Presumed Guilty

by Jose Baez

  And Edwards chimes in, “Manipulated it some?”

  Kronk then says, “Right. Yeah, manipulated it.”

  Clearly this was a coached term.

  Later in the interview, Kronk was talking about being at the crime scene with his two coworkers and whether they talked on the radio to him. Then Edwards let the cat out of the bag. He said, “We discussed the radio transmission of, ‘I told you she was there,’ I think is what….”

  And Kronk said, “Right, because, you know, because I gave them my theory that they thought I was insane at the time, or that it was a joke.”

  Edwards, of course, would argue that the technique is legitimate, just as Melich would say there’s nothing fishy about a pre-interview. They would say, “We’re not coaching him. He tells us what he tells us.” But I don’t buy that for a second. What they’re actually trying to do is get Kronk to change his testimony.

  It is inconceivable to me that events transpired the way Kronk described them. There are just too many inconsistencies. So what really happened? No one knows for certain, but consider what in all probability I believe did occur:

  On August 11 Roy Kronk was taking a break from his meter reading with two coworkers when he had to urinate. He went into the woods, said to his coworkers, “Hey, I saw a skull,” but after they saw the dead snake and got excited, he thought better of calling the police about his find, figuring, Wait a minute. Why would I share the reward with these two other guys?

  So he returned later that day and hid Caylee’s body, waiting for the size of the reward to go up, as it did, from $10,000 to $255,000. This is the evidence I believe backs up this theory.

  Dave Evans, Kronk’s attorney, rejected that theory, asserting that Kronk “immediately and repeatedly reported his find to local law enforcement.”

  But, consider this; on December 10, the day before Kronk “found” her body, his car broke down on his way to work. He was broke, needed a new transmission. He had to borrow $1,084.17 to fix it. The very next day, he called the police to report his find again. This time, the two police officers who arrived at the scene were Turso and Porter. In her deposition Porter told me that the first question Kronk asked was, “Do I still get the reward even though she’s dead?” And the second question was, “Will my ex-wife find out about the money since I owe her child support?”

  When Alex Roberts, Kronk’s supervisor, showed up at the scene, Alex testified that Kronk told him he had just won the lottery, and that he was going to be rich because he was the one who had found Caylee.

  Kronk also made his intentions known during his January 6, 2009, interview with Melich and Edwards. Kronk said to them, “And you notice I am still keeping a low profile as humanly possible, but you know what …”

  “We really appreciate that,” said Melich.

  Then Kronk said, “But Roy has to eat too, so …” Basically he was saying he was going to go public, making the rounds of the reality news shows.

  In the end, Roy Kronk ended up getting about $25,000, including $5,000 from attorney Mark Nejame.

  For the record, here’s what Kronk said when Edwards asked him why it took him four months to go into the woods and report Caylee’s body: “I had things on my mind. My car blew up. I had to replace it, okay?

  I had just started a relationship with my son again after eighteen years of not seeing him. All right, I got insurance to pay. I have to pay my parents back. I had to go out and find a car. I think we spent all Memorial weekend, all these days out trying to find me a car. I had real things to do, okay?”

  After listening to the absurdity of his answer, did the cops say to him, “And all these things were more important than making sure we recovered this poor dead girl’s body?”

  No. Rather, they went on to their next question.

  We would find out later that the police tried to bury any mention of Kronk’s financial motives. Our investigators learned that Porter was ordered by Internal Affairs not to say anything about Kronk mentioning the reward to her. I was appalled by the report. But good cops, like Porter, don’t always go along with what the other cops want. It’s comical they changed the name from Internal Affairs to Professional Standards. These apparently are Orange County’s professional standards.

  There’s more evidence beyond Kronk’s clear financial interest in finding Caylee’s remains. When he returned to the woods, at least one person saw him—Gale St. John. St. John, the psychic dog handler, told my investigator that she saw Kronk by that part of the woods that day. We believed her because she had a video of her and her associates there that day.

