Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (34 page)

I knew that when the time came, I’d be able to fight Ashton toe-to-toe on the issue of DNA. I also hired Richard’s wife, Selma, who was a knowledgeable fireball of a woman.

I was out of money, so I asked the Eiklenbooms if they would come work on the case pro bono, which they did. They provided me with insight and so much knowledge. Richard and Selma showed me the example of a burned body that had been thrown in the water and how they were still able to find DNA. He showed me the case of a person who had died twenty-five years before, but from whom they were still able to recover DNA on a pair of underwear from touch, not blood or semen.

He talked to me about the duct tape, and what it meant that there was no evidence of DNA on it.

His conclusion was that the duct tape was
never
wrapped around Caylee’s face.

The photographs of Caylee’s skull and the tape nearby backed up his conclusion. I found numerous photographs that showed the duct tape in a completely different position from ones in other photographs.

I knew that if I presented this photographic evidence at the trial, it would be tricky, because I would have to show the jury photos of Caylee’s skull, and it was going to require a delicate type of examination to be effective. But the evidence was too important not to put before the jury.

In addition I also had the evidence that Dr. Werner Spitz pointed out at our autopsy of Caylee’s remains, in which we found scientific proof that the skull had been moved from its original location. In other words, she didn’t decompose the way she was found. The decomposition residue inside her skull proved she had been lying on her side.

The fact that I kept reading the 26,000 pages of discovery over and over again allowed me to find a needle in the haystack. I found an FBI email that gave us some disturbing news. The email said:

UNLCASSIFIED
NON-RECORD

Hello.

Nick Savage called in and they have been getting requests for info about the tape from skull. The prosecutor would like to know if any of you had taken pistures (w/scale) of the tape as it was received to show the full length and width of tape pieces before they were separated. They are esp interested in the width info.

They want to know if it would be possible for the tape as it was to cover both the mouth and nose areas - they would need the measurements/photos w/scale in order to do some computerized re-creation images of the skull w/tape. The ME’s office only took initial photos of tape on skull w/o scale and they didn’t measure it because they thought the full measurements would be done by us.

By “scale,” they meant ruler measurements.

The reason they wanted such pictures was to show that the tape was wide enough to cover both Caylee’s nose and mouth and to suffocate her. What this email shows is that the prosecutor (most likely Ashton) is forming his theory of death by duct tape.

There are two problems with this cause of death: first, this isn’t coming from the medical examiner’s office—it’s coming from the prosecution. A prosecutor does not get to make up a cause of death based on what he or she
thinks
may have happened.

Second, this email was dated February 6, 2009,
before
the prosecution changed its position and decided to seek the death penalty. I would argue that the prosecution was also locked into using it in deciding whether to take another human being’s life. It was disgusting and reprehensible.

After the trial I heard Ashton make the claim that it wasn’t his decision to seek the death penalty, and that he never felt there was a likelihood that Casey would get it. He claimed it was the decision of his boss, Lawson Lamar. Ashton was trying to give the impression that he didn’t support seeking the death penalty against Casey. I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. We tried multiple times to get the death penalty taken off the table, and the biggest opposition always came from Ashton, who was the “death penalty lawyer” on the prosecution team.

The prosecution hired Dr. Michael Warren, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Florida, to get on the stand and show a video superimposition of a photograph of a smiling Casey and Caylee that would morph into a vision of a piece of duct tape covering Caylee’s nose and mouth with her little skull in the background.

The medical examiner’s pictures lacked scale, so they invented evidence. It was disgusting. Judge Belvin Perry admitted it over our objections, even though it was ridiculously prejudicial and served only one purpose: to try to inflame the jury, to get the jurors angry so they could render their verdict with their emotions, not their brains. It’s an age-old prosecution technique, an attempt to get the jury to hate the defendant, ensuring that a conviction will follow—the evidence be damned.

Throw in Kronk’s crazy testimony, and the prosecution had a complete and total mess. Death by duct tape? Only in the mind of Ashton. But, the theory played well to the media which was always hungry for a “let Casey Anthony die” angle.

Once we went to trial, my method of attack had one focus. I was going to show the jury that only one reasonable conclusion could be reached about the duct tape found near Caylee’s remains. Using the photos and evidence at the crime scene, I would show it was a staged crime scene.

There were two other pieces of duct tape evidence. There was an identical piece of duct tape on one of George’s gas cans. Another piece of the identical duct tape had been used to put up a poster at the command center manned by George. The evidence showed that this was George’s duct tape, not Casey’s.

By this time our defense was beginning to take shape, and we didn’t just have Casey’s word; we now had solid forensic science backing up her story.

CHAPTER 16

THE PROSECUTION’S EVIDENCE WAS GARBAGE

N
UMEROUS TIMES I heard this case being referred to as a circumstantial case, but I never thought of it that way. I always looked at it as a forensic case rather than a factual one. The reason is the only real, factual witnesses who were relevant were George and Cindy. Even Lee wasn’t particularly relevant to exactly what happened to Caylee.

All the other evidence in the case came down to science.

