Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (30 page)

“You know, during those six months that Caylee was missing, I was down on Suburban Drive too!” George said.

WHAT THE HELL?
I screamed to myself. What was
he
doing there? And why in the world would George admit to walking around near where Caylee’s body was found? I thought about this and decided,
Forget red alert, I am now swimming in a sea of red!

Linda Baden and I came to the conclusion that there was only one reason George would say that: to create an alibi for himself. If a witness were to come forward and say he saw George in the woods, George could then say, “I already told you I was down there.”

This had already happened once before—three months earlier. On November 5, 2008, nine days before Dominic and Hoover searched off Suburban Drive, a news station reported that someone saw George in a wooded area in east Orlando. It was not Suburban Drive, and when I asked George about it, he said he was scouting an appropriate area to put his kid-finders tent, where he passed out flyers for Caylee. I remember thinking,
What a strange place to put a tent
, but at the time I had no real reason to think it was suspicious.

But
now
my head was spinning. The imagined scenarios were endless.
Did George move Caylee’s skull there and then send Dominic to Suburban Drive to search?
If so, why?
Was this the area where Caylee was originally hidden and then moved to Suburban Drive to be found? If so, then how does Roy Kronk fit into all this? Is that why Officer Cain couldn’t find her?
I thought about it so much my head hurt.

But since I didn’t know the exact location, I couldn’t send our investigator out there to search for clues as to what was going on.

For months I wanted to get George to make this statement on tape, but I couldn’t take his deposition without tipping off the prosecution as to my thinking. I had to sit on this information until just before trial, when we met with the Anthonys and their lawyer, and I finally got George to admit being near the wooded area off Suburban Drive. We recorded it, so if he lied about it on the stand, we could impeach his testimony.

I knew I needed Casey to tell me what happened on the day Caylee died.

Casey and I had discussed her sexual abuse, and I felt it was only a matter of time before she would tell me the truth about what happened to Caylee.

The day I had a major breakthrough with Casey came in the early months of 2009. I had set it up a couple days before when I said to her, “You know, Casey, I’ve never pressed you about what happened. I never asked why you didn’t trust me. You had no reason to do so. But time is running short, and I need to know. You and I have to have a serious conversation about what happened. And I promise you that I will not tell a soul unless you allow me to. There’s so much out there that I could be doing, and I’m not doing it because you’re not allowing me to.”

“Do you not trust me? Do you feel I’ll walk away?”

“No, no, no,” Casey said, “I don’t feel that way.”

I surmised at this point that she didn’t want to disappoint me. As we sat in the jail, she began to tell me what happened the day Caylee disappeared.

“Let’s start from the moment you woke up,” I said. “What happened?”

“On the 16
^th
[of June] I had fallen asleep,” Casey began. “I dozed off, and when my father woke me up, he started yelling at me, ‘Where the hell is Caylee? Where the hell is Caylee?’

“I got up. Usually I locked the bedroom door, but on this morning the door had been ajar. Caylee usually slept in my bed, but on this morning I was alone. I’m a light sleeper, but I couldn’t recall Caylee leaving the bedroom. My father and I started looking around the house. We looked in all the rooms, and she was nowhere to be found. We went into the garage. She wasn’t there either. Then we both went outside. I looked to the right. My father looked to the left, by the pool. At the end of the house there’s a path, which leads to a shed. I walked down around the corner and looked down the path toward the shed. I didn’t see her. When I walked toward the pool, I noticed that the pool ladder was still attached. Caylee and my mom had been swimming the night before. I couldn’t believe it was still up. Caylee loved to swim, but once she got into the pool, she had no way of getting out, so I always made sure someone was there with her.

“I turned around and started to walk toward the house when I saw my father carrying Caylee. I could see Caylee was dripping wet. I could tell she was dead. She had passed away. You could tell she had been in the water a long time.”

Tears flowed from Casey’s eyes. I’d never seen her break down like this.

I had my eyes locked on her. I didn’t take a single note.

She said, “My father started yelling at me, ‘It’s all your fault. Look what you’ve done. You weren’t watching her. You’re going to go to fucking jail for child neglect. You weren’t watching her, she got out of the house, and look what happened. It’s all your fault. Your mother will never forgive you, and you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.’”

Casey said she just cried the whole time he was yelling at her.

Casey said her first reaction was to blame her father. Why hadn’t he kept an eye on her? She said she went so far as to ponder whether he had molested her and then killed her.

Maybe he was doing something to her and he tried to cover it up,
she thought.

Casey said she went inside the house and laid down on her bed. She said her father walked into her room and told her, “I’ll take care of her.” Those were words he had often said to her. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I’m taking care of it. Don’t say a word of this to anyone, especially your mother,” and he walked away.

Casey said that after George went to work later in the afternoon, she remembered he called her on her cell phone and told her, “I took care of everything.” And again he warned her not to tell her mother.

Casey said she was frantic and did not know what to do. After pacing and crying for about an hour, she said she could not hold it in any longer and wanted to tell her mother and began to frantically call her. She tried Cindy at work and when she couldn’t get ahold of her there, she tried her cell.

“I desperately wanted to tell her and I called her a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.” Casey said. When she couldn’t get hold of Cindy, Casey said she just “went to Tony’s house and acted like it never happened.”

Casey’s phone records would show that she was telling the truth. She had called her mother a total of six times in a matter of four minutes. And the call from George was there at 3:04
P.M.
, exactly when he would have arrived at work. One thing you should know is that during the months of June and July 2008, Casey and George spoke on the phone a total of two times—June 16 and July 8. This struck me as extremely odd, given that his daughter and granddaughter were missing and not living at home, as they had all their lives. By comparison, in March 2008, they spoke a total of thirteen times. When looking at these records, it seemed clear that George was avoiding Casey as much as she was avoiding him. (Casey never had a copy of her phone records in the jail—they were too voluminous—nor did she ever have access to them when she was out on bail, so she could not have tailored her story to match the phone records.)

