Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (24 page)

It could mean one of two things. He could be telling the truth. If so, then the skull was outside the bag, and someone put it inside the bag and hid it while Casey was in jail. Or it tells us that Kronk was lying.

Other aspects of Kronk’s story were also inconsistent. What I found most interesting was that Kronk told the Crimeline that he looked
down
at the round object. In all of the statements Kronk would make, he would say he saw it from a distance. Here he was saying, “I looked down and saw this round skull.” To me that was an indication he was standing right over it. Another indication of that was the detail he was able to give about the type of bag it was, the cut on the tree, and the white board.

Fourth, as I noted earlier, there is some evidence that Kronk was coached by the police to get his story straight. The police claimed they weren’t satisfied with Kronk’s story, so they went back and interviewed him for a second time on December 17. I never did get a clear answer from law enforcement as to what prompted them to go back and talk to Kronk again on December 17. What they
said
was that they felt the evidence at the scene didn’t coincide with his statements, so they wanted to go back and get a second statement to clarify some important points.

But, in my view, that’s not what they were doing and I’ll tell you why. Something law enforcement does too often is called “pre-interviewing.” They interview the person privately, and after they are done talking to them and done getting the information they want, they go back and turn on the tape recorder and get the person to say what they want him to say. They can do this because the cops know beforehand exactly what the witness is going to say before the statements are recorded. And they do it so the accused and the accused’s lawyers can hear only the conversation that was recorded and not the initial one. As I said, it’s a technique often used by law enforcement, and I believe it was used all the time in this case. Often, the information given after a pre-interview isn’t very reliable. The tactics are hidden. A slick detective can coach a witness, tell him what he wants to hear, tell him what he should say, and then they go on tape, and the witness merely regurgitates everything that he’s expected to say.

The record provides evidence that Melich and Edwards pre-interviewed Kronk before interrogating him on tape on December 17.

From the transcript of their interview, Melich said, “Okay Mr. Kronk, we came down here to visit you at your house because we wanted to get a more detailed statement about the morning of the 11
^th
, when you found what you found. Walk me through that morning
just like you did before
[emphasis mine], and then we’ll kind of use that to go back to that earlier Crimeline tip that you mentioned.”

This proves Melich and Kronk had talked earlier.

Kronk says, “Okay,” and then he starts to talk about it.

Later in the interview Edwards said to Kronk, “Now, your description earlier when we first got here and did a little pre-interview, you had said it was almost like balding, like a male pattern baldness. The top was aha—”

“Okay, okay,” said Kronk, and he gives them what they want. Here Edwards very clearly stated they had had a pre-interview.

Here’s another example. Edwards and Melich were interviewing Kronk on December 17 and asked him whether he moved Caylee’s skull.

“I mean I didn’t move it as in physically move it … from one location to another,” Kronk said. “I just kind of lifted it up a little bit when it …”

And Edwards chimes in, “Manipulated it some?”

Kronk then says, “Right. Yeah, manipulated it.”

Clearly this was a coached term.

Later in the interview, Kronk was talking about being at the crime scene with his two coworkers and whether they talked on the radio to him. Then Edwards let the cat out of the bag. He said, “We discussed the radio transmission of, ‘I told you she was there,’ I think is what….”

And Kronk said, “Right, because, you know, because I gave them my theory that they thought I was insane at the time, or that it was a joke.”

Edwards, of course, would argue that the technique is legitimate, just as Melich would say there’s nothing fishy about a pre-interview. They would say, “We’re not coaching him. He tells us what he tells us.” But I don’t buy that for a second. What they’re actually trying to do is get Kronk to change his testimony.

It is inconceivable to me that events transpired the way Kronk described them. There are just too many inconsistencies. So what really happened? No one knows for certain, but consider what in all probability I believe did occur:

On August 11 Roy Kronk was taking a break from his meter reading with two coworkers when he had to urinate. He went into the woods, said to his coworkers, “Hey, I saw a skull,” but after they saw the dead snake and got excited, he thought better of calling the police about his find, figuring,
Wait a minute. Why would I share the reward with these two other guys?

So he returned later that day and hid Caylee’s body, waiting for the size of the reward to go up, as it did, from $10,000 to $255,000. This is the evidence I believe backs up this theory.

Dave Evans, Kronk’s attorney, rejected that theory, asserting that Kronk “immediately and repeatedly reported his find to local law enforcement.”

But, consider this; on December 10, the day before Kronk “found” her body, his car broke down on his way to work. He was broke, needed a new transmission. He had to borrow $1,084.17 to fix it. The very next day, he called the police to report his find again. This time, the two police officers who arrived at the scene were Turso and Porter. In her deposition Porter told me that the first question Kronk asked was, “Do I still get the reward even though she’s dead?” And the second question was, “Will my ex-wife find out about the money since I owe her child support?”

When Alex Roberts, Kronk’s supervisor, showed up at the scene, Alex testified that Kronk told him he had just won the lottery, and that he was going to be rich because he was the one who had found Caylee.

