Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (29 page)

I’m not convinced that finding Caylee in mid-August instead of mid-December would have made much of a difference forensically. In either case the little girl would have been completely skeletonized. But emotionally, we all wished she hadn’t had to lie there among discarded trash for even a moment when all those who knew her wanted her home—that is, everyone except perhaps Casey.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

LIFE OR DEATH?

A
lthough a large amount of evidence was collected at the crime scene, the ravages of weather, water, and nature had rendered most of it relatively useless. The worst conditions for preserving DNA or fingerprints involve heat and water, and in the more than six months Caylee was there, we had an overabundance of both. The recovery team left no stone unturned, though. Every scrap of garbage within the search radius was collected, cataloged, and stored, and ultimately most of it was sent to the lab.

The remains themselves told us the most. It is a credit to the folks at the sheriff’s office, in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and on the FBI’s Evidence Response Team that they were able to recover almost all of Caylee’s bones, some of which were smaller than a dime because of her age. If a bone was large enough to be spotted by the investigator, it was photographed in position and its location recorded both on a diagram and by the placement of numbered flags at the precise location. The information was also entered into a software program called Total Station, which combined that information with a topographical survey of the area so that the precise orientation of any object to any other object could be determined with a keystroke.

Those bones that were too small or too buried to be detected visually were discovered by a sifting technique. First the search area was divided into approximately four-by-four-foot squares using a grid. Each square was given an alphanumeric designation. The ground cover was then removed to a designated depth and placed in buckets marked as to location and depth. The contents were then sifted through two levels of wire mesh. Any objects of interest were tagged and the bag labeled with location and depth information. The system was set up with the advice and assistance of Dr. John Schultz, an anthropology professor at the University of Central Florida and a contract consultant with Dr. G’s office. As suspected bones were found, they were shown to Dr. Schultz at the site, since he was often participating in the search, or in his absence they were given to Steve Hansen, the ME investigator, during his daily visits to the scene. It was through this rigorous combination of techniques that they were able to recover Caylee’s entire skeleton with the exception of some of the smaller bones of the foot. We were all very proud of the men and women who were so dedicated to showing Caylee the respect that she deserved, even in death.

Once Dr. G arrived on December 12, she began the process of examining the remains. Unfortunately, the tape had already been removed from the skull by the time she saw it. Dr. Utz had thoroughly documented the condition of the tape on the skull from every possible angle. The FBI was eager to send the skull to the lab for analysis, but in retrospect I wish they had been more patient and waited for Dr. G to see it for herself. As much as we try to use photos as a substitute, there is nothing like seeing something firsthand. We didn’t get good pictures of how the pieces of tape were configured over one another, since all the pictures were taken either after the tape was separated, or to provide exact measurements of the total width of the pieces together. Not having better photos hindered us somewhat in arguing precisely how the tape was placed on Caylee’s face. Who knows if it would have made a difference, but it was a source of frustration as we were deciphering all that we could from the remains.

Once Dr. G had a chance to examine the entire skeleton, she said it really didn’t tell us much. It was free of any evidence of injury and looked like the skeleton of a perfectly healthy little girl, but it was from this skeleton that Dr. G was tasked with discerning both the manner and the cause of death.

There is a difference between the manner of death and the cause of death. The cause of death is a purely medical determination of the biological mechanism that causes the body to cease to function. In a suicide by gunshot wound to the head and a murder by the same method, the cause of death is the same. The manner of death is a medical and legal determination that the medical examiner (ME) is required to make based upon both medical and investigative information. In the example above, though the cause of death is the same, the manner of death is different, since one is a suicide and one is a murder. It is not unusual for the cause of death to be undetermined but the manner of death to be homicide—in fact, in most skeletal cases or cases where the body has been incinerated, that is likely to be the case.

Such was the situation with Caylee. Dr. G rendered the opinion that the manner of death was homicide, basing that judgment mostly upon the manner in which the remains were found and the actions of the mother, but when it came to the cause of death, medically it could not be determined. The only things found with the body that could have caused her death were the tape and the plastic bags. Either one would have been sufficient to cause suffocation, but the state of the body prevented us from medically determining which one might have played a direct role in the death. That determination would have to come from the jury applying their common sense to the evidence revealed in the photographs.

Ultimately, most of the information we obtained from the remains was based upon where the bones were found. Dr. Schultz was able to learn a good deal from the distribution of the bones, allowing us to say more definitively that an animal had indeed been involved in their dispersal. He explained that when the body decomposes, the connective tissue keeps certain body units together even as other units separate from each other. The torso may separate from the head and extremities but still maintain cohesion as a unit for a bit longer. As decomposition continues, the torso itself will separate into its component parts as well, until all the connective tissue has decomposed, leaving the individual bones free to be moved about separately. In our situation it was apparent to Dr. Schultz that an animal had moved the torso as a unit from the primary site to a location about ten feet away. All the ribs were found in that area. Since the vertebral column would have been the last to break down, it was later dragged a few feet farther away, where the remaining connective tissue decomposed, leaving all the vertebrae again in the same area.

More important than an animal’s involvement was that this dispersal gave a better sense of the time period involved. Because of the way the animal(s) had moved the body parts, Dr. Schultz felt that the body had been placed where it was at some point during the decomposition process but while the body was intact. His opinion was that the body could have been completely skeletonized in as little as two weeks after death and most certainly was only bones within a month, a time frame that sent Casey’s thirty-one days of lies shooting back into all of our minds.

