Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (18 page)

Those negotiations never went anywhere.

It was my ethical responsibility to always discuss plea deals with my clients. My thoughts of innocence or guilt aside, as a lawyer I always had to explore the possibility. At the end of the day, I’m not the one facing jail time. I have had many innocent clients plead guilty because the calculated risk of going to trial, losing, and being sentenced to a long, long prison term was too much to bear. It’s a screwed-up system, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

Not that I think Casey ever would have accepted a deal, even if she knew where Caylee was. She was always very adamant about her innocence of the murder charge. Pleading guilty to murder was something she never would have considered.

CHAPTER 8

THE WACK PACK

T
HE FASCINATION OF THE CASE—as drummed up by the intense coverage of the media—drew all sorts of people to Orlando. Crazies came out of the woodwork. Psychics appeared. Colorful characters appeared left and right in search of fame and in a few cases, fortune. Ed Phlegar, my paralegal, would listen to Howard Stern in the office, and we would always listen to the cast of characters that Howard called the “wack pack.” Soon we would have a wack pack of our own.

By early September Tim Miller had met with Orlando law enforcement several times. They went over Casey’s cell tower records and looked at locations and wooded areas where the police hadn’t searched.

Miller had honorable intentions, but, like a lot of people involved in this case, he was looking for publicity and he got it when he went on
Nancy Grace
and asked for volunteers—and donations.

To work for Texas EquuSearch, each volunteer had to pay twenty-five dollars. A lot of people joined. Most of the searchers were good people who were just concerned about Caylee and wanted to find her. Unfortunately there were also more than a few bad seeds, who were enticed by the attention given to the case by the media. They became obsessed by it. To me, they were like the groupies who followed The Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead around the country. They volunteered because they wanted to be a part of the action. During the search to find Caylee, a number of these colorful characters came out of the woodwork.

One of the earliest “tips” came from a woman by the name of Kiomarie Cruz, who one evening took police to a section of woods near the Anthony home. She told the police that she was Casey’s best friend during middle school and that she and Casey and a third friend, “Jessica Kelly,” used to hang out in the woods a quarter mile down the street from Casey’s house by the nearby Hidden Oaks Elementary School. She told police she and Casey used to bury their pets there. She also said that when Casey got pregnant, Casey wanted to give Caylee up for adoption, and that Cruz wanted to adopt Caylee, but apparently Cindy wouldn’t hear of it. She would later testify that she sold her story to the
National Enquirer
for $20,000.

I asked Casey about Cruz, and she said she had known who she was, but they weren’t good friends. Casey said Cruz’s story that she had offered to have Cruz adopt Caylee was “complete nonsense.”

When I asked Cindy about it, Cindy corroborated what Casey had said.

“That’s a bunch of BS,” said Cindy.

I didn’t find Cruz credible because when I took her deposition, she didn’t seem to know much about Casey and her life. She claimed that Casey, she, and “Jessica Kelly” were an inseparable threesome growing up, but when the police searched for Kelly, they were unable to locate her. Casey, it seemed, wasn’t the only one with made-up friends.

Cruz stated in her deposition that she thought Caylee was alive, and she related how she had called Officer Appie Wells, and she and Wells went to the site where she and Casey used to go in the woods, in her attempt to see if Caylee was there.

“At ten at night?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“And you were hoping that Caylee would be there playing?”

“Yeah,” she said, which took me aback. Why would a two-year-old be out playing in the woods late at night? Then Cruz said she never took the same route home because she believed that people were following her. She also claimed that Casey had called her during the thirty days in June to borrow money from her.

“Casey said she needed money for her child,” she said. When police asked her for her telephone records, she said her fiancé didn’t think it was a great idea.

She later told police that it wasn’t Casey Anthony who had asked her to borrow money; it was another friend of hers named Casey Williams, an African-American girlfriend of hers.

She had gotten the two confused. And that’s when I said to myself,
Here is yet another wack packer.

Another of these colorful characters was a man by the name of Dominic Casey, who had emailed me, saying he wanted to work for me for free as an investigator. I was alone in this battle and was getting bombarded with an avalanche of leaks appearing in the media. I didn’t have any money and needed help, so when I got a series of emails from an investigator who said he’d work for me pro bono, I jumped at the opportunity.

After I checked out Dominic’s license, I called him and invited him to join me. When he came to meet me, he seemed capable enough, so I welcomed him to my team.

My first assignment for him was to look into whether a former fiancé of Casey’s, a man by the name of Jesse Grund, might have abducted Caylee.

“Jesse met Casey while he was working in loss prevention at Universal Studios,” I told him. “They began a relationship, and then he went to Florida State University in Tallahassee. Shortly after he left, Casey found out she was pregnant and she told him he was the father. They started seeing each other again, and he offered to marry her.

“Cindy didn’t like him,” I told him. “While they were dating, Jesse was at the police academy, and then he got a job working for the Orlando Police Department, and he was working there when Casey broke it off. Jesse underwent a DNA test to see if Caylee was his, and even though she wasn’t his child, he still wanted to marry Casey and raise Caylee as his own. They were engaged, but after Caylee was born, they broke up because of Cindy.”

