by Jose Baez
It wasn’t what the brass wanted to hear, and Allen, becoming frustrated, said, “Let me close the door a minute.” After closing the door, he said to Cain, “You understand what we’re doing here, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And you understand the importance of telling the truth?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You understand the importance of telling the whole truth, right?”
What Allen was really saying to Cain was, “Hey, you’re not playing ball. Your story doesn’t match Roy Kronk’s story. And the cops who don’t play ball, wink, wink, they get fired.”
“Yes,” said Cain, who naively had no idea his superiors were setting him up to get rid of him.
So Cain went to work, and he had some time to think about what Allen was saying to him: Hey man, your statements have really fucked up the “Case of the Century” for this department. Surely Cain said to himself, If I don’t change my story, I’m going to get fired like Deputy Rusciano.
When Allen and Melich at three in the afternoon reinterviewed him, Cain did a complete one-eighty. Allen’s warning probably was sufficient in and of itself, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone high up the ladder got to him during those six hours and told him, “Listen, you’re going to need to play ball and go back and tell them the truth.” Meaning, lie.
And that’s what Cain did. In the second interview, Melich said to Cain, “It’s been a couple hours, and I know that during that time you’ve had some chance to think about the call [from Kronk], and think about what actually happened. And I understand from the onset what you originally told us, it differs a little bit from what you told us now because you’ve had a little bit of time to think about it, correct?”
“Yes, yes,” Cain said, and then this time he proceeded to say that he never saw a bag, and that Kronk stayed near the street and never went with him into the woods. He also said he might not have searched the exact area that Kronk had pointed out. All this so as not to contradict their star witness, Roy Kronk.
Allen said to Cain, “Earlier you indicated that you picked the bag up with your baton and sticks fell out, right?”
Cain said, “Right.”
Then Allen said, “Okay, did that happen?”
Then Cain said, “I don’t believe it was a bag. It was probably just … yard waste.”
Allen asked him again, “Did you pick a bag up?”
Cain answered, “Not a bag,” and then sighed, which I was sure was Cain saying to himself, There goes my career.
“Did you pick anything up?” asked Allen.
“Just yard waste,” said Cain.
Allen, who was angry about the whole Kronk situation because there wasn’t much he could do to salvage it, aggressively pursued the line of questioning and got Cain to admit it might have been a piece of a trash bag.
“It wasn’t a whole sack,” Cain said.
Allen asked, “Did it look like a garbage bag?”
“It wasn’t a full-sized bag,” said Cain, sounding uncomfortable.
Allen then said, “All right, name three other things it could have been besides a bag?”
Cain said, “It could have been a piece of dark clothing. It could have been, I don’t know, a shirt. I don’t know. It could have been a piece of something out of their yard. I don’t know.”
Allen asked him, “You never said to him, I don’t see a bag in here. Show me what you’re talking about?”
“No.”
“Would that have been a reasonable thing to do?”
“Probably.”
“What other ways to handle that call might have been reasonable?”
“Maybe ask him to go find it,” said Cain.
“Okay. Did you do any of those things?”
“No.”
Allen asked, “What do you think was going through your mind when you went back there, and this guy was describing there was a bag there, and you didn’t see it? Did you say something to him about there’s no bag there?”
“I thought maybe he saw something he didn’t see,” said Cain, still ignorant that his career was about to come crashing to an ignominious end.
After the second interview, Internal Affairs immediately launched an investigation of Cain to determine whether he lied under oath. They called a slew of witnesses, including the first responders, anyone Cain worked with, and Allen and Melich, and even though Allen and Melich both claimed they weren’t hostile toward Cain, Cain said they were.
Cain was fired for lying. But, I believe he was set up for it. He appealed his dismissal, but before the appeal was heard, he resigned. He moved far away. He left Orlando and moved to Pennsylvania. We were able to take his deposition before he left, but the internal investigation was still pending, so he was unable to answer the questions we most wanted answered.
Cain left in shame, sacrificed for the honor of the state’s star witness, fabulist Roy Kronk.
I later sent one of my investigators to find Cain, but he didn’t want to come back to Florida and testify. The poor guy just wanted to put it all behind him and move on with his life, and I can’t say that I blame him. I would have loved for him to come forward and be brave enough to stand up and own up to the truth.
I wanted to question him severely about his actions. I wanted to ask him who he had spoken with between 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. I wanted to ask him, “Did you feel pressured to tell your story?” And I wanted to know, “Which of your stories is the truth, the morning story or the afternoon story? Or is there an altogether different story?”
There was a time when Cain returned our calls, but we couldn’t get him to come to Florida to testify. We knew he wasn’t cooperative, so we elected not to bother calling him as a witness. Since the prosecution didn’t call Kronk during the trial, it also decided not to call Cain.
