Presumed Guilty

by Jose Baez

  I had gotten Lee’s cell phone number from another forensic scientist. I called him and introduced myself.

  “Dr. Lee, my name is Jose Baez.”

  He answered with a joke.

  “So you’re telling me you’re biased,” he said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “In a manner of speaking, I guess I am.”

  Lee knew about Casey’s case. He had heard about it on the news and he was interested in meeting with me. Though his main office was in New Haven, Connecticut, he owned a home in Orlando and traveled to Florida often. He happened to be traveling to South Florida several days later, and we agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant, of all places. It turns out he’s a big fan of Chinese food, and the people who work in Chinese restaurants recognize him and cook extra special dishes for him. Dinner was really a treat.

  We started talking about the case. I had prepared a packet to give him, which included the discovery I had received from the prosecution as well as a videotape of law enforcement processing the trunk of Casey’s car. Since the crime scene investigators had requested that the media film them, I was hoping that perhaps Lee might find something inappropriate that might backfire against them.

  He said, “The best way of doing this is to inspect the car.”

  We set up a date for the car inspection. I started taking depositions to get more information, interviewing the employees of Amscot, where the car was abandoned, and the employees of the tow yard.

  I didn’t tell a soul that I had hired Lee. He was kind enough to sign onto the case for a $5,000 donation to his institute. The day came, and the media, which found out about our arrival through checking the public records, showed up. When I walked in with my paralegal and Lee, I could see the look of recognition on the faces of some of the reporters.

  There’s a long hallway that goes back to the forensics section of the sheriff’s department, and we had to walk by a conference room where all the cops were sitting. Around the table joking and laughing were CSI Gerardo Bloise, CSI Michael Vincent, FBI Special Agent Nick Savage, Detective Yuri Melich, Sergeant John Allen, and Detective Eric Edwards. I’ll never forget the look on their faces when I walked in with Dr. Henry Lee. Prior to that, I had just told them I was bringing an expert; I never mentioned a name. Their jaws all dropped. They sat up straight in their chairs. Early on, it was one of my finer moments.

  “We’re here to inspect the car,” I said.

  As Lee was getting on his protective gear, we went into the forensics area. Savage walked with me and said, “I have to tell you, Jose, I’m impressed. You got Henry Lee. What did you have to do, get a second mortgage on your house to get him?”

  “Something like that,” I said with a smirk.

  The very first thing Lee and I did was walk over to Casey’s car. It was sealed with yellow evidence tape. The doors and trunk were sealed. There was some black powder dust on the trunk, and I could see it had been dusted for prints. Why, I wasn’t sure. Of course Casey’s fingerprints were going to be on the trunk of her car.

  When Bloise opened the trunk, I could smell something rotten. I had been to a morgue before and I had smelled dead bodies, and my first impression was that this smelled like a dead body, especially after hearing about it for so long.

  I smelled something else in the air, a chemical-like substance, but I couldn’t place it. It didn’t smell like gasoline, but I could tell it had a gasoline base. If you took a good strong whiff, it almost hurt your nostrils.

  Oh my God, I immediately thought. This is not good. I thought to myself, This is not good at all. I’m going to have to talk to Casey about taking a plea.

  I was feeling low and watching Lee at work, looking for a reaction from him, because he had told me, “If there’s something I need to tell you, I’ll pull you aside and we’ll talk about it.”

  He was looking at the contents of the trunk, doing his inspection, slowly and meticulously. After a while he stopped, and we left the area and went inside to ask for the trunk liner.

  They brought it out piece by piece, and Lee took out his magnifying glass and began a methodical inspection. I watched him and couldn’t believe just how meticulous he was. He went over that trunk liner inch by inch and then called me over.

  “Do you see this?” he asked.

  I could see a light hair.

  “Do you see the shape of the hair?” he asked. “It’s curved a certain way. That shows it’s an animal hair. Not human hair.”

