Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (25 page)

Sparks told Smith about Kronk’s violent streak. She said that after she divorced him, he often threatened to kill her.

“He was angry about the divorce,” she said. “I pulled a fast one on him to protect myself, protect my child. I didn’t want to be around the abuse, the violence, the alcohol. So he was angry. He made constant threats against me. He would say, ‘I should have killed you when I had the chance.’ I heard that all the time.”

Sparks spoke of how relieved she was not to have Kronk in her life anymore. She told Smith that it had been years since she had heard from him when, out of the blue, a week before Thanksgiving, her son Brandon got a call from Kronk.

She said, “Roy said to him, ‘Guess what? You’ll see me on the news. I’m going to be a hero. I know where the little girl in Florida who’s missing is. I’m going to go get her.’

“Brandon called me, and he repeated what Roy said, that he was going to get the body when the water went down.” (Smith also interviewed the son, Brandon Sparks, who corroborated the testimony of his mother.)

According to Crystal Sparks, Kronk told his parents the same thing at the same time. This was in November 2008.

Sparks spoke at length about Kronk’s proclivity for fantasy.

“Roy liked to fantasize,” she said. “His world is a fantasy world. Make-believe. He loved Dungeons & Dragons. He would act out like he was the king. Roy was fascinated with the pretend. If he could inject himself into another world, and be that person, that was Roy. He believed in black magic, in wizards, fantasy, fairy tales, demons, vampires—that was his world.”

“Is he a person who can be believed?” Crystal Sparks was asked.

“No. Absolutely not,” she said. “I have to say that. Roy says so many untruths, and when he does tell the truth, you still don’t believe him. Because everything in his head is made up. It’s like a walking book, and he wants to make things up as he goes. The story you hear today will grow tomorrow. And he was known for that.”

My faith that Crystal Sparks was telling the truth was bolstered when, during the second deposition on July 30, 2010, Kronk testified to something he had never said before. He said that at one point he stuck his meter reader stick into the eye socket of Caylee’s skull and lifted it up. It came from out of the blue and when we heard him say that, our jaws dropped to the floor. This was after three 9-1-1 calls where he said he never touched anything, two statements on December 11, 2008, the follow-up December 17 “massage session” statement, two more statements on January 6, 2009, an eight-hour deposition on November 19, 2009. Almost two years after finding Caylee’s body, he says he lifted her skull with a stick. This was exactly what his ex-wife meant when she said, “Roy’s story would grow and grow and grow.”

Kronk’s propensity to exaggerate and to lie was, of course, relevant to our case. We wanted to show that his story couldn’t be trusted, and that there was a very good chance that the crime scene was “staged,” meaning that it had been interfered with by Kronk, and possibly others.

But Kronk was more than a liar. If the testimony could be believed, Kronk had a violent streak. Allegedly he was obsessed with duct tape, and there was even testimony that implied he had an interest in young girls. Now, ultimately, I never believed that Kronk had anything to do with Caylee’s death. But I didn’t tell the prosecution that. As you will see, the prosecution did everything they could to make it difficult for me to do my job. If I sent them down a few blind alleys, it was okay with me.

CHAPTER 12

A STAGED CRIME SCENE

I
WAS SURE THAT THE KRONK SCENARIO would give us solid ground around which to build a defense. We started to investigate Kronk, listened to his 9-1-1 tapes, and read all his statements. I found it telling the way law enforcement handled the information. I said to myself,
They’re going to try to sweep this under the rug and find a fall guy. We have to follow them and exploit that.
And that was exactly what they ended up doing.

The fall guy was Deputy Richard Cain. They made a decision that Kronk was going to be their prized pony, and they were going to ride him to the finish line.

On August 13, when Cain finally arrived at the scene, it’s very likely that Kronk didn’t show Cain the bag and Caylee’s skull. Instead, it was a ruse.

I firmly believe that Cain was telling the truth.

The problem for Cain was that the prosecution’s case depended on the veracity of Kronk. If Cain was telling the truth, by definition Kronk wasn’t, and that presented a dilemma for the police and prosecution.

The issue of who was telling the truth, Kronk or Cain, came to the forefront on December 11, four months after Kronk first called the police in August, when Kronk again called to say he had found Caylee’s remains.

When this four-month gap became public knowledge, the police department really looked incompetent. (That assumes there was a body to be found by Cain in August and that Kronk wasn’t hiding it, which was possible.)

Unable to keep hidden the information about Kronk’s August 9-1-1 calls, the sheriff’s department must have felt it had no choice but to throw Cain under the proverbial bus.

Kronk informed them about the three prior August 9-1-1 calls on December 17, 2008, and the police brass now had a major problem. Kronk had been caught in a serious omission. What everyone wanted to know after the media got hold of the story was,
Why wasn’t Caylee’s body found when he called in August?

They took Kronk’s statement, but now they realized what they had to do if they wanted Kronk’s story to stand up: Cain had to be the fall guy.

To verify whether Kronk was telling the truth, you would think that the police would have investigated Kronk’s background. You would also think the first person they would want to talk to would be Cain, who came out to the area when Kronk called. You would think their first question to Cain would have been, “What happened? What did Roy Kronk say?” But they can’t do that because they had already arrested their culprit—Casey—and charged her with first-degree murder.

Instead of investigating Kronk, they decided
, Let’s investigate Cain.

On December 17, they launched an investigation in which they questioned everyone
except
Cain.

After the cops talked to Kronk at his home in St. Cloud, Florida, for about an hour that evening, they were shitting in their pants. A few hours later they called in Officer Adriana Acevedo and asked her about Kronk’s call back in August.

