Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (65 page)

When Kronk finished testifying, I think it was clear to the jury that something was just not right about any of this.

We called Roy Kronk’s son Brandon Sparks to the stand. Sparks, a very straightforward military kid, said that his father had called him a month before Caylee had been found in December and told him, “I’m going to be rich and famous.”

We then called George to the stand to talk about his relationship with Krystal Holloway, whom he had met at the command center during the search for Caylee. It was a relationship that he denied. We showed that George sent her a text message in which he wrote, “I need you in my life,” and he denied telling Krystal that Caylee’s death was “an accident that snowballed out of control.”

On the stand George began by saying Krystal was no different from any other volunteer. He denied ever being intimate with her and said he only went to her condominium on two or three occasions. And then he said something almost comical.

“She had relayed to me just a few days prior to me going there for the very first time that she has a brain tumor. She was dying,” George said. “She needed someone to comfort her, and I felt as being a good guy or someone who had come to know a lot of people volunteered for us, I became very connected with a lot of people and her, and I felt because she was giving of herself to me and my family to help with my granddaughter, that’s the least I could do.”

As he was giving his ridiculous recitation, I thought to myself,
In the closing argument I’m going to shove it right up this lying SOB by saying, “His wife was the one who needed comforting. They had a missing granddaughter, not this woman who he barely knew. And not only that, she didn’t have a tumor. She’s still alive three years later. She didn’t have any brain tumor
.”

I pressed him.

“Is it your testimony to this jury that you weren’t going there for any romantic interludes? It was just because you were going there to console her for her brain tumor?”

Ashton objected; his objection was overruled.

“Sir, yes, I did go there just to console her because she had confided in me that she had a brain tumor, or she was having medical issues, and she also explained that to my wife.” He added, “I had nothing to hide, sir. Never have.”

There isn’t a man in American who has
more
to hide
, I thought to myself.

Despite George’s denials, I got everything I needed from him. I got that he had a relationship with her, though he denied it, and he also denied he ever made the statement to Holloway, “It was an accident that snowballed out of control.”

I then called Krystal. I had met with her beforehand, and I found her to be a colorful character. She was who she was, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

A scorned lover, she had a lot of anger toward George. Out of the kindness of her heart, during a period when George was telling Cindy he was working but really wasn’t, she lent him more than $4,000 so he could keep his head above water financially.

Initially, she had wanted to protect George. When the relationship was made public, George not only kept denying its existence, he insulted and bad-mouthed her, claiming she was a criminal and a liar. As a result, she lost all sympathy for him. That and the fact he never paid her back.

Describing how their relationship ended, Krystal said, “Shortly after the memorial service for Caylee, I blew him, and he blew me off.”

A
FTER
K
RYSTAL WE CALLED
Dominic Casey, who was the Kato Kaelin of our case. He was such a wacky character. A number of times during his testimony, the jury couldn’t stop laughing at how crazy he was. I called him because he had emailed a psychic and included a Google map. Right where Dominic put the pin was where Caylee’s remains were found, and this was in November, a month before she was found.

I showed the jury a blowup of an email with the spot where Caylee had been found. I had had Kronk’s coworkers circle the area, had Melich do the same. And I got Dominic to say, “Yes, I sent this to a psychic because this was the area I had searched …” Right then and there, the jury and everyone in the courthouse knew there was something fishy going on.

I summarized it when I asked him, “This was the only time you searched for a dead Caylee?”

“Yes.”

“Orlando is a hundred square miles?”

“Yes.”

“The only place you searched was where she ultimately was found?”

“Yes.”

The jury could have come up with but one explanation: either George or Cindy had told him, “Hey, you need to go to this spot and search.”

Either they wanted Dominic to find her or wanted Dominic to be able to testify that he had searched the area and there was no body there.

Neither George nor Cindy have ever come forth and actually spoken about this. But, I have just about run out of excuses for all the coincidences.

I
CALLED
C
INDY TO THE STAND
to advance our theory that Caylee’s death was an accident. She and I were talking about the layout of the house, the fact that there were no child-safety locks, and that Caylee was able to open the sliding-glass doors to the pool. It was at this point we introduced one of the most important exhibits in our entire case—the photo of Caylee opening the sliding-glass doors.

