Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (8 page)

A
S
I
SAID
, very early on I spent a lot of time with Cindy and George. No one got much sleep the first couple of days. I chalked up their manic behavior to the situation as I knew it. Their granddaughter had been kidnapped and was missing, and they were terrified that something had happened to her.

I thought,
These people are going through a horrible, horrible experience, and this would make anybody crazy. It would make anybody act differently
. It took me a while before I realized that not only was there something off about Casey but something was off about her parents as well. At first glance the Anthonys seemed like the all-American family. They worked very hard to maintain an amazing façade of normalcy, one that I bought into hook, line, and sinker. It took a significant amount of time before I realized,
There’s something off here.
Exactly how “off” I would discover much later.

Everything suggested that when it came to Caylee that this was a loving family. Cindy was the protector. She swore up and down that Casey would never harm Caylee, and everyone else said the same thing. Her brother Lee said it. Even George said it. They all talked about what an incredible mother Casey was. After discovery was made public, not one incident of child abuse or child neglect on Casey’s part ever came to light. There was nothing that would lead anyone to believe this child was anything less than doted on and loved and cared for by her mother and grandparents.

And you could see it throughout the house. You could see it everywhere—this child was
loved.
From a defense attorney’s perspective, I was being more reactive than proactive, because I was trying to get a grasp of the situation. Early on, as I was starting to acknowledge to myself that there was a possibility that Caylee was dead and trying to determine whether Casey—or anyone else—was involved, I thought,
This has got to be an accident. These people truly loved this child and took good care of her.
That was something that you could see. A person just doesn’t all of a sudden wake up one day and think,
I’m going to kill my child, whom I’ve loved and doted upon for the last three years.
People just don’t do that. Where there’s abuse, there’s always a progression of violence. There’s a black eye or a broken arm, or an emergency trip to the hospital for a more serious injury. Other people notice these things. There was
nothing
like that in this case. Even up until today, not a single person has ever testified that this child was anything but loved.

Casey officially hired me on July 17, 2008, and I filed a motion for a bond hearing, which was heard on July 22. Meanwhile, I went to see Casey and the Anthonys every day. I don’t know what it was—I was drawn into this case immediately. It was as if everything else had to be put on hold, because I was sure that at any minute this child would either be found, or something was going to break. That’s what this case did to me from the very beginning: it sucked me in, taking me away from everything else I was doing.

CHAPTER 3

THE BOND HEARING

O
N JULY 22, the morning of the bond hearing for Casey, the Anthonys—George, Cindy, and Lee—came to my office. They came late, and I had to rush through our meeting with them so we could get to the courthouse on time for the 1:00
P.M.
hearing. We went over the questions I was going to ask them, and I told them what to expect.

I explained to them what I was trying to accomplish at the hearing, that my goal was to establish Casey’s ties to the community, to show she had no prior record, to show she had a safe place to go—the Anthony home—and to tell the judge that the Anthonys would be responsible for her and would ensure that she would show up in court.

The purpose of bail, you have to understand, is not to punish the defendant. Rather, it’s to ensure the safety of the community and to make certain that the defendant shows up in court for the trial.

Those are the two goals of bail, and those were the two criteria I was trying to establish for Casey. Under Florida statutes, a defendant accused of a third-degree felony, as Casey was, normally would have bonded out for $1,000. She was also charged with two misdemeanors, for which the standard bond amount totaled $500. I figured that under the local guidelines, once she posted $150 dollars, she would be out of jail.

Months later I would find out that Lee had called Detective Yuri Melich and not only told him that the Anthonys had met with me but also told him what we talked about, including my strategy. My guess is that Lee was trying to stay on the good side of law enforcement by letting them know that just because he was testifying on Casey’s behalf, it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t assist them. Never before or since have I ever experienced someone calling law enforcement before going to testify for a family member.

Later on I would discover that George would say some pretty negative things about me to law enforcement, and it would take quite a while longer before I found out why. But to my face both he and Lee were perfect gentlemen, as kind as they could be. They always seemed to be very encouraging when trying to help out Casey.

Because I was meeting with the Anthonys at the last minute, we were running behind. As we walked into the courtroom, Judge Stan Strickland was already seated on the bench. Not a good start for me.

I got ready and made my presentation. I called George, Cindy, and Lee to the stand. George did a wonderful job. He testified that Casey had no criminal history, that Casey had lived at the same address for twenty years, that she had significant ties to the community, that even when the police started to question her, she never ran, even though she could have.

I also went over the family’s finances so the judge would have an idea of how much bond money the family could afford to post. I explained that George was a security officer making ten to fourteen dollars an hour and that Cindy was a nurse. She wasn’t a practicing nurse but worked as a clinical supervisor making between $50,000 and $60,000 a year. I talked about the family assets and said they owned a home worth $250,000.

They were middle class, I said, maybe even lower than that, and they all said they would assist with the posting of bond.

After we were done, I felt I had established Casey’s significant ties to the community and showed that she had no prior record, was no danger to the community, and was no flight risk.

