Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (37 page)

In all of those years though, I had never seen him demonstrate the slightest reluctance to testify in any case on any issue. That day as we waited to begin the deposition, his demeanor was truly startling. In my opinion, he saw himself that day, not as a physician giving a diagnosis but as a vehicle for the transmission of a lie and I think the thought sickened him. I think he choose the word
vector
with great care. In his mind he was spreading the virus of Casey’s lies. He knew that he was chosen because he would make the lie seem credible in a way she never could. In the end, I think he refused to allow himself to be used that way and he spoke his mind. I admire him for that because he was the only one who did.

We had asked Dr. Danziger to bring us copies of his notes from his interview with Casey, and we started out just going through them. A lot of them were biographical and background information, easy stuff. Then we got to the bombshell. Part of Casey’s new claim was that at age eight, her father had begun molesting her. The abuse had included oral sex, vaginal—everything. It lasted until she was in her early teens, and then it stopped. According to Danziger’s notes, her father was not the only abuser in the house. When she was a young teenager, her brother, Lee, had entered her room and felt up her breasts. She claimed she woke up and he was standing there, but he had not done anything other than that.

Then Danziger went over Casey’s claims for the scenario that had played out on June 16, 2008. What follows is my best recollection of our conversation during the deposition with him. Casey was asleep in bed at 9
A.M
. She was awakened by her father screaming at her, “Where is Caylee?”

Casey said that she would have Caylee sleep with her for Caylee’s protection because she was afraid her father might try to molest Caylee. That morning, Casey slept very hard and very late for her. The subtext was that it was unusual for her to be that sound asleep, and we believed this was meant to imply that she had been drugged. Her father then began to search the house and he found Caylee in the pool.

Reading Danziger’s report, we now had two versions of who found Caylee. Jose had told Linda that it had been Casey who found Caylee in the pool. But Casey’s version to Danziger had George finding Caylee in the pool. In Danziger’s version, George walked in with Caylee in his arms. She was dripping wet. He laid her on the floor and he began to scream, “This is your fault!”

Casey ran to her room, and that was the last she ever saw of Caylee.

Danziger said he interviewed Casey three times. We went methodically through the notes. During all three of her meetings with him, she consistently stuck with the exact same scenario.

That was the bombshell, but we still had the mushroom cloud.

Dr. Danziger went on to say that Casey told him she did not believe that Caylee drowned by accident. She did not believe that Caylee could have gotten into the pool on her own, because she couldn’t have gotten the ladder up. Casey believed that her father drowned Caylee deliberately or drowned her while he was molesting her, even though she had no evidence that George had ever molested Caylee in the past.

This allegation of abuse was particularly alarming because in Danziger’s interview with Casey when she was first arrested he had asked her specifically if she had ever been sexually abused and she had said no. Dr. Danziger had given her the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standard tool for a psychologist that he had taken special training to administer. Comprised of five hundred questions, the test is designed to discover mental illness or personality disorder. In all respects, she scored within normal ranges, Dr. Danziger said. He described her demeanor during the interviews as pleasant and happy, saying that the only emotion she showed was anger when she was describing her father.

That day, we did not complete Dr. Danziger’s deposition, because we weren’t anticipating the volume of information that he gave us. We agreed to reset it a few days later.

We didn’t have much time to process everything we had heard. Dr. William Weitz was scheduled to talk with us that same day after lunch, and to the best of my memory, that deposition went like this:

We went through the same procedure with him as we had with Dr. Danziger, slowly and carefully reviewing his notes. He did not have the same reluctance as Dr. Danziger to relay his information to us.

As far as molestation went, Casey had basically told him the same story she had told Danziger: the abuse started when she was eight and included all manner of sexual activity. But she told him that the sexual activity continued into her late teens, which was longer than in her other account. She also said she had been concerned that George might be Caylee’s father until the DNA test done by the FBI ruled out that possibility. Casey also told Dr. Weitz about Lee. She said she had tried to tell her mother about some aspect of the abuse, but Cindy had called her a whore.

As to the day of the tragedy, she added a few additional details to the version she’d told Danziger. She began by talking about being awakened by George and by him coming into the house with Caylee. Those details were the same.

The new detail was about the clothing. She told Dr. Weitz that Caylee went to bed wearing a nightgown, but when George brought her into the house in the morning she was wearing different clothes, striped shorts and a pink shirt, implying that George had changed her clothes. She explained in great detail that George’s upper body was wet but that his lower body was not. The doctor took that as an indication that George held Caylee underwater while he himself was outside the pool. It seemed important to Casey to say that only her father’s shirt was wet. She repeated her assertion that Caylee could not have died by accident and that George had murdered her.

She said that George yelled at her, “It’s your fault. It’s your fault. You’re a bad mother.” She said that she saw George carrying Caylee out of the house. She also told Dr. Weitz that she wasn’t sure Caylee was dead, that in fact she thought Caylee might actually have been alive. From time to time during the thirty-one days, George would tell her that Caylee was okay.

She claimed that for the next thirty-one days, she was in a fog. She did not have a clear recollection of what she did or why she did it. She did tell him that she was not a “party girl.” In explaining the “
Bella Vita”
tattoo, she said it was an ironic comment on the fact that her life hadn’t been beautiful. Dr. Weitz could not elaborate further on what she meant by that statement. This was as far as we got in our first interview with him.

