Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (41 page)

As happy as we were with our strong points, we had to consider our weak points as well. After all, absent a cause of death, this was a circumstantial case. To us, the presence of chloroform in the trunk pointed to Casey using it on Caylee, probably to knock her out. However, no chloroform was found in the Anthonys’ home when it had been searched. Similarly, there had been a “how to make chloroform” search performed on Casey’s computer in March of 2008, but three months had gone by before Caylee died, which left a gap between when she conducted the search and when the child was last seen.

It would be harder to argue that Casey had used chloroform on Caylee when she had not made a more recent search, however, we had the evidence of chloroform in the trunk and we had discovered something interesting on Ricardo Morales’s MySpace page. An advertisement-style photo of a man and a woman on an upscale date in a restaurant mentions the powerful anesthetic. The man is leaning over the woman to kiss her neck, and in the hand obscured from her view is a man’s handkerchief. The caption states, “Win her over with chloroform.”

This posting may have aroused Casey’s curiosity about the knockout potential of chloroform, and gotten her to thinking of using it. But we really weren’t sure how our chloroform theory would hold up in court. At the time, our computer forensics person had reported that there had been searches performed on the Anthonys’ home computer that included the word “chloroform,” “how to make chloroform,” and one search for “how to break a neck.”

Another challenge was overcoming the fact that everyone said Casey was a good mother. Caylee never showed evidence of abuse or neglect. Friends of Casey said she was fond of her daughter, nobody had seen her become annoyed or short-tempered with her daughter. Caylee’s room was neat and tidy and filled with toys.

This was an area where more candid testimony from Cindy Anthony would have been helpful. We knew from Cindy’s coworkers that Cindy had her own doubts about Casey’s parenting of Caylee and that Cindy felt Casey wanted to party too much rather than take care of her daughter. We also knew that some had even gone so far as to suggest to Cindy that she seek custody of Caylee, a drastic move to be sure, but also one that Cindy seemed to have considered. If Cindy had owned up to those conflicts with Casey—in police interviews, in depositions, and on the stand—we would have had a powerful rebuttal to defense claims of Casey as the perfect young mother. It wouldn’t have explained Casey’s jump to violence, but it certainly could have gone a long way to showing the jury where Casey’s priorities lay. Unfortunately we never got that level of cooperation from Cindy.

Another hurdle was how the law severely restricted our ability to persuade the jury to focus on the victim. The appellate courts are very sensitive to attempts to evoke naked sympathy for the victim that may affect the jury. However, the courts rarely restrict the ability of the defendant to play the sympathy card under the guise of a legitimate defense. Even the best judge will often err on the side of excluding evidence about the victim that does not relate to an issue in the case.

Ultimately, though, we thought the weak points of our case were minor, and easily surmountable with the right jury. We knew that in the opening remarks we would be safe introducing Caylee to the jury in a general way, but that eventually she would be reduced to a mere piece of evidence in the case. We could only hope the seed we planted early would be enough to make the jurors care enough about Caylee to sustain her image throughout the weeks. After that, it would be up to the jurors to keep her at the forefront.

There is this common belief that jurors’ hearts go out to children who are the victims of homicide, but in my experience that is less the case when a parent is accused of the crime. They have a much easier time accepting the homicide when it has been committed by a stranger. It is too horrible to comprehend that a parent could kill his or her own child, especially one so young and defenseless. For a jury, maternal filicide was the most difficult crime of all.

Our theory was as follows:

What we knew of Casey was that the primary motivating force in her life was herself. There is a self-centeredness that comes with adolescence, and while most teens outgrow it, Casey never did. We knew we would never fully understand the real relationship between Casey and her mother. Cindy’s denial prevented that. But from everyone we’d talked to and from what we’d witnessed ourselves, we did know that there was conflict.

George and Cindy had expectations of Casey, seeing that she was living in their home. They expected her to work and contribute to the household. Exactly why Casey didn’t work, we don’t really know. Maybe she was just lazy, maybe she wanted to spend more time with Caylee, or maybe she felt entitled and didn’t want to work. Eventually, lying about what she did during the day was easier than explaining to her parents why she was unemployed. But not working meant she had no money. Because she had created the illusion that she was employed, she couldn’t pretend she needed money, because supposedly she was making her own. Therefore, she started stealing from her parents, which soon became as easy as spinning her lies.

Casey now had two things in her favor: she had her parents off her back because they thought she was working, and she had money skimmed from wherever she didn’t think it would be noticed. The problem remained that she was with Caylee 24/7. After spending the entire day with her toddler, she wanted to get out in the evening to socialize, as any young adult would. However, based on our conversations with Cindy’s coworkers, we speculated that Cindy was hard on Casey about that. After all, Cindy thought Casey had already been out all day at her job, so to her, Casey going out at night meant she was shirking her responsibility as a mother. And of course, Casey couldn’t explain that she’d just been with Caylee for eight hours straight, because doing so would reveal the lie about her job.

When she started a relationship with Ricardo Morales at the beginning of 2008 and wanted to be out late, she told her parents she had been promoted to event planner at Universal with flexible hours. It was brilliant. Now, any time she wanted, she could say she had to work in the evenings. When she wanted to spend the night at Ricardo’s, she used a made-up babysitter, Zanny, who had enough room in her apartment to have Caylee, or even both Casey and Caylee, spend the night. The plan was so well thought out that Casey came out looking incredibly responsible. If she “worked late,” she didn’t have to wake Caylee when she got off. In reality, she and Caylee would spend the night at Ricardo’s.

In Casey’s eyes, Ricardo was a potential dad to Caylee. He wasn’t much of a party guy, preferring to stay home in the evenings. Casey, Caylee, and Ricardo were like a little family unit. Caylee fit right into this lifestyle. The next problem started when Casey started dating Tony Lazzaro.

