Mommy's Little Girl (23 page)

One thing that often occurs in the case of a missing child, didn't happen here. Authorities did not issue an AMBER Alert, because of the length of time since Caylee had disappeared, and because the known information did not meet the requirements of the established criteria.

The afternoon of July 18, George and Cindy roamed around their house and yard trying to think of any little thing that could have happened to their granddaughter. “You know, George,” Cindy said, “I hope she didn't—something happened—she didn't panic. Caylee coulda got outside real quick.” They both thought back to the day that Cindy had come home and found the pool ladder propped beside the pool.

That day, Attorney Baez attacked the sheriff's office, saying, “police really haven't been looking for Gonzalez, they've been digging in the grandparents' backyard.”

Law enforcement was in fact looking for the missing little girl by running down leads—forty of them had already been received by the end of Friday, and they kept coming in by phone, fax and email in Orange County as well as on the hotline at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Some were actual sightings, sending officers out to investigate and verify or eliminate. One person reported seeing Caylee at Chuck E. Cheese's on the day of her mother's arrest. On Thursday, someone else thought they'd seen her in the lobby of a Bank of America branch.

Throughout the investigation, a large number of tips came from people whose knowledge was indirect—psychics from around the world, people who'd had dreams of Caylee and those who claimed they'd received a special message from the Lord. The leads were all over the place.

Conflicting visions abounded. Caylee was covered with leaves, next to a stream, or in a barn, or buried in a field full of telephone poles, in the Anthony backyard, in a playground, or in a landfill. One believed that Caylee was in Lucedale, Mississippi, with the KKK, who'd paid for her because they use children in their cult rituals.

Another, claiming that she'd gotten all of her information from Caylee's great-great-great-grandmother, had a story about a person finding Caylee on a bus and turning her over to Child Protective Services—but Caylee was now dressed as a boy and going by the name “Robert.” This caller explained the stench in the Anthony car by saying that Caylee had bought a cat and forgotten it in the trunk of the car. Someone else thought it was vital for the police to know that Caylee's Care Bears lunch pail was filled with “Dingos and M&M's” and stashed inside of a cupboard in a house on Centennial Drive.

 

Kid Finders Network, an organization in West Palm Beach that helped families in searches for missing kids, donated fliers and began building a mobile billboard detailing Caylee's disappearance, scheduled to hit the roads of Orlando the next week.

On Saturday, July 19, two dozen family members, friends and volunteers gathered at the Publix grocery store at Lake Underhill Road and Chickasaw Trail. They set up a tent, marked car windows with urgent messages and sallied forth to distribute fliers in the area.

Gentiva employees—Nilsa, Charles, Deborah and Debbie—stopped by the Anthony home to pick up fliers. Cindy no longer appeared angry. She seemed calm, focused and determined. Before they left, Jesse Grund arrived. Cindy threw her arms around his neck and said, “We've got to bring this little girl home. We've got to find her.”

The team from Gentiva canvassed Tony's apartment complex, handing out fliers. Other groups distributed them at the University of Central Florida in the Conway area,
in downtown Orlando, at large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target, and at major intersections.

George made arrangements for more posters to be picked up at Staples downtown. A family member needed to run that errand, and Cindy volunteered. She stopped by the tent at Publix first. There, she spotted Annie Downing writing on car windows, and thought it would be a good opportunity to take her aside and ask her about what she knew. “Annie, you wanna go with me to Staples?”

During the ride to the office supply store, Cindy found comfort chatting with one of Casey's friends. She brought up her desire to gather up a bunch of Casey's friends and try together to create a timeline of Casey's movements in recent days. Annie thought that was a good idea.

After dropping Annie off at the Publix tent, Cindy returned home, where Jesse and Lee sat at opposite ends of the dining room table working on the logistics of the search for Caylee. “Annie and I just had a really great talk. I think it'd be helpful if we get all of Casey's friends together and kind of do a timeline over the last month and see where her head was at and what was going on.”

“Mrs. Anthony, let me volunteer to be in charge of that timeline,” Jesse offered.

“Well, Jesse, a lot of these friends I'm gonna be talking to, you don't know. And I'd kind of like to talk to her friends first. Certainly, you can interject your stuff in the timeline.”

“I really want to participate,” Jesse said.

“Fine,” said Cindy, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. She took notes as Jesse told her all he could remember. At this time, Jesse thought he recalled talking to Casey on the telephone the last week of June—more than a week after anyone had seen Caylee. He thought he'd heard Casey tell Caylee to get off the table during that conversation. He later told police that he believed he was confused about the date of the call.

On Sunday, July 20, Christopher Stutz, Amy Huizenga, Troy Brown, Rico Morales, Jesse Grund and other friends
gathered at the Anthony home to provide information to Cindy and each other. They vented their frustrations and concerns about the current situation and plotted out events on calendars.

While they worked, George went next door to Brian Burner's house. When Brian answered the door, George handed him a flier and told him that they were having a vigil for Caylee on Sunday evening. “You're the one that turned in the shovel, right?”

“Yeah, I turned in the shovel,” Brian said, wondering why he'd even asked, since it had already been all over the news.

“Well, we're trying to set up our own timeline, and want to know when you gave her the shovel.”

“I think it was the week of the sixteenth, but I'm not sure,” Brian said.

“I'm sorry we haven't been able to come over and speak to you about what's going on, but everything has been crazy.”

