Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (39 page)

“Coffin Flies Found in Trunk of Casey Anthony’s Car,” was the headline.

As it would turn out, there were
no
coffin flies. Not one. Did the media report “Not One Coffin Fly Was Found in Casey Anthony’s Car” in a future headline? Of course not.

What’s most important for me to note here is that the flies they found didn’t come from the trunk of Casey’s car. They came from the
garbage bag
that was in the trunk. These flies are commonly found in garbage and are not specific to human decomposition.

With the coffin fly theory at a dead end, Haskell was struggling to find a way to tie the smell in the trunk to Caylee’s body, so he came up with yet another half-baked theory about how the decomposition in the trunk could have been Caylee, not the garbage found inside. This time the evidence concerned a blowfly, or rather the
leg
of the blowfly.

The most common fly associated with human decomposition is called the blowfly, but they are also commonly found most everywhere. Check your windowsill and you might find a dead one. When a person dies, blowflies are early colonizers to the corpse. They come by the hundreds to lay their eggs on and feed off it.

Haskell reported that investigators found a
leg
of a blowfly attached to a napkin in the trash. The napkin was sent to Vass, who found that the napkin contained what are called fatty acids, which, he said, were commonly found with human decomposition. What Vass conveniently didn’t mention was that fatty acids are also commonly found in cheese, meat, and other normal food products like
pizza
, which is what Casey and her boyfriend had eaten before throwing the box in the trash bag that lay moldering in Casey’s car for three weeks.

The far-fetched conclusion reached by both Vass and Haskell was that there was a body in the trunk because of the chemical composition (chloroform) and the fatty acid on the napkin.

Here’s how far they went in trying to tie Caylee to Casey’s car: The prosecution’s scenario was that because blowflies don’t travel at night as frequently (this was a weak attempt to try to explain why there was only one), Casey had opened the trunk, tried to clean out the decomposition with a napkin, and accidentally caught the leg of a blowfly as she was cleaning up. Then she threw it all in the trash and immediately closed the trunk so no other flies or insects could get into the trunk. This is another huge leap, but somewhere out there is a blowfly missing a leg that knows the true story.

This was the state’s case as it related to Casey’s car.

I needed help and proceeded to seek out experts in the various fields to disprove their “science.” I knew I needed to find an entomologist, a bug expert. I had never worked on a case with entomological evidence before.

Linda Baden knew Haskell, but obviously he was working for the prosecution. Nevertheless, they were friends, and she asked him who he would recommend. Haskell touted one of his former students, Dr. Timothy Huntington, the youngest of the fifteen board-certified entomologists in the country.

I liked Tim right away. He’s a tall, thin, and honest guy from Nebraska.

“All I want from you is the truth, whether it helps or hurts,” I told him.

“Great,” he said, “because that’s all you’re going to get from me.”

He took a look at the evidence, everything Haskell was saying, and the very first thing he told me was, “I can’t believe Neal is taking these tremendous leaps in his report.” He had a lot of respect for Haskell, but he couldn’t go along with his conclusions about the flies coming from a dead body.

Tim said to me, “If I go outside to my backyard, and I see shit in the grass, why would I assume it’s the neighbor’s kid and not my dog?”

What he was saying was,
If you find flies that are normally found in trash, and you find trash in the trunk, why would you assume the flies come from a dead body and not from the trash?

I
NEEDED TO HIRE SOMEONE
to combat this “air science.” I called Vass and asked for a referral, which he offered, and was someone who lived in Belgium. I then did some research and consulted with Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, an expert in DNA from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He looked up who had done work in the area and advised me to hire Dr. Ken Furton, an expert in chemical compounds as it relates to dead bodies. He used the chemical compounds as training aids for canines in finding dead bodies. Furton, a member of the faculty at Florida International University in Miami, did a lot of work for the FBI.

These scientists are really dedicated to their field, and when cases come along that offer interesting issues, they want to be involved. When I called Furton, he said he was shocked that the FBI hadn’t called him to look into their air issue because in fact he had done more work in that area than Vass, the prosecution’s expert.

“Well, my friend,” I said, “Here’s your chance to get involved.”

We also consulted with Dr. Barry Logan, chemistry director at one of the largest private labs in the country, NMS Labs. Logan was a toxicologist who did extensive work in forensics and ran the forensics division in his lab. We asked him to talk about the different protocols and methodologies of the prosecution’s scientific studies as they related to this case.

With Logan and Furton, we mounted a double-barreled attack on Vass’s “evidence.” Furton would attack the actual chemistry, and Logan would attack his methodologies, comparing Vass’s research to what was done at other forensic laboratories.

Logan confirmed for me that the prosecution’s case didn’t even rise to the level of junk science. At trial he said the tests “lacked organization and planning, [were] poorly documented, and did not follow even minimal standards of quality control.”

Step one, collect the samples. Step two, put it in a Tedlar bag. Step three, do this, and so on.

We did find written protocols that Vass used in another case he worked on just four months before he got involved in our case. That case had to do with the Charles Manson murders back in 1969. After cadaver dogs had alerted in several areas at the Barker Ranch, the police called Vass to see if he could collect samples and check his database to see if there were dead bodies buried there.

