Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (44 page)

Next on the stand was Brian Burner, the Anthonys’ next-door neighbor. Casey had borrowed a shovel from him on June 17, 2008, and we considered his testimony additional evidence that Casey had tried to dispose of Caylee’s body. Two shot girls from Fusian, Jamie Realander and Erica Gonzalez, followed Burner. All told, there would be twenty-one “friends of Casey” called to testify. We were trying to impress by sheer numbers how many people Casey had partied with, duped, or lied to. We wanted to show that no one, not a casual friend or a best bud, was immune from her deceptions.

We did make a misstep with one of these early “friends of Casey’s,” a woman named Maria Kissh. She was an acquaintance of Casey’s and the girlfriend of one of Tony’s roommates. She testified that she had been in the Pontiac at some point following Caylee’s disappearance, and that there had been no odor in the car. In her original statement, Maria had said that she had been in the car; however, she had not specified
when
. During her testimony, Frank asked her when she had been in the car anyway, and her response was June 16, which surprised us all. This left the door open for Jose to promote his theory that the body was never in the car.

Thankfully, her testimony was repaired through the testimony of Tony Lazzaro, who explained that Maria had been in the car
before
Caylee disappeared, not after. Problem solved, but it gave us all a bit of heartburn.

Tony’s testimony introduced another issue bigger than that of Maria Kissh, however. During the early investigation, we’d learned that before her arrest Casey had told Tony she’d been molested—although not by George, but by Lee. When Baez cross-examined Tony, he asked him questions about the confidences he’d shared with Casey. We knew exactly where he was going, and we also knew the dangers. By sharing the conversation that had passed between Tony and Casey, Baez was introducing hearsay by Casey. Doing so would mean that Casey’s past character was an addressable issue, and as a result, the prosecution would be able to bring up Casey’s criminal past—her prior convictions for check fraud against her friend Amy Huizenga.

For the time being, we stuck with our objection to Baez’s line of questioning as hearsay. Judge Perry sent the jury back to their hotel and met with us and the defense together. He wanted to decide for himself if what Tony had to say about Casey’s confidences was admissible to the jury. He began by asking him when Casey first told him about her brother’s alleged misconduct.

“It was either around June 30, 2008, or July 5, 2008,” Tony recalled.

Judge Perry asked him if he knew what Lee had done. Tony said Lee had tried to feel his sister’s breasts, but Casey said he was unsuccessful. Next, Judge Perry wanted to know if Casey mentioned anything inappropriate on her father’s part. “Could you relate to us what she said occurred in terms of abuse with Mr. Anthony, as in much detail as you can recall?”

“Hitting. That’s all I can remember,” Tony replied.

“What did you take that to mean or did she give you a more specific description of hitting?”

“I took it as discipline.” Tony answered.

Judge Perry continued, “Did she tell you . . . besides using the word ‘hitting,’ did she say anything else?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

The judge ultimately agreed that Tony’s information was hearsay and the jury was not allowed to hear the testimony.

O
N
D
AY
F
OUR,
G
EORGE
A
NTHONY
returned to the stand. His testimony this time had to do with the duct tape on the gas cans. Based on the unfortunate way that George had chosen to frame this story at the deposition, I knew this area would be problematic, but I was prepared.

At the time of his deposition, way back in the summer of 2009, George had been evasive about the duct tape. He’d claimed that some of the tape had been on the gas can for years, but that he hadn’t put that particular piece of tape over the vent hole, seemingly implying it must have been placed there by the police. In this statement, he had put his support behind Casey at great risk to his integrity as a witness.

Now, with Casey’s allegations against him fresh in everyone’s minds, he told a different story. On the stand, he said that when Casey brought the gas can back to him, it didn’t have a cap on the vent hole, the implication being that Casey had lost it. George then said he’d put a piece of duct tape on the hole, then and there on June 24, 2008. The whole story was completely inconsistent with his deposition. I’d long known that his attempt to help Casey back then would come back to haunt him, and sure enough it had.

