Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (27 page)

L
ET ME TELL YOU
what we found later on: The police and prosecution had taken complete control of the area and then destroyed it before we had our chance to look at it. All we had to go on were the hundreds of photos the police had taken of the site. When Dr. Henry Lee came down in late December, after our failure to get access to the crime scene, he started looking at the crime scene photographs. When Lee began studying the photos and saw the large tree at the site, the tree that was removed before we were allowed to visit, the first thing he said was, “That tree that’s fallen there was used to hide the body.”

A group of us were seated around my conference table in my office, and when he said that, we all got up to take a look. That made complete and perfect sense; if you want to hide a bag containing a body, you either bury it or put it underneath something. There was something else we found interesting about that tree: it was apparent in some of the crime scene photos, but it was missing in others. We later learned that the photographer had it moved in order to take better pictures of Caylee’s remains.

We learned from a report written by one of the crime scene investigators that Stephen Hanson, who worked for the medical examiner, and another crime scene person picked up the tree and moved it. In other words, the person who hid Caylee under that tree had to be pretty strong to lift it up in order to place the bag and body under it. Did anyone think 105-pound Casey had the strength to be able to do that?

I spent a full week, eight hours a day, looking at each and every one of those photos. I sat in my office with my door closed, flicking back and forth from photo to photo. It’s grunt work, but very important work because the crime scene photos are the first images. They can tell you a great deal about the crime scene. And one of the things I noticed was the lack of the white board that Kronk had described in his 9-1-1 call. It had apparently disappeared, as though it was never there. In my opinion, the purpose of that white board was to be an X marking the spot. I don’t know who put the white board there and I don’t know who removed it. Even today I don’t know for sure whether someone put it there with the intention of using it to help relocate the bag and the body at a later date, or whether it had been placed there by whoever put the body there.

F
ROM THE VERY BEGINNING
the police decided that Casey Anthony was guilty and decided to only focus on evidence that supported this theory. They arrested her prematurely, as I noted earlier, and decided to collect the evidence later. This is not the way to run an investigation. The police work was sloppy throughout.

When Kronk reported finding a body on Suburban Drive, Melich would later say that that area had been searched, but that wasn’t so. The EquuSearch people didn’t begin searching until September, so there’s no way EquuSearch could have searched that area. Chalk that up to more brilliant detective work by Melich.

Yet Melich, to my knowledge, never caught any flak for sloppy police work. He was always portrayed as being thorough. In fact, before we went to trial, he was nominated for detective of the year by
America’s Most Wanted
. That was just and appropriate, if you think about it, because reality shows are about personalities, fame, and show business, not being a good detective. Deputy Richard Cain would take the fall, but nobody gave any shit to Melich for ignoring Kronk’s tip in August.

Later I would ask for all the paperwork of all the searches by law enforcement around Suburban Drive prior to Kronk’s trip. They gave us nothing, claiming they never searched there. But here was White saying, “That area has been searched.”

This could have meant one of two things: the police searched there and hid the search records, and all the evidence from the defense, because they didn’t want us to be able to claim, “You searched the area, and the body wasn’t there. Casey was locked up in jail, and therefore she couldn’t have done it.”

In fact, we did argue that very thing for a long time.

Choice number two: the police were totally incompetent. No reports of searches exist. Why? I want to know why. Why wouldn’t you search the closest wooded area to the Anthony house? For any police department, that would have been the
first place
to look. For one thing Kiomarie Cruz, who had claimed to be a close childhood friend of Casey’s, said that’s where they played as kids, and where Casey would eerily bury her dead pets.

I still have a hard time believing the police didn’t search the area, but maybe they didn’t. Everything at trial is open to interpretation, so here’s my interpretation: they were grossly incompetent, they were lying, or, something more sinister than lying, they destroyed records,
and
covered it up.

Despite all of Kronk’s crazy stories and his inconsistencies, and his love of duct tape, the police never thoroughly investigated him. To my knowledge, they never pulled his phone records to see if he had any contact with the Anthonys. He could have known Casey, or George, or Cindy. But they didn’t do that.

They could have confiscated his computer. Who knows, maybe it might have led to maps he had of the woods, or maybe he had shopped for something incriminating. Or there might have been things he had researched or searched for on his computer. But they didn’t do that, either.

They could have taken his DNA when it was discovered later that there was foreign DNA on the duct tape. But they didn’t do that.

They didn’t take his hair samples, which would have come in play when later on an unidentified male hair was found near Caylee’s skull. But they didn’t do that. Nor did they take his fingerprints.

One can only speculate why they didn’t do any of this. Perhaps, if they had done any of this and found Kronk to be involved, it would have ruined their case. Kronk muddied the waters something awful, yet the police left him alone. They didn’t open any unmarked doors. Was it because they were afraid of what they might find?

The police didn’t interview Kronk’s ex-wives. We did that.

I don’t chalk that up to incompetence. No, to me it looked like a deliberate effort to keep the truth at bay, or hide it.