Kronk also made his intentions known during his January 6, 2009, interview with Melich and Edwards. Kronk said to them, “And you notice I am still keeping a low profile as humanly possible, but you know what …”

“We really appreciate that,” said Melich.

Then Kronk said, “But Roy has to eat too, so …” Basically he was saying he was going to go public, making the rounds of the reality news shows.

In the end, Roy Kronk ended up getting about $25,000, including $5,000 from attorney Mark Nejame.

For the record, here’s what Kronk said when Edwards asked him why it took him four months to go into the woods and report Caylee’s body: “I had things on my mind. My car blew up. I had to replace it, okay?

I had just started a relationship with my son again after eighteen years of not seeing him. All right, I got insurance to pay. I have to pay my parents back. I had to go out and find a car. I think we spent all Memorial weekend, all these days out trying to find me a car. I had real things to do, okay?”

After listening to the absurdity of his answer, did the cops say to him, “And all these things were more important than making sure we recovered this poor dead girl’s body?”

No. Rather, they went on to their next question.

We would find out later that the police tried to bury any mention of Kronk’s financial motives. Our investigators learned that Porter was ordered by Internal Affairs not to say anything about Kronk mentioning the reward to her. I was appalled by the report. But good cops, like Porter, don’t always go along with what the other cops want. It’s comical they changed the name from Internal Affairs to Professional Standards. These apparently are Orange County’s professional standards.

There’s more evidence beyond Kronk’s clear financial interest in finding Caylee’s remains. When he returned to the woods, at least one person saw him—Gale St. John. St. John, the psychic dog handler, told my investigator that she saw Kronk by that part of the woods that day. We believed her because she had a video of her and her associates there that day.

So (again, my supposition) he thought:
Shit, somebody saw me in the woods. I’ve got to do something. I’ll call the cops, and when they arrive, I’ll be able to say that I called them to show them what I found,
when in actuality he was doing nothing of the sort except creating an alibi for himself.

In his deposition, we asked Kronk why his cell phone would ping off nearby towers after he got home from work that afternoon. We didn’t really have his cell tower records, so this was a bluff on our part. But he did not know that. He admitted returning to the general area and gave us a story about stopping at a store near the site where he saw the skull on his way home. This really sounded suspicious to me.

So Kronk bides his time. And then on December 11, after months go by and the reward goes way up, he cashes in his ticket.

Looking at the scenario backward and forward, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. This is just my opinion, but can you think of a plausible alternative? There is significant evidence to support this theory.

A
S PART OF OUR INVESTIGATION
, the defense looked into the background of Kronk, and what we found wasn’t pretty. Kronk was married twice, first to Crystal Sparks and then to Jill Kerley. They painted a picture of a man who was not only a habitual liar and fantasist but a violent abuser who was arrested for kidnapping an ex-girlfriend.

Kerley, a heavyset woman who suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was married to Kronk for only four-and-a-half months. She divorced him because he was abusive. She told my investigator Mort Smith, “We were living in Maryville, this was after he got kicked out of the U.S. Coast Guard, and he packed a bag, put it in the car, and he told me we were going to the store. And the next thing I know, we went to his parents’ house. He wouldn’t let me call my mom and dad to let them know I was okay. And then he beat me in front of his father, because I wouldn’t do what he asked me to do.”

She told us of another time when he picked her up at the airport, and when they got home, he gave her a glass of wine.

“After I drank it,” she said, “I passed out on the couch. I believe he drugged me and had every intention of having his way with me.”

Kerley told our investigator that Kronk had a thing for duct tape. “He called it hundred-mile-an-hour duct tape,” she said. “Nothing can get through it.” She said that on two occasions he used duct tape to tie her down.

When asked about what went through her mind upon hearing that Kronk had found Caylee’s body, she said, “That he had done it. The duct tape. A lot of reasons. I say that because of the abuse I went through. My gut told me he had something to do with it.”

According to Kerley, Kronk enjoyed playing the game Dungeons & Dragons on the computer.

“He would believe he was one of the characters,” she said. “It consumed him. I think if given the opportunity I think he would have killed me. I was very afraid of him.”

Smith asked her, “Is he honest?”

She said, “I don’t think he’d know the truth if it hit him in the head.”

Sparks, who was in the U.S. Coast Guard with Kronk at the time they married, told a particularly chilling story of the day she received a call from Kronk’s father. They had divorced, and she was working in the legal office of the U.S. Coast Guard when he called to say that Kronk was in jail.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Roy kidnapped his girlfriend,” he said.

She wanted to know the details.

“The girlfriend, the nurse, they were living together and they had a breakup,” the father said. “She went back to South Carolina, and Roy was upset enough he wanted to get her back. He rented a car, and he decided he was going to take her back to Key West. He used handcuffs, duct tape, and a plastic gun he got from a drugstore to hold her.”

Sparks was asked by Smith why Kronk was estranged from his sister Susan and his niece Jessica. Sparks told him, “There was a concern that Roy wanted to be close to Jessica. In my heart I had concerns about it. There’s concern about Roy being with young girls. Would he do something to his own niece? Someone would have to look at it with seriousness. Susan made sure Jessica didn’t sit on Roy’s lap.”