Instead we called Kronk, and when Cain didn’t testify, the jury had to wonder whether the prosecution was hiding something. The jurors had to be wondering, Where’s the cop who showed up that day? What’s the prosecution hiding?
They had to be thinking, This is hardly a search for the truth.
IN ANY MURDER INVESTIGATION, examination of the body is essential evidence. If the body is found as it was left by the murderer, then the position and condition of the body can be very revealing. If the body has been tampered with then it’s a staged crime scene, and one should be a lot more cautious about drawing conclusions from the state of the body.
In the Casey Anthony case, the prosecution would contend that there was duct tape wrapped around Caylee’s mouth, and that Caylee’s mandible (the lower jaw) was found in the perfect anatomical position, meaning that the duct tape held the mandible in place. But if the skull had rolled out of the bag, the duct tape would not necessarily have remained where it was originally placed, and the mandible would not have been in perfect anatomical position as it was found. This would have destroyed the integrity of the crime scene. The prosecution was intent on demonstrating that the cause of death was the duct tape, and that there was evidence that the duct tape had been wrapped around Caylee’s face. But as we will see, the evidence did not show this at all. And if you allow for the fact that the body had likely been moved, it didn’t show a thing.
After looking at all the inconsistencies, and even though there were still a lot of questions that remained unanswered, one thing was clear: we couldn’t trust Kronk. What I eventually was able to convey to the jury and make absolutely clear was that we weren’t accusing him of being Caylee’s murderer, or being involved in her death in any way. What we wanted to convey was that because of Kronk’s activities, the crime scene was so compromised that it couldn’t be trusted. Because of the moving of the skull, the moving of the duct tape (the duct tape was stuck to some hair, but was otherwise loose, not wrapped around the skull as implied by the prosecution), and the different stories concerning the skull rolling, and Kronk’s picking up the skull with his meter reader stick, we told the jurors that the clear conclusion was
that this was a staged crime scene, and that they couldn’t trust any evidence that came from Suburban Drive. In other words, if you can’t trust the messenger, you can’t trust the message.
This is the point of the whole Kronk saga. I needed to show that it was possible—actually quite likely—that Kronk had interfered with the body. And there was a great deal of evidence supporting me in this. The police and prosecutors needed to discount my evidence, even if it meant throwing Cain under the bus to do so.
But the weaknesses in Kronk’s story were not the only indicators that Caylee’s body had very likely been moved. The specific area where Caylee’s body was ultimately found had been searched at least five times between August and December, but no one found a body.
On October 21, 2008, Keith Williams, an Orlando trailer park security guard, was found in the woods off Suburban Drive with a shovel in his hand. He was seen by the assistant principal of the nearby Hidden Oaks Elementary School, who asked the police to issue Williams a trespass warning. When we talked about Williams, we joked that the police attitude was, “Get out of here, kid. You might find Caylee.”
When the police questioned him, Williams told them that he knew Casey because Casey used to play with his younger sister when they were kids. He said he was someone who was following the case on TV, that he had a lady friend who worked with him by the name of Charlie, and Charlie told him that her mom, who lived in Texas, was a psychic. Williams said he called the woman, who told him that Caylee had drowned and that she was buried in the woods not far from the road near the school. I don’t believe in psychics, but I have to admit it’s quite a coincidence. He said he had searched in the woods in the exact area where Caylee’s body was later found, but all he could find was a bag of stuffed animals, which he took to the Anthony home. When told by Cindy that the toys didn’t belong to Caylee, Williams said he went and threw the bag back into the woods.
We later found out while investigating Suburban Drive that in October a woman and her neighbor had called 9-1-1 after they heard a child screaming from the wooded area near the elementary school. The call was made to the Orlando Police Department, not the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and a massive search was undertaken in the exact area where Caylee’s remains later were found. A helicopter flew over the area, they brought in dogs, and performed an exhaustive search. No child was found, but after searching the records of the Orlando Police Department, we could verify that the site where Caylee was found was the area where they searched for the child who allegedly was screaming in the woods.
Two intensive searches in that area also were undertaken by Tim Miller and his EquuSearch team, one in September 2008 and one during the weekend of November 8, 2008. Records show the searchers tramped all over the area around Suburban Drive, but nothing turned up during either search.
In addition, Laura Buchanan, an EquuSearch volunteer from Kentucky, had given us an affidavit saying she too had searched that area, but there was no body there.
And finally, there’s the saga of Jim Hoover and Dominic Casey, bodyguards for the Anthonys. During our visit to the Anthony home in December after Caylee was found, that evening we brought our forensic team over to take soil samples and to do some tests, Dominic revealed that he and his sidekick Hoover had searched the exact area where Caylee’s body had been found a few days earlier. We would later discover that they had videotaped their traipse through the woods, because Hoover attempted to sell the film for $50,000 to any national news media that would pay him. When I interviