Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (42 page)

Later in the case I was unable to pay my mortgage, and my house went into foreclosure. I was about to leave the house when I saw the helicopters flying over. I looked up, and I knew what this was about. I couldn’t leave my house. I didn’t want them to film me leaving. It was humiliating, never mind putting my family at risk, something for which I will never forgive them. The media took that to mean I was going to quit the case.

“He can’t afford to stay on the case,” was what they wrote.

But I never considered quitting, not for a second. I told myself,
I will try this case out of a cardboard box before I quit.

CHAPTER 19

THE SHRINKS

I
NCEST HAS BEEN CITED as the most common form of child abuse, with estimates that between ten and twenty million American children have been victimized by parental incest.

Incest is considered by experts to be a particularly damaging form of sexual abuse because it is perpetrated by an individual the victim trusts and depends on. The victim feels great pressure to keep quiet because of her fear of the family breaking up over her revelations.

Father-daughter incest is most common, though mother-son incest does happen. It’s difficult to assess just how prevalent parental child abuse is because of the secrecy that surrounds it. Experts say that many young incest victims accept and believe the perpetrator’s explanation that this is a “learning experience that happens in every family.”

As a result, it remains one of the most underreported and least-discussed crimes in our nation because its victims can’t bring themselves to come forward because of guilt, shame, fear, and social and familial pressure. There’s another more practical reason: incest victims feel that either no one will believe them, or they will be blamed or punished if they report the abuse. As in Casey’s case, more often than not, they’re ridiculed for coming forward.

Casey had been courageous enough to tell me about the incest she had endured. But because of the compartmentalization, and all the discredited lies she told to the police at the beginning of this case, we knew no one would believe her. She was the girl who cried wolf.

One of the problems I knew we would have with Casey’s account of what occurred on June 16, 2008, was how to present what really happened to the jury.

We knew putting her on the stand would be risky, so instead we decided the best way to get her testimony admitted was to have psychiatrists interview her and put them on the stand.

We debated this for six months. Casey’s death penalty lawyer, Ann Finnell, kept saying, “How are we going to get this in without her testifying?” Cheney Mason talked about a case he had in which he was able to get it in. In fact, Cheney said he submitted a video of his client making the statement without subjecting him to cross-examination.

This was not a case where we were pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. We did the research. We knew we were on very thin ground, but we still wanted to hire psychiatrists to talk to Casey.

One of the first names to come up was Dr. Jeffrey Danziger. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, he was an associate professor at the University of Florida and had a thriving practice in psychiatry in Winter Park, Florida.

At the behest of the court, Danziger had interviewed Casey and had made a competency evaluation. In his report, Danziger wrote, “Casey Anthony does not fit, in my opinion, into any of the categories of maternal filicide. The history is not consistent with an altruistic or mercy killing, a mentally ill or psychotic mother, the accidental death of a battered child, spousal revenge, or an unwanted child.”

He noted what a “doting, loving, devoted” mother Casey was.

He quoted Cindy saying, “Casey bought safety door handles and outlet covers. She carried an extra key for the car, for what if she locked the child in the car by accident. She was very safety conscious. She called me if the child had a sniffle, the child never had a diaper rash. She cooked her food, healthy food, vegetables.”

He explained her behavior during the thirty days she was away from home by citing a “pathological level of denial.”

Danziger wrote, “Denial is a psychological mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed, and one keeps out of conscious awareness any aspects of reality that if acknowledged would produce extreme anxiety.” He said she was acting the way she was because of a “refusal or inability to recognize reality.”

In his initial competency hearing report, he wrote about how normal she seemed in the face of such stress, calling it a clear indication of her compartmentalization.

Danziger seemed a perfect person to examine her for the defense. I thought he would carry a lot of weight not only with the judge but also with the jury, in part because he had been called by the court to evaluate her the first time.

When we talked to him, Danziger seemed excited at the opportunity.

“I’m glad to not have to sit on the sidelines for this one,” he said.

We were ecstatic to have him. We thought we had ourselves a great psychiatrist.

Danziger went to see Casey several times, and each time we talked to him, he indicated to us that he was certain she had been a victim of sexual abuse. He said that while she didn’t have any symptoms of mental illness and didn’t have any diagnosable issues, she did show classic signs of sexual abuse, such as lying, compartmentalizing, and pretending nothing was wrong.

We’re going to be super strong with him
, I thought.

We only had one reservation about Danziger: normally when he testified in court, he was a witness for the prosecution.

We also hired a psychologist, Dr. William Weitz. He was referred to us by a friend of Andrea Lyon, who had a colleague that used him in another case. The background of Weitz, a graduate of the University of Miami with a PhD in clinical psychology, had to do with post-traumatic stress disorder. He had once trained at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (now called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) in Washington, DC.

What I wanted to talk to Weitz about was the sexual abuse, of course, but equally important, I wanted to be able to explain Casey’s behaviors during the thirty days after Caylee was found in the pool by her father, behaviors that the prosecution and the media had trumpeted as shocking proof that Casey killed Caylee: partying at the nightclub Fusion, getting a tattoo, and ostensibly staying away from home all that time, as the prosecution described it, to party.

I wanted to ask him how someone reacts after going through a stressful event, such as the one Casey underwent. I wanted him to analyze her behavior during the thirty days after Caylee was found in the pool by her father.

