Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (5 page)

You might wonder why the cops arrested her so quickly. According to Melich, the reason they did so was what occurred in the Melinda Duckett case. Duckett was a young woman from Lake County, Florida, who had a missing child. After going on the
Nancy Grace
show, where Nancy Grace attacked her repeatedly, Duckett came home and took her own life. She shot herself in her grandparents’ home on September 8, 2006. Melich said they didn’t want a repeat of what happened to Duckett. But this case was different. Casey had shown no signs of depression. What was their hurry?

I have always believed that at this crucial moment in the investigation, the police made a horrible decision. They should have stopped and realized,
Wait a minute, we’re not dealing with someone who’s playing with a full deck here
. How much more evidence did the police need to see that this girl was taking them on a wild goose chase? Rather than thinking,
This is a guilty person who’s a horrible liar
, why didn’t they consider,
This is a person who has built some kind of fantasy world, someone who lives within a mythical reality
?

I just can’t fathom that after going down to Universal and watching her make up names of coworkers and a fictitious office, saying she worked there when she didn’t, why the cops wouldn’t say,
Wait a minute. Maybe we should have a psychologist come in and talk to her and see what we’re dealing with here.

That moment at Universal Studios was the time and place to confront this girl in a different manner. It was the time to bring in a mental health professional and say,
We’re dealing with something beyond our comprehension
. Instead, they went old school with a good cop/bad cop routine and mounted an accusatory interrogation.

They slapped the cuffs on her. They thought they were going to pull the truth out of her and that after a night in jail she’d break down and tell them everything. If they had just let her remain free, they could have bugged her phones, watched her movements, followed her, and perhaps would have gotten a better idea of the extent of her involvement in Caylee’s disappearance. But within twenty-four hours they arrested her and made her a suspect. She immediately got herself a lawyer (yours truly), which meant they had no more access to her. I’d have to say that was a really stupid move on their part.

The police took Casey to the Orange County jail, and the next morning she had what is called a first appearance. The judge read the police report. He told her, “You’re not cooperating. We need to know where Caylee is.”

Casey said nothing, and despite being held for child neglect and lying—minor crimes—the judge held her without bond, which was odd. Casey had a public defender at this point (she hadn’t yet hired me), so I can’t answer why this wasn’t fought more vociferously.

Several hours later I came to see her, and my life would never be the same.

CHAPTER 2

THE PHONE RINGS

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2008, our little firm was growing. We were really rocking and rolling. I had moved my practice from Orlando to Kissimmee, Florida, which is a suburb of Orlando. It had almost tripled in revenue because I had built a strong practice specifically catering to the Hispanic market.

There are three units in the building where my office is: two small units on the side and a larger unit in the middle. At the time I met Casey we had just finished moving from one of the smaller units to the big one. An appraisal firm, our neighbor, moved into my smaller office, and I moved into its bigger one.

I had put in close to $30,000 in renovations. We hired an interior designer and installed hardwood floors because we really wanted to show that we were a boutique law firm on the rise. One hundred percent of my business was based on referrals. We did not advertise. The only way to build a strong referral-based practice is by delivering results. And that is how the phone rings.

Later, when the media described my office as being in a “strip mall,” it upset me, because we had put so much work into our office, and the entire firm was so proud of it. It was one of the first attempts to paint me as a small-time lawyer with no prospects, even though my cases were taking on greater importance.

The last case I tried before Casey’s, the Nilton Diaz trial, had been an ordeal. Diaz was accused of murdering his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter.

I strongly believed that Diaz was innocent. It was a pediatric head-injury case in which our defense contended that the mother was the one who struck the child, and after she hit her, the child went through a lucid interval, a common occurrence in such head-injury cases. While the mother ran out to the store, leaving the child in Diaz’s care, the child had a seizure. Diaz immediately took the child to get help, but she died anyway. The police arrested him and charged him with child abuse and first-degree felony murder.

Our defense was excellent. We answered every question we thought the jury would have and raised a significant amount of doubt. But what I didn’t understand yet was that in child death cases, juries want someone to pay. I really believe the jury thought Diaz was innocent, but it felt someone had to be held responsible so it came back with a compromise verdict. The jury found him guilty of child abuse and manslaughter and sentenced him to fifteen years.

I was devastated. It had been a long trial, and I had dedicated a significant amount of my personal time to it. I needed to do something where I could relax a little bit and find an activity I could do outside my office. I was living in Florida and figured that boating would be relaxing, so I joined a boat club. Members got to rent boats at reasonable rates. I was sure this would be a wonderful activity for my wife, Lorena, and me to do together.

As part of the process of becoming a member, I went out with one of the owners to learn the workings of the boats. He and I were talking, and I told him I was a criminal defense lawyer, and after a day of training he said, “Jose, we’re trying to get the word out about the club. We’re having a local newspaper do an article on it. Do you mind if they call you and you can talk about the club? We’d like other professionals like you to join.”

“Sure,” I said, “no problem.” And I forgot about our conversation.

About a week later, on July 17, 2008, I was driving in downtown Orlando when I called my office to check my messages. My secretary told me to go see a prospective client. She said a relative of an inmate called and wanted me to go to the Orange County jail to see an inmate by the name of Casey Anthony.

