Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (5 page)

Lee was often the intermediary between the two hotheaded, obstinate women. Cindy and Casey argued a lot, and Lee was the peacemaker, when possible. He headed for Casey’s room, assuming that his sister was simply trying to upset his mother by hiding Caylee somewhere. He didn’t actually believe that Caylee was missing in the classic milk carton “Have you seen me?” sense. To Lee, this was a typical Cindy-Casey power play, and Caylee was only a pawn.

Lee was hoping to talk to Casey alone in her room, but Cindy kept slamming in and out, venting her frustration and threatening to call the police. Once he convinced her to stay out, he attempted to talk with Casey, brother to sister. He pleaded with her to tell Cindy where Caylee was. He even offered to go and see her by himself so he could reassure everyone that she was safe. He couldn’t fathom why Casey was going to such great lengths to upset their mother. Yet he received the same response that Cindy had: Caylee was with her babysitter, probably asleep, and should not be disturbed.

Cindy continued with her angry outbursts while Lee and Casey talked. During one of her rantings, she informed them that she had called the police and they were on their way. Still, Casey’s story stayed calmly consistent.

Lee didn’t think the situation warranted the police. As a last-ditch effort, he decided to try role-playing, and he told Casey to imagine he was a police officer.

In the voice of an imaginary cop, he introduced himself and informed Casey that her mother had contacted law enforcement, concerned about the welfare of Caylee. He acted coplike as he explained that the best way to quickly resolve the matter would be for Casey to take him to Caylee so he could see the little girl for himself.

For her part, Casey sat stone-faced, not revealing anything, but giving Lee’s logic some consideration. After ten to fifteen seconds of silent reflection, she began to cry.

“You want to know the truth?” she asked him. “I haven’t seen my daughter in thirty-one days.” Believing that he had finally broken through, Lee leaned in, whispering to keep Cindy from hearing, and questioned Casey more. All she would say was that “she was kidnapped.”

Lee was stunned. For all his commitment to resolving the conflict between his sister and his mother, he had never entertained the thought that Caylee was actually in danger. How could his little niece be missing? How could she have been kidnapped, and how could Casey keep that fact a secret?

What Lee didn’t realize was that he was witnessing the birth of a lie.Something had made Casey determine that she wasn’t going to be able to produce Caylee under any circumstances, and so she made up a story about a kidnapping. In the coming months, we in the prosecutor’s office would title this first spontaneous fabrication, sprung from desperation, Casey Anthony 2.0.

W
HILE
L
EE WAS GIVING HIS
statement about the events of earlier in the evening, Casey was being interviewed by Corporal Fletcher. She told him that on the Monday after Father’s Day, sometime between 9
A.M
. and 1
P.M
., she took her daughter to the apartment of her current babysitter, Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, also known as Zanny. She had been introduced to the woman eighteen months earlier by her friend Jeffrey Hopkins, who had also hired Zanny to babysit his son, Zachary. She said that Zanny was half black and half Puerto Rican, twenty-five years old, and originally from New York. She described her as being five feet seven and 140 pounds, with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes. She even said that her birthday was in September. She gave Zanny’s address as the Sawgrass Apartments on South Conway Road in Orlando. There, she said, Zanny and two roommates, Raquel Flora and Jennifer Rosa, shared Apartment 210.

After dropping her daughter off at Zanny’s that Monday, Casey said, she had gone to her job at Universal Studios, where, she claimed, she was an event planner. At the end of the day, around 5
P.M
., Casey drove straight back to the Sawgrass Apartments to pick up her daughter, but no one was home. She tried Zanny’s cell phone number and was surprised to learn that the line was out of service, since it had been working earlier in the day. Casey said that she spent two hours on the steps to the second floor of the building waiting for Caylee and Zanny to return, thinking they were either having car trouble or were just running late. It seemed odd to me that Casey’s story now failed to mention the two roommates she had earlier created for Zanny, who should have been home or come home sometime that evening.

As time passed, Casey said, she became increasingly worried, so she spent the next few hours going to familiar places in the area looking for Zanny and Caylee. She started at Jay Blanchard Park, one of Caylee’s favorite spots, and moved to other places where she thought Zanny might be. After she gave up, she spent the rest of that evening at Tony’s, pacing and worrying. His apartment was, in her words, “one of the few places she felt at home.” To me, saying that reconfirmed that things weren’t great at her parents’ house, and spite and retaliation might be at work.

As Casey recalled her version of the events of the last thirty-one days, she stated that she had lied and stolen from her family and friends during that time, claiming, however, that her actions had been justifiable, desperate as she was to find Caylee. Every day since the toddler’s disappearance, she had gone to malls, parks, even banks, any place that she could remember Zenaida taking Caylee. When asked why she had not alerted authorities, she claimed that it was out of fear for her daughter. She had seen movies and reports on TV in which bad outcomes came about when the police were called, and she was hoping to handle it on her own. I wondered why she didn’t mention a ransom note, that inevitable terror-laced prop in kidnapping movies.

Her tone contradicted her words of concern. During the ten-minute conversation, the young mother was completely unemotional, her answers flat and unembellished. In many instances, the officer had to prod and pry responses from her. Her presentation didn’t even hint at the hysteria one would expect of a young mother who had not seen her daughter in a month. Even if she were just hiding Caylee, some emotional tone should have been present. Her demeanor just didn’t make sense.

Her composure was not the only suspicious thing; the story itself grew increasingly more preposterous. By this point, Officer Eberlin had taken over for Fletcher, and Casey informed him that Zanny had made contact once during the last four weeks. She was unable to provide the deputy with the exact date or time of the call and said it had been disconnected before anything was said, so the report was not very valuable. Even more shocking, that very morning, Casey said, she had gotten a call from her daughter. Caylee had started to tell her what she had been doing, but Casey had interrupted her and asked her to put an adult on the phone. The child had hung up without telling her how or where she was, and there was no way to call her back. The number was blocked.