  So (again, my supposition) he thought: Shit, somebody saw me in the woods. I’ve got to do something. I’ll call the cops, and when they arrive, I’ll be able to say that I called them to show them what I found, when in actuality he was doing nothing of the sort except creating an alibi for himself.

  In his deposition, we asked Kronk why his cell phone would ping off nearby towers after he got home from work that afternoon. We didn’t really have his cell tower records, so this was a bluff on our part. But he did not know that. He admitted returning to the general area and gave us a story about stopping at a store near the site where he saw the skull on his way home. This really sounded suspicious to me.

  So Kronk bides his time. And then on December 11, after months go by and the reward goes way up, he cashes in his ticket.

  Looking at the scenario backward and forward, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. This is just my opinion, but can you think of a plausible alternative? There is significant evidence to support this theory.

  AS PART OF OUR INVESTIGATION, the defense looked into the background of Kronk, and what we found wasn’t pretty. Kronk was married twice, first to Crystal Sparks and then to Jill Kerley. They painted a picture of a man who was not only a habitual liar and fantasist but a violent abuser who was arrested for kidnapping an ex-girlfriend.

  Kerley, a heavyset woman who suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was married to Kronk for only four-and-a-half months. She divorced him because he was abusive. She told my investigator Mort Smith, “We were living in Maryville, this was after he got kicked out of the U.S. Coast Guard, and he packed a bag, put it in the car, and he told me we were going to the store. And the next thing I know, we went to his parents’ house. He wouldn’t let me call my mom and dad to let them know I was okay. And then he beat me in front of his father, because I wouldn’t do what he asked me to do.”

  She told us of another time when he picked her up at the airport, and when they got home, he gave her a glass of wine.

  “After I drank it,” she said, “I passed out on the couch. I believe he drugged me and had every intention of having his way with me.”

  Kerley told our investigator that Kronk had a thing for duct tape. “He called it hundred-mile-an-hour duct tape,” she said. “Nothing can get through it.” She said that on two occasions he used duct tape to tie her down.

  When asked about what went through her mind upon hearing that Kronk had found Caylee’s body, she said, “That he had done it. The duct tape. A lot of reasons. I say that because of the abuse I went through. My gut told me he had something to do with it.”

  According to Kerley, Kronk enjoyed playing the game Dungeons & Dragons on the computer.

  “He would believe he was one of the characters,” she said. “It consumed him. I think if given the opportunity I think he would have killed me. I was very afraid of him.”

  Smith asked her, “Is he honest?”

  She said, “I don’t think he’d know the truth if it hit him in the head.”

  Sparks, who was in the U.S. Coast Guard with Kronk at the time they married, told a particularly chilling story of the day she received a call from Kronk’s father. They had divorced, and she was working in the legal office of the U.S. Coast Guard when he called to say that Kronk was in jail.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Roy kidnapped his girlfriend,” he said.

&n
bsp; She wanted to know the details.

  “The girlfriend, the nurse, they were living together and they had a breakup,” the father said. “She went back to South Carolina, and Roy was upset enough he wanted to get her back. He rented a car, and he decided he was going to take her back to Key West. He used handcuffs, duct tape, and a plastic gun he got from a drugstore to hold her.”

  Sparks was asked by Smith why Kronk was estranged from his sister Susan and his niece Jessica. Sparks told him, “There was a concern that Roy wanted to be close to Jessica. In my heart I had concerns about it. There’s concern about Roy being with young girls. Would he do something to his own niece? Someone would have to look at it with seriousness. Susan made sure Jessica didn’t sit on Roy’s lap.”

  Sparks told Smith about Kronk’s violent streak. She said that after she divorced him, he often threatened to kill her.

  “He was angry about the divorce,” she said. “I pulled a fast one on him to protect myself, protect my child. I didn’t want to be around the abuse, the violence, the alcohol. So he was angry. He made constant threats against me. He would say, ‘I should have killed you when I had the chance.’ I heard that all the time.”