It’s just another case
, I thought. I didn’t think anything of it. I was going to the jail anyway.

“I’ll go see her,” I said.

After a twenty-minute drive, I was at the Booking and Release Center, what we call the BRC, which is where they house the newly arrested inmates who are going to bond out shortly. While I was waiting in the building, I noticed a whiteboard on the wall, and I saw the name
Casey Anthony
written on it.
That’s odd,
I thought
. Of all the inmates, why is her name up there?
I wondered if maybe she had beaten the crap out of a correctional officer and she was a high risk.

Maybe she’s a live one
, was my thinking. They usually only put the names of the troublemakers up on the wall.

I told the guards, “I’m here to see Casey Anthony,” and I was struck by their reaction. They looked at each other as if to say, “He’s here to see
her.
” A public defender, who was also waiting to see Casey, asked me, “Who are you?” I explained I had gotten a call to come see her.

“This case has been in the news,” he said, “and I just came down to tell her not to talk to anyone because detectives might be coming by.”

Casey walked in and sat down. The public defender told her, “A private lawyer is here to see you.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I asked someone to do that for me.”

He said, “We just wanted to let you know you shouldn’t talk to anyone without a lawyer being present.” And then he left.

I sat down and said, “Hello. How are you?”

I saw this tiny, attractive, hip-looking girl with short dark hair and greenish-gray eyes in her early twenties. She was no more than five feet tall, weighed 105 pounds soaking wet, and looked totally out of place in the jail. She wasn’t your typical inmate. She was dressed in jail blues but very well kept. Most of my clients, both male and female, are a little rougher around the edges, more street-wise. That was not Casey. In this business you mostly run across people who have been through the system. They’re much more hardened. I could see Casey was a first-timer.

After I introduced myself, I could tell she was grateful that I had come to see her.

I asked her, “Do you have your paperwork with you?” meaning her police reports. We were talking through a glass partition, so she slid them underneath the glass.

“Give me a second to read your report,” I said.

I saw that the specific charges were child neglect and lying to law enforcement. I thought,
Okay, she’s going to be out of here pretty soon.
Then I saw, “No bond,” and that was a head-scratcher. I couldn’t understand how, with those relatively minor charges, she didn’t have a bond.

I thought,
There’s no reason she should be held without bond.

As I was reading the arrest report line by line, I could see that this was not your typical child-neglect case. I thought,
This is a missing person’s case.
I kept reading, and the report said that she hadn’t seen her child in thirty days and that she had led police to an apartment that had been vacant for 142 days.

Strange
, I was thinking.
They certainly have cause for suspicion.
I read further, and the report talked of statements she had made. She said that she dropped off Caylee at the babysitter’s home thirty days before, and it gave a location, and that when she came back to pick up the baby from the nanny, no one was there. When the police went to verify her story, they knocked on the door and found it to be a vacant apartment. They then called the manager of the apartment complex, and he said the apartment had been vacant. So the conclusion of the police was that she was lying.

I saw she didn’t have a phone number for this woman, whom she identified as Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez. She didn’t have any information that could lead them to this woman. As I was reading this, I was thinking that this set of facts was “crazy.”
Her child is missing and she takes the cops to a vacant apartment?

I read the part of the report where she took the cops to her job at Universal Studios. She said she worked there, but with one phone call they found out she hadn’t worked there for two years. They wanted to see how far she’d go with her lies, so they took her to Universal Studios, and after leading them on a wild goose chase, she said, “Okay, I don’t work here.”

That did not look very good for her, but I couldn’t help thinking,
What are the secrets she is hiding?

I kept reading. The report said she was arrested for not reporting her child missing and lying to law enforcement about the nanny, about working at Universal, and about where she dropped off the child.

I’m thinking to myself,
This is more than it seems. I need to be very diligent with how I deal with the situation.

I badly wanted to hear what she had to say, certainly as much as the cops did, but I didn’t want to push her too hard because if the police report was accurate, either the child was deceased and she knew something about it, or there was an actual kidnapping. I thought,
Maybe she’s afraid to talk to the police and if she’s afraid to talk to the police, she’s got to be afraid to talk to me, a stranger she doesn’t know.

I spoke with Casey, and as we talked, I could tell she was a very bright girl.

Okay, there are probable trust issues here,
I thought, so I explained to her, “Listen, Casey, everything you tell me is confidential.”

When I asked her, “What happened?” she stuck to her story that she gave the cops, saying that her babysitter, Zenaida, took Caylee.

I asked her to describe Zenaida.

“She’s a perfect ten,” she said.

“People notice perfect tens,” I replied. “A woman that attractive gets noticed.”

She didn’t respond.

It didn’t make sense, but I took her at her word. The thing with clients in my line of work is they aren’t always up front with you at the very beginning. They don’t know you; it takes time to build trust. I would never say, “You have to tell me everything right here and now.” Especially to someone young like her. I needed her to trust me, and to do that I needed to demonstrate that I was on her side, that I was going to do whatever I could under the law to help her through this process.

I did say to her early on, “Don’t send me on fool’s errands, because that’s not going help you in any way.” But I always had that nagging certainty,
This is a person with some serious trust issues.