Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (52 page)

I
WAS ALSO A STUDENT
of Steve Jobs. He would give brilliant presentations; I would study his Apple product releases. I saw how when Jobs spoke he always told his audience at the outset exactly what he intended to say in his talk. I did that in my opening statement. I wanted to explain to the jury what I was going to tell them.

I broke it down into five areas.

“First off,” I said, “I would like to tell you what happened. We sat through almost two hours. There was Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, and so on and so on, but no one ever told you what happened. But today you will be the first people to know exactly what happened to Caylee Marie Anthony.”

The second area of focus was Roy Kronk. I told the jury that his was a name not mentioned in Burdick’s opening statement. I told the jurors that his role would be crucial in deciding their evaluation of the case.

The third area I was going to discuss was the investigation by the police. I told the jurors that the police were very thorough when it came to investigating Casey, but that their investigation was directed at one person and one person only.

“At what point do we stop speculating?” I asked the jury. “At what point do we stop guessing? At what point do we stop being so desperate?”

The fourth area I was going to focus on, I told them, was Suburban Drive, where Caylee’s remains were found.

“There are numerous suspicious circumstances surrounding that location,” I said, “and I want to make sure it’s brought to light to you.

“I want to make sure you understand what was there, who was there, and for how long.”

And then I said we were going to talk about Casey’s car.

“The evidence, or the lack of evidence, or the confusion of the evidence that surrounds this car,” I said, “will probably double, if not triple, the length of this trial.” I said that by the end of the trial they would be asking themselves whether the evidence about the car would have any relevance at all.

Then I talked about the fantastic nature of forensic evidence. I told them the state’s case would be more science fiction than science. I didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the forensics because they hadn’t been educated yet about it. I was going to wait until the closing arguments to discuss the finer details that made the forensics so powerful for us. Then I explained how Caylee died.

“Now, everyone wants to know what happened,” I said. “How in the world can a mother wait thirty days before ever reporting her child missing? It’s insane. It’s bizarre. Something’s just not right about that. Well, the answer is actually relatively simple. She never was missing. Caylee Anthony died on June 16, 2008, when she drowned in her family’s swimming pool.”

I told the jurors not to be distracted by emotion. This was a theme I would come back to over and over. I said the levels of distraction might even reach the bizarre, but that they should never forget that this is a first-degree murder case.

“They want to take someone’s life,” I said.

But then I told them, “This is not a murder case. This is not a manslaughter case. This is not a case of aggravated child abuse. This is none of those things. But you can’t be distracted.”

I then made the point that the Anthony family was extremely dysfunctional. This, I knew, would make them sit up and take notice.

“You will hear about ugly things, secret things, things that people don’t speak about. Things that Casey never spoke about.”

I invited the jury to come with me to Hopespring Drive, what looked like an all-American home.

“You never know what secrets lie within,” I said. “You never know what’s going on.”

I began to give them a look at the evidence that would explain her strange behavior after Caylee’s disappearance.

I told the jury, “On June 16, 2008, after Caylee died, Casey did what she’s been doing all her life, or most of it. Hiding her pain. Going into that dark corner and pretending that she does not live in the situation she’s living in. She went back to that deep ugly place called denial to pretend as if nothing was ever wrong.”

And I told them they’d hear evidence of this and that and in the end, they would conclude that something was not right with her.

I then gave them information that they didn’t hear from the prosecution: that Casey was an excellent mother.

“The child never went without food,” I said, “never went without clothing, without shelter. You won’t hear a single person come up here and testify how she was neglected or abused. There are no broken bones, no trips to the hospital, no moment that would help you determine that this child was abused or anything but loved by all the members of the family.”

“Especially her mother.”

I then began to talk about the abuse.

“You see,” I said, “this family must keep its secrets quiet. And it all began when Casey was eight years old and her father came into her room and began to touch her inappropriately, and it escalated and escalated.”

“What does a sex abuse survivor look like? Do they have a tattoo on their forehead? We can be sitting next to a sex abuse victim and not even know it. These things are kept quiet. And these ugly secrets slowly will come out through this trial.”

I told them that by the end of the trial they would come to know why Casey acted the way she did, and why she acted as though nothing was wrong.

I gave them subtle evidence that Casey hadn’t committed a crime.

“She didn’t run,” I said. “She didn’t move to California, to New York. She didn’t say to her parents, ‘Sorry, you’re never going to see your granddaughter again.’”

“That would have been the easiest thing for her to do.”

“Instead,” I said, “she acted as if it never happened.”

