d visited the scene. At three in the morning and by moonlight, mind you, he could swear that no remains were present.

In the end, the defense’s earlier claim that there were a hundred searchers, as well as their subsequent claim that there had been a dozen, were both a big fizzle. It had taken hundreds of hours of investigator time and dozens of hours of depositions to confirm what the physical evidence told us to begin with: for almost six months little Caylee had lain in that spot while literally thousands of people had passed by, never knowing that they were within feet of her.