Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (36 page)

I had to hand them a copy of the transcript of the prior hearing, and Dorothy Sims wrote out in longhand on a piece of yellow legal paper exactly what Jose had previously said in court on the matter. The handwritten paper served as the new motion. It was presented to Judge Perry, and Baez, as the lead defense counsel, signed it. I looked it over and said I was fine with that.

Back in court before Judge Perry, I explained to all the people present, “Judge, we’ve resolved the matter. We have agreed that if Mr. Baez apologizes and complies with the original order, we will agree to drop the contempt motion. The defense is going to file a pleading in compliance with the court’s order.”

Baez then presented Judge Perry with the signed yellow piece of paper, which documented that Baez would limit the scope of his challenge to Dr. Vass. He stood before the court and apologized for what he had said about me, crediting it to the deep passion he felt for his client. While it hadn’t started out as much of an apology, he did acknowledge that the things he’d said were not appropriate or true. I accepted his apology and shook his hand, thinking the issue was resolved. I could now prepare for the Frye hearing knowing exactly what the issues were. Or so I thought.

When the Frye hearing came along in early April 2011, I experienced the most bizarre episode in my thirty years in court. As the hearing progressed, Baez began to challenge everything Vass had done, as I had originally feared he would do. He completely abandoned the limitations he himself had placed on the issues when he’d signed that handwritten piece of yellow legal paper. I was dumbstruck, and so was the judge. After two or three attempts to broaden the scope of the issue were denied, Baez actually complained that he had been coerced into signing the yellow piece of paper that Dorothy Sims had given him, and that he should not be held to what it said. He even claimed that I had coerced him into signing it.

My jaw dropped. He had lost that little battle of wills with the judge and me a month earlier, and now he stood in front of the court to whine about it. Words escape me at times like these, but they did not escape Judge Perry. “Well, I guess I can’t trust any stipulation you get,” Judge Perry said.

In the end, the court ruled that Dr. Vass’s opinions were based upon generally accepted scientific principles, so Vass would be permitted to testify. It was an important victory for us, but we didn’t have too long to savor it. The trial was a little over a month away—more than enough time to get one final, massive curveball thrown our way.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

THE NUCLEAR LIE

E
ight weeks before trial, Linda, Frank, and I were reviewing every defense action that Jose and his dream team might come up with. We had long expected what Linda would call the nuclear lie, the big one. Our job was figuring out what that might be.

With Caylee’s remains found and the crime scene tied to the Anthony home through the duct tape, the argument of abduction by a stranger had become hard to maintain. As late as the late winter of 2011 the defense was still trying to support the theory that Caylee had been alive, abducted by persons unknown, when Casey went to jail. That theory held that Caylee had been killed during Casey’s incarceration and her body then deposited in the Suburban Drive swamp. In this scenario, Casey’s alibi was irrefutable. She was in jail so she couldn’t have murdered her daughter. The poor child’s killers were still at large.

As their Texas EquuSearch witnesses fell apart one by one, the three of us on the prosecution knew that this version of Casey’s lie was dying its inevitable death. In the two and a half years we’d been on this case, we’d seen this all before, whether it was during the role-play with Lee when Casey had first developed the kidnapping story and Casey 2.0 was born, or at Universal Studios, when she’d reached the end of the hall, or when she’d created the Blanchard Park variation of the kidnapping story, Casey 3.0, for Lee. She had nowhere else to go with the mysterious abductor story, so she needed a new narrative. We’d seen it before so many times, we could almost smell it. All the telltale signs were there that Casey’s story was about to change. It had to. But the nuclear lie that was about to be dropped was beyond even our wildest imaginations.

With the Frye hearing finally over, Linda, Frank, and I had submitted the state’s list of witnesses and the defense had submitted theirs. All motions about discovery had been resolved. There was nothing left for either side to do but plan for the logistics of the trial itself.

