Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (64 page)

My goodness
, I said to myself,
how could they miss something huge like that?

And what’s funny is, after the trial I received an email from one of the jurors.

After asking why the state didn’t check the phone records of anyone but Casey, including Roy Kronk, the juror wrote, “The computer evidence was just the final straw for me. What a joke!”

And I have to say, this is where having a quality expert makes a huge difference. Larry Daniel was the one who found the discrepancy, and he was nothing short of spectacular in his knowledge of what was on the Anthonys’ computer. He knew it ten times better than the state.

When the trial was over, John Bradley, the designer of the software used by the state to determine that Casey had made eighty-four searches for chloroform, wrote an article saying that the searches were based on inaccurate data, and that there had only been one search, not the eighty-four searches as the state claimed.

Not only that, but according to
The New York Times
, “Mr. Bradley said he immediately alerted a prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, and Sgt. Kevin Stenger of the Sheriff’s Office in late June through e-mail and by telephone to tell them of his new findings. Mr. Bradley said he conducted a second analysis after discovering discrepancies that were never brought to his attention by prosecutors or the police.”

“Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected,” said an article about it in
The New York Times.

“I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” wrote Bradley. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

Bradley, who lived in Canada, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to set the record straight.

Bradley said that the first analysis report, conducted by Stenger, had been hidden from him.

And this was huge, because once again it showed the pattern of bad faith on the part of law enforcement and/or the prosecution when it came to this case.

The question arose: Did Linda Drane Burdick know that she was presenting false evidence? Where it gets fishy is that she called Bradley a civilian from Canada (we do not have subpoena powers in Canada) to testify about Sgt. Stenger’s report. Then you have John Bradley’s post trial comments. But I know Linda Drane Burdick, and John Bradley removed his statement off of his website after the
New York Times
wrote a big article on it and it began to get a lot of attention. Maybe Bradley got scared and backpedaled because all of his business comes from law enforcement, or maybe he was mistaken. I will never know. If it had been any other prosecutor given these facts I would say absolutely they knew they put on false evidence, but Linda’s character stands in the way of that, and I have the utmost respect for her character. So without first-hand knowledge, I would say no, she did not knowingly introduce false evidence. But nonetheless, the evidence was false.

A
FTER THE COMPUTER TESTIMONY
we wanted to delve more into the theme of shady police work. We called Detective Ryan Eberlin, who was the officer who first handcuffed Casey at her house, only to have her uncuffed a few minutes later.

We wanted to show the perfect example of law enforcement misleading the jury. Sergeant Reginald Hosey had testified that he had never told Eberlin to handcuff her, whereas on the stand, Eberlin testified Hosey had told him to do it.

That wasn’t huge as it related to the case as much as it said to the jury, “Look, they are lying to you.”

We then attempted to call to the stand Detective Eric Edwards and Linda Tinelli. We wanted to show that law enforcement wanted Tinelli, one of the women manning George’s search-for-Caylee booth, to wear a wire and question George about Caylee’s disappearance. Outside the presence of the jury, Judge Belvin Perry ruled that it wasn’t relevant, so we never got them to testify.

We also got Melich to testify that the police had pulled Roy Kronk’s phone records, when in truth they didn’t. I got Melich to return the next day and admit to the jury that he “misspoke.”

We then turned our attention to Suburban Drive. One of the issues we dealt with was the search in the woods conducted by Dominic Casey and Jim Hoover, who were working for the Anthonys. To bring the issue to the fore, on June 28, we called to the stand Cindy Anthony, Lee Anthony, and Yuri Melich.

In one of his reports, Melich had written that on December 20, when they went to the house to execute a search warrant, Cindy had said, “I had my people (Dominic and Hoover) search there a month ago, and they didn’t find anything.” Later Cindy would deny making that statement. She had denied it in her civil deposition, so I knew she’d deny it at trial. Sure enough, we called Cindy up, and she denied ever making it.

During my meetings with Lee, he had told me that in fact she did have Dominic and Hoover out in the woods searching for Caylee sometime in October. And as a result, said Lee, he and Cindy had had a fight, because Lee thought Caylee was still alive, and Cindy was sending Dominic into the woods to search for a dead Caylee.

How did Cindy know she was dead? While we will never know, you can insinuate in good faith that at some point Cindy learned the truth from George, and that’s when she sent her guys into the woods.

At any rate, after Cindy testified, I called Lee to the stand. This was right after Cindy had testified, “No, I didn’t make that statement, and no, I didn’t send Dominic Casey into the woods.”