  I nodded as if this was exactly what we expected to find. Meanwhile, I noticed that Melich was taking photographs of everything Lee was doing. I guess he was documenting the examination. Lee resumed his exploration and then stopped. He called Bloise over and told him, “This is a hair. Collect it.”

  Bloise got out a pair of tweezers and did as he was told. Then Lee resumed his search and, after three hours of painstaking work, looking inch by inch, he finally completed his examination of the trunk liner. In the process he collected a total of fourteen hairs that had been missed by the searches of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. Bloise, hard at work, collected each hair, one by one.

  They then asked, “Do you want to see the contents of the trunk?”

  We did, of course. I really had no idea what was in there. Prior to this I had heard Cindy talk about the pizza box so I figured there would be a small bag containing remnants of leftover pizza. Ten minutes later Bloise arrived with two large boxes filled with garbage. I couldn’t believe how much garbage had been in the back of that car.

  I said to myself, This is where the smell came from.

  Prior to that, I was really feeling low. Once I saw this, my eyes opened up.

  They started emptying the boxes piece by piece, and I could see that the contents had been dried; I was enraged.

  The garbage they brought out had no smell. It was completely devoid of any smell whatsoever.

  She had two large bags of garbage in the car and it doesn’t smell? I said to myself. What the fuck?

  “Where’s the bag?” I asked, meaning the bag that must have held all the garbage. I wanted to know.

  “It’s not here,” they said.

  Well, where the hell is it? I thought to myself. Perhaps they threw it away. I left it at that. Little did I know that they had sent it to a lab to have it checked for bug evidence. Of course, they neglected to tell me that.

  Lee started going through the garbage, pulling out three more hairs. He could see the trash no longer was soiled. In fact, there was an empty bottle with three or four ounces of dried spit from chewing tobacco in it.

  I still worried that the smell I smelled was that of a human body. I too had heard what the cops always said: Once you’ve smelled human decomposition, you never forget it. Well, it was a pretty bad smell.

  Afterward we broke for lunch, and I talked to Lee about what he had found. The first question I asked him was, “Does the car smell like a human body to you?”

  He said, “It smells like decomposition. You never know whether it’s decomposing garbage or a decomposing body. There’s no way to tell, and for anyone to make that leap, it’s impossible.”

  At that point I was extremely relieved.

  We came back from lunch to find Angelo Nieves, the public information officer, outside the sheriff’s office telling the press, “we’re processing the car and it still smells like a dead body.” Instead of reporting, which was his job, Nieves was making himself into a witness.

  I’m going to call him as a witness, I told myself.

  I chalked that up to just one more time when the cops overstepped their boundaries. I thought to myself, They don’t even know the word boundaries.

  We returned to the car and the garbage, and I continued to be amazed at the endurance of Lee. I was tired just watching him as he meticulously studied the evidence, hour after hour.

  Later that afternoon, the police asked to talk to me.

  Savage and Allen called me aside and asked, “What are we going to do
to end this case?”

  “The state hasn’t made any offers,” I said. “They aren’t making any real effort.”

  “I’ll make some calls,” said Savage. “I’ll make this happen. I think if you play your cards right you can get a great deal, and we can end this thing. The last thing I want to hear is ten years from now Cindy calling me, telling me she spotted Caylee at a high school football game, and that she’s still three.”

  I told him, “I’d be delighted to explore any deals and listen to whatever the state has to say, but they haven’t even approached me.”

  We were interrupted by Melich, who said, “They’re about to open the cans.”

  Allen said, “You have to check this out. We want you to see this.”

  Of course they did.

  We walked back over to where Lee was. Sitting on a table were metal cans that looked like small paint cans. They were sealed.

  What they had done was cut out small pieces of cardboard from the trunk liner, put them in these cans, and sealed them. When you seal air, whatever smell there is gets magnified. I didn’t know any of this. They opened one of the cans and said, “Smell this.”

