Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (22 page)

The judge ruled that we should go into the back room and try to work out our differences. Linda and I were met by Ashton, Linda Drane Burdick, and a female county attorney representing the sheriff’s department.

Immediately we started arguing.

“We don’t know it’s her,” said Burdick.

“Come on,” I said. “Quit being ridiculous.” And that was when from out of the blue Burdick said to me, “There’s a unique way we think Caylee died, and if your client wants to plead out now, she needs to tell us first. We’re withholding this information.”

The hell they were.

“Are you referring to the duct tape that the police have already leaked?” I asked her.

“I don’t know where the media are getting that from,” she said. “It’s not true.”

I believe that was the first and only time that Burdick out-and-out lied to me. Then she said, “Obviously, the deal isn’t the same as the deal we were talking about before. The situation is different now. She had her chance. The manslaughter discussion is off the table, but if she would come forward and tell us the unique way we think Caylee died, I will entertain something.”

We were in a back room with the door shut, when a reporter for the
Orlando Sentinel
by the name of Anthony Colarossi put his ear to the door to listen in. We sensed someone was out there, and when I opened the door, I saw him standing there.

“Have a little decency and respect, will you?” I said to him.

Burdick and I were both angry about that.

While we met with the prosecution, Sergeant John Allen and FBI Special Agent Nick Savage returned from the crime scene. They came in and said to me, “We should be done processing the scene possibly by tomorrow, and then we can turn it over to you.”

Based on their statement, I brought down a team of high-profile, world-renowned experts to examine the crime scene. We called in our forensic entomologist, Dr. Timothy Huntington. Werner Spitz flew in, as did Kathy Reichs, the prolific forensic anthropologist and novelist, and Dr. Henry Lee.

Linda suggested we hire investigator Pat McKenna, who is from West Palm Beach, Florida. McKenna knew Linda through other cases. McKenna, one of the private investigators for the O. J. Simpson murder trial, was the one who found the Mark Fuhrman tapes. Fuhrman had been an effective witness against Simpson, until McKenna found those tapes the defense played during the trial, on which Fuhrman used the N-word left and right. The mostly black jury took notice, and it was one piece of evidence that helped the defense acquit Simpson.

McKenna worked on many high-profile cases, including the William Kennedy Smith rape case. He’s a topflight professional, and I was relieved to have someone like McKenna on board assisting me in the investigation. He quickly took over as our lead investigator.

We had the full team ready to go. All we needed was access to the crime scene and Caylee’s remains.

Two days later, the prosecution and police still hadn’t handed over the crime season, so while we waited, we went to the Anthony home. Huntington collected soil samples in the backyard, because we knew they’d do a geology sample comparison of the recovery scene and compare it to any dirt found either in Casey’s car or on her shoes. We also checked out the backyard area and inside the home. We talked to the Anthonys, and while we were there, Dominic, who was working for George and Cindy, told me something I found odd: he said he’d been out only a month before in the woods in the area where Caylee had been found, and no remains had been found there.

I didn’t really take this too seriously because Dominic often had a lot to say, but what he failed to mention was that he had a video of their visit to the site.

Dominic kept saying he had photographs, and I kept asking him for them, and he said, “Oh sure, no problem.” It wasn’t until several days later, when I saw on the news that Hoover (the Anthonys’ other bodyguard) was trying to sell his video of the crime scene to different networks for $50,000, that I learned that Hoover had taken videos of their visit. Like so much other information in this case, I found out about it through the news.

Most of the time during the days following the discovery of Caylee’s body, we sat in my office while we waited to be given access to the scene. Day after day, we waited for the call that would allow our high-priced investigators to go down to the recovery site.

The next day would come, and they would say they weren’t finished, and then the next day, and then the next. They didn’t turn over the crime scene for
nine days
, and when we arrived, we discovered they had demolished the scene, removed all the debris, took everything, and left it worthless for our purposes. Yes, they had turned it over, but the area they turned over was useless.

On December 16, big news flashed across the TV screens showing the three prosecutors, Burdick, Ashton, and Frank George, going to the scene where Caylee was found. Four days earlier these same prosecutors were standing before the judge arguing we couldn’t go there—we didn’t have standing—because they weren’t sure it was Caylee. And yet, without telling us it was Caylee, there they were, parading around the recovery site on TV.

We later found out that the prosecution had been told by the FBI DNA unit on December 16 that they were in fact Caylee’s remains. They were supposed to tell us immediately, but they didn’t because they didn’t want us filing motions to gain access to the site.

On December 19, the prosecution and police announced they had found Caylee, trumpeting that duct tape had allegedly been found around Caylee’s mouth and nose. They were announcing to the world that things were looking very bad for Casey and that they might consider changing their minds and seek the death penalty.

I
SHOULD TELL YOU THIS:
in every case, I’ve found that you will get a little bit of luck if you avail yourself to it.

“We’re going to catch a break somewhere,” I kept repeating to everyone on the team. I said that because the publicity had been uniformly negative.