Brian assured George that he understood and said, “I didn't turn in the shovel to make it like something bad had happened in your yard.”

 

Kiomarie Cruz called Yuri Melich at 8:30 that night to tell him about the woods where she and Casey used to hang out in middle school. An hour later, the two met at Hidden Oaks Elementary School and walked back to the wooded area, just blocks from the Anthony home. Kiomarie was the first to point to this location—but she would not be the last. Those woods would haunt the investigation for months.

 

Sixty people showed up in the Anthonys' front yard for the first Caylee vigil on July 20. They prayed together and shared comforting thoughts with the family. José Baez stepped up to speak to the group in defense of his client. “I'd like to make it clear that my client, Casey Anthony, at no time refused to speak with law enforcement.
A lot has been reported about this matter and that I am in some way standing in her way. I'd like to . . . direct everybody's attention to the arrest report, which clearly states that the police were called out on the fifteenth of this month, and she spoke with them immediately on that day, and then on the following day, practically the entire day she spent with law enforcement. Only upon being arrested and might be detained that she invoked her right to counsel, as I think anyone would do in this country. We are focused on trying to find Caylee.”

 

Cindy Anthony appeared on the
Today
show on the morning of July 21. She asked that police release her daughter so she could help investigators. Cindy also said that Casey had gotten a mysterious telephone call from Caylee last Tuesday, July 15.

Ann Curry asked, “Cindy, if you could speak to your daughter, what would you say to her?”

“My first words probably be: ‘I forgive you.' I have not said that to her, although I told her that I love her and that I support her.”

“Why would you say, ‘I forgive you'? Forgive her for what?”

“For not telling me sooner, for not telling the police sooner. You can't, you can't understand, someone can't come to grips until they're forgiven. So she's probably not going to be able to tell me everything until I can forgive her,” Cindy explained.

“Well, what could possibly explain why it took her five weeks to report her missing daughter, Cindy? You know her.”

“I have no idea. I know her, and I know Casey knows. I know Casey doesn't know where they're at right at the moment, but I don't know anything else right now, because I can't speak to my daughter, and we're trying to get that changed very quickly. I'd like to make a plea to the prosecutor and the judge to let her out so we can all talk to her.”

In the Orange County Sheriff's Office forensics garage, Dr. Michael Sigman collected two separate air samples from the Pontiac Sunfire. He used a large gas-tight syringe to extract them. He placed each one in a separate Tedlar polymer bag, a sealed clear package designed to capture and hold gas vapors and air samples. He prepared the bags for shipment—one to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the other to the National Center for Forensic Science.

On Tuesday, he collected an additional sample using an SPME filter—a piece of equipment widely used in research laboratories studying odor pollution from pig and poultry farms. The smell from the garbage bag recovered from the impound lot was studied, but no trace of decomposition odor was detected in the trash or the bag itself.

Cindy clung to the rotten pizza story as an explanation for the wretched stench emanating from the car.

Casey, with José Baez by her side, appeared in Circuit Court Judge Stan Strickland's court for a bond hearing on July 22. Casey appeared calm, undisturbed by the drama swirling around her. Baez, with his slicked-back black hair and expensive suit, seemed confident and ready to do battle.

Assistant State Attorney Linda Drane-Burdick called Detective Yuri Melich to the stand. He testified that the forensic specialists “found hair samples in the trunk of the car that are a similar color to that of Caylee. They also set a stain inside the trunk of the car that came up under black light that's questionable, and we need to process. They also found some dirt inside the trunk of the car that needs to be processed. I actually went into the car to smell what the smell smelled like. Briefly, just before I came into the job, I was a homicide detective for two years with Lawrence County Sheriff's Office. And in my experience, the smell that I smelled inside the car was the smell of decomposition.”

“Right now, what we are dealing with is that you have a child who is missing for a lengthy period of time . . .” Drane-Burdick began.

“Yes,” the detective agreed.

“That wasn't reported by the mother for several weeks . . .”

“Correct.”

“That there was an abandoned car that contained evidence of human decomposition.”

“Correct.”

“Is Casey Anthony a suspect, a possible—I don't wanna misstate this. The evidence of human decomposition would lead you to believe, would it not, that there is a possibility that this child is no longer alive?”

“Yes, that can be concluded,” Melich nodded.

“All right. And is Ms. Anthony a suspect in that circumstance?”

“I wouldn't use the word ‘suspect' I would use the word ‘person of interest.' ”

Jason Forgey, K9 Deputy with the Orange County Sheriff's Office, stepped up next to testify about his trained cadaver dog, a German Shepherd named Gerus, responding to the odor in the car. “He jumped up into the trunk with front claws, stuck his head in, backed up, did the eye contact and moved to the right rear passenger side, rear fender/trunk–taillight area and gave me a fine train of alert.”

“What's that mean?” Drane-Burdick asked.

“He alerted to the odor of human decomposition.”

“In the trunk of that car?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

When cross-examined by the defense, all the witnesses with the Orange County Sheriff's Office insisted they were still looking for the girl alive, and urged anyone with information to step forward. As of this date, they had received more than one hundred tips and were investigating every credible lead. The detectives told Baez that they had not been able to find the baby-sitter or prove that she even existed.

Linda Drane-Burdick turned to the judge. “The risk of her flight if she is released on some low bond increases exponentially, especially now that she's heard this additional evidence, and knows that she is their person of interest.”