Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (28 page)

“George was collecting unemployment and worker’s comp,” she said. “George could have worked. He didn’t work because he didn’t want to work.”

George had worked in distribution and as a security guard for the
Orlando Sentinel.
He had also worked as a fumigator, and then he worked in security as a guard. That’s what he was doing when we met him. He was working the 3:00
P.M.
to 11:00
P.M.
shift.

George, Cindy, and Casey arrived at the home of Cindy’s brother, Rick, the day before his wedding. Rick was surprised to see Casey was obviously pregnant. In his sworn statement, he told police, “She had a tight-fitting top on and her stomach was protruding. Her belly button was sticking out at least a half inch.”

Rick invited them all in. He hadn’t seen the Anthonys in a long time, and he said to George and Cindy, “What’s up with Casey? You got something to tell me? What’s going on here?”

According to Rick, their response was, “What?”

“She’s expecting?” he asked.

“They looked at me like I was crazy,” Rick said.

Rick looked over at his wife, who rolled her eyes at their answer.

“Cindy,” her brother said, “She looks like she’s pregnant. Come on.”

“Oh no,” said Cindy, “she’s not. She’s just putting on weight.”

“Cindy,” said her brother. “I’ve seen a lot of pregnant girls. I’m not an expert, but man, she looks pregnant.”

Everyone on his wife’s side of the family wanted to know, “Who’s the pregnant girl?”

Rick said he told Cindy that his mom and dad also thought she was pregnant.

Commented Rick, “Cindy’s a nurse for crying out loud. She can’t see it?” So he said to Cindy, “You’re kidding me. Now tell me, is Casey pregnant?”

And Cindy, either in denial herself or lying, said to him, “Casey told us that she’d have to have sex first in order to have a baby and that she did not have sex with anyone.”

Thought Rick,
If that’s not a baby, it’s a tumor, and she only has a short time to live because it’s big
. It was June, and she was more than seven months pregnant.

In an email to Cindy, Rick wrote, “You guys will go down in history as the stupidest parents in the universe.”

Someone was keeping secrets. I knew I was on to something.

Every time I would see Casey in jail, she would be happier than a pig in shit. She was almost ecstatic to be there, and for a long time I couldn’t understand why. When you go see a client in jail, they may be happy to see you, but inevitably the client is angry to be in there. But unlike all my other clients, Casey was happy in jail because she had structure and she was safe. A couple times she even said to me, “I feel safer in here than I do out there,” and I thought to myself,
That’s a weird thing to say.
She even said it to her parents during one of their early visitations. I also picked up on it when she told Detective Yuri Melich the first night the police were called that she had gone to her boyfriend’s house because she felt “safe.” At the time I asked myself,
What does that mean?

The prosecution made a big deal of the fact that there were searches on her computer for chloroform and neck breaking, but they were among a slew of searches on topics like self-defense for women and how to use household items as weapons for self-defense. These searches were indicating someone who didn’t feel safe at home. The neck breaking search had to do with the art of kung fu, used for self-defense.

I was asking myself,
These searches indicate someone who doesn’t feel safe at home. Why is she so afraid of being home? Why does she feel safe somewhere else? Why does she feel safe in jail? Why is she making these searches?

Another interesting thing I learned: once Caylee was born, both Lee and George moved out of the house.

Lee moved out, I was told, because one more person in the house was too much for him. That was also around the time George and Cindy separated. I would later hear that George left at the insistence of Casey. Eventually George worked his way back home, but that was one more event I found suspicious.
Why was the man being kicked out of his own home? Why were Lee and George moving out?

T
HE MYSTERIES WERE PILING UP
. Why did George attempt suicide? Why was he apologizing to Casey? Why did he report the gas cans missing? How did he know to bring a gas can to pick up Casey’s car at Johnson’s Wrecker Service? Why did Casey feel unsafe at home and safer in jail? Why did Casey leave every day for two years to an imaginary workplace, taking Caylee to an imaginary nanny? Why did Lee and George leave when Caylee was born? Why was the family in denial about Casey’s pregnancy?

Eventually, the answers began to come together.

We received some shocking information from Jesse Grund, one of Casey’s former boyfriends. Jesse was Casey’s fiancé at the time Caylee was born. He was around the Anthony family a lot and noticed that after Caylee was born, Casey was careful never to leave Caylee alone with Lee.

Jesse asked her point-blank what the deal was with Lee.

Casey told Jesse that when she was a teenager, Lee would touch her inappropriately. She said she didn’t want him doing that to Caylee. We began to wonder if Lee was actually Caylee’s father.

Casey’s critics in the public and in the media have said she made up these charges to get herself acquitted of murder charges, but nothing could be further from the truth. This was no recent fabrication. The conversation with Jesse took place
two-and-a-half years before
Casey was charged with murder. These allegations were made
long before
anything ever happened to Caylee. Casey had also told her most recent boyfriend, Tony Lazzaro, about Lee fondling her as a teen.

There was further testimonial evidence of the sexual abuse. Casey had befriended one of the inmates at the Orange County Jail, and the two had exchanged letters. In one of those letters, Casey had stated that Lee had abused her and that she was starting to feel her father had abused her too. The inmate had kept the letters and given them to prosecutors in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence for herself. We were able to read the letters through discovery.