The goal of our initial interviews had been to gather the basic facts with the intention of conducting more probative examinations in the days ahead. But on the morning of our next scheduled appointment with Dr. Danziger, we received a call from Jose Baez saying that he wanted to withdraw him as a witness. There was no need for deposition, he said. No sooner had he dropped the eleventh-hour witness on our doorstep than he whisked him away.

I wanted to proceed, and when Jose and Danziger arrived at our office I insisted we continue the questioning. We questioned him briefly, but then Jose said he wanted to call Judge Perry to prevent me from asking another question. We did, and the judge said that just to be safe, if I wanted to continue, I’d have to file a motion, and we of course complied.

Dr. Weitz was also scheduled to give a deposition that day. When he arrived at the office, Jose did not interfere. Dr. Weitz told us that he had reviewed Dr. Dangizer’s report. He brought to our attention Dr. Danziger’s MMPI results and agreed they were normal. Dr. Weitz had given her a battery of tests, including one designed to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by trauma like sexual victimization. The test did not support the conclusion that she had been victimized. Weitz explained it this way to me: I am not diagnosing her as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but all of these things that she did were as a result of the denial of having been sexually molested. You can understand all of this behavior by denial and suppression.

“So, when Casey said that Caylee was with the nanny, she believed it?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Weitz said.

“When she was taking the cops through Universal, did she believe she worked there?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened when she got to the end of the hall?” I questioned.

“Well, people can go in and out of denial” was his easy answer.

I didn’t know denial could ebb and flow like that, but I was no psychologist.

After we took the doctors’ depositions, both sides agreed in court that the transcript of the depositions should not be made public, because the allegations were so sensational. Until now their contents have never been discussed publicly. On the prosecution side, we wanted to spare George the weeks of pretrial discussions in the press. I could just see the
did he/didn’t he
debates all over HLN, and if there was any way to minimize that, I was all for it. As for the defense, we assumed that Baez wanted to keep the story under wraps so he’d get the “wow” headlines at the beginning of the trial.

Regardless of our motives, Judge Perry concurred with our assessments and the documents were sealed. In the end, though, Weitz did not testify either. Having completed the depositions of both therapists, we filed a motion to have Casey submit to an examination by a state-certified expert. This is a procedure that usually applies to insanity cases, and we felt it should apply in this odd circumstance as well. We argued that point in court, and Judge Perry agreed with us. If the defense was going to offer mental health testimony, we had the right to have Casey submit to an examination by our own expert.

After Judge Perry agreed, Cheney took Jose in the back. It was clear there were risks for them in giving our expert access to Casey. For one thing, our expert could get Casey talking and lead her in a direction that the defense had no control over. Then there was always a risk that she could reveal something she didn’t mean to when our expert had her alone.

When they returned, we were informed that they were pulling both psychologists from their witness list. They might still have an expert testify on some hypotheticals about mental health, but they would spring that on us later during the trial.

I knew what Jose Baez had been up to. He had two possible objectives. The first, I think, was that he was trying to get Casey’s story in front of the jury without having Casey actually testify. The two psychiatrists would have testified to everything Casey told them about what went down on June 16, as well as all her allegations about her father and brother. Meanwhile, she would be protected from having to take the stand because of the rules of self-incrimination. Baez’s second motive was to present some explanation for why Casey would take thirty-one days to report that her daughter had disappeared or died. We were surprised that Baez had not anticipated the request for our own expert evaluation and considered that before showing his hand like he had. We appreciated the heads-up, nonetheless.

E
VEN THOUGH THE WITNESSES HAD
been withdrawn, Linda, Frank, and I all wondered how much of this George and Cindy knew. Just because the defense had dropped the witnesses didn’t mean they were abandoning the argument completely. There was still a chance that George could be dragged into this.

One evening around the time that all this was happening, Mark Lippman, the attorney who by then was representing George and Cindy, filed a strange press release. It said something to the effect that George Anthony had nothing to do with the disappearance of Caylee. I thought it was an odd statement, and I figured it indicated that they knew about the allegations, so I contacted Mark. Linda was in the room when I asked him about his press release, assuming that the release had been somehow in response to these new inflammatory allegations from Casey. I wanted to know if in light of the allegations, we should expect George or Cindy to change any of their testimony. During the call, I sensed that Mark and I were not talking about the same sequence of events. “Mark, what is it that you think the new story is?” I asked.

Mark told me that a few days earlier, Baez had asked for a meeting with just Cindy. When she arrived at his office, Baez, Dorothy Sims, and Ann Finnell via the phone were waiting for her with important news. Baez proceeded to tell Cindy that Casey had authorized him to say that Caylee had died at the house and that her death had been an accident. Baez also told Cindy that the state was investigating George’s involvement with Caylee’s death. Baez claimed that the authorities had information from a witness who said that George’s phone records held valuable clues.

I was speechless. Poor Mark only knew the tip of the iceberg. It was the cruelest thing I have ever seen an attorney do. Many times in defending a client a lawyer must do things that end up causing pain to innocent people. It happens, and I lay no blame on them. To tell this grieving woman, who for almost two years had held out hope that her daughter had nothing to do with the death of her little angel, that her own home was the place where it happened was bad enough. But to try and convince her that her husband was implicated and in jeopardy was beyond the pale. To me, there was no way to justify that kind of statement—no matter how “passionate” Baez may have been to defend his client. The only strategy I could see was that he was trying to get them to refuse to cooperate with us, fearing the prosecution of George.