Finally, I had what I believed to be the truth. I wanted more, but then she said that was all she could remember about that day.

After arriving at Tony’s apartment, they later went to Blockbuster, but she said she had no memory of having done so. She said she remembered going to Tony’s house, but otherwise it was all a blur to her. She said that during the thirty days she stayed away from the house when her mother was there, most of it was a blur. I would ask her specific questions about her activities, and most of the time she would say, “I don’t remember.”

“Casey,” I said, “that’s not good enough. We need to explain why you went to a nightclub. We need to talk about that.”

“We can talk about it all day,” she said, “but the fact of the matter is, I don’t remember who that person is [meaning herself], or what that person was doing.”

I believed her. It all made sense. The prosecution’s contention that Casey had killed Caylee was made from whole cloth. Casey had loved that child. Her whole life revolved around her and protecting her from abuse from her family. But I still couldn’t condone how she acted during the thirty days.

Prior to that time I had gone into Casey’s room, and it was a shrine to Caylee. Casey took so many pictures of Caylee and put them up on the wall that the room oozed of her love for her daughter.

When I saw it months earlier, I had said to myself,
There’s no way this girl murdered her daughter.

When she was done telling me the whole story, I kept telling myself
, It all makes sense.
And I told myself something else too:
The reason the prosecution has no proof that Casey murdered Caylee is because the charges brought against her simply aren’t true.

The key question everyone asks when they hear this is,
Why didn’t either George or Casey immediately call the police?

The answer has everything to do with the screwed-up dynamics of the Anthony family. Why didn’t George call the police? There are several possibilities.

Did he fear the police would find out he was abusing Casey? Was he afraid an autopsy would show that the child had been abused? Another possibility: if George called the police, would it later come out that he was Caylee’s father?

What if George called the police, and Casey was arrested for child neglect? Let me throw out this family dynamic: Casey and George had a love/hate relationship. What if the police arrived and Casey said Caylee drowned because George should have been watching Caylee, and he wasn’t. George surely would have pointed the finger at Casey and accused her of the same thing. Since both were home, it would have been he said/she said. George might have anticipated that Casey would be angry that her daughter had died because her father had been negligent, so George would have feared that Casey would tell the police that he had been sleeping with her since she was eight years old. If I were George, I surely wouldn’t have wanted the police to find
that
out.

If abuse had been revealed, George would have faced charges for sexual battery on a minor, a penalty that would have far exceeded any negligent homicide charges that Casey would have faced.

Whatever the motive, George seemed to do everything he could to hide his involvement in what happened and to make sure that if any blowback came from Caylee’s death, the onus would rest entirely on Casey’s shoulders.

When questioned about June 16 by law enforcement, George spun the story that would be repeated over and over in the media, a story that would become a “truth” in the reality show chain of events repeated over and over. George said that Casey had told him that she was taking Caylee to the babysitter, Zanny, that she was going for a meeting at work, and that she might stay over at the babysitter’s. He said she told him that Casey would also stay there because Casey didn’t want to come in late to wake them up.

George said Casey left the house with Caylee at about ten minutes to one that day. He said he knew the time because he was watching one of his favorite TV shows,
Diners, Drive-ins and Dives
on the Food Network.

“I was watching it,” he said, “and I remember Casey and Caylee, you know, leaving and the last time I saw Caylee.”

“I walked with Caylee and Casey out when they left to get into their car and go.” He said he held the door open while Casey buckled Caylee in the back passenger seat, and “you know, just blew her a kiss, told her I loved her and, you know, ‘Jo Jo’ will see you later.” Numerous times he also told us that as Casey and Caylee left, he checked his watch to see how much time he had left before he had to get ready to go to work. He was certain of the time they left.

His cover story went so far as to describe exactly what Casey and Caylee were wearing. He said Casey was wearing gray slacks and a white shirt, and Caylee was wearing a backpack with monkeys on it, a pink T-shirt, and a denim skirt with her hair in a ponytail.

“She said ‘Bye, Jo Jo,’ and that’s the last I saw her,” he said.

It was the story that cops bought, and the media spread throughout the blogosphere, and none of it was verified. Or true.

Why was George able to describe in detail exactly what Casey and Caylee were wearing when they walked out the house on June 16? The way he told it, he didn’t know that would be the last time he would see Casey and Caylee, yet he remembered exactly what they were wearing? It didn’t make sense.

Later I would ask him what Cindy was wearing that day, and he couldn’t remember. And then I asked him what Cindy was wearing last week, and he couldn’t remember. I didn’t find his testimony to be truthful.

The shorts were for a 24-month-old child, and Caylee was already a 3T, and you know how fast kids grow. In the trial Cindy testified that Caylee hadn’t worn those shorts in almost a year. This was a critical piece of evidence. But there was more.

Whoever dressed Caylee after she drowned ripped those clothes as he was putting them on her. And that’s what Dr. Lee was going to testify to.

No one knew about that, and it never came out in the case. That was a piece of evidence we were really looking to smack them with.

Our problem was that Dr. Lee quit our team about ten months before the trial. He informed me he just couldn’t continue. The prosecution was going to require him to take his deposition, and he had to submit reports, and he was catching a lot of pressure from his friends in law enforcement for being involved in this case.

When Dr. Lee said he couldn’t continue, I was so distraught about that I actually flew up to Connecticut to try to get him to change his mind. I went to his institute, and we sat down and we talked.

“Quite frankly,” he told me, “I just didn’t need the aggravation. And then he recommended that perhaps I should drop out too.