Yet one complication remained. During the Frye hearing, we’d received a new witness list from the defense with two new names: Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, a psychiatrist from Orlando, and Dr. William Weitz, a psychologist from the Fort Lauderdale area. I had known Dr. Danziger for many years. He was a forensic psychiatrist, and part of his practice was forensic evaluations. He was one of the two doctors who had originally examined Casey in July 2008 by order of Judge Strickland, who had asked both doctors to do a basic competency evaluation. At that time, the only significant finding had been that she was unusually happy for somebody in her circumstances.

Baez had not filed anything about the content of what these two mental health experts were going to testify to, so all signs pointed to another Baez ambush. At the end of the Frye hearing, we raised the issue with Judge Perry: the court had previously ordered that all experts had to provide reports, so we were expecting reports from Danziger and Weitz.

For the defense, Ann Finnell said she was going to contact these doctors and have them submit reports by that Friday, April 8. We had only four weeks till trial, so even Friday was pushing it. We needed to decide if we were going to depose them, but we didn’t know what they were going to say.

That afternoon I was running out of the courtroom to pick up my children from day care. Linda and Frank had already gone home. When I got outside the courthouse, I remembered that my wife was on pickup duty so I slowed my pace. My cell phone rang just as I reached the parking garage. Ann Finnell was asking me to come back upstairs to the courtroom. I walked in to find Finnell, Mason, and Baez standing in the courtroom.

Ann told me she had contacted the two doctors and there was no way they could get their reports to her by Friday. She wanted to go before Judge Perry to explain the delay and she needed a member of the prosecution team in court. We called the judge and he reentered the now empty courtroom, without a court reporter, to see what was up.

We all stood in the courtroom near the jury box as Ann explained the issue with the report. I didn’t have a problem with a slight delay, but time was of the essence.

“What is this about?” Judge Perry demanded. “Why don’t you just tell? Why do we have all this mystery?”

All of us, including Judge Perry, went together into the back jury room. We took seats around a small table. Finnell started by saying that the doctors were important to explaining Casey’s failure to report Caylee’s disappearance for the thirty-one days.

I looked at them in disbelief and said, “Why don’t you quit playing around and tell us what the story is?”

Jose smirked, and said that the story was going to be that Caylee drowned by accident and Casey trusted someone she shouldn’t have to take care of it. I was dumbfounded by both parts of the premise. They were going to concede that Casey knew Caylee had died from the beginning, and they were going to implicate someone else in the cover-up.

“Who would that be?” I asked.

“George,” he replied matter-of-factly, as if this were somehow an obvious answer.

I looked at him and broke out in laughter. “Just bring it on,” I said. “I can’t wait to cross-examine Casey.” It was not my proudest moment, but it had been an exceedingly long day and my feistiness was showing.

I thought it was a complete crock of crap. For ages I’d assumed that Casey was going to implicate someone beyond herself as a way to deflect blame. Linda, Frank, and I had been debating for years what her next story was going to be. What was shocking was not that she had a new lie, but that this lie contained the combination of Caylee drowning and Casey blaming George. We had considered both separately, but we had never thought she’d put them both together in the same story.

I left the conversation, went downstairs, and called Linda. I got her answering machine and left a cryptic voice message. “I know what her story is,” I said.

Linda called me back right away. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she exclaimed when I told her. Frank didn’t get back to me until the next day, and he had the same response.

Sometime over the next day or two, Linda spoke to Jose and got a little more detail. The story was going to be that Casey had been awakened on the morning of June 16 by her father, saying that Caylee had drowned in the pool. Everything was on George. Casey took no responsibility whatsoever. That was always her position.

The following week, late as usual, we got the reports from the therapists. Dr. Danziger’s report had a psychological evaluation of Casey and generalizations about maternal filicide. Dr. Weitz’s report, also in very general terms, talked about the ideas of molestation, trauma, and denial. All of these allegations were not unusual to justify a crime. It seemed that Casey saw, as we did, that her prior lies weren’t going to work, so it was time to come up with another one.