I became even more suspicious because when the FBI asked Lee about the incest with his sister, the FBI said his response was, “We’ll talk about it when the time is right.” (Why the FBI accepted this answer without following up, I don’t understand.) If true, I could not believe this response. It was a tacit admission in my opinion. I don’t know a brother in the world who would give an answer like that unless the charge was true, and that’s why I started my discussion about Lee with Casey. I had learned that Casey had told Jesse about Lee abusing her. I figured if she could tell Jesse, maybe she’d feel comfortable enough to tell me about it. I figured it may have been too soon to ask her about her father, but perhaps she’d tell me about Lee.

“Casey,” I said, “I understand Lee sexually abused you.”

Hesitantly, she began to talk about it, saying that Lee had fondled her, touched her, felt her up.

But Casey had stayed away from home for thirty days because she feared someone at home, and Lee didn’t live at home. There had to be more to it. I didn’t think the abuser was Cindy. I had seen her in interactions with Cindy, and I didn’t feel that Casey feared Cindy.

“Where do you think Lee learned it from?” I asked her.

“Well, what do you think?” she said sharply.

I said to her, “Tell me about the first time your father touched you.”

She slouched in her chair.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Casey said. She was embarrassed. What girl was ever comfortable talking about having sex with her father?

“Listen, all of our experiences in life make us who we are today,” I said. “I am who I am because of my past mistakes, my past life, the way people treated me,” and I told her about some of the things that happened to me, including my long quest to become a lawyer.

“I’m a persistent person,” I said, “and I’m the type of person who doesn’t give up, because that’s what life taught me. And I can tell you’re the same, that you’re a fighter.”

“You have to confront your demons. You have to confront what’s there.”

“He touched me,” Casey began, “and then it went a little bit further than touching.”

That was the first conversation. A little bit came out at a time. Slowly she would tell me more and more, how it first started with inappropriate touching when she was eight years old, then he made her touch his penis, and then he made her jerk him off. She said he even named his penis “Baldy” and used to tell her to play a game called “pet the bald-headed mouse.”

“Pet it until it sneezes milk,” he would say to his eight-year-old daughter.

When she was eight, Casey said, her father started having intercourse with her, three and four times a week, until she was twelve. I assume he stopped the habitual abuse at that age because she had gotten her period, and he was afraid of getting her pregnant.

I began to loathe George, but I couldn’t let my emotions get the better of me. I didn’t want to push Casey too much or ask her too much, as I wanted the mental health professionals to get an unfiltered version. I knew all I needed to know. From that day on, the entire defense team called George “Baldy,” a constant reminder of the child molester and rapist we
believed
him to be.

During the summer of 2009, the defense team had a retreat off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and to the amazement of all, our computer expert found the pictures taken on the day Caylee was born. Casey delivered Caylee by natural childbirth at the hospital, and standing right there on the receiving end, as the baby was coming out, was none other than her father, George. We all thought it was disgusting. I have a daughter who’s an adult and I would never consider putting her in that situation. Tell me, how many women have their fathers attend the birth of their children?

Now we wondered,
was George Anthony Caylee’s father?
Casey had said that Caylee’s father had been a man by the name of Eric Baker, but I never believed that. Her story was that Baker, whom she said was married and had a son, came over for a one-night stand, got her pregnant, and then went back with his wife. She said he and Casey agreed he would not be part of Caylee’s life. Then conveniently, Baker tragically died in an automobile accident.

The cops verified that a kid named Eric Baker did die in a car accident, but no one who knew Casey knew who he was. No Eric Baker had been part of Casey’s life that anyone could recall, so I never bought that story. If I couldn’t verify the story, I didn’t believe her. I was convinced that Baker, like Zanny the nanny, was another of Casey’s many imaginary friends.

As we looked at the birth pictures, we could see that everyone was happy and smiling about the new addition to the Anthony family—everyone but George, that is. That’s when Smith, our investigator, quipped, “Look at George. He’s pissed off. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Goddammit, I’m my own son-in-law and I don’t even like him.’”

We all laughed, even though it wasn’t at all funny.

C
ASEY’S ALLEGATION
of sexual abuse at the hands of her father wasn’t out of the blue. It actually explained a great deal. It was the reason Casey left the house every day for two years, letting her parents think she was working at Universal Studios when in fact she was unemployed. She didn’t want to leave Caylee alone with George. She said she feared that George would molest her daughter, as he had molested her. Recall that at this time George was working the 3:00
P.M.
to 11:00
P.M.
shift.

It explained why the family was in denial about Casey’s pregnancy. It explained why George and Lee left the home after Caylee’s birth.

After Caylee was found, law enforcement took DNA samples from the entire Anthony family, but they delayed giving us the results. We had to file a motion to get them, and Judge Stan Strickland gave the prosecutors twenty days to comply. It was right around the twentieth day that George made his suicide attempt. I thought,
he must have tried to commit suicide because he feared the test would prove that he’s Caylee’s father
.