Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (63 page)

CHAPTER 30

DESTROYING THE FANTASY

W
E PRESSED ON. As a lawyer, I learned to have a short-term memory, to put the past behind you and look forward. It’s what we did on a daily basis. My whole approach was to fly straight. When we had a good moment, we didn’t rejoice. When we had a bad moment, we didn’t pout.

After a couple hours of extreme anxiety the previous day, I recovered. I vowed I wasn’t going to let any of this affect my performance. I knew in the next few days the prosecution’s fantasy—its made-up theory of how Caylee died—would be exposed.

We went after the prosecution’s death-by-chloroform theory first by calling Detective Yuri Melich to testify that the police didn’t find any chloroform anywhere in the Anthony home. He testified they didn’t find any ingredients for making chloroform, didn’t find receipts for buying chloroform, didn’t find any chemistry kits, didn’t find anything in any way, shape, or form in the Anthony home or anywhere else, for that matter, that indicated that Casey had been involved in making chloroform.

We then called Dr. Arpad Vass’s partner, Dr. Marcus Wise. We didn’t call Vass because he had already testified, and I had gotten what I wanted from him. And he wasn’t a chemist; Wise was.

Dr. Wise was not happy to be there, and the jury clearly saw he was not being straightforward. When I attempted to get him to admit there were no standard protocols for his test, he kept avoiding the answer. Jeff Ashton did his best to keep him from answering.

Dr. Wise explained that he had done a qualitative analysis of the chemicals in the trunk but decided not to do a quantitative one because of the nature of chloroform.

“Chloroform is what is called a volatile chemical,” Wise said. “That means it evaporates easily. If you put a drop of chloroform on a surface, it’s going to begin to evaporate, and over a period of minutes, hours, days, it’s going to decrease.”

He also said that because he didn’t have a history of the carpet sample, didn’t know the temperature of the trunk, how it varied every day, didn’t know when the material was deposited, how much was there originally—in short, because there were so many unknowns—it was impossible to determine the amount of chloroform.

While it took pulling teeth from the guy he finally stated one crucial fact without equivocation: contradicting Vass, who had testified that there had been a “huge” amount of chloroform, Wise finally had to admit there was
no way
to determine how much chloroform was in the trunk of Casey’s car.

So much for the state’s theory that Casey used chloroform to drug Caylee.

We next called Maureen Bottrell, a soil expert from the FBI. She testified that she collected all of Casey’s shoes—about thirty pairs—and tested them to determine whether any of her shoes had soil samples that matched the soil of the recovery site. None did.

There went state’s theory that Casey dumped Caylee’s body in the woods.

Madeline Montgomery of the FBI testified that there were no drugs found in Caylee’s hair, and that included Xanax, chloroform, sedatives, or designer drugs. No drugs—period.

On cross-examination Ashton got her to say that such drugs are volatile and take a while to get into someone’s system, and so the fact they were tested, and the tests came back negative was virtually meaningless.

I rose and said to her, “So what other meaningless work do you do over at the FBI?”

“My work is very important,” she replied. “It’s critical. We find evidence in cases.”

As she did in this case.

W
E CALLED
D
R
. M
ICHAEL
S
IGMAN
, who conducted the air sample tests. Sigman testified that the chloroform levels were low and that the main chemical in the trunk of Casey’s car was gasoline.

Then we recalled Michael Rickenbach. If you remember, we tried to show he had conducted other tests during his initial appearance, only to be shut down by Ashton’s objections. Here was my chance to throw it right into their faces—to show the jury what the state was hiding from them.

Rickenbach testified that he tested not only the trunk for chloroform but also the steering wheel cover, the door handle, and Caylee’s doll, and none of those tests came back positive.

So much for the state’s theory that Caylee was being knocked out by chloroform on a regular basis so Casey could go out and party.

We then returned to the issue of the hair—the one hair that supposedly had root banding, indicating there had been a dead body in the trunk.

We called Karen Lowe, and her testimony was especially impactful. On direct she had testified about the one hair, but this time I was able to ask her about the nine other tests she had conducted—the tests the prosecution wanted to keep from the jury. After making those nine inspections of more than a hundred other hairs, I was able to get her to tell the jury that not a single one of those other hairs had root banding—human decomposition—on them.

For example, they took Casey’s clothes and took hairs from them, and not one hair had root banding.

They did vacuum sweepings from the house. None of them had decomposition on them.

They did vacuum sweepings from Casey’s car. None of them had decomposition on them.