Understandably, Baez picked up on the discrepancy between whether there had been tape on the gas can during his cross-examination of George. He ended up asking the same question that I had asked during the deposition: “When the gas was returned, did it have duct tape on it?”

Rather than saying, “No, it didn’t,” and staying consistent with what he’d said to me only an hour or so before, George started to be difficult with Baez, answering his questions with questions for the sole purpose of frustrating him.

This was not helpful to our case. George must have hated Jose, particularly because of the latest allegations. I think George may have believed that it had been Baez’s idea to accuse him of molesting his daughter. In George’s mind, Casey had only submissively gone along with her lawyer’s plan. None of us on the prosecution saw it that way. To us, the molestation accusation had “Casey” written all over it. Regardless, one thing I was sure of was that Baez knew how much George disliked him and used it to his advantage. Baez probably wanted the jury to see George’s hostility, and George took the bait. He was not bright enough to read what was happening. I wanted to say, “George, just stop playing games, just answer the question,” but I couldn’t. I’ve always wondered if on some subconscious level George was trying to look guilty. Maybe this was his way of helping Casey. I didn’t really think so, but I wondered. For someone who was innocent, he had a way of making himself appear suspect. I didn’t think it would seriously hurt our case, or lend any real credence to the defense’s baseless accusations, but I knew this was not the face of George that we on the prosecution team wanted to project.

Baez knew that George would continue to try and dance around the connection between the tape and his house. By now, we also had a video in which the same duct tape was being used at the “Find Caylee” command center. This further made George look like he was lying. If initially he had been trying to protect Casey, now he was looking as though he was trying to protect himself, something not lost on Baez.

Ultimately, George said that the gas can didn’t have duct tape on it when Casey brought it back. So why the game? He was playing right into Baez’s hands. I just wanted to slap him, and this wasn’t even the end of it. The next thing I knew, George was arguing with Baez about how often he mowed his lawn.

“You cut your grass every week?” Baez asked.

“Well, every week, two weeks, ten days,” George answered instead of just simply saying, “Yeah, I cut my grass every week in the summer.” Baez then brought up George’s call to the police to report that his shed had been broken into, implying that his call was an attempt to set Casey up.

I could tell that George wanted to spar with Baez about anything. But not only was he not as practiced at the dance as Casey, he didn’t have a motivation to stop. Normally, a lawyer can appeal to a witness’s better judgment by saying, “You’re at risk of allowing the accused murderer to go free by the way you are acting.” But George didn’t have that motivation because the accused murderer was his daughter. Instead, he was exercising his private outrage at Baez, and ended up looking like he was trying to hide something. He was only shooting himself in the foot. All we could hope was that the jury would understand that George’s anger was justified, that it was directed at Jose, and it was not indicative of complicity.

As much as George wasn’t doing himself any favors, I thought some clear questions with concise answers could help dispel any doubts about George that surrounded him. On redirect, I tried to make the point that in June 2008, there was no way George could have known that the gas can or the tape on it had anything to do with Caylee’s death. I asked George what he had done with the gas cans in the four months between the fight with Casey and the discovery of Caylee’s body. When he said he had stuck them in the shed for four months, I made my point that it would be pretty stupid for someone who was involved in a crime to deliberately keep the evidence around. I wasn’t sure if it had undone George’s struggles with Baez, but hopefully it had helped.

After George was dismissed, the jury had two questions of its own for Judge Perry. They wanted to know which twelve of the fifteen jurors would deliberate the case and which three were alternates. Would it be the first twelve and the alternates were the last three, or would the order be mixed up? The other question was, Did the alternates get to go home when the jury deliberated? Day Three of the trial and they were already talking about wanting to go home—not a good sign.