Although we will never know the genesis of Casey 4.0, since conversations between Casey and her lawyer are privileged, Linda had a theory. During a deposition of our medical examiner, Dr. G, back in September of 2010, Cheney had probed her about the possibility of drowning. Linda’s theory was that he was exploring a potential defense in the case. Of course at that point, Cheney had still been pushing the stranger abduction story, so at the time it appeared to us that Casey 4.0 hadn’t been born . . . yet.

In early 2011, something else had occurred which supported Linda’s theory. Out of the blue one day, Baez called her. He was interested in discussing whether we would consider something called a proffer in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. A proffer is essentially an offer of proof, so in other words, Casey would offer her story to us, if we would consider taking the death penalty off the table.

The conversation was incredibly vague. We had a closed door meeting with the defense during which they were evasive about the specifics of her story, but they felt it would be something that would convince us not to seek the death penalty. We discussed it with Lawson as well to get his take. At that point, we all wanted to hear what she had to say, but I must admit I think our motive was curiosity more than anything else. Much like everyone else, we wanted to know what the next lie would be, but of course we had to do what was best for the case, not what was best to satisfy our own interests.

Still, it was an intriguing possibility made all the more interesting because the offer appeared to be unconditional; we could hear the story she had to tell, and if we didn’t buy it, we could still move forward with the death penalty. However, as with many things with the defense, their position changed over time. Eventually a huge caveat was put on their proffer: if we decided to hear her story out, we had to take the death penalty off the table. We had to take it sight unseen, or else the deal was off. In the end, none of us were comfortable striking this ambiguous bargain with a woman who had a documented history of lying, so we let the whole thing go.

But after we learned about the therapists’ reports, suddenly these events from the months prior fell into place. Taken with Mason’s comments about drowning at Dr. G’s deposition, we could suddenly understand what they’d been up to. The way we figured it, Casey’s version of events—blaming George for the abuse and the drowning—probably started coming together around fall of 2010. At some point before Baez called Linda about the proffer, that new version, Casey 4.0, had been pitched to the therapists. Once it was clear that they could get backing from the therapists on it, they tried to serve it up to us. When we wouldn’t take the bait, they simply decided to use Dr. Danziger and Dr. Weitz as mouthpieces for Casey’s story.

After we got the reports, we arranged sit-downs with the two new eleventh-hour witnesses. Dr. Danziger came first. On the morning of his appointment, he arrived before the defense attorneys. I noticed that Dr. Danziger was uneasy that morning. He expressed his apprehension in an odd kind of way. “I am very uncomfortable being the vector for this information,” he said to me.

I was puzzled and went back to my office to look up the word
vector.
I wanted to be sure of which definition he meant. The one definition that seemed most applicable was “a vehicle to spread disease.”

When the defense attorneys got there, Dr. Danziger repeated his concern about being a vector. He added that he had difficulty being a mouthpiece for these “very, very serious allegations against someone in a situation where there is no other evidence he actually did anything.”

I had known Jeffrey Danziger for twenty years. I had led him in testimony, as well as cross-examined him. He had testified in favor of some of my cases and against others. He had testified in cases where I felt the defendant was feeding him a line, and I called it for what it was. In still others, he had reported the symptoms displayed by a defendant, while questioning their genuineness and suggesting further observation.

And when he thought a defendant was honestly displaying symptoms, he said that, too. On our first case together, involving the brutal rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl, he gave the opinion that the defendant was insane but volunteered he had little factual support for his opinion. While I disagreed with him, I admired his frankness. You don’t find that much in forensic psychiatry. When I did disagree with him, it was in cases where he believed there was genuine mental illness, and our disagreement went more to the legal significance of the illness than to its existence. Yet through all this disagreement, differing opinions, and professional respect, I have always known him to be an honest person—someone I respect immensely, even if I don’t always agree with him.