Mommy's Little Girl (20 page)

When he heard a knock, Tony shouted, “Come in.” The door opened and he looked up at Amy, who appeared totally miserable.

“I need to talk to you,” she said to Casey.

Casey went outside and closed the door behind her. Nathan and Tony returned to their game. Drama intruded on their concentration just two minutes later as the door flew open and Casey came inside loudly arguing with her
mother. As Casey rushed back to the bedroom, Cindy spoke to Tony. “I hope you're rich, 'cause Casey's going to take all your money and leave you high and dry.”

Tony and Nathan exchanged looks of bewilderment. “What are you talking about?” Tony asked.

Casey zoomed back into the room and told her mother to shut up. The door slammed and they were gone.
What was that all about?
Tony wondered. He waited for Casey to contact him with an explanation. After two hours, when it hadn't come, he picked up his cell and wrote a text message. Just a moment after he hit send, he heard a tone across the room. Casey had forgotten her phone.

He picked it up, looked for Amy's number and gave her a call. She told him that Casey had taken her checkbook and used it to steal money from her. Cindy's last words before leaving now made sense.
But what else was going on?
He remained in the dark until he got a call from Casey's brother Lee.

After dropping off Amy, Cindy said, “Casey, I'm going to take you to the police department. Maybe they can talk some sense into you and tell me where Caylee's at.”

“Mom, go ahead, go ahead. I can't take you to see Caylee tonight.”

Cindy pulled into the parking lot of the Orlando police substation on Pershing Avenue, but the office was closed for the day. Cindy turned to her daughter. “Casey, come on, tell me what's going on.”

“Mom, I can't.”

“Someone's going to help me,” she said as she called 9-1-1. When the operator answered, Cindy didn't quite know what to say.
She won't take me to see my granddaughter?
she thought.
That isn't a crime. But I need to talk to a detective
. She blurted out, “My car was stolen.”

Cindy and the operator went back and forth in a confusing dialogue about where she could meet the officers. Cindy called it quits, deciding she'd just call them back when she got home. She wanted to shake Casey and force the answer out of her, but she was afraid if she started, she wouldn't be able to stop. In her current state of rage, she worried that she could not trust herself to maintain her self-control.

Back on Hopespring Drive, Lee waited outside for his mother and sister. Once there, Cindy questioned Casey again, hoping Lee's presence would get her to talk. But it didn't. Frustrated at her inability to get satisfactory answers
from her daughter, Cindy called the police again to report her car stolen.

While Cindy was on the phone, Casey spewed out her kidnapping scenario to Lee. She repeated the tale to her mom. Cindy punched 9-1-1 again—this time in an all-out panic. She informed the authorities that her granddaughter had been missing for thirty-one days—she'd been kidnapped by the baby-sitter. At the operator's request, she put Casey on the phone.

George pulled into the driveway and saw his wife pacing, crying and waiting for the police to arrive. “Someone's got Caylee. Caylee's gone! Someone took her,” she wailed.

A police car pulled up just moments after George. The responding officer took statements from everyone. When Detective Yuri Melich got to the scene, he sat down with Casey and a tape recorder.

Lee called Tony and got the go-ahead to come over to Sutton Place and pick up the rest of Casey's things. He arrived at 2 in the morning. The laptop sat on the kitchen counter, plugged into an outlet. He started it up, but only got a blue screen. A message popped up warning that the computer had been shut down improperly. Lee rebooted. The plain screen came up again, followed by the error message. He assumed that a virus had deleted or corrupted some of the files needed to open Windows. He turned off the computer.

He couldn't ask Casey about the cause of the problem when he returned to the house because she was out with the detectives, pointing out the current and past addresses of Zenaida Gonzalez. On another computer, he logged into Casey's Yahoo! account and discovered a total absence of incoming and outgoing messages dated before July 15—even all the spam was gone. Lee knew someone had to have manually removed them from the account. He began to doubt that a virus caused the problem with the laptop. It appeared as if the damage might be intentional.

Before dawn on July 16, Cindy's mother, Shirley Cuza, sat down at her computer and sent an email to her sister. In the middle of her update about her cat's health and questions about her sibling's dog, she wrote:

I guess you haven't heard from Cindy? I just can't imagine what's going on with Casey??? Unless she and Cindy had a “spat” before she left last time, there doesn't seem to be any reason for her to do this to her mom???

For now, Shirley simply believed that her granddaughter Casey was playing games with Cindy. She did not suspect that her great-granddaughter Caylee had come to any harm.

 

A little before 7 that morning, Casey began a text message exchange with Tony. “I'm so sorry for not telling you what happened. We obviously need to talk. I need you and I love you more than you know.”

“Where is Caylee?” he asked.

“I honestly don't know.”

“Don't know? R u serious? When did u find out?”

“I've been filing reports all night and driving around with multiple officers looking at old apartments I had taken her to. Everything. Too long. Let's just leave it at that.”

“Y wouldn't u tell me of all people? I was ur boyfriend that cares about you and ur daughter. Doesn't make sense to me. Why would you lie to me?” Tony asked.

“I lied to everyone. What was I supposed to say? I trusted my daughter with some psycho? How does that look?”

“Idk [I don't know] what to say. I just hope your daughter is okay and I'm gonna do whatever I can do to help ur family and the cops.”

“I was put in handcuffs for almost 10 minutes and sat in the back of a cop car. The best and most important
person in my life is missing. I am the dumbest person and the worst mother. I honestly hate myself. The most important thing is getting Caylee back but I truly hope that you can forgive me. Granted, I will never be able to forgive myself.”