One bone in particular was of interest to him in dating the placement of the body. One of Caylee’s hip bones was found several feet away from the primary site. It had evidence of animal damage and was found up against a palmetto trunk, buried in four inches of muck. For those not familiar with the term,
muck
is the product of decomposing vegetation. It occurs when the vegetation is somewhere between being identifiable as what it was and being actual soil. When an area like the swamp off Suburban Drive floods, this fine debris mixes with the water, and as the water recedes, it leaves behind a layer of the fine debris in the form of muck. It is less dense than soil, and in swamps it can be several feet deep. Occasionally, in an extremely dry period, it can catch fire underground, which is what we call a “muck fire.” The fact that the bone was buried in muck meant that it had been deposited in that spot before the rains of summer and in particular before Tropical Storm Fay in August, which allowed the muck to settle over the bone. Based upon his estimate of the time for decomposition and dispersion of the bones, he placed the date of deposit of the remains in late June or early July.

Dr. David Hall, a retired professor from the University of Florida and a renowned expert in forensic botany, was called to the scene to examine the plants growing in the area where the remains were found. He was also sent photographs of the remains and the items found with them. Dr. Hall noted significant plant root growth into some of the bones. The mass of Caylee’s hair that had fallen around the skull was inundated with both small and large roots. Significant root growth could also be found in the baby blanket, laundry bag, and trash bag found with her. He issued an initial report expressing his opinion that the root growth through the items found with the remains would have taken at least four to six months. This was my first time dealing with forensic botany, so I was eager to meet Dr. Hall and explore his opinions further.

In February 2009, Linda, Frank, and I took a road trip to Gainesville to meet with a number of the experts we had working on the case. The University of Florida, my alma mater, has always been a valuable resource for prosecutors in the state of Florida. Over the course of this case, we would consult experts associated with the university in botany, toxicology, anthropology, hydrology, and law. We met Dr. Hall at his home in what appeared to be an older residential area not too far off one of the main roads past the university. His home sat on a multi-acre plot that could only be described as a botanical garden. Let’s just say it made my meager attempts at landscaping look like a dying potted plant. He gave us a tour of the grounds, which included his own private swamp on part of the property. All of the plants were beautiful native vegetation. You could tell that botany was not only this man’s profession, it was also his life.

Dr. Hall may have been retired and looked every bit the grandfatherly figure he had sounded over the phone, but his life was anything but that of a typical retiree. Between lectures, teaching, writing, and consulting, he had a full plate, and we appreciated the time he took with us. Taking us into a wood-paneled room that served as his library and office, he pushed aside the project he was working on—a treatise on some botanical issue I couldn’t possibly understand—and sat us near his desk.

He explained to us that when a human body is in the process of decomposition, the fluids released are actually toxic to plants. If you were to find a body in the middle stages of decomposition, you would find the grass underneath it dead. The importance of that in this case was that the root growth wouldn’t begin until the body was completely skeletonized, meaning that his four- to six-month time frame would have to be tacked on to Dr. Schultz’s two to four weeks for decomposition. That was putting us right about the time Caylee was last seen.

He candidly admitted that there were no published studies on root growth rates that could apply to this issue; his opinions were based upon five decades of studying and working with plants, not on specific documentation. But looking at the man who sat before me and at the lush grounds of his home, I was confident that his opinion would be enough.

With the plant issue settled, we moved on to the insects. When forensic etymologist Dr. Neal Haskell completed his evaluation of the insect evidence at the crime scene, it also dovetailed with Caylee’s body being deposited in the swamp during that midsummer period. Dr. Haskell discovered something else interesting as well, but to explain it I have to talk a little about bugs.

When a human body goes through the process of decomposition, it passes through a number of stages that involve different chemical processes. These five stages are referred to as
fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay,
and
dry remains.
I will spare you the disgusting details of each stage, but suffice it to say that different insects are attracted to remains at different stages of this process. At each stage the insect will deposit eggs in the remains, which will then hatch and consume the remains to support its maturation. Once mature, the insect will repeat the cycle. Each stage of that evolution leaves behind some remnant that etymologists can interpret. The first insects to be attracted to fresh remains are referred to as
early colonizers.

What interested Dr. Haskell at the scene was what he
didn’t
find. Had the body been placed in the swamp shortly after death, he would have expected to find evidence of large colonies of early colonizers. Instead he found evidence of very few, and though there had been both flies and maggots in the trunk, these fell into a separate category from the early colonizers that Haskell expected to find. What this indicated was that the remains had been stored in some other location and then moved to the swamp after a few days of decomposition. Even if the body had just been moved from one open area to another, he still would have expected to see evidence of early colonizers from the location. The only conclusion to draw was that wherever Caylee had been, the early colonizers had difficulty getting to her—like, say, if she were in the trunk of a car sealed in multiple plastic bags.

A
SIDE FROM THE SCENE, THE
items found with the body couldn’t tell us much scientifically. Most of their value for us lay in our ability to connect them to the Anthony home and Casey. Investigators had obtained a warrant to search the Anthony house on December 11, the day Caylee was found, and returned again nine days later on December 20. The list of items they were searching for included shoes belonging to Casey Anthony; the original clothing Caylee had been wearing when George last saw her—a pink top, blue jean skirt, white shoes, backpack with a monkey design, and white-rimmed sunglasses; doll clothing that would fit the doll recovered from the Pontiac Sunfire; small plastic toy horses similar to one that had been found at the crime scene; and any prescription drugs, including amphetamines and narcotics.