Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (31 page)

“You really should consider quitting,” he said to me. “You don’t need this aggravation either. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

So Dr. Lee never testified to the rips in the shorts. But it was clear that Caylee’s body was found wearing shorts she had stopped wearing long ago, which confirms Casey’s version of events.

T
HE HARDER AND MORE IMPORTANT
question was:
why didn’t Casey call the police after she saw that Caylee had drowned?

One reason certainly was the guilt Casey felt that she hadn’t been able to protect her child. She had been up most of the night before texting and talking to Tony, knowing she had to watch Caylee in the morning. She had also been on the computer early in the morning, just before seven, figuring Caylee would be okay with George for a little while, and when it turned out she was wrong about that, the guilt ate her up.

And then there was George telling her that she was going to go to jail for child neglect. People get arrested all the time for not watching their children who get injured or die. Casey must have felt scared about the possibility of going to jail for Caylee’s death.

Here’s another important question:
Was there negligence in Caylee’s death?
There’s some probability that there was. The real question is,
Who was neglectful? Was it Casey or was it George?
Given the circumstances and the timing, you have to take a strong look at the concrete evidence we had.

George said he was having breakfast with Caylee around 7:30
A.M.
There were no safety locks on the doors for this child, and Caylee had the ability to open the sliding door to the pool. (We have a photo of her doing so.) She also loved to swim and would sometimes wake George up in the morning and say, “Jo Jo, swim. Jo Jo, swim.”

While George was with Caylee, Casey was on the other side of the house in Lee’s old room, working on the computer. In looking at the computer records, someone was on the computer that morning from 6:52
A.M.
to 7:52
A.M.
, with visits to Yahoo!, AOL Music, Facebook, and Myspace. Forensic computer experts will always tell you the most difficult thing to do is put a face behind a computer. But you can speculate, based on the type of searches made, creating a profile. The searches that morning fit the profile of Casey, who could spend hours on Facebook and Myspace. The records show that from 9:00
A.M.
continuously until 10:59
P.M.
she was on Facebook and Myspace. She was researching outfits worn by shot girls in clubs, going to Victoria’s Secret, Frederick’s of Hollywood, and other sites featuring sexy outfits, shot girl outfits, and Tila Tequila. Tony was a promoter for Fusion nightclub, and Casey was helping him out by managing his shot girls. The shot girls are pretty girls who walk around the club selling shots. What she appears to be doing here is legwork for Tony in trying to find the cutest outfits for the girls to wear on the nights he was a promoter.

These were not the searches of someone out to kill her daughter.

If Casey was on the computer, who was negligent when Caylee wandered toward and into the pool?

George himself gives us the answer.

According to the computer records, at 1:50
P.M.
someone got on the computer and signed into AOL Instant Messenger. George had an AOL Instant Messenger account. Casey didn’t. George’s user name was george4937. Right after someone logged in to instant messenger, the first search was to Google. Then someone typed in “foolproof suffocation.” It was misspelled, and George was a poor speller. Google automatically corrected the spelling, and the first link that was clicked was “venturing into the pro-suicide pit.” It appeared that someone was thinking about killing himself.

“Venturing into the pro-suicide pit” is a blog discussing websites that talk about suicide. Shortly thereafter, the person at the computer went to a page that said “heat can melt disposable breathing circuits.” And then a little later, someone visited a link that appears to be a gardening website (George was an inveterate gardener): ten ways to kill a rhododendron.

I suppose you could argue these searches were made by Casey, but AOL Instant Messenger had been used on the computer, and this occurred more than an hour after George said she had left the house with Caylee. It wasn’t Cindy. She had left the house and Lee didn’t live there anymore.

There’s further concrete proof that George was on the computer, not Casey. We checked Casey’s phone records, and at the time these suicide-related searches were being made, Casey was on the phone talking with Amy Huizenga. When we interviewed Amy, she couldn’t recall anything special about the conversation. Would Casey have these morbid thoughts about killing herself at the same time she was talking on her phone with her friend? It didn’t make any sense. Casey’s cell tower records also support her claims that she was at home. The records show her in the vicinity of the home until 4:18
P.M.
, when she left for Tony’s house. While it was never conclusive evidence, it does support her statements and contradicts George’s testimony. Because they knew it hurt their theory, it’s no wonder that the prosecutors didn’t admit the cell tower evidence during the trial.

Again, not exactly a search for the truth.

It appears suicide had long been on George’s mind, so much so that he tried it on January 22, 2009.

So who was negligent in Caylee’s drowning? By looking at the websites being researched, all concerned with suicide and death, it certainly appears that the one who felt the blame was a guilt-ridden George Anthony.

When it came to evidence concerning George and Casey’s computer use on June 16, the police really pulled a fast one. You would think if you were investigating the Anthony computer—very important evidence—that you’d look into and list the computer searches on the day Caylee died. But the police didn’t do that, as my computer expert, Larry Daniel, discovered.