Vass ran soil samples and concluded, based on his database, that there were dead bodies buried at several locations. The investigators then used ground-penetrating radar and performed an excavation. They found no dead bodies.

In this case, when sending law enforcement written instructions (or protocols) on how to collect the samples, Vass warned them not to collect samples anywhere near—drum roll, please—garbage and gasoline! The reason Vass gave for these instructions was that even something as small as a can of soda could contaminate the sample, creating a false reading.

I argued that Vass violated his own protocols. Furthermore, according to Logan, Vass had zero quality control for something as volatile as chemicals, which could be exposed so easily to contamination.

In one experiment, the goal was to identify the chemicals inside the trunk of Casey’s car. Furton said that Vass went to a junkyard in Tennessee and collected carpet samples from other cars and tried to compare the chemical makeup among the carpets. They found chloroform in one of the other trunks. Once again, they were out to prove that the chemicals in the trunk came from Caylee’s dead body and not from the garbage.

Vass claimed there were 484 chemicals that come from human decomposition. In one of his papers, he narrowed it down to thirty important ones. In the carpet sample from Casey’s car, only five of those thirty were found. And, said Furton, if you excluded overlap from chemicals found in the garbage as well as in the air and gasoline, only three of the chemicals in the top thirty were found.

And despite all of this, it was Vass’s conclusion that the chemical signature from the carpet sample from Casey’s car was consistent with a human decompositional event.

I asked Furton to review Vass’s findings. Furton compared Vass’s work with key publications that contained the study of chemical compounds of human decomposition. There were fifteen in all, which isn’t a lot, but it tells you this is a new area of study. Further, as reported by ABC News (and others), Vass’s “emerging research had never been used in a criminal trial before.” Furton made a chart and listed the compounds that each study associated with human decomposition. To his amazement, he discovered that each study listed different compounds. While there was no apparent consensus on the subject, Vass had proclaimed that certain compounds could determine the presence of decomposition—something he did in this case—but as Furton explained it to me, “Dr. Vass has no scientific basis for his conclusion.”

Furton’s research concluded the opposite of what Vass concluded: there was no uniform signature for human decomposition.

What was masterful about Furton’s work, as it related to our defense, was that all the chemicals that Vass found, as they related to the carpet samples from Casey’s car, were
also
found in garbage. Vass had concluded that the chemicals in the trunk proved that Caylee had been in there, but that wasn’t at all scientifically accurate. Rather, it was bullshit.

The evidence showed, said Furton, that the chemicals in the trunk proved only that
garbage
had been in Casey’s car.

So why was it so important for Vass to find that those chemicals meant that a body had been in the trunk? Because of the “signature of human decomposition” evidence, we redoubled our investigation. We investigated Vass and discovered that he was listed on a patent disclosure as an inventor for a machine (“The Labrador Patent”) that analyzed burial remains and decomposition odor. The machine looks like a metal detector and uses the database that Vass created in his studies to determine whether human decomposition is present. One thing we discovered was notable: he didn’t put the patent application on his CV, though other patents he applied for afterward were listed.

Vass and his partner were going to sell this machine to police departments all over the country. But in order to sell his machine, he needed to have the results admissible in court. If they weren’t admissible, his machine was toast. So for the very first time in the United States, the database was admitted into evidence. I asked Vass if he had a financial interest in this case, to which he replied, “Not in my opinion.” So much for pure science.

Vass had a financial motive for finding what he inevitably found. After the trial was over, I found a brochure that showed the estimated amount of revenue they could make by selling it to law enforcement in the U.S. market was $486 million. Did that influence him? I don’t know.

We tried our best to preclude his “junk” science, but of course we were unsuccessful. We made a motion to exclude the “evidence,” arguing that to admit it would be a “miscarriage of justice.” The testing was done unreliably, we argued. We showed that the chemicals—common chemicals—were not from a decomposing body but from garbage.

As much as we discredited it in front of the judge in what is called a Frye hearing, our motion to exclude it from coming before a jury was denied. I thought we were most persuasive, but the judge let it in anyway.

He let
everything
in, but it didn’t matter. We had the science on our side.

CHAPTER 17

THE PROSECUTION’S FANTASY OF FORENSICS

W
E WEREN’T SURE when we were going to get Caylee’s remains. Finally, the prosecution released her body to us on December 23, 2008, a full twelve days after Caylee’s body was found. I called Dr. Werner Spitz, our pathologist, and told him apologetically, “We have the body now. I am so sorry to ask this of you, because I know tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, but can you come down tonight?”

He laughed.

“Jose, are you stupid?” he said. “I’m Jewish. It’s not a problem.”

The medical examiner’s office apparently tipped off the media as to which funeral home Caylee’s body was being sent, so when I arrived there was a pack of media trucks parked outside. Spitz hadn’t arrived as yet, so we decided we would wait until after the eleven o’clock news, knowing they’d pack up and go home after the news was over.