That night, they started sending out requests for DVDs that they wanted to watch. Some of them were kids’ movies, which was kind of weird. Judge Perry pointed out that they had already agreed on a list of movies, two hundred in all, but there apparently were some additional ones that they wanted. As I look back on it, I understand that the jury was sequestered and it was a long trial, but they were a rather high-maintenance bunch. There seemed to be a lot of thought and discussion about what entertainment they wanted, which movies they wanted to watch, and which restaurants they wanted to go to. Yet, as we would learn later, when it came time to deliberate, they never asked a single question about the evidence.

There was another mentionable high-maintenance incident when one of the jurors ran out of water during testimony. He looked at the court deputy, held up his empty water bottle, and shook it, like the court deputy was his personal butler and should fetch him a new one. The court deputy was annoyed at being treated like a servant.

Throughout the trial, Judge Perry was very accommodating of the jury, really wanting to keep them happy, satisfied, and reasonably entertained. They wanted to watch the finals of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game on television, so Judge Perry was going to get somebody from the cable company to acquire a tape of the game for them to watch. In the end, the local cable company hooked them up so they could watch the game live and on national television. Judge Perry gave the company a nice nod for their kindness. When the jurors wanted pretzels in the break room, he provided them. He spent a lot of time on their comfort. I now wonder if the judge made it too comfortable for them.

W
HEN THE TRIAL RESUMED,
F
RANK
called more “friends of Casey” to the stand. One of them was her ex-boyfriend Ricardo Morales. Frank asked him general questions about the Anthony family and the relationship between Casey and Caylee. He said he had last seen the toddler on June 10, the day he and Casey broke up. During the cross, I thought Baez behaved inappropriately toward Morales, drilling him about selling a photo he had taken of Caylee wearing the pink “Big Trouble Comes in Small Packages” shirt and others of Caylee to a magazine. He acted all indignant that this man would sell photographs of this poor dead child for $4,000. It was so hypocritical, when Jose had brokered the sale of photos of Caylee for $200,000 on Casey’s behalf. You wonder, how does he live with that?

Ricardo’s friend Troy Brown, Troy’s ex-girlfriend Melissa England, and four friends of Casey’s—Iassen Donov, Dante Salati, Christopher Stutz, and Matthew Crisp—followed Ricardo Morales. All of them testified to Casey’s lies. On cross-examination, Jose did manage to get the majority of them to say that Casey was a good mother.

In retrospect, I think the sheer quantity of lies might have taken away some of the impact of the individual lies. Almost like in aversion therapy, exposing someone to something that bothers him enough makes it seem not quite as bad. After about a dozen of these witnesses, I thought it got little boring to keep going over and over the same questions and the same points. We stressed to the jury that Casey was a woman who went on as if nothing had happened after Caylee disappeared; in fact, her life got better. Looking back on it, though, it was probably overkill. I thought we had made the point and I suggested we could cut out a few. Linda decided we should stick to the plan, and she was the boss. I did suggest to Frank that he tighten it up, which he did.

This was around the time I began to tell Linda and Frank that I thought Casey was not going to testify. I was feeling stronger and stronger in my conviction that she wasn’t going to take the stand. I thought Jose’s whole opening statement was probably something that he was going to put out there and never prove. They both thought I was crazy, and that based on what Baez said in opening, she had to back it up on the stand. I completely agreed with the logic of what they were saying. But I pointed out that in the three years we had been dealing with this guy, he had filed motions or made statements time and time again, and got indignant when we made him back them up. I had this gut feeling that he thought he could just say anything, and people would believe him.

On May 27, Simon Birch took the stand. He was the manager of Johnson’s Wrecker, the place where George and Cindy came to retrieve the Pontiac. He testified that the smell from the Sunfire to him was foul and potent, like that of decomposition. He said he had been in the towing business for more than twenty years, with a two-year stint in waste management, and had smelled everything you could imagine in a car. He was firm in his belief that the odor in the Pontiac was from a dead body. He related that when he and George Anthony opened the trunk, lots of flies flew out. There was a bag of garbage in the trunk, which they tossed into the Dumpster. It did not help the smell in the trunk at all.