Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (38 page)

With William Slabaugh and Michelle Medina, two lawyers in my firm.

My staff (from left to right) celebrating at a private party right after the verdict: Sallay Jusu, Jeanene Barrette, Michelle Medina, Shakema Wallace. Behind them on the right is Robert Haney, who provided security at the trial. You can see the verdict being replayed on television and Jean Casarez, a reporter, talking on the phone.

I kept a picture of David on my phone to keep my spirits up. The big guys don’t always win.

The only piece of evidence linking the crime scene to the Anthony home.

The duct tape was found one other place—at the Caylee command center, manned by George Anthony, three weeks after Casey was put in jail.

I created a number of set pieces for the jury to help them follow the complex evidence, thanks to Legal Graphicworks. (Used with permission of the
Orlando Sentinel
, copyright 2011.)

I also created a number of charts to help the jury keep track of the complex and conflicting testimony.

Jeff Ashton and Linda Drane Burdick, after the verdict is read. Behind them are the defense team, celebrating. (Used with permission of the
Orlando Sentinel
, copyright 2011.)

Congratulatory texts stream in to my phone right after the verdict.

Caylee Anthony. Despite all the hatred directed at us, we knew that we were fighting for justice for her, as well as for Casey.

There was a day when Cindy called me to say that Sergeant John Allen and Melich were at the house and they wanted to know if I knew why Casey would be searching for information about chloroform on her computer.

“Chloroform?” I said. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. There might be a million ways to kill a child, but using chloroform would be number one million and one.

I thought the death by chloroform assumption by the prosecution was so ridiculous I couldn’t believe it.

Understand, with this information, the prosecution had a theory it was more than willing to share with their adoring public: Casey had chloroformed Caylee before she suffocated her. The state had a murder weapon, a cause of death, and an argument for premeditation, something they could hang their hat on when asking for the death penalty. Because of Vass, now they were
really
into this ridiculous chloroform theory.

And sure enough, the prosecution released the report on Casey’s computer usage and found she had made two searches for chloroform.

Those occurred in March 2008,
three months before
Caylee disappeared. Casey’s boyfriend at the time, Ricardo Morales, had posted on his Myspace page a photo of a man and a woman entitled, “Win her over with Chloroform.” The man is giving the woman a kiss on the cheek while taking a facial tissue and getting ready to put it over her mouth to subdue her.

Casey, who was twenty-two at the time, told me she had no idea in the world what chloroform was, but after seeing her boyfriend’s post about chloroform, she searched online for “chloroform” to find out what Morales was talking about. By sheer bad luck, Morales had given some credence to the prosecution’s utterly ridiculous theory of premeditated murder via chloroform. I would later write in a motion that this whole chloroform line of argument was one of the biggest frauds ever pulled on the American public.

To this day I can’t understand how so many people ended up buying the chloroform argument. Even now people think chloroform had something to do with this case. The cops said it, and the media regurgitated it. In this age of reality television, where news is entertainment, we question neither the authorities nor the media.

The waters became even muddier when Vass’s colleague, Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist expert, suggested to Vass that the fruit flies from the trash in the trunk of Casey’s car, “might be coffin flies.” Haskell volunteered that he would be more than happy to take a look at them. (If you’ve ever left a doggie bag in your car, or thrown out old trash from your home, you know what these fruit flies look like.)

Vass emailed Orange County Sheriff’s Department Crime Scene Investigator Michael Vincent. He wrote, “Mike, forgot to mention something in my last email. I finally got a call back from Dr. Neal Haskell, my entomologist friend, and he said that the ‘fruit flies’ may really be coffin flies and that might be significant. He said that if you still have them to please send them to him at the following address and he will check them out.”

Haskell did check it out, and he concluded that the flies recovered from the garbage bag were
Megeselia scalaris
, a species from the family of flies known as Phoridae. Coffin Flies,
Cornicera tibialis
, are from the same family, but are from a different genus. There are more than two hundred genera and three thousand described species within the family of Phoridea, which is why this doesn’t make any sense. If you took high school biology, you know that’s like saying an orangutan is the same species as a human being. No matter. In his report, Haskell went on for two or three paragraphs talking about coffin flies, and how they are known to get into areas such as car trunks. The police, of course, let the media in on their little secret. This “information” gave the media more fuel to say Caylee’s body was in the trunk.