Lee walked right up there after sitting next to his mother and said, “Yes, she did, and not only that, but we got into a big fight over it, and shortly after that fight I went back to work and stopped searching for Caylee.”

It was huge, huge, and then I called back Melich, and he said, “Yeah, she made the statement.”

For me the infighting among those three made such an impactful impression on the jury that it was one of the landmark reasons why Casey was acquitted.

And once again, not a word of it was mentioned in the media the next day.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE
24, in court Burdick came up to me, and she said, “You know, all I really want is the truth from Casey as to what happened.”

When she said that, I thought,
This is a plea overture.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Let’s talk about it,” she said.

Some other people have said I was the one who approached Burdick, but I will tell you, that wasn’t the case. A plea bargain was the furthest thing from my mind, in large part because Casey had made it clear she was innocent and wouldn’t entertain the possibility of a plea bargain.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m willing to let her plead to count three.”

Which was aggravated manslaughter of a child, with a thirty-year maximum. The problem was that there’s no minimum, so Judge Perry would have discretion as to how many years he would sentence her to.

Judge Perry’s involvement, for us, was the tricky part.

“If Casey will say that she would consider a plea,” said Burdick, “Then we will go to Judge Perry, and he can tell us what he will sentence her to ahead of time, and then she can decide whether to accept it or not.”

Hmmm. To me this was a no-lose situation, because once Judge Perry announced how many years he would sentence her to, say hypothetically twenty-five years, if afterwards she was convicted of murder and was sentenced to life, I could argue that it was vindictive sentencing in that he had already said, “Twenty-five years.”

And if she was handed a death sentence, I could make an argument that might save her life.

All five of us on the defense team, Cheney, Lisabeth, Dorothy, Michelle, and I went to see Casey. I told her about the offer and that all she had to do was consider it.

“No,” she said right away.

“Casey, you have got to at least think about it.”

“Okay,” she said. “I just thought about it. The answer is no.”

We all went round and round talking to Casey, how this was a no-lose situation, but in the end, even listening to a plea deal was something she just couldn’t do.

“No, I’m not guilty. I’m innocent,” she said. “And I don’t care what anyone has to say. I feel this jury is on our side. I’ll plead guilty to lying to the cops, but I won’t plead guilty to something I did not do.”

Cheney and I left the room, and he said, “I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Casey was taking a huge risk by not considering the deal, innocent or otherwise. Her life was at stake here, and she was trusting twelve strangers to decide whether she would live or die.

“I’m going to the judge,” Cheney said. “I have issues about her competency.”

We went to sidebar. Cheney was about to tell Judge Perry when I said, “Wait a minute, Cheney.” And I asked the judge to give me a couple more minutes. I wanted another chance to talk to Casey.

I did, and I still didn’t get anywhere with her. I went back, and Cheney and I told the judge.

“I have questions about her competency,” said Cheney.

And whenever a lawyer does that, the trial has to stop, because any evidence that gets presented if the client isn’t competent—it’s a waste of time.

Judge Perry called a recess.

“I’ll have some people go in and evaluate her today. We’ll stop and say it’s a legal issue. They’ll evaluate her tonight, and tomorrow we’ll see what the reports have to say.”

We told Casey what they were doing, and she said, “Fine.”

Doctors went in and talked to her, and they found her competent. The next day the trial continued.

When Judge Perry called off court for the day, saying it was a “legal issue,” the media went crazy, inventing all the events it might be including Casey pleading guilty and one of the lawyers quitting the case. It was the usual garbage by reporters who needed a story for the news, whether there was truth to that story or not.

I can say a lot of things about Casey, but one thing I can never say is that she lacked courage. She looked death in the face and said, “A plea? Absolutely not.” I know I wouldn’t have had the same courage. To this day I’m amazed at how strong she was, and maybe that’s what life taught her: how to be a survivor. But to this day I’m amazed for her actions on that day.

W
HEN WE RESUMED
, we called Kronk to the stand. Because of my fatigue, I turned over the questioning of Kronk to Cheney, who got Kronk to testify to all his calls in August. We outlined all the Kronk madness, went through the Kronk chronicles where he admitted to sticking his meter reading stick into the eye socket of Caylee’s skull, lifting her up. We brought out his discussions of money. He denied that money was his motivation, denied calling his son, Brandon Sparks, around Thanksgiving and telling him he was about to become famous. He testified the cops never pulled his phone records, that the cops never spoke to him between August and December, the two times he called in to say he had found bones and remains.

He admitted his car needed $1,000 in repairs on December 10, and calling the police to report he had found Caylee’s remains on December 11.