When Cindy took the stand, the lead prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, asked her about financial problems, questions I felt were totally irrelevant to the issues relating to whether Casey should be freed on bond. Her questions appeared to be focused mainly on airing dirty laundry as opposed to accomplishing anything. Cindy had to admit that she had several judgments against her and that her wages had been garnished. I don’t know how that established anything for the state other than showing that Cindy had financial problems.

I didn’t call Casey to the stand. A lot of lawyers call their clients to the stand, but I never do that because anything and everything they say can be held against them. A smart prosecutor might push the envelope and go beyond the scope of direct examination, and a biased judge could overrule any objections that I might make. It is always a foolish move, though I see lawyers do it all the time.

That should have been the end of it. It was an open-and-shut case. Casey Anthony should have been freed on bond.

But nothing about this case ever turned out to be as simple and straightforward as it should have been. In certain cases, the judge will allow the prosecutors to call law enforcement officers to testify so they can give the judge an idea of what the case is about. However, on most occasions prosecutors just rely on the arrest report to fill the judge in on the facts alleged. In this case, Strickland allowed the prosecution to put on what amounted to a minitrial taking more than two hours. The prosecution put on a dog-and-pony show for the press, the sole purpose of which was to bash Casey.

First up was Melich, who took the stand and testified as to Casey’s actions on the day she was arrested. He listed many of the false statements she made and showed how he had disproved them. He talked about going to Universal Studios with Casey, replaying her lies. He talked about smelling the car when it was at the forensics bay. Melich said that before going into missing persons he had been in homicide, and that, based on his experience, he smelled the “smell of decomposition.”

Every cop who testifies always has the same line that “once you smell the smell of human decomposition, you never forget it.” It’s like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in his concurring opinion on
Jacobellis v. Ohio
, writing he couldn’t define pornography, “but I know it when I see it.”

And yet, in his five-page detailed initial report, Melich had said
nothing
about the smell of the car. He also testified about a stain in the trunk of the car that the crime scene investigators thought was “questionable.” I would later find out that the test was negative—not at all “questionable,” as testified to by Melich. CSI had used a product called Bluestar Forensic, a spray similar to luminol that, after applying, can reveal human bloodstains even after someone has cleaned them up. There was a small reaction in the trunk but the confirmatory test turned up negative. This is not uncommon and as an experienced detective, Melich surely should have known that.

Melich also gave testimony to finding hairs similar in color and length to that of Caylee in the trunk of the car. This is also not uncommon because the human head sheds between one hundred and two hundred hairs a day. If Casey had taken Caylee’s sweater and put it in the trunk, her hair easily would have transferred to the trunk. Or Casey could have Caylee’s hair on her clothing from dressing her and then gone into the trunk to retrieve something, transferring the hair in the process. Put simply, every trunk has hair in it. Melich failed to mention that Casey’s hair, and even animal hair, was found in the trunk as well, but no one was accusing Casey of throwing her cats in the trunk.

I took notes feverishly and listened carefully to each witness because as a defense lawyer, even if I don’t win the battle of the bail hearing, the testimony can help me win the war. Not only was I getting to hear from crucial prosecution witnesses but their testimony was on the record and locked in so they couldn’t ever change it. Having them on the record so early gave us an advantage.

When the prosecution talked about cadaver dogs and the smell coming from Casey’s Pontiac, I didn’t know how to read them. The bond hearing was the first time that anyone had made a big deal about the smell of the car. Cindy hadn’t made an issue of the smell of the car to me, so I hadn’t paid too much attention to the fact that the car allegedly had some foul odor. I thought there was still a possibility that there was some crazy woman out there who had taken Casey’s baby.

Next up was the dog part of the state’s dog-and-pony presentation. Deputy Jason Forgey, the handler of a cadaver dog named Gerus, took the stand. He struck me as someone who was slick. And I say that because ever since the
Miranda
ruling, defendants had to be read their rights before they could be questioned, and the police know just how far they can go to get around that law. The cops know the rules. And they know the exceptions. And, in my experience, this has developed a police culture called
testilying
, police slang for when they decide to embellish or omit critical testimony regarding a criminal defendant.

Why do they do it? Because they know they can get away with it. And I strongly sensed Forgey was testilying.

He got up there and recounted how he and his dog Gerus came to inspect Casey’s Pontiac. He said he deployed Gerus, who alerted Forgey to the trunk area of the car. Forgey then testified that he took Gerus into the backyard of the home, and that the dog alerted there as well. He said he then called in another dog from another county, who alerted to the same area as well.

When Forgey finished testifying, I stood up to cross-examine him. I had never had any experience dealing with a cadaver-dog handler before. On top of that, this was the first time I was hearing about this evidence, so I really had to think fast on my feet.

“Your dog alerted in the backyard?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“And obviously CSI dug in the backyard and found nothing.”

“Correct.”

“And then your dog alerted in the trunk of the car?”

“Yes.”

“And obviously you didn’t find a body in the trunk.”

“No.”

“And so,” I said, “at the very best your dog was one for two, or at worst, oh for two.”

And what Forgey did—and I didn’t quite catch it at the time—was save himself by saying, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand you.”

I went over it again. I even repeated myself, but Forgey avoided answering my question by playing stupid and pretending not to understand the point I was making.