  Sparks spoke of how relieved she was not to have Kronk in her life anymore. She told Smith that it had been years since she had heard from him when, out of the blue, a week before Thanksgiving, her son Brandon got a call from Kronk.

  She said, “Roy said to him, ‘Guess what? You’ll see me on the news. I’m going to be a hero. I know where the little girl in Florida who’s missing is. I’m going to go get her.’

  “Brandon called me, and he repeated what Roy said, that he was going to get the body when the water went down.” (Smith also interviewed the son, Brandon Sparks, who corroborated the testimony of his mother.)

  According to Crystal Sparks, Kronk told his parents the same thing at the same time. This was in November 2008.

  Sparks spoke at length about Kronk’s proclivity for fantasy.

  “Roy liked to fantasize,” she said. “His world is a fantasy world. Make-believe. He loved Dungeons & Dragons. He would act out like he was the king. Roy was fascinated with the pretend. If he could inject himself into another world, and be that person, that was Roy. He believed in black magic, in wizards, fantasy, fairy tales, demons, vampires—that was his world.”

  “Is he a person who can be believed?” Crystal Sparks was asked.

  “No. Absolutely not,” she said. “I have to say that. Roy says so many untruths, and when he does tell the truth, you still don’t believe him. Because everything in his head is made up. It’s like a walking book, and he wants to make things up as he goes. The story you hear today will grow tomorrow. And he was known for that.”

  My faith that Crystal Sparks was telling the truth was bolstered when, during the second deposition on July 30, 2010, Kronk testified to something he had never said before. He said that at one point he stuck his meter reader stick into the eye socket of Caylee’s skull and lifted it up. It came from out of the blue and when we heard him say that, our jaws dropped to the floor. This was after three 9-1-1 calls where he said he never touched anything, two statements on December 11, 2008, the follow-up December 17 “massage session” statement, two more statements on January 6, 2009, an eight-hour deposition on November 19, 2009. Almost two years after finding Caylee’s body, he says he lifted her skull with a stick. This was exactly what his ex-wife meant when she said, “Roy’s story would grow and grow and grow.”

  Kronk’s propensity to exaggerate and to lie was, of course, relevant to our case. We wanted to show that his story couldn’t be trusted, and that there was a very good chance that the crime scene was “staged,” meaning that it had been interfered with by Kronk, and possibly others.

  But Kronk was more than a liar. If the testimony could be believed, Kronk had a violent streak. Allegedly he was obsessed with duct tape, and there was even testimony that implied he had an interest in young girls. Now, ultimately, I never believed that Kronk had anything to do with Caylee’s death. But I didn’t tell the prosecution that. As you will see, the prosecution did everything they could to make it difficult for me to do my job. If I sent them down a few blind alleys, it was okay with me.

  CHAPTER 12

  A STAGED CRIME SCENE

  I WAS SURE THAT THE KRONK SCENARIO would give us solid ground around which to build a defense. We started to investigate Kronk, listened to his 9-1-1 tapes, and read all his statements. I found it telling the way law enforcement handled the information. I said to myself, They’re going to try to sweep this under the rug and find a fall guy. We have to follow them and exploit that. And that was exactly what they ended up doing.

  The fall guy was Deputy Richard Cain. They made a decision that Kronk was going to be their prized pony, and they were going to ride him to the finish line.

  On August 13, when Cain finally arrived at the scene, it’s very likely that Kronk didn’t show Cain the bag and Caylee’s skull. Instead, it was a ruse.

  I firmly believe that Cain was telling the truth.

  The problem for Cain was that the prosecution’s case depended on the veracity of Kronk. If Cain was telling the truth, by definition Kronk wasn’t, and that presented a dilemma for the police and prosecution.

  The issue of who was telling the truth, Kronk or Cain, came to the forefront on December 11, four months after Kronk first called the police in August, when Kronk again called to say he had found Caylee’s remains.