“Who is this Zanny Nanny person?” he asked.

“Someone I had met through a mutual friend almost 4 years ago. She used to be my buddy Jeff's nanny before she became mine. I'm scared.”

“R u home?”

“Yeah. Almost 12 hours of stuff. Finally getting a shower. I feel like shit.”

“Where did u drop off Caylee last time u saw her?”

“At her apartment. At the bottom stairs.”

“Where?!”

“Sawgrass Apartments. Have told and showed police the apartment. Told them and drove out there with two different officers. I just got back from the second drive. If they don't find her, guess who gets blamed and spends eternity in jail?”

“Yeah, no shit,” Tony agreed. “Why wouldn't u say something sooner bout this? To anyone? Oh and why are u texting and not calling?”

“I talked to two people that have been directly connected to Zanny. How can I sit there and be so blind and stupid? It's my fault. I was scared to admit it. I was scared that something was going to happen to my baby.”

 

Iassen Donov received a call from a friend telling him to check out Casey's MySpace page. He did. Everything had changed. “Caylee's missing,” dominated the page. He called Lee's girlfriend, Mallory Parker. She explained what was going on with Casey and Caylee. Later, Lee called asking him to spread the word.

Matthew Crisp read the message on his cell phone. “Caylee is missing. She has been for thirty-two days now. Please if you have any information call me on cell or at home.”

“Are you serious?” he typed.

“Yes,” she responded.

“I believe we had lunch since then and it never came up.”

“It's a long story,” Casey typed. “Posting on MySpace and Face Book shortly. Please pass it on.”

When Melina Calabrese heard the news of Caylee's disappearance, she was perplexed.
Oh my gosh, why didn't she call me? My gosh, why didn't you call anybody? Five weeks? I mean, I'm one of her best friends.
Melina could not understand why Casey had not reached out to her, her parents, her brother or the cops in all that time.

Lauren Gibbs received the message about Caylee and called Casey right away, breathless. “Omigod, Casey.”

Casey was matter-of-fact in her response. “Yeah. Caylee's missing. I haven't seen her. I talked to her yesterday, so I know she's fine. It was from a private number.”

“Do you have any idea who it could be?” Lauren asked.

“No,” Casey said.

Childhood friend Brittany Schrieber woke up that morning to discover the same text message from Casey waiting on her cell phone.

Brittany typed, “Caylee missing?”

“Yes, she has been for a few weeks.”

“What happened?”

“Her nanny. Someone I trusted took her. No calls until yesterday,” Casey claimed.

“I'm sorry. If you need anything, let me know.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything I should keep my eye open to watch out for.”

“A silver Ford Focus, four-door,” Casey responded.

A lot of people received a similar text message that morning. Some received similar responses from Casey, some got no response at all and others received a phone call from Lee explaining the situation and asking for assistance to find Caylee.

Brittany seemed to get everyone's attention. After she'd
texted with Casey, she received two calls from Lee. The first was an explanation and a plea for help. The second was a wrong number—he thought he was calling someone else—and a complaint about Casey giving the family false phone numbers. Cindy made contact with her as well. She walked the short distance up the street to visit in person after Casey left on another excursion with the police just after noon. “Casey is hiding something,” Cindy told Brittany. “She told me she was going to Jacksonville for a month for a job, and was going to drop the baby off with a sitter.”

Cindy explained that she hadn't offered to take care of Caylee while Casey was out of town because of the jealousy issue over Cindy's relationship with her granddaughter. Cindy said they knew Casey wasn't in Jacksonville when they found out that her car had been towed from Amscot.

“The car seat, diapers and Caylee's baby doll were in the car—Caylee never leaves without her baby doll. It's been her baby since she was born.”

Cindy moved on to Casey's behavior in the last month. “She made sure I wasn't there before she came to the house. She'd go and take the stuff she needed, and stole money every time. But she never took anything for Caylee. No shoes, no pajamas, no dolls, no anything.”

Detective Yuri Melich spent the day of July 16 chasing down leads and talking with Casey Anthony. It was clear to him that every detail provided by Casey turned into a dead end. The claim of the last place she'd seen Caylee, the tale of the kidnapping nanny, the story of a job at Universal—one falsehood piled upon another.

Melich gave Casey the opportunity to change her story—again and again. She stubbornly persisted, as if repetition could magically transform reality.

Although the investigator hoped for Caylee's safe return, he feared that the prospect of finding her alive was already passing through the improbable phase, and quickly approaching the impossible. He didn't have the evidence to charge Casey for her daughter's death, but he could arrest for her false statement and child neglect.

As he prepared the charging document, he called George Anthony and asked for permission to pick up everything that had been in the white Pontiac Sunfire at the time George retrieved it from Johnson's Wrecker service.

With George's agreement, Melich sent Detective Charity Beasley to the Anthony home. George wrote a statement affidavit for the detective allowing the Orange County Sheriff's Office to “search and provide evidence to help bring back my granddaughter—Caylee.”

Beasley pulled evidence tape across the doors and trunk of the Pontiac. From inside the home, she recovered Caylee's cloth-body, unclothed baby doll, a
Dora the Explorer
backpack, a child's toothbrush, a dinnerware knife and a leather bag containing papers, along with other miscellaneous items. The Anthonys volunteered a Compaq laptop used by Casey.

Cindy told the investigator that she'd already washed a vile-smelling pair of pants she'd found in the car, as well as all of Casey's smoke-filled clothing, which Lee had picked up at Tony's apartment. Because of the laundering, Detective Beasley did not confiscate them.