I
THEN TALKED ABOUT
how Casey pretended she had a job and how she pretended she had a nanny.

“Is that normal?” I asked. “Is that what normal people do? They pretend they’re going to work? They have fake emails from work?”

I told the jury there was a reason she did this. I told them she did it to protect Caylee from abuse, as she had been abused.

“Anything Casey could do to protect her child she did,” I told the jury, “including living a lie, making up a nanny, making up a job. That’s what Casey had to do to live. She forced herself to live in a world that she wanted, not the one she was thrust into.”

I told the jury how when she became pregnant, the family hushed it up. I told them about the wedding she went to when she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant, and how Cindy and George denied she was pregnant. The exclamation point was when I showed them a picture of a pregnant Casey who was clearly showing, less than two months from giving birth. The jury had to wonder: why did the Anthonys claim they didn’t know she was pregnant?

“The entire family wanted to keep it quiet,” I said. “And if they hid this child, this beautiful child, in life, you can best believe that they would hide her in death.”

I told the jurors, “They hid this child like a flower in the attic.” I said it on purpose. We had seven women who would decide Casey’s fate, and most of them were old enough to remember the movie or the book about four abused and mistreated children who were the product of incest, and I could see a look of recognition on some of their faces. It was an important moment where I could feel we had made a connection.

About an hour and a half into my opening, I asked the jurors if they wanted to recess, because I knew they were tired around that time when Burdick was speaking to them. Also we had a few smokers on the panel. I stood three feet from them, and I asked them, “Do you want to take a break?”

None of them did, and it wasn’t
what
they said as much as
how
they said it. I could see in their eyes they were saying,
No way. Don’t stop now. I want to hear more.

I knew at that point we were on the right track.

I
TOLD THE JURORS
how Casey’s brother had molested her, how Lee had started to follow in dad’s footsteps. I told them the FBI had tested Lee to see whether he was the father. I told them he hadn’t denied the abuse when confronted with the evidence.

“You’re going to hear all kinds of bizarre family behavior that just doesn’t make sense,” I said.

I them told them about how George was making statements incriminating Casey for Caylee’s murder.

I told them Casey was the way she was because of who raised her. I became more graphic. I told them, “Casey was raised to lie. This child, at eight years old, learned to lie immediately. She could be thirteen years old, have her father’s penis in her mouth, and then go to school and play with the other kids as if nothing ever happened. Nothing’s wrong.”

I told them this information should help them understand why no one knew her child was dead.

“Sex abuse does things to us. It changes you,” I said. “Some people are fortunate to live with it. [Meaning survive it and move on.] Others are not, and in this sad tragedy, it had to happen to Casey.”

Then I described to them—and to the public—how Caylee died, and I did something the prosecution couldn’t do. I had photos of the house, of the sliding door leading to the pool, and to the backyard and the pool, and I was able to help the jurors visualize the scene.

I told the whole story of June 16, how George woke Casey and started yelling at her, “Where’s Caylee?” How they searched the house, the bedrooms under the beds, the closets, in the garage, and then they went outside.

I talked about the above-ground pool and the ladder that was up, and how Casey saw George holding Caylee’s body, and how she cried and cried.

Then I told them how George had yelled at her, “Look what you’ve done,” and “Your mother will never forgive you,” and “You’ll go to jail for child neglect.”

I told the jury that Casey should have been stronger, that she should have called 9-1-1.

“Casey should have done the right thing,” I said, “and that’s what she’s guilty of.” We always wanted to acknowledge Casey’s bad behavior. I never felt we should shy away from it. Instead I wanted her to own it, to fall on the sword and give them nowhere to go with it. That way we could focus on the big question of murder.

I
KNEW THAT THE KEY
to winning the case was one key question: how can you call it a murder if the prosecution doesn’t know the cause of death?

I knew that because a couple months before jury selection, I got a call from CBS’s
48 Hours Mystery
. They said they were curious about whether Casey could get a fair trial, so I suggested that they do a focus group to determine what people were thinking and how they were analyzing the evidence. We selected Orlando because we wanted to get the most tainted jury pool possible.

48 Hours Mystery
hired a dozen “jurors,” a good cross section of the community, and they had them fill out juror questionnaires, just like a real jury would. Our trial consultant, Richard Gabriel, spent an entire day with them, discussing only the prosecution’s case. They talked about air samples, the cadaver dogs, the duct tape, and Casey’s behavior after Caylee disappeared, and while they were talking, I was able to sit behind a two-way mirror and watch and listen to them interact.