Science was the key factor in determining Casey’s guilt or innocence—it always has been and always will be.

To better understand the prosecution’s case in terms of the forensics, the best and clearest way is for me to break it down into two strands. The first strand has to do with the information the police investigators gleaned from going over Casey’s car after it came back from the tow yard.

The second strand comes from the recovery site of Caylee’s body off Suburban Drive. (I’ll present that evidence in the next chapter.) But first, let’s talk about Casey’s car, and why what was in the trunk was so crucial to the prosecution.

The prosecution based its entire case on a theory that after Casey killed Caylee, she dumped her into the trunk of her car for a couple of days and drove her to the woods where she disposed of her body.

Shortly after Casey was arrested, Deputy Charity Beasley went and picked up her car. She secured it with evidence tape, made sure everything was sealed, and followed the tow truck to the forensics bay.

With the car in hand, the prosecution had to somehow prove there had been a body in the trunk and that it was Caylee’s. Since it was Casey’s car, the link was obvious. But knowing what I know now, it’s interesting to see the lengths to which the prosecution had to go to make its case.

The areas the prosecution dealt with to try to prove its case that there was a body in the trunk had to do with cadaver dogs, a stain, hairs, and the air in the trunk of Casey’s car.

Their first line of “evidence” came from the dogs, who, the prosecution contended, alerted to the trunk of the Casey’s car and in the backyard of the Anthony home.

Deputy Jason Forgey arrived with his dog, Gerus, who supposedly alerted to human decomposition in both the trunk and the backyard. Later that day, Forgey went to the Anthony home and deployed Gerus, who again alerted in the backyard. He then called in another cadaver dog by the name of Bones. Bones went to the backyard and alerted as well.

The next day the crime scene investigators returned with their two cadaver dogs and found—
nothing.
This time neither dog alerted. How do we account for this? What’s the explanation? How can a dog find evidence of decomposition one day and nothing the next?

There are several reasons, all having to do with the nature of cadaver dogs.

The first reason is that a cadaver dog can be inconsistent. Cindy told me that, according to a police officer at her home, the reason the police brought Bones in was because Gerus was not being consistent in his alerts.

Here’s another example of just how unreliable these dogs can be: after Caylee’s remains were found and most of her remains had been recovered, there were still a few bones missing, so the police recruited Forgey and Gerus to help find them. Gerus was deployed to the woods off Suburban Drive, where there was a
100 percent certainty
that a dead body had been.

After sniffing around, Gerus did not alert in the area.

The second reason cadaver dogs can be inconsistent has everything to do with their training. Studies have shown that there’s a tremendous amount of unreliability when it comes to dog handlers, because often they cue their dogs. I did extensive research on cadaver dogs and the kind of training they receive, and I learned that cadaver dogs are most reliable when using double-blind testing.

How does double-blind testing work?

Dogs are very smart and can read their handler’s body language, so it’s crucial when deploying a dog to a vehicle for the dog to have to choose among
several
cars, not just the target car. Thus, it’s important that
the handler
not know which car belongs to the suspect.

The police didn’t do this when they inspected Casey’s car. In this case Gerus was only given one car—Casey’s car—to explore, and he alerted. Forgey testilied there were two cars for his dog to sniff when he deployed Gerus on Casey’s car. However, every other witness said there was only one car for Gerus to sniff—Casey’s.

The second piece of evidence had to do with evidence concerning a stain found in the trunk. Crime scene investigator Gerardo Bloise processed the trunk by spraying it with Bluestar Forensic, which is very similar to luminol. It can identify human stains not noticeable to the naked eye using an instrument called an alternating light source (ALS). It works like a black light, so that if you wipe away a bloodstain, the ALS will reveal it anyway. The police got a slight reaction in the trunk, but eventually the stain they found was determined not to be human.

The third piece of evidence had to do with hairs in the trunk—actually
one hair
that belonged to Caylee.

When the crime scene investigators were about to start processing the car, they advised the media that if they parked across the street behind the gate, they could film them inspecting Casey’s car. This was at night, and they opened the garage doors so the film crews could get them on camera working. They did this strictly for publicity, and you could argue they also did it to intimidate us. Or both.

While they were processing the trunk, they found some hairs. It’s not uncommon to find hairs in the trunk of a car, not only the car owner’s but others. Our bodies shed more than a hundred hairs a day. They found Caylee’s hair, Casey’s hair, and dog or cat hair. They took a mini vacuum and swept up the rest of the evidence for later inspection.

Early on, the prosecution sent the hairs it had found to the FBI lab at Quantico, Virginia. The FBI lab would find
one lone hair
of Caylee’s that had a darkening band around the root end of the hair.

Around this one hair, the prosecution decided to build its case against Casey.

I needed an expert on post-mortem root banding and reached out to the man who basically discovered it, Nicholas Petraco. He wrote the first peer-reviewed article on it about twenty years ago. It was important to bring him in because this was going to be a key issue.

Many times after someone dies, scientists will find a dark band around the root of the hair. They call this the “death band” or “the dead man’s ring,” but the scientific term is post-mortem root banding.