Sandra Cawn, who did the computer investigation for the police, reported that she had conducted a search of the computer on June 16 and 17, 2008, and in her report she showed that there was NO COMPUTER ACTIVITY between the hours one and seven
A.M.
, and then she said “for the nine o’clock, noon hour, and between three and eleven on the 17th of June, there was NO COMPUTER ACTIVITY.”

She gave zero evidence as to what the computer activity was. And for a while I couldn’t comprehend what she had done. But by telling the public what time Casey wasn’t on the computer that day, she was hiding the truth: she (or someone connected with the police) had deleted the computer evidence that would have shown that George’s story was a lie and that Casey was telling the truth.

George said Casey left at 12:50. And yet someone was on the computer over an hour after that time. It had to have been George on the computer because he said Casey was gone, and he was the only one out there trying to kill himself. But Cawn’s report says nothing about his computer use.

If you look at the discovery you will find that the Anthony computer was in use practically non-stop on the days prior to June 16. If you search June 16, there is only one entry. Where are the other entries?

There was nothing there. It was gone. It mysteriously disappeared. When I looked at this I was stunned.

If you go to the cookies, there is not one cookie listed for June 16th. Here was the supposed “unfiltered version” of what was on that computer, filtered by the police.

When I came across this information, I wanted to find out whether the prosecutors were aware of this. It was possible that the police did this on their own and kept it to themselves.

To find out, I initially put Larry Daniels on my witness list. I planned on him testifying to the omissions and ramming this down the state’s throat at the trial.

I also hired another confidential computer expert, Josh Restivo from St. Louis, and he verified the same thing that Daniels had found.

C
ASEY’S REVELATIONS
about what really happened on June 16 were, for me, a major breakthrough in the case. It was what I had been waiting for all along—the truth, not some story about people who didn’t exist. But I immediately realized a
major
problem. Her testimony was almost useless. I say this because Casey had lied so many times and for so long that I knew no one would believe her. She was the girl who told lies. I realized very quickly that if we were going to use this information as a defense, we were going to have to find evidence to corroborate what she was saying. But how do you prove a secret? I knew it would be difficult, if not impossible.

I decided it was time to reread all of the discovery and do another walk-through of the evidence, but this time my goal was to try to disprove what Casey had told me. While her story made perfect sense, I wasn’t so quick to jump on board, especially given her prior proclivity for lying. I was going to be her harshest critic, because I knew if I couldn’t buy it, I couldn’t sell it to the jury.

I then reviewed all of the evidence in the case, including phone and computer records, an effort which took weeks. I made a column for and against her story and the more I reviewed the evidence, the more the column in her favor began to stack up. I’m a visual person and knew with so many facts in this case, it was exactly what I would do to sway the jury.

It began with the pool ladder. Casey told me it had been up. I checked it out.

On June 16, 2008, the day Caylee died, Cindy said she came home from work and found the pool ladder up against the pool. This alone caused Cindy to be alarmed; when she went to work the next day, she told her coworkers about the ladder being up.

“Somebody has been swimming in my pool,” she told them.

“That’s what pools are for,” replied Cindy’s coworker Debbie Bennett.

“No, you don’t understand,” said Cindy. “The pool ladder was left up, and the gate was open, and we
never
leave the ladder up. It must be kids in the neighborhood.”

We later found out that Cindy and Caylee went swimming the night before, and while Cindy never admitted it, she may have been the one who left the ladder up when they got out of the pool that night. I found this conversation with her coworkers to be odd. Why would they even have this conversation? For a long time I suspected that Cindy might have known all along that Caylee was dead. But Casey never told me that was the case, and I had no other evidence to support that.

The mystery I couldn’t solve was what would George do with Caylee’s body if he found her wet and limp in the pool? I reread all of George’s statements to the police and found a bombshell on July 24, 2008. Without his realizing it, George made a very damning statement to the detectives about his involvement.

George had met with law enforcement and told them about the smell in Casey’s car and in doing so he said the following: “I know that as a fact. I’ve been around that. I mean the law enforcement stuff that I did, we caught people out
in the woods, in a house, and in a car.
So I know what it smells like. It’s a smell that you never forget.”

There were three places where we knew Caylee had been dead. The first was the
house
where she died. The second was a
car
in which she was transported, and the third was in the
woods
. This was six months
before
Caylee was found in the woods.

George didn’t say, “I smelled bodies in a Dumpster, in an alley, and in a morgue.” His statement only mentioned the places where her body had actually been.

What I found shocking was that he made this statement long before Caylee was found in the woods. I know this is subjective, but I didn’t think it a coincidence and I was going to question him severely about this at trial. I couldn’t wait to ask him, “How did you know she would be found in the woods?”

If that statement doesn’t impress you with being damning evidence, consider this: what if Casey had made it? I guarantee you the prosecution would have trumpeted that statement to the media as being her tacit confession.