  It reeked. I leaned over to smell it and just as I did, Melich snapped a picture of me.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked him. He didn’t reply.

  What they were trying to do was catch me reacting to the smell. They wanted to either catch me making a prune face so they could use it against me in a motion or they wanted to leak the photo to the media to make me and my case look bad. There was no other reason for them to take a photo of me smelling the can than to try and use it against me in the media. It was pathetic. I didn’t show any reaction.

  I smelled it. Lee smelled it. My paralegal, Ed Phlegar, smelled it.

  “Yeah, right, that’s pizza,” said Edwards sarcastically.

  “What, you don’t like pepperoni?” said Ed. “It smells like pizza.”

  We left around five after being there all day. On the ride back I asked Lee, “What about the cans? I’m concerned about the smell. That’s pretty pungent.”

  “Look,” he said, “the first thing they do is seal it. The gasses get caught in the can. They heat up the can, and it magnifies the smell. You can take your carpet from your office, throw it in one of those cans and heat it up, and you would have a stinky, smelly can just like they did. Don’t read any more into that than what it really is.”

  He said, “They inspected the trunk, not once, not twice, but three times, and look at how many hairs I found after they were done. No one inspected that car more thoroughly than I did. There is nothing there.” I was relieved. I had the very best man in the business telling me not to worry. That gave me strength moving forward.

  When our experts came down to inspect all the evidence at the sheriff’s department, Dr. Lee saw something about Caylee’s shorts that no one had noticed. Her shorts were ripped. There were a couple holes due to the elements, but there were actual rips that we believe came from someone trying to fit too-small clothes onto her body.

  IN MID-OCTOBER I drove to the FBI office in Maitland, Florida, and I met with Linda Drane Burdick, the lead prosecutor, Savage, Steve McElyea of the FBI, and Allen. Melich wasn’t there. For some reason, whenever the cops needed to talk to me, Melich, the lead investigator, was never present. Either he hated me so much that he couldn’t control himself or the cops thought Allen was my buddy and had a better rapport with me. Either way, his absence was weird. Savage had promised he’d make some calls to start the ball rolling on a plea deal and he was good to his word.

  We sat around a table, and Burdick handed me a score sheet saying that if Casey, who had no prior criminal history, were to plead guilty to manslaughter of a child, the statutory recommended sentence would be thirteen years. If Casey ever was convicted of either first- or second-degree murder, she stood to spend the rest of her life in prison.

  Burdick said to me, “In exchange for Casey telling us where Caylee’s body is buried and telling us what happened, we might let her plead to count three, and she will only have to serve thirteen years.”

  Burdick was very specific with her words “we might let her plead,” meaning this was not a formal offer but more like a “let’s talk some more”–type offer. I think the reason she chose those words was because she didn’t want the media reporting that they had offered Casey a plea deal.

  Under these circumstances, I thought thirteen years was a phenomenal offer, and with some negotiating, I was sure I could have reduced that to ten years.

  As her lawyer, I had the obligation to bring the offer to Casey, informal or not. Plus I always told Casey everything; it was her life, and I never played with it. I explained to her, “My obligation as a lawyer is to entertain all deals, and I have to bring this one to you.”

  “But I don’t know where Caylee is,” Casey said emphatically. And she would say it with such great frustration and anger that I believed her.

  Over the course of the case, I brought up the offer more than once, and each time her answer was the same. I was convinced that Casey didn’t know where Caylee was, alive or dead.

  Since she couldn’t lead them to Caylee’s body, I couldn’t make the deal, and it frustrated me, because I then didn’t have anything to bargain with on her behalf.

  Those negotiations never went anywhere.