I told Dominic that, according to Cindy, Jesse had been very possessive of Caylee, that he was jealous when Casey found a new boyfriend, and that Cindy suspected that it might be Jesse who took Caylee. (None of this turned out to be true, of course.)

“See what you can find out about Jesse,” I said to Dominic.

About a week later, Dominic and I met in my conference room. I was curious as to what he had found.

“I think I’ve solved the case,” said Dominic. “I’ve been doing some research, and the word on the street is that ‘Zanny’ is actually a code name for Xanax. I believe what happened was that Casey was giving Caylee Xanax to sleep. That’s what she meant when she said ‘Zanny the nanny.’”

I thought to myself,
Number one, that’s not what I asked you to do, and number two, that could very well be the second-most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard
. Number one, of course, was that there ever was a Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez in the first place. I also realized that this guy was not the type of investigator I wanted working for me on a case like this. But I had a problem. He was out there doing work for me, and if I let him go and the media found out about it, I couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.

At that point, I had lost complete confidence in him. I didn’t think he was useful so I gave him menial tasks like running a license plate or standing outside the Anthony home and keeping his eye on the protesters.

“If something happens, give me a call,” I said.

I just kind of blew him off, and he became increasingly frustrated with me because I wasn’t including him in anything important. I really wanted to divorce myself from the guy.

It was tough, because I had never been in a situation with this amount of media scrutiny. Trying to keep things private was a major undertaking.

Dominic’s full name was Dominic Anthony Casey. You cannot make this stuff up. Down the road, Dominic Anthony Casey would almost destroy me and my case.

Another of the colorful characters to come along was Gale St. John, who billed herself as a psychic dog handler, meaning she owns dogs which she claims are trained to find dead bodies. Her search team was known as “The Body Hunters.”

On August 11, 2008, a man by the name of Roy Kronk called 9-1-1 to report seeing something suspicious in the woods near the Anthony home. On this same day, St. John was driving herself and a couple of her psychic associates when she videotaped herself pulling up to the Anthony home. You can see the media trucks on her tape, and she says, “I’m getting a feeling.” Then she says, “Let’s turn left over here,” and she starts heading toward Suburban Drive. When she stopped there, she said, “My feelings are getting stronger.” She pulled to the right, and on the tape you can hear the dogs breathing heavily.

St. John said the feeling she got that day was overwhelming.

“You get very sick to your stomach,” she said. “You feel as though you’ve been punched in the stomach and something knocks the air out of you.”

“I’m getting a feeling right here,” she said, and everyone got out of the car. The dogs searched around and stopped at the exact spot where Caylee would eventually be found months later in December. Her dogs found no body.

I don’t believe in psychics, but I had to give it to her. This was not the first beyond-bizarre experience in this case and would not be the last. She was right there, but the question we would later ask was,
Where was Caylee?

A
FTER SEVERAL DAYS
of turning up nothing, people stopped volunteering to work for Texas EquuSearch, and it was then that Miller went on TV talking about how much money the company had spent. Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary stepped up, donated $5,000 to the company, and asked Miller not to leave. Miller stayed a few more days, announced he would come back in November, and then returned to Texas.

Also going on the TV and making a name for himself was Leonard Padilla, the bounty hunter with the reality show who had dropped his bond on Casey when she was arrested on the bad check charges. I was able to get another bondsman to post the money, and Padilla, in search of a new path to publicity, joined Miller in the search for Caylee. Padilla and Miller announced that when they returned in November, they were going to launch the biggest search in U.S. history. In fact, they did come back and had a huge turnout—more than thirteen hundred volunteers—though no one ever found anything, including those who searched on Suburban Drive where Caylee would later be found.

One morning in November, I was eating my breakfast and turned on the news to find Padilla standing on the banks of a lake inside Jay Blanchard Park in Orlando. He had hired divers to search that lake because he believed Caylee’s body was hidden there. Why, I was never sure, though perhaps it was because that was the park Casey had mentioned as the place where Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez kidnapped Caylee.

The reporters came in droves, and one of them asked him, “Mr. Padilla, are you going to search again today?”

He said yes.

“How many days do you plan on searching?” he was asked.

“We’re going to stay until Tuesday,” he said.

“Why Tuesday?”

“Because the flights are cheaper on Tuesday,” he said.

I cracked up watching this. And then the reporter asked him, “Are you back out here trying to redeem yourself because you didn’t find anything last time?”

“Fuck you,” he shouted over the airwaves live across Orlando. “I don’t have to redeem myself for anyone.”

I almost spit out my cereal. I couldn’t believe Padilla had said “Fuck you” on live TV. The commentator had to apologize for his language.

At any rate, Padilla and his divers went into the lake searching, and in the afternoon on TV there was breaking news. At the bottom of the lake he had discovered a waterlogged sack. Padilla was certain he had found Caylee’s body.