If you listen to the audio of the interview, you can hear how confrontational Allen was with her. All Acevedo did was respond to a call that night, and she told Sgt. Allen it was really too dark to see much. From listening to the interview, it’s clear how unhappy Allen was, because he was getting aggressive in his questioning.

After talking to Acevedo, they interviewed Kethlin Cutcher, the officer who arrived with Cain on August 13 to meet Kronk. To repeat, they were
not
calling Cain. They talked to everyone else so they would have the facts and possible inconsistencies that they could use to attack Cain, no matter what statement he decided to make. It’s something defense lawyers do before we cross-examine a witness. You interview all the other witnesses and get the facts so that you can arm yourself with questions and effectively confront and cross-examine the witness.

Cutcher was interviewed just after midnight on December 18, 2008, and then at 9:00
A.M.
they called in Cain. It was clear to me that rather than go to Cain to find out if Kronk was lying that, they were questioning Cain for the express purpose of catching him in a lie.

Apparently, that was their plan: to catch Cain in a lie and set him up as the fall guy in order to sweep the major screwup in this investigation under the rug.

Detective Yuri Melich and Allen called Cain in for an interview, and as soon as he walked in the door, Allen became confrontational with Cain. He asked him, “Do you know who Deputy Rusciano is?”

“I know of him,” said Cain. “I don’t know him personally. I know him because he was fired.”

They weren’t being recorded—this was another of their pre-interviews, where they got their point across without being taped—and according to Cain, Allen began yelling at him, telling him he could end up like Rusciano.

Rusciano had had the bad luck to have dated and to have had a sexual relationship with Casey Anthony
before
any of this happened. When asked about their relationship, Rusciano, who was married and didn’t want their tryst made public, told investigators it was a casual relationship and that he barely knew her. The investigators then impounded Casey’s computer, found out that he knew her well and had been intimate with her, and fired him.

Beginning around nine in the morning, they turned on the tape recorder, and Cain told them what happened that day in August. He stated unequivocally that when he went to the scene after Kronk called 9-1-1, he did nothing wrong. He told them that he and Kronk walked together into the woods, and Kronk was standing right behind. Kronk showed him a bag that he described as “pretty heavy.” Cain testified that he lifted up the bag with his baton, and that when the bag tore, leaves and sticks came spilling out. He said that he inspected the debris closely, that he didn’t see a skull, and that he found the trip to be much ado about nothing at all.

It wasn’t what the brass wanted to hear, and Allen, becoming frustrated, said, “Let me close the door a minute.” After closing the door, he said to Cain, “You understand what we’re doing here, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you understand the importance of telling the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You understand the importance of telling the whole truth, right?”

What Allen was really saying to Cain was, “Hey, you’re not playing ball. Your story doesn’t match Roy Kronk’s story. And the cops who don’t play ball, wink, wink, they get fired.”

“Yes,” said Cain, who naively had no idea his superiors were setting him up to get rid of him.

So Cain went to work, and he had some time to think about what Allen was saying to him:
Hey man, your statements have really fucked up the “Case of the Century” for this department.
Surely Cain said to himself,
If I don’t change my story, I’m going to get fired like Deputy Rusciano.

When Allen and Melich at three in the afternoon reinterviewed him, Cain did a complete one-eighty. Allen’s warning probably was sufficient in and of itself, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone high up the ladder got to him during those six hours and told him, “Listen, you’re going to need to play ball and go back and tell them the truth.” Meaning, lie.

And that’s what Cain did. In the second interview, Melich said to Cain, “It’s been a couple hours, and I know that during that time you’ve had some chance to think about the call [from Kronk], and think about what actually happened. And I understand from the onset what you originally told us, it differs a little bit from what you told us now because you’ve had a little bit of time to think about it, correct?”

“Yes, yes,” Cain said, and then this time he proceeded to say that he never saw a bag, and that Kronk stayed near the street and never went with him into the woods. He also said he might not have searched the exact area that Kronk had pointed out. All this so as not to contradict their star witness, Roy Kronk.

Allen said to Cain, “Earlier you indicated that you picked the bag up with your baton and sticks fell out, right?”

Cain said, “Right.”

Then Allen said, “Okay, did that happen?”

Then Cain said, “I don’t believe it was a bag. It was probably just … yard waste.”

Allen asked him again, “Did you pick a bag up?”

Cain answered, “Not a bag,” and then sighed, which I was sure was Cain saying to himself,
There goes my career.

“Did you pick anything up?” asked Allen.

“Just yard waste,” said Cain.

Allen, who was angry about the whole Kronk situation because there wasn’t much he could do to salvage it, aggressively pursued the line of questioning and got Cain to admit it might have been a piece of a trash bag.

“It wasn’t a whole sack,” Cain said.

Allen asked, “Did it look like a garbage bag?”

“It wasn’t a full-sized bag,” said Cain, sounding uncomfortable.

Allen then said, “All right, name three other things it could have been besides a bag?”

Cain said, “It could have been a piece of dark clothing. It could have been, I don’t know, a shirt. I don’t know. It could have been a piece of something out of their yard. I don’t know.”

Allen asked him, “You never said to him, I don’t see a bag in here. Show me what you’re talking about?”

“No.”

“Would that have been a reasonable thing to do?”

“Probably.”

“What other ways to handle that call might have been reasonable?”

“Maybe ask him to go find it,” said Cain.

“Okay. Did you do any of those things?”