  It was my ethical responsibility to always discuss plea deals with my clients. My thoughts of innocence or guilt aside, as a lawyer I always had to explore the possibility. At the end of the day, I’m not the one facing jail time. I have had many innocent clients plead guilty because the calculated risk of going to trial, losing, and being sentenced to a long, long prison term was too much to bear. It’s a screwed-up system, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

  Not that I think Casey ever would have accepted a deal, even if she knew where Caylee was. She was always very adamant about her innocence of the murder charge. Pleading guilty to murder was something she never would have considered.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WACK PACK

  THE FASCINATION OF THE CASE—as drummed up by the intense coverage of the media—drew all sorts of people to Orlando. Crazies came out of the woodwork. Psychics appeared. Colorful characters appeared left and right in search of fame and in a few cases, fortune. Ed Phlegar, my paralegal, would listen to Howard Stern in the office, and we would always listen to the cast of characters that Howard called the “wack pack.” Soon we would have a wack pack of our own.

  By early September Tim Miller had met with Orlando law enforcement several times. They went over Casey’s cell tower records and looked at locations and wooded areas where the police hadn’t searched.

  Miller had honorable intentions, but, like a lot of people involved in this case, he was looking for publicity and he got it when he went on Nancy Grace and asked for volunteers—and donations.

  To work for Texas EquuSearch, each volunteer had to pay twenty-five dollars. A lot of people joined. Most of the searchers were good people who were just concerned about Caylee and wanted to find her. Unfortunately there were also more than a few bad seeds, who were enticed by the attention given to the case by the media. They became obsessed by it. To me, they were like the groupies who followed The Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead around the country. They volunteered because they wanted to be a part of the action. During the search to find Caylee, a number of these colorful characters came out of the woodwork.

  One of the earliest “tips” came from a woman by the name of Kiomarie Cruz, who one evening took police to a section of woods near the Anthony home. She told the police that she was Casey’s best friend during middle school and that she and Casey and a third friend, “Jessica Kelly,” used to hang out in the woods a quarter mile down the street from Casey’s house by the nearby Hidden Oaks Elementary School. She told police she and Casey used to bury their pets there. She also said that when Casey got pregnant, Casey wanted to give Caylee up for adoption, and that Cruz wante
d to adopt Caylee, but apparently Cindy wouldn’t hear of it. She would later testify that she sold her story to the National Enquirer for $20,000.

  I asked Casey about Cruz, and she said she had known who she was, but they weren’t good friends. Casey said Cruz’s story that she had offered to have Cruz adopt Caylee was “complete nonsense.”

  When I asked Cindy about it, Cindy corroborated what Casey had said.

  “That’s a bunch of BS,” said Cindy.

  I didn’t find Cruz credible because when I took her deposition, she didn’t seem to know much about Casey and her life. She claimed that Casey, she, and “Jessica Kelly” were an inseparable threesome growing up, but when the police searched for Kelly, they were unable to locate her. Casey, it seemed, wasn’t the only one with made-up friends.

  Cruz stated in her deposition that she thought Caylee was alive, and she related how she had called Officer Appie Wells, and she and Wells went to the site where she and Casey used to go in the woods, in her attempt to see if Caylee was there.

  “At ten at night?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were hoping that Caylee would be there playing?”

  “Yeah,” she said, which took me aback. Why would a two-year-old be out playing in the woods late at night? Then Cruz said she never took the same route home because she believed that people were following her. She also claimed that Casey had called her during the thirty days in June to borrow money from her.

  “Casey said she needed money for her child,” she said. When police asked her for her telephone records, she said her fiancé didn’t think it was a great idea.

  She later told police that it wasn’t Casey Anthony who had asked her to borrow money; it was another friend of hers named Casey Williams, an African-American girlfriend of hers.

  She had gotten the two confused. And that’s when I said to myself, Here is yet another wack packer.

  Another of these colorful characters was a man by the name of Dominic Casey, who had emailed me, saying he wanted to work for me for free as an investigator. I was alone in this battle and was getting bombarded with an avalanche of leaks appearing in the media. I didn’t have any money and needed help, so when I got a series of emails from an investigator who said he’d work for me pro bono, I jumped at the opportunity.