We didn’t have this photo until the middle of the trial. Casey had been an inveterate photo-taker, taking thousands of photos of herself and Caylee, and she had had a lot of photos taken of herself, photos like the ones at her high school senior prom. Cindy had sold some of these photos to CBS, and we wanted to see them so we could use these photos to show to Cindy so she could talk about Casey being a good mother. At the same time I wanted to show Cindy had sold the photos.

There was a huge batch of photos that I put under the care of William Slabaugh, who was in charge of the Casey Anthony file.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” I said to him. “Go through these photos and pull out the ones that show Caylee by and in the pool so we have proof the ladder was always off.”

“Sure, no problem,” he said.

We worked weekends, and this was a Sunday. He was working on his assignment, and I was in my office preparing for upcoming witnesses, when William came over to me and said, “Jose, you’ve got to see this.”

“What?” I said, walking over to his computer.

He clicked the button for the photo to come up, and just as it appeared, he slapped his hands together and yelled, “Pow, there it is.”

And we couldn’t believe it.

We sat around the conference room staring at a picture of Caylee opening the sliding-glass door to the pool. I have a three-year-old, and I have hundreds of pictures of him, but I don’t have one of him opening a glass door.

No one had ever showed the picture because in and of itself it was so inconsequential. Caylee’s face doesn’t even show in the picture.

We all just stared.

It was the coup de grâce for the entire case.

We all sat in dead silence.

“It’s as if she’s trying to tell us something,” said one of our interns.

CHAPTER 31

THE PET CEMETERY

A
FTER WE FOUND THE PHOTO of Caylee opening the glass door on the way to the pool, we decided to look for more photos that would substantiate what George told Holloway, “It was an accident that snowballed out of control.”

Casey had told me the same story, so I knew this to be the truth. But for the jury to believe it, we needed more, and we got it. We not only found the sliding door photo, but we also found a photo of Caylee walking up the ladder with Cindy, with Cindy barely touching her, we also found ones of Caylee jumping into the water and swimming in the pool.

We called Cindy to the stand to discuss these photos, which we blew up for all to see. Cindy talked about Caylee’s ability to get out of the house on her own, that she had to be watched, that there were no locks to keep her from leaving. I showed her the photos and it was clear the jury was beginning to understand that this notion of ours that Caylee had drowned in the pool was not something we had pulled out of thin air.

It was huge.

We then talked about the shorts that had been found along with Caylee’s remains. She had outgrown them. They were size twenty-four months, when Caylee wore a 3T. Whoever put them on her hadn’t had much experience dressing her.

Cindy testified that she hadn’t seen those shorts in six months.

When Dr. Henry Lee inspected the shorts, he had found rips in them. Whoever put them on her was so desperate to get them on, that he ripped them as he fought to get her body into them. It would have been nice to have had Lee’s testimony. It was another piece of evidence we had that we never got to produce.

Who could have been the one to have dressed her like that? We believed we knew exactly who, but I don’t know that the jurors made the connection.

We went to our grief expert, Dr. Sally Karioth. I had taken her class at Florida State University back in 1994. Her class was hard to get into, and she talked about grief and how people grieved in different ways.

The basic premise behind her testimony was that a person of sound mind and body grieved in the usual way, but those suffering from trauma, like sexual abuse or other mental health issues, grieve in a very different way—in a way that people just can’t understand. She said that the way Casey pretended nothing was wrong was a common way that sexual abuse victims conduct themselves after suffering trauma or loss.

There aren’t that many people who are qualified to testify about grief. Her specialty is unique, and she was criticized by many in the media who had no clue as to what they were talking about.

The day we were about to drop Sally off at the airport, she said to me, “Jose, when this trial is over, I want you to call me, because you’re going through a traumatic event, and you’re going to need me. In fact, not only you, but your whole defense team.”

“Thank you,” I said, “that’s very kind of you.”

And I thought to myself,
I don’t think so. I’ll be fine.

And looking back, I can’t tell you how right she was.