What’s even more shocking: the prosecution never called Kronk to the witness stand during the trial.
We
had to call him.

You would think the first witness—if not the key witness—for the prosecution would be the guy who found the body. The prosecutors never called him, because they knew we’d destroy him on cross-examination. We called him and interrogated him using direct examination, which isn’t nearly as powerful a tool.

Another thing that shocked me was that it wasn’t until the prosecution’s closing argument that Jeff Ashton finally admitted that the prosecution didn’t believe Kronk.

Unfortunately, it came after I had closed my case and sat down. If I had had the opportunity, I would have stood and said, “When you’re asking for the death penalty, it takes a lot of nerve to show the jury a crime scene and evidence from that crime scene when the person who gave it to you is, in your own opinion, dishonest.”

To me, the prosecutors are supposed to be ministers of the truth and justice. I won’t say it was prosecutorial misconduct, but it was certainly deliberate on their part not to call him. I’m sure their response would be, “We didn’t call him because we didn’t believe him, but we don’t believe the scene was staged or anything like that, so we presented everything in good faith.”

I have a different point of view. To me, what they did was scandalous.

CHAPTER 13

THE ANTHONY FAMILY SECRETS

O
N JANUARY 22, 2009, I started getting a series of text messages from George Anthony. The texts were saying in effect, “I’m sorry. Please tell Casey I love her.” These were obvious, “I’m checking out” kinds of messages. Clearly George was intending to kill himself. Frantically, I called his cell phone several times, but kept getting his voice mail.

He then left me a voice message. He didn’t admit anything, but he wanted me to apologize to Casey for him.

I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me.

Apologize for what?
I wondered.

I kept calling him and calling him to no avail. Later that day I got a call from Cindy that George had driven to Daytona Beach, Florida, rented a room at the Hawaii Motel, and swallowed enough pills to kill himself. An alarmed Brad Conway, the Anthonys’ third lawyer, called Sergeant John Allen, and through George’s cell phone pings, the police found him in his motel room. He was taken into custody under the Baker Act, and the rescue squad rushed him to the Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach. He was held there for a couple of days before being evaluated and released.

I wondered,
Why did George Anthony try to kill himself?

There was always something hard to understand about George’s behavior. Nine days after Caylee’s disappearance, George called the police. Not to report Caylee missing. Rather, he called to report the theft of gas cans from his garage. George knew that Casey also used these cans, so their disappearance wasn’t exactly a major mystery. So why did he report them missing? George had once been a cop and knew reporting stolen gas cans to the police wouldn’t amount to anything. There was no Gas Can Task Force to solve that crime. He knew all that would happen was that police would come, take a report, and that would be the end of it. No detective would be assigned to the case. I would later ask the jury, “Who in the world would report twenty-year-old gas cans missing?” And if you like coincidences, the officer who responded to the call was none other than Deputy Richard Cain.

George’s suicide attempt was very upsetting. I had loved George. I had thought him to be a phenomenal guy. I even bought him a birthday card and wrote some really kind things about how much I respected him as a father and as a man. And I don’t usually buy anyone a birthday card. It’s just not me.

But I never gave it to him. Something held me back—maybe it was the day I had mentioned sexual abuse in the living room and the place went silent. Or maybe it was the business with the gas cans. Or possibly it was because of my staff’s research on George, which had started to reveal some character issues.

George had grown up in Warren, Ohio; when he was a young adult, he joined the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy. He was an officer for approximately ten years, working mainly in auto theft, narcotics, and homicide. Then suddenly, he resigned.

Cindy said the reason was that after Lee was born, she persuaded him to quit because the job was too dangerous. But I had also heard from one of the Anthonys that he quit because he was involved in a car accident in which two people were killed. My investigator, Mort Smith, interviewed a survivor in the crash, and apparently George was responding to a call when he went through a red light and crashed into another vehicle. Two passengers in the other car died.

I’ve never heard of a cop simply quitting after ten years, especially to become a car salesman. We wanted to find out if perhaps he had been fired, but unfortunately the building that housed the records had burned down, and all the records were destroyed. The police chief had gone to the academy with George and was a friend, so we got nowhere talking to him.

George was married to another woman before he was married to Cindy. We interviewed her. She told Smith that George was nothing short of a pathological liar. She said, “George couldn’t tell the truth to save his life.” She said he was a compulsive liar. I had only heard those words used to describe one other person—Casey.

After leaving the department, George went to work for his father in the car sales business, which apparently didn’t go too well. George was married to Cindy by this time, and Cindy’s brother, Rick Plesea, said that George got into a huge argument with his father and threw him through a plate-glass window. After that George took out a second mortgage on their home and went into car sales on his own. He opened Anthony Auto Sales, but the business went under, and George and Cindy lost their home. In 1989, when Casey was three, they relocated to Orlando, where Cindy’s parents had moved. From then on George bounced around from job to job.