Tony was different from Ricardo. He was a night owl and a nightclub promoter. He had a totally different lifestyle that had no room for a little kid. Why not just leave Caylee with Cindy in that case? We thought it was probably because Casey didn’t want her mother all over her about ignoring Caylee, but we also knew that Cindy was growing frustrated with Casey’s entitled behavior. For a while, Casey had been dropping Caylee off at Gentiva, where Cindy worked, and basically taking advantage of Cindy as a babysitter whenever she wanted. We knew this from the depositions of Cindy’s coworkers, but Cindy herself always stonewalled inquiries about any conflict in the relationship, so we were left with just hearsay. However, something happened the night of June 15 that triggered a blowout.

Cindy had become increasingly exasperated as one thing piled on another: missing money; unauthorized charges on her credit card; either dumping Caylee on her or withholding Caylee from her, whatever suited Casey’s fancy; and generally irresponsible behavior. The only specific rumor that we had heard about that meltdown on the fifteenth was that Cindy had found pictures of Casey at an “anything but clothes” party on Facebook and had lost her last bit of patience. In the photos, Casey was wrapped in an American flag and holding a beer. Cindy was enraged. Our theory held that Casey decided that night of June 15 that she was going to take Caylee from the household for good.

I imagine Casey told herself some lie to rationalize that murdering her baby was best for Caylee. Maybe she told herself that she didn’t want Caylee to grow up with Cindy, as she had. Or maybe she knew that it wouldn’t be long before Caylee began to really talk, and once that happened, the made- up babysitter, the fake job, the whole world would come crashing down. When you are that good at lying to other people, you get really good at lying to yourself. This was all guesswork on our part. What Casey was actually thinking, we will never know.

I would tell the jury that Casey used chloroform to put Caylee to sleep so she wouldn’t suffer, put duct tape over her nose and mouth, wrapped her in her favorite Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, and put her in the trunk to die. She went off to Tony’s and went on with her life with Caylee dead in the trunk. The next day, she went back to her house after George and Cindy had left for work and backed the Pontiac into the garage. She got the laundry bag and garbage bags off the shelves where they were kept, and took Caylee into the backyard to bury her. The shed was locked, so she couldn’t access the tools. She went next door to borrow a shovel from their neighbor, Brian Burner, telling him she was transplanting bamboo.

Back in her own yard, which was protected from view by a six-foot high stockade fence, she laid Caylee’s lifeless body on the grass. It appeared to us that she started a grave, based on the cadaver dog alert, but she got lazy or scared and decided against burial there. She put Caylee back in the trunk, and either that day or the next, snuck out to the woods, walked twenty feet in, and dumped her body.

I don’t think that Casey thought through how she would get away with this in the long run. Her ability to adapt and lie had always gotten her through to this point, so why should it fail her now? It always reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara—“I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

A lot of denial kept Caylee’s disappearance from being known for thirty-one days. A lot of good luck for Casey kept anyone from finding the child for six months. Three pieces of evidence found in the trunk of the Pontiac—the odor of decomposition, the hair with the band of death, and the high level of chloroform—were the keystones of our forensic case. The duct tape over the mouth and nose of the little angel’s skull was our smoking gun. Casey’s lies would fill in the motive: that her new lifestyle had no room for a child.

We were fully prepared for anything the defense wanted to throw our way.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

OPENINGS

O
n Tuesday, May 23, at precisely 8:13
A.M.,
I pulled in front of the Orange County Courthouse like I had so many times before. This morning was different, though. The level of excitement and commotion had reached a fever pitch. One of our investigators was waiting to escort me in. Walking past a line of people waiting to get into the trial, I heard some of them calling my name, which was kind of creepy. Of course the press was all over us, taking camera shots of us walking. I didn’t know why they were so obsessed with capturing that shot, but they were.

Across the street from the courthouse was a five-acre vacant lot owned by a development company. For years it had been slotted as the site of an office building, but for now it was Camp Casey, our nickname for the media zoo. It had been rented by TruTV, which then divided it and rented it out as smaller lots assigned to all the other media outlets, Headline News (HLN), CNN, etc. There was a sprawling overflow of media trucks with satellite dishes attached from all over the country. Stages, tents, and backdrops were built to accommodate the daily bulletins and nightly newscasts of the networks. A second, smaller lot just to the north of our office was converted into Little Camp Casey and rented by two local media outlets.

I had been involved in many cases before that were high-publicity, with a high level of local interest. Once in a while in the past, someone would approach and congratulate me or thank me for my work during or right after a trial. It was very flattering but not intrusive. This case was different. The cameras were on us every time we walked in and out of the courthouse, even for little hearings. There must be a hundred hours of tape of us doing nothing but walking, just walking.

The first time someone asked to take a picture with me outside the courthouse, it freaked me out and I politely declined. The next time it happened I was walking back from lunch and a woman with a small group of teenage girls stopped me. Moments before, they had poked their heads into the restaurant where I was eating, and when I stepped outside, they followed me like I was a sports legend. Finally, they made their move and asked me to pose with them for a photograph.

I realized in that moment that for them this was a thrill, something to tell their friends about. It wasn’t that I was someone special, it was that I was
connected
to something special. Somehow this made me a minor celebrity.

Nothing about me was different. I was doing the same work in this case that I’d done dozens of times before. From that point on, I took it in stride and just accepted the fact that, as bizarre as it was, I had fans. There were times during the trial when the admiration became difficult. When Linda, Frank, and I would walk to court, we would be cheered, as if we were entering the ring at a sporting event. That never sat right with me. This was a trial for the murder of a little girl, and the celebrity aspect made it seem like a spectacle.