Everywhere they turned, they tested all these other hairs, and when the tests turned up negative, that increased the probability that the one hair that had root banding had changed not because it came from a dead body but because of environmental conditions in the trunk of Casey’s car.

Her testimony wasn’t conclusive, but it strongly suggested that the state’s theory that Casey put Caylee in the trunk was weak at best.

W
E THEN WENT AFTER
the computer evidence. We called Cindy Anthony. Remember I said I wanted the old Cindy back? I found my opening. I realized how I could get her back.

I knew in her deposition she had claimed that she had been the one who had made the searches for the chloroform. However, her work records showed her to be at work that day. To get around that, she said she had worked from home that day, but her time records didn’t reflect that.

I don’t know if she was lying, because you can’t be certain who is behind a computer, but we always felt our strongest argument that Casey had been on the computer was Ricardo Morales’s Myspace posting of “Win her over with Chloroform.”

This is a perfect opportunity for me to do two things: one, continue to cast reasonable doubt on these searches; and two, get Linda Drane Burdick to attack her best witness, Cindy,
I thought to myself.

And that’s exactly what I did.

We got Cindy up on the stand, and Cindy testified that she had made the searches for chloroform. She said she was doing research on chlorophyll, because she said she feared her dogs were eating bamboo and were acting lethargic, and by accident chloroform came up.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about her testimony. You can certainly say what she was doing was lying to protect Casey, but there were plenty of other occasions when she could have stepped up and helped her a whole lot more.

I really don’t know. Maybe she really believed she made those searches. Later, of course, it turned out she didn’t. Maybe she was trying to save her daughter, but if she was, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

And that was the big news of the day: Cindy falling on her sword for Casey.

When Burdick got up to cross-examine Cindy, boy, it was like the good old days, as Cindy and Burdick went back and forth at each other. An angry Cindy was pointing her finger at Burdick, and the two of them once again were doing the Cindy Two-Step.

I remember sitting back in my chair catching myself smiling at what was going on. I had to stop myself.

Oh shit
, I thought
, I’m enjoying this way too much.

Because up until then Cindy had been the perfect witness. But there came that moment, and it was on. She and Burdick would bump heads, and it was like the good old days.

And then Burdick did us a
big
favor. During her cross-examination, she asked her, “Did you run this search on how to make chloroform eighty-four times?

Cindy danced around the answer.

Burdick kept on the eighty-four searches. I could have objected as asked and answered, but I didn’t. I wanted to give Linda enough rope to hang herself, and she was doing it over and over again.

Burdick repeated, “Eighty-four times,” and all Burdick was doing was digging a bigger hole for the prosecution by repeatedly bringing up “eighty-four times.”

Because with my next witness I was about to blow that theory out of the water.

We called Sergeant Kevin Stenger of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department Computer Crimes Squad, and I got him to compare two different reports of the Internet histories of the Anthony family computer.

He testified that the report that he prepared using a program called NetAnalysis, had a problem with the times and dates, but otherwise was accurate. He said that according to his NetAnalysis program on March 21, Myspace was visited eighty-four times, and that there was one search for “How to Make Chloroform.” This fit perfectly with Casey’s explanation that one time she had gone to a chloroform site because her boyfriend at the time, Ricardo Morales, had posted that photo on Myspace that said, “Win her over with Chloroform.”

To get rid of the notion that Cindy was the one doing the looking, I asked Stenger whether, if you type in chlorophyll, it could happen that chloroform might come up. He said no.

Stenger testified that the person who looked up the chloroform site during the two searches was on it for exactly three minutes.

On cross-examine Burdick tried to suggest that Casey might have stayed on the website a lot longer than three minutes, or might have printed out the results.

On redirect Stenger said that to say she might have stayed on longer was pure speculation.

“I do not know if that happened,” he said.

I asked him whether anyone had recovered pages about chloroform that had been printed out and taken in as evidence.

“No one informed me of that,” he said.

During Stenger’s testimony, which pretty much blew to smithereens the notion that Casey had visited chloroform sites eighty-four times, Burdick, who had been pushing the theory, was turning red. That wasn’t one of her finest moments, but it certainly was one of ours.

So much for the state’s theory that Casey had looked up chloroform eighty-four times.

We left court that day, and it was one of the few days when I said to myself,
This evidence was so persuasive, these media folks are going to have no choice but to tell the public what a great session we had blowing a gaping hole in the state’s case.

But in the media the next day, all they were reporting was Cindy admitting to the searches for chloroform. Not one single reporter mentioned about how we had slammed a forensic issue in the state’s case and made it look like a complete and total fraud.