Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (59 page)

“What did you recognize that odor to be?” Ashton asked him.

“I would recognize it as human decomposition odor,” said Vass.

“That you’ve smelled many, many times before?”

“Many times before,” said Vass.

Vass then testified about paper towels and napkins sent to him by Dr. Neal Haskell for analysis. Vass said he did a chemical test and it revealed a number of fatty acids on the napkin.

His conclusion: those fatty acids are from decomposition.

“It is a product of the breakdown of the fat,” he said.

“Is it associated with decomposition?” asked Ashton.

“Yes.”

He then testified that the carpet was the source of the odor.

Said Dr. Vass with great finality, “Now, in the car sample, the car trunk sample, we identified fifty-one human decomposition [chemicals] based on the studies we’ve done over the last several years.”

He said he started eliminating compounds found in the car trunk. He said he looked at decomposing pizza, squirrel remnants, the garage air, and that left approximately sixteen compounds.

“Of those sixteen compounds,” said Vass, “seven of those are considered significant.” He said there were six others, but they were eliminated because they had the same makeup as gasoline, which had been in the car.

He continued, “Those seven were found to be in the list of thirty compounds that we considered most relevant out of five hundred compounds in human decomposition.”

“Can you come to any opinion about the source of the odor that you analyzed from the carpet?” asked Ashton.

“I consider it consistent with human decomposition,” said Dr. Vass.

What I considered at that moment should not be set in type.

I
KNEW WHEN
V
ASS
took the stand that Judge Perry was going to allow his testimony, even though according to my experts his methodology was faulty and his conclusions weren’t based on reliable science.

Sometime in 2010 Judge Perry had conducted what is called a Frye hearing in which each side discusses the evidence they want to introduce, giving the other side the opportunity to object. I objected at every turn, but to no avail.

Judge Perry let everything come in. I know I sound like I’m whining, and I’m really sorry about that, but I can’t help myself.

The Frye hearings were comprehensive, and so at the trial Vass knew exactly what it was that I was going to ask him. Often during the Frye hearing he was vague, or nonresponsive, or pretended he didn’t get what I was saying.

It wasn’t any different at trial. I did what I could to let the jury know that his science was junk, but I was stopped at every turn by Ashton’s objections and Judge Perry’s agreement. Vass had supposedly come up with a database which was supposed to identify the chemicals which indicated a dead body, but the way he collected his data was so totally unscientific, I couldn’t believe it. Yet when I questioned him about it, I didn’t get very far because of Ashton’s objections and Judge Perry’s upholding them.

I even had difficulty letting the jury know that Vass had a financial interest and stood to make a mint if he could sell his machine to police departments. His problem was that he needed his database study to be admitted in a court of law for him to sell these dead body detectors.

I fenced with him for an hour, getting him to admit he would get paid if his testimony stood up and his machine was sold to police departments around the country.

“These devices—the goal is to sell these to police departments all across the country?” I asked him on cross-examination.

“In my position at the national lab, we are required to file invention disclosures,” was his answer. He then went on about how this involved a grant from the National Institute of Justice. He was totally unresponsive.

“Did you understand my question?” I asked him.

Ashton objected to my interrupting his witness.

“Sustained.”

He said it was the laboratory’s decision whether to file a patent or not. He said he had no say in the matter.

“Do you understand my question?” I asked again.

“I think I answered your question,” Vass said.

“I don’t think you did.”

“The goal of this, sir, is to sell this to police departments all across the country?”

“No,” he said. “My goal is not to sell these at all. My goal is to develop them.”

“You have to have validation of that database in a court of law, do you not, sir?”

Ashton objected and asked to approach the bench.

The court sustained his objection.

“I do not know that,” said Vass.

I pressed on.

“You get royalties as a result if this device is sold, and sold basically to the police, do you not, sir?” I said.

“I honestly don’t know …” he said.

It went on like that for a while.

The owner of the patent and Vass stood to make a mint if he could show his data to prove decomposition was scientifically proven, and he was going to do all he could to make sure the jury didn’t know. Unfortunately for Dr. Vass, they knew full well.

Fortunately for me, Vass loved giving interviews and writing articles. In researching his career, I found an article he wrote in which he said he could prove that divining rods work. A divining rod is like an unbent coat hanger, and he asserted that he believed in using divining rods to unearth hidden graves.

I started to question him about that, and Ashton objected, but I pushed the issue. In the end he admitted he used divining rods to teach, and that he believed in them. It was comical. In our research we also learned he had also tried to put electronic leashes on flies.

What was interesting, and germane to our case, was that a lot of the prosecution witnesses talked about how unique the smell of human decomposition was; however we were able to find an article where Vass said that a rotten potato sitting in a cupboard smelled very similar to human decomposition.

I was really bothered—it bothers me to this day—how many of Ashton’s objections were sustained. Why shouldn’t I have been allowed to show examples of outrageousness on the part of Vass? Why shouldn’t I have been allowed to impeach his credibility? Vass was like any other witness, but whenever I went after him, I was shut down. Reliving this makes me as angry as when it was happening.