Weitz, like Danziger, was extremely excited to be part of the case.

I always had my reservations about Weitz, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. But he went to see Casey and reported the same thing as Danziger. He said she showed classic signs of being a victim of sexual abuse.

“I couldn’t be more certain that Casey was sexually abused by George,” he said.

After getting their reports, we made the determination that we were going to put them on our witness list. We weren’t sure how this was going to play out, but the trial was right around the corner, and we needed to make a decision, so we decided to go with them. After all, we could always decide not to call them if we so wished.

We filed their names on the witness list, and the prosecution took its depositions, and the day Danziger was to show up for his deposition, I felt a shiver down my spine that something was very wrong because when I arrived, Danziger was already in a room in the state attorney’s office with Ashton and Linda Drane Burdick, the prosecutors.

What’s going on?
I asked myself.

I would soon find out.

His testimony was certainly promising and would have helped us tremendously with the jury. In his deposition with Ashton, Danziger described Casey’s ambivalence toward her father. He said Casey talked about finding emails from women on his computer, and how when her mother found them, her father blamed Casey, saying Casey had been the one setting him up.

Danziger said Casey hated the fact she could still love him, that she was a little girl wishing he could be her dad.

“I can’t figure out why I don’t hate him,” Danziger quoted Casey. “Years of anger, frustration, hurt and pain, finally openly speaking about it, but it’s painful and distressing.”

Danziger related that Casey’s great fear was that her father would sexually abuse Caylee, the way he had abused her. He said that was why she always locked her door at night, why Caylee ordinarily never went outside by herself, and why she had Caylee shower with her.

Danziger then recounted Casey’s events of June 16, how she saw her father carrying Caylee’s limp form, and how George had said, “I’ll take care of it.”

He also quoted Casey as saying she didn’t think it was an accident. She posited that her father had held Caylee underwater and drowned her. He quoted Casey as saying her father’s suicide attempt was his way of trying to force her to take the rap for Caylee’s death.

But the jury, I knew, would hear none of this, because toward the beginning of his deposition, Danziger began by backpedaling furiously.

“Jeff, let me just say something parenthetically here,” he said to Ashton, who was doing the interrogation. “And this is something that has caused me great distress and places me in a bit of an ethical bind and concern.

“In my meetings with her, with Casey, she said things that accuse others of criminal behavior. I am deeply troubled, and I don’t know how to handle this. I realize you’re entitled in the deposition to know what she said to me, but I am very troubled about being a vector by which statements she made may accuse others of crimes past and present. I don’t know what to do.”

He continued, “I am very nervous and reluctant to say things she told me [knowing] what the media would do with it. [I’m not sure] I am ethically doing the right thing by reporting things she said that accuse others of crimes that may never have happened. I don’t know what to do, and I’ve expressed my concern about this.”

He concluded, “I am just deeply worried that I’m doing the wrong thing.”

Added a smug Ashton, “We are equally concerned with unsupported allegations of criminal conduct being thrown around in this case.” The irony of his sanctimonious statement by the guy who had been bashing Casey without remorse for the last three years almost knocked me over.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe Danziger was behaving this way. He was a professional. He had a reputation to uphold. If he was going to in effect recuse himself, why didn’t he at least have the decency to call me and let me know beforehand. There would have been no point to his testifying.

As I was listening to him, I became so angry that I wanted to jump up and punch him. How could he tell me one thing and then get up there and testify in a deposition to the same thing, but put so many qualifications to his answers that they were worthless? It was disgusting. He was making it clear that there was no point whatsoever for us to put him on the stand.

After his testimony, we told Ashton to take him off our witness list. When we arrived back at my office, Cheney, Dorothy, and I talked about why he did what he did. We decided it was remotely possible that his conscience got the better of him at the last minute, but that didn’t make any sense. He knew the topics of conversation. He knew the parameters of the testimony. We were certain that Danziger did his about-face because he gets most of his work from the prosecution, not from defense lawyers. We figured that someone had threatened him and said something like, “If you testify for Casey Anthony, you can forget about getting more business from us.”

Of course, we didn’t have any proof of that, but that’s certainly what we thought. He’ll deny that, but that’s his business. It turns out I couldn’t have made a worst choice.

I could only hope I’d have better luck with Weitz, an older gentleman who had retired from private practice.

His deposition turned to the subject of incest.

“She told me that her father had physically and sexually abused her back to the age of childhood,” Weitz said. He said that took place from the time she was eight until she was twelve.

“What sort of physical abuse was described to you?” asked Ashton.

“She described physical touching and involvement all the way to sexual intercourse,” Weitz said.

“When you say physical, do you mean striking her?” asked Ashton.

“No. I would say … physical, sensual. More of a sexual assault or sexual—in a sexual connotation.”

“To include fondling and intercourse?”

“Yeah, fondling, touching, hugging, kissing, all the way to intercourse, correct, on multiple times.”

When asked how frequent the incest was, Weitz said Casey had told him her father had raped her “a few times a week” over the course of four years, from the time she was eight until she turned twelve. And when he stopped, Weitz said, Casey said her brother Lee, who was four years older than she was, began coming into her room at night while she lay in bed, and he would fondle her breasts. Weitz said Lee did this from the time she was twelve to when she turned fifteen.