As odd as this story sounded, members of law enforcement know that it does no good to call your only witness a liar when you are trying to find a missing little girl. By treating Casey like a victim until the investigation proved otherwise, Eberlin was doing his duty as a police officer and following a procedure that’s been proven to uncover the truth. Implausible as Casey’s version of events sounded, there was value for the officers in going along with it. Sooner or later, they hoped, Casey would crack and the little girl would be brought home safely. They just had to be patient.

In keeping with this protocol, Eberlin took down all her information in his report. He listed the case as a possible kidnapping of a child, and Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez as the prime suspect. Ten minutes before midnight, Sergeant Hosey, the supervisor on the scene, instructed Deputy Acevedo and Corporal Fletcher to escort Casey to the Sawgrass Apartments on South Conway Road so she could point out the location where she last saw her daughter with Zenaida. Casey, dressed in a pale blue short-sleeved football hoodie sporting the number “82” and tight blue jeans, was in the back of Acevedo’s patrol car, and Fletcher was in his vehicle following behind. She directed them ten minutes away to an appealing and well-maintained three-hundred-unit apartment community with all the amenities—a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a small private lake with a fountain. Each building had three floors, and the units had small terraces with sliding glass doors that opened on a view in one direction or another. Casey directed the deputy over a speed bump and pointed to the first building on the right, just past the
WELCOME
sign. She did not get out of the patrol car, but simply indicated a unit on the second floor, saying it was Apartment 210.

Corporal Fletcher walked alone up the stairs to the second floor. He knocked on the door of the apartment, but no one answered. Looking in the window, he saw no furniture or personal belongings anywhere inside. The unit was completely vacant. While Deputy Acevedo took Casey back home about twenty minutes after they arrived, Fletcher remained at the complex to investigate further.

When Casey and Acevedo arrived back at the Anthony house, sheriff’s deputies were still taking statements from the other family members. Cindy had not calmed down at all, while George remained grim and quiet, and Lee, confused. Sergeant Hosey had now been at the house for two hours, and in that time he’d witnessed a lot of drama.

There was unmistakable tension between Casey and her mother. Casey was making accusations that Cindy wanted to take Caylee away from her, while Cindy was incredulous and frustrated about her daughter’s behavior. Sergeant Hosey was of the opinion that some undercurrent of a custody battle was playing out, so he invited Casey to walk privately with him, out of earshot of Cindy and the rest of the family. He wanted to reassure her, in case she was hiding Caylee, that no one was going to take her daughter from her. In fact, he was hoping that she was hiding Caylee. The other possibilities were awfully dire.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

FOUR LIES

A
phone ringing in the middle of the night is never a good sign, but Yuri Melich was used to it.

A detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Melich had been working cases in Orange County for more than ten years. In that time he’d had his share of calls in the hours before dawn. Earlier in his career with the sheriff’s office he’d been in the homicide unit, but it wasn’t long before he’d been promoted to his current role as a missing persons corporal, a position he’d been in for seven years when his phone rang in the early morning hours of July 16.

Answering the phone, he got the specifics of the situation and where he’d be headed. A two-year-old child was missing. The dispatcher instructed him to report to the Anthony home on Hopespring Drive, where officers were already on the scene. Melich hung up and started getting ready.

Melich has the look of a seasoned lawman, with close-cropped hair and a chiseled face. Though he joined the homicide unit after I left it in 2000, I’d known him for a while, having met him through my occasional work on cases in later years. Melich’s wife, Sam, was also a detective in the sheriff’s office. It was on the murder of Deputy Michael Callin, the son of an old friend and former homicide detective, that I’d first met Melich. I’d been impressed with his work then and had continued to hear good things since. All in all, he always struck me as the kind of officer who’s seen it all and then some—confident without being arrogant, and usually in command of the situation. In the years since I first got involved with the Anthony case, I have continued to marvel at the quirk of fate that just happened to place this experienced homicide detective on this call for a missing persons alert.

When Melich arrived at the house at 4
A.M.
, he was greeted by Sergeant Hosey, who quickly brought him up to speed. Hosey told him the story of the thirty-one days, the attempts to locate Caylee and Zenaida, and their inability to verify anything that Casey had told them. Before speaking to anyone in the house, Melich took a few moments to read the handwritten statements taken from the four family members.

Once he’d read the statements, Melich sat down with Casey, explaining that they were going to go through her statement together, line by line, and that this process would be recorded. However, before they began, Melich made it clear that this was her chance to be forthcoming with the truth. He showed her the signed four-page document, and proceeded:

“You’re saying that everything contained in these statements is true and accurate?” he asked her.

“Yes,” replied Casey.

Melich wanted to be certain that Casey knew what was going on before launching into the consequences of lying.

“I want to explain what happens if you make a false report or if there’s something about this incident that you’re not telling us the truth about.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I want to make sure I make it perfectly clear that if you want to go ahead and rescind this statement and if you want to tell me a different story about what happened, if you’re trying to fabricate a story to kind of make something look a little bit better, now is your time to tell me. Are you telling me that this is the story you want to stick with?”

“That’s the truth,” Casey said. “It’s the story I’m gonna stick with, yes.” It was an odd choice of words. While on the one hand she was simply parroting back Melich’s language, that wording left open the possibility that there were other versions beyond the one she was selecting. It was the story she was “sticking with,” but did that make it the truth? Either way, she’d been given the chance to correct a story that already stretched credibility, but instead she’d vigorously insisted that her statement was accurate in every way.