Vass had testified about how the chloroform levels were “shockingly high” and “unusually high,” and as hard as I tried, I didn’t get very far in my attempt to show there had not been a quantitative analysis, and that there was no way Vass could have known what the level of the chloroform had been.

Then the prosecutors handed us another gift. They did something so stupid I can’t believe they did it. They brought on as a witness an FBI scientist by the name of Dr. Michael Rickenbach, who did very little if anything to bolster the prosecution’s case. I can only think the reason they brought him in to testify was so they would have a second scientist to back up Dr. Vass.

But when I asked Rickenbach about the levels of chloroform found in the trunk of Casey’s car, his answer was that the chloroform levels were very, very, very low.

“Were they shockingly high?” I asked him, mimicking Vass’s high-pitched voice.

“No,” he said.

“Were they unusually high?”

“No,” he said.

And the fact they put him on the stand told me that Ashton did that because he totally lacked an understanding of the science. Not only did Rickenbach testify to the low levels of chloroform, he also testified that chloroform could be found in degreasers and other normal cleaning products, and that the levels found in the trunk were comparible to chloroform levels found in cleaning products. He was called for the prosecution, but it was as though he testified for the defense.

It wasn’t one of Ashton’s best days. During my cross-examination, Ashton went to make an objection, and he did it with a loud, aggressive shout. His screech was almost violent, and when he did it, I looked at the jury, and I could see juror number eight, the Caucasian woman who worked for Verizon, made a grimace as if to say, “You asshole.” It was such a telegraph that she seemed to be signaling to anyone who noticed how much she didn’t like Ashton.

As the trial dragged on, I never could be sure how well I was doing, how effective I was being. At times I felt good about how we were doing, but the pressure was intense every day, and the amount of preparation was great. Vass had been an important witness for us. If I had allowed him to get away with selling the cock and bull he was selling, I might have given the jury something to hang its hat on. If they had a suspicion or even a hint there might have been a dead body in the car instead of garbage, there was the chance they could have concluded that Casey had put it in the trunk of her car, because after all, it was her car. When it became clear that Vass could no more discriminate between decomposition and garbage, the prosecution’s case became much weaker.

CHAPTER 28

HOPING IT STICKS

T
HE PROSECUTION next went to the dogs. In between our pretrial motions and actually going to trial, the Supreme Court of Florida handed down a ruling in the case of
Harris v. the State of Florida
. The ruling required law enforcement to provide records of their search and cadaver dogs to show that a dog was reliable. In the past, the training records had been acceptable, but the court ruled that because the one who did the training was the dog’s handler, the results were biased. What would be needed were real-world results. Every time the dog went out what were the results?

In effect, the court wanted the results to come from blind testing.

In our case, neither Gerus nor Bones had any records to show their reliability as cadaver dogs, so under
Harris
, the testimony about what they may or may not have found should have been excluded.

I was baffled when Judge Belvin Perry allowed Officer Jason Forgey to play a video of Gerus finding another body in another case and tack that on to a couple of articles about other cases in order to allow in the testimony. These records were put together ghetto-style.

To me, hands down, this was reversible error.

I sat and watched the video, objecting all the way.

“You can’t let the jury see this,” I said.

“You’ve made your bed,” Judge Perry said to me, “and now you’re going to have to lie in it.”

He took the
Harris
decision and turned it upside down.

It was so unfair.

After the dogs came the computer searches. Sandra Osborne Cawn was called to testify about her work with the home computer in Lee’s old bedroom that everyone in the Anthony family had used.

One thing I noticed: though George was in his fifties he was an active user of that computer. He was always online. You can never categorically prove someone is behind a computer, but you can group searches to give you a very good idea who was using it. Casey, for example, spent hours on Facebook and Myspace. Based on the Internet history, it appeared George’s favorite sites included job searches like Monster.com, but if he wasn’t looking for a job, he was looking for prostitute and escort sites. Two of his favorites were Forty Plus and Single.com. He also looked up some gardening sites including Lowes.com. Again, you can never put someone behind a computer.

Cawn testified she found there were some deleted files, but she didn’t know how to retrieve them, so she gave the computer over to Sergeant Kevin Stenger of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department Computer Crimes Squad. Stenger used software called NetAnalysis to pull the reports of the deleted files and isolate them. He said he utilized a new type of software called CacheBack that was designed by the next witness, John Dennis Bradley, an ex-law enforcement officer from Canada. Bradley stayed up for three nights writing code and developing the CacheBack program during the process after Stenger told him he couldn’t get it to work.

So Linda Drane Burdick called Bradley to testify about Stenger’s report because he was the developer of the software. While she was questioning him, she’s going over each and every one of the searches. I saw one website for chloroform had been visited eighty-four times. I couldn’t believe it.