Presumed Guilty

by Jose Baez

  After putting the snake in their truck, they drove back to the office and showed fellow employees passing by in the office parking lot the snake they had found. You’d think Kronk would have said something about the skull he saw, especially since they had just been talking about Caylee’s disappearance and how that spot would be a perfect place for a body. But he didn’t. The location of the skull wasn’t more than a quarter mile from the Anthony home, but by his account, he said nothing more about it until he returned home after work.

  Once home, Kronk mentioned the skull to his girlfriend, Michelle, who was following the case closely on TV. Kronk says it was she who insisted he call 9-1-1.

  “There’s a gray bag down there,” he told the woman at the other end of the phone. “I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s Caylee or anything of that nature.” They then talked about the neighborhood, but Kronk was unable to tell her exactly where it was.

  He told the dispatcher about the snake and said to her, “Right here, behind one of the trees down there was a gray bag, and then a little further up, I saw something white. But after I saw that eastern diamondback rattlesnake, I wasn’t going back in there.”

  “Okay, thank you,” said the dispatcher. “Good-bye.”

  The call was assigned to Deputy Adriana Acevedo. It came at night, and she really didn’t know where to look. She drove down Suburban Drive and then called in, “I don’t see anything.”

  The next night, August 12, Kronk called again. He told the dispatcher, “I went down there, and behind one of the trees was a gray, vinyl-like bag.” Obviously he has been close enough to the bag to be able to identify what it was made of. He said, “It’s like a pool cover or something like that. I didn’t touch anything.” And then he said, “A little bit further up someone ran across with a mower, but the weeds were still very high in that area.” Again, he’s giving details about the area, and here he’s talking about the grass line, where they cut the grass along the woods. There’s no sidewalk, but there’s grass, and the city cuts it to keep the foliage attractive. That’s what he was referring to. Then Kronk said, “There’s a fallen tree that looks like someone has tried to cut it at one point, but there was a white board hanging across the tree, and there’s something round and white underneath it.” Obviously he was describing Caylee’s skull. He said, “I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t look like it should be there.” Kronk and the dispatcher then discussed directions, the nearby elementary school, the snake, and his phone number. They told him he should call Crimeline.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. But in the end he did and when he did, the dispatcher typed out everything that Kronk had said. She typed, “Caller was assigned as a meter reader to the Anthony residence. On the way back down to Suburban, passing the Anthony’s street, there’s a swamp with a six-foot-high fence. Caller stopped and looked down and saw a single metallic thing that looked like a vinyl bag and a little further up there was a little white, round object. Caller was not sure what it was. Behind the tree there was a six-foot diamondback rattlesnake. He wasn’t interested in going to see any further.”

  Then it said, “There was a break where the tree had fallen over. That is where the caller saw it.” So again, Kronk mentioned the tree.

  After this 9-1-1 call, the Crimeline tip was investigated by Detective Jerold White, whom I found to be extremely professional and well organized. When the tip was assigned to him on August 14, it was marked, “Area has been searched.” I would later find out that White had gone to Detective Yuri Melich and had asked him about the area. Melich told him he didn’t need to follow up on that, because that area had been searched.

  Kronk’s call to 9-1-1 was assigned to Deputy Sheriff Elizabeth Collins on August 12. She called Kronk and talked to him on the phone. She was driving with her night light, which she shined into the woods, but she said she couldn’t see anything. She suggested that Kronk call again after he got off work, and an officer would meet him at the site.

  The next day, August 13, there was a third, brief 9-1-1 call. He told the dispatcher where he was standing as he waited for the police to arrive. Kronk met with Detective Richard Cain and a second officer, Deputy Kethlin Cutcher. According to Kronk, “The deputy [Cain] shows up. He gets out of the car. I told him what I had seen. I also told him that the day before that we had seen a six-and-a-half foot eastern diamondback rattlesnake right there. He pulled his expanding metal baton. I showed him in the area where it was. He took two steps into the woods. He basically slid down the hill. He came out, and told me the area had already been searched. He told me I was wasting the county’s time and basically told me I was an idiot. He just started belittling me, and I left. When I get that kind of treatment from people, I’d just rather not deal with it anymore, okay?”

  In no situation could I envision a scenario in which an officer is dispatched after someone calls the cops and says he had found a dead body, shows up, and comes back empty-handed, without really looking.

  And we have a discrepancy, because Cain’s story of what happened on August 13 is very different. Cain said that after he arrived at the scene, Kronk took him into the woods, stood right behind him, and showed him a bag that was full of leaves and sticks. There was no evidence of bones or body parts. Cain said he inspected the bag with his baton, saw that there was nothing to Kronk’s call, and left.

  Four months passed. Then on December 11, 2008, Kronk, again reading meters in the area of the Anthony home, returned to the site and this time he absolutely, positively found Caylee’s skull.

  In his written statement of December 11, Kronk said that this time he went into the woods to urinate, saw a black plastic bag, and hit it with a stick. He said he heard a thud, and that it sounded like he had hit plastic. He said when he felt it, it felt round, so he pulled on the bag with the stick, the bag opened, and a human skull with hair and duct tape around its mouth dropped out.