Our break came on December 18, the day
before
the prosecution announced that the body belonged to Caylee. Linda, McKenna, and I were all sitting in my conference room watching the TV, because the police were scheduling a press conference, and this one was being touted as one that would break some
big
news. We were also waiting there because we continued to hold out hope that the prosecution would turn over the crime scene to us.

Angelo Nieves, the public information officer, came forward and made the announcement that the police were investigating three prior tips called in in August about the area where Caylee was eventually found.

There wasn’t much of a stir until Mike DeForest of WKMG asked Nieves whether the person who called in the three tips in August was the same person who found the remains on December 11, five months later?

And Nieves answered, “Yes.”

And as we sat around the conference table listening to this, our jaws dropped. I was seated, and as soon as Nieves said that, I stood up from my chair. We all began watching much more closely.

I thought to myself,
How could this be?
And then Nieves took our great fortune a step further when he stated that in August a police officer had actually come out to investigate the call by Roy Kronk, the tipster.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I couldn’t believe what we were watching.

“Oh my God,” said McKenna. “They have major shit all over their faces now.”

We all knew the problem the police now were facing: I said to myself,
How do you call someone out in August, a police officer comes out and investigates, and they find nothing, and five months later you go back again to the same spot and you find her body?

It reeked of trouble for the prosecution, and all of the media went nuts.

I can’t say I felt sorry for Nieves, but I saw him squirming up there trying to deflect some very direct questions by saying, “I don’t want this to take away from the fact that these officers are scouring the area and doing an excellent job recovering here at the scene.”

Though he kept trying to put a positive spin on it all, the entire media contingent was going nuts searching for answers. It got to the point where Nieves finally said, “I’m not answering any more questions. We are currently investigating. That’s the end of the story.”

The introduction of Kronk, the meter reader who found Caylee’s body, was a major turning point in the case. I’ll never forget, after the press conference was over, DeForest came on TV and said, “This incredible new development has now opened a major hole in the state’s case in which the defense will be able to drive a Mack truck through it.”

Which was exactly what we intended on doing.

CHAPTER 11

THE KRONK CHRONICLES

T
HERE IS STILL an enormous amount of confusion in the tale of Roy Kronk. As a result, the events surrounding the discovery of Caylee Anthony’s bones remain a mystery.

Kronk, a recent hire as a meter reader for Orange County, Florida, was reading meters in the Anthony family’s neighborhood. He was accompanied by trainee Chris Dixon and his trainer, David Dean, who had also trained Kronk.

Finishing their rounds around 1:30
P.M.
on August 11, 2008, the three decided that, rather than heading back to the office early, they’d park off Suburban Drive to relax and hang out before they had to be back around three. Suburban Drive was not a far-off location; it’s only twenty houses down from the Anthony home.

They were hanging out, grabbing a smoke, when Kronk had to urinate. He walked into the woods so he couldn’t be seen from the nearby elementary school. His fellow workers followed, and they joked that this would be a perfect place to hide a body.

“In these swampy woods, a body could decompose, and no one would notice,” said one of Kronk’s coworkers half in jest, half seriously. And why shouldn’t they have been discussing this? Caylee had been missing since June and there was no bigger topic of conversation around these parts than the mystery of little Caylee’s whereabouts.

“This would be a
great
place to stash a body,” said one of the others.

Kronk agreed.

Kronk decided to have a look around and do his own investigation of the area. As he was standing there, he told his coworkers, “Hey guys, I think I see a human skull.” Immediately they laughed him off, saying he was being ridiculous.

“No, no, come and look,” he said. They started walking toward him, but were startled by the sight of a lifeless six-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake lying in the grass. Blood oozed from its mouth. Kronk surmised that it had been hit by a car, slithered into the woods, and died. They started freaking out, and at that point, according to Kronk, he came out of the woods and started talking about the snake. He changed the focus away from the skull and concentrated their attention on the dead snake. The topic of the skull did not come up again in conversation. The three then took photos of the large snake with their cell phones.

After putting the snake in their truck, they drove back to the office and showed fellow employees passing by in the office parking lot the snake they had found. You’d think Kronk would have said something about the skull he saw, especially since they had just been talking about Caylee’s disappearance and how that spot would be a perfect place for a body. But he didn’t. The location of the skull wasn’t more than a quarter mile from the Anthony home, but by his account, he said nothing more about it until he returned home after work.

Once home, Kronk mentioned the skull to his girlfriend, Michelle, who was following the case closely on TV. Kronk says it was she who insisted he call 9-1-1.

“There’s a gray bag down there,” he told the woman at the other end of the phone. “I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s Caylee or anything of that nature.” They then talked about the neighborhood, but Kronk was unable to tell her exactly where it was.

He told the dispatcher about the snake and said to her, “Right here, behind one of the trees down there was a gray bag, and then a little further up, I saw something white. But after I saw that eastern diamondback rattlesnake, I wasn’t going back in there.”