  When this four-month gap became public knowledge, the police department really looked incompetent. (That assumes there was a body to be found by Cain in August and that Kronk wasn’t hiding it, which was possible.)

  Unable to keep hidden the information about Kronk’s August 9-1-1 calls, the sheriff’s department must have felt it had no choice but to throw Cain under the proverbial bus.

  Kronk informed them about the three prior August 9-1-1 calls on December 17, 2008, and the police brass now had a major problem. Kronk had been caught in a serious omission. What everyone wanted to know after the media got hold of the story was, Why wasn’t Caylee’s body found when he called in August?

  They took Kronk’s statement, but now they realized what they had to do if they wanted Kronk’s story to stand up: Cain had to be the fall guy.

  To verify whether Kronk was telling the truth, you would think that the police would have investigated Kronk’s background. You would also think the first person they would want to talk to would be Cain, who came out to the area when Kronk called. You would think their first question to Cain would have been, “What happened? What did Roy Kronk say?” But they can’t do that because they had already arrested their culprit—Casey—and charged her with first-degree murder.

  Instead of investigating Kronk, they decided, Let’s investigate Cain.

  On December 17, they launched an investigation in which they questioned everyone except Cain.

  After the cops talked to Kronk at his home in St. Cloud, Florida, for about an hour that evening, they were shitting in their pants. A few hours later they called in Officer Adriana Acevedo and asked her about Kronk’s call back in August.

  If you listen to the audio of the interview, you can hear how confrontational Allen was with her. All Acevedo did was respond to a call that night, and she told Sgt. Allen it was really too dark to see much. From listening to the interview, it’s clear how unhappy Allen was, because he was getting aggressive in his questioning.

  After talking to Acevedo, they interviewed Kethlin Cutcher, the officer who arrived with Cain on August 13 to meet Kronk. To repeat, they were not calling Cain. They talked to everyone else so they would have the facts and possible inconsistencies that they could use to attack Cain, no matter what statement he decided to make. It’s something defense lawyers do before we cross-examine a witness. You interview all the other witnesses and get the facts so that you can arm yourself with questions and effectively confront and cross-examine the witness.

  C
utcher was interviewed just after midnight on December 18, 2008, and then at 9:00 A.M. they called in Cain. It was clear to me that rather than go to Cain to find out if Kronk was lying that, they were questioning Cain for the express purpose of catching him in a lie.

  Apparently, that was their plan: to catch Cain in a lie and set him up as the fall guy in order to sweep the major screwup in this investigation under the rug.

  Detective Yuri Melich and Allen called Cain in for an interview, and as soon as he walked in the door, Allen became confrontational with Cain. He asked him, “Do you know who Deputy Rusciano is?”

  “I know of him,” said Cain. “I don’t know him personally. I know him because he was fired.”

  They weren’t being recorded—this was another of their pre-interviews, where they got their point across without being taped—and according to Cain, Allen began yelling at him, telling him he could end up like Rusciano.

  Rusciano had had the bad luck to have dated and to have had a sexual relationship with Casey Anthony before any of this happened. When asked about their relationship, Rusciano, who was married and didn’t want their tryst made public, told investigators it was a casual relationship and that he barely knew her. The investigators then impounded Casey’s computer, found out that he knew her well and had been intimate with her, and fired him.

  Beginning around nine in the morning, they turned on the tape recorder, and Cain told them what happened that day in August. He stated unequivocally that when he went to the scene after Kronk called 9-1-1, he did nothing wrong. He told them that he and Kronk walked together into the woods, and Kronk was standing right behind. Kronk showed him a bag that he described as “pretty heavy.” Cain testified that he lifted up the bag with his baton, and that when the bag tore, leaves and sticks came spilling out. He said that he inspected the debris closely, that he didn’t see a skull, and that he found the trip to be much ado about nothing at all.