  It was Melich and Detective Eric Edwards who pulled Kronk aside to take his statement. This was the biggest case of their careers. They had invested hundreds if not thousands of man-hours trying to find this child, and Kronk finds her body. But, they interviewed him for exactly three minutes.

  Note that Kronk said “in it.” Here he’s clear that the skull was inside the bag.

  “Did you open it? Was it open?” he was asked.

  “No, it was closed,” he said.

  “Okay, so what happened next?”

  “I saw a round dome,” Kronk said. “It kind of looked like something, so I took my stick and I hit it, and it sounded like plastic or hollow bone or something. And then I took my stick, which is curved for pulling meter reader boxes, and I grabbed the bottom of the bag and pulled it. And I pulled it a second time, and then a human skull dropped out with hair around it and duct tape around the mouth. And I went, ‘Oh God,’ and I immediately called my supervisor that I had found human remains and I needed the police.”

  Kronk told the police he didn’t touch anything. He reinforced that, and after they asked for his stick, with reluctance he told them where they could find it in his truck. He talked to the two detectives about his supervisor, and then Melich asked him a key question: “So is there anything else, the bag, or how you found it, or anything you wanted to tell us that you think is important?”

  After Kronk again said he didn’t touch anything, Melich asked him to raise his right hand.

  “Do you swear what you told me was the truth?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Kronk.

  THERE ARE A NUMBER of problems with Kronk’s story, a few of which you may have noticed already.

  First, Kronk calls 9-1-1 in August saying that he saw a skull twenty houses down from the Anthony home in the midst of the biggest case in recent memory. He knows where the skull is, but he can’t seem to successfully get the police to see it. Doesn’t this seem odd?

  Melich and Edwards conducted a follow-up interview with Kronk on January 6, 2009. They were in a bind. If Kronk saw a skull in August and ca
lled the police, the police would have egg all over their faces for not following up and finding it. So Melich and Edwards went back to the question of what Kronk saw back in August.

  “What do you think it was?” asked Melich.

  “I thought it was a human skull,” said Kronk.

  “No question?”

  “No.”

  Then Melich asked him, “If someone were to ask you why you didn’t call that afternoon, while you were standing there, if you thought it was a skull and your reaction to that would be?”

  “Well, it looked like a skull to me,” Kronk answered. “I was ninety nine point nine, nine, nine percent sure it was a skull, but Dave tells me I’m crazy, and honestly, it was a hot day. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to take a shower. I wanted to, you know, drink a soda, relax in the pool.”

  And what was the cops’ reaction to such an obviously ridiculous response?

  “Um hum.”

  Which left open the answer to the very important question that Melich asked, but that Kronk ducked: When Kronk first saw the skull, why didn’t he persist until the police came and found it? Why didn’t he go to the media?

  Second, when Kronk finds the body in December, he seems to claim it was just a coincidence that he’s back there. In his statement on December 11, Kronk told them, “I’ve read this route before.” It was the first thing he said to them. “And I know the area over here in the woods. It’s a safe place to urinate.” But he never said, “Because the last time I urinated here, I saw a skull.” Instead, he said, “So I parked my truck with my yellow lights on, to make it appear I was actually doing something. I grabbed my meter stick out of the back of my truck and I went into the woods to urinate. When I finished, I noticed a black plastic bag and saw a dome in it.” Isn’t it very strange that he doesn’t mention the first sighting of the skull?

  And he and the police both downplay the August call to an extent that strains credulity. Recall that in the December interview Melich asks him a key question: “So is there anything else, the bag, or how you found it, or anything you wanted to tell us that you think is important?”

  The natural answer would have been, “Yeah, assholes, I called you four months ago, and the cop came out and said I was wasting his time.” But instead he said, “I just noticed there was white material like clothing or a pillow or something, but I really didn’t stare at it too long.”

  What I found incredible was that there was nothing written in the report about the fact that he had called the police about the bag and skull back in August.

  I found that to be a glaring omission.

  When we launched an investigation into Kronk’s background, we learned that when he was living in Tennessee fifteen years earlier, he had called in a tip to the police, telling them that there were stolen guns hidden in the woods. The police went out and searched, but found nothing. I found it both shocking and relevant that two times in this man’s life he had called the police about something he saw in the woods and the police found nothing. How many times have you done that? This guy did it twice!

  In a sworn statement on January 6, 2009, Kronk for the first time said he had told police on December 11 that he had made three calls in August about finding Caylee’s body. In a conversation on January 6, 2009, Kronk also mentioned that he was told by the police not to say anything about the August calls. I interviewed all the officers in the case connected to Kronk, and everyone said the same thing: “I never told him not to say anything.” Every police officer denied it, even though Kronk’s statement was that he was told not to mention the earlier calls because “it would make the department look bad.”

  So the question then arises: Who was lying? Was it Kronk, or was it the cops? The police brushed Kronk’s, “They told me, ‘Don’t say anything about the August calls’” statement under the rug, saying Kronk was making a joke. Internal Affairs came up with a cockamamie story that that conversation took place between Kronk and a coworker at the scene on December 11, not between Kronk and the police.

  I don’t believe that explanation for a minute. I don’t see how you can confuse the two. In fact, to say it was a conversation between Kronk and a coworker strains credibility.

  Third, Kronk changes his story about whether the skull was in the bag or outside it. He told the detectives in December that he found a bag with the skull in it. Back in August when he first found the skull, he said it was outside the bag. He told Crimeline that he was in the woods, stopped, and looked down, saw the vinyl bag and a little further up saw a little round white object. Obviously he’s describing a skull.

  This change was downplayed by both Kronk and the police. Kronk said, “I really didn’t notice anything else, because obviously once I discovered what I discovered, the bag was minimal to me anymore. It really didn’t matter.”

  Then Edwards said to him, “So the image that’s being portrayed through the media is this skull rolling out of the bag and …”

  Kronk replied, “No, I, no.”

  “So that never occurred?” asked Edwards.

  “That never occurred,” said Kronk.

  In my view, we were watching Edwards get Kronk to change his statement of December 11, where Kronk told Deputy Edward Turso, the first officer on the scene, “A human skull rolled out of the bag.” He also told Deputy Pamela Porter, the second officer on the scene, that it rolled out of the bag. So this wasn’t something the media had made up. This was something Kronk had told two different police officers.

  Now Kronk, with the help of “Eric the Masseuse,” was saying it never happened. We had given Edwards the nickname “Eric the Masseuse” because he is an expert at massaging witnesses and their testimony. And the reason it was so important to the cops to get him to change his statement had to do with the initial investigation by Cain. If the skull had been outside the bag, why hadn’t Cain seen it?

  It also has a lot to do with subsequent actions by Kronk, as I noted earlier. If Kronk had seen a skull, as he initially told Cain and Kutcher, why didn’t he go down the block and grab a media truck and show them the skull? If the skull dropped out of the bag, how did it end up that way? If he saw the skull, why did he wait four months to make sure the cops saw it? There are so many questions to be asked, if Kronk saw the skull in August.

  It could mean one of two things. He could be telling the truth. If so, then the skull was outside the bag, and someone put it inside the bag and hid it while Casey was in jail. Or it tells us that Kronk was lying.

  Other aspects of Kronk’s story were also inconsistent. What I found most interesting was that Kronk told the Crimeline that he looked down at the round object. In all of the statements Kronk would make, he would say he saw it from a distance. Here he was saying, “I looked down and saw this round skull.” To me that was an indication he was standing right over it. Another indication of that was the detail he was able to give about the type of bag it was, the cut on the tree, and the white board.

  Fourth, as I noted earlier, there is some evidence that Kronk was coached by the police to get his story straight. The police claimed they weren’t satisfied with Kronk’s story, so they went back and interviewed him for a second time on December 17. I never did get a clear answer from law enforcement as to what prompted them to go back and talk to Kronk again on December 17. What they said was that they felt the evidence at the scene didn’t coincide with his statements, so they wanted to go back and get a second statement to clarify some important points.

  But, in my view, that’s not what they were doing and I’ll tell you why. Something law enforcement does too often is called “pre-interviewing.” They interview the person privately, and after they are done talking to them and done getting the information they want, they go back and turn on the tape recorder and get the person to say what they want him to say. They can do this because the cops know beforehand exactly what the witness is going to say before the statements are recorded. And they do it so the accused and the accused’s lawyers can hear only the conv
ersation that was recorded and not the initial one. As I said, it’s a technique often used by law enforcement, and I believe it was used all the time in this case. Often, the information given after a pre-interview isn’t very reliable. The tactics are hidden. A slick detective can coach a witness, tell him what he wants to hear, tell him what he should say, and then they go on tape, and the witness merely regurgitates everything that he’s expected to say.

  The record provides evidence that Melich and Edwards pre-interviewed Kronk before interrogating him on tape on December 17.

  From the transcript of their interview, Melich said, “Okay Mr. Kronk, we came down here to visit you at your house because we wanted to get a more detailed statement about the morning of the 11th, when you found what you found. Walk me through that morning just like you did before [emphasis mine], and then we’ll kind of use that to go back to that earlier Crimeline tip that you mentioned.”

  This proves Melich and Kronk had talked earlier.

  Kronk says, “Okay,” and then he starts to talk about it.

  Later in the interview Edwards said to Kronk, “Now, your description earlier when we first got here and did a little pre-interview, you had said it was almost like balding, like a male pattern baldness. The top was aha—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Kronk, and he gives them what they want. Here Edwards very clearly stated they had had a pre-interview.

  Here’s another example. Edwards and Melich were interviewing Kronk on December 17 and asked him whether he moved Caylee’s skull.

  “I mean I didn’t move it as in physically move it … from one location to another,” Kronk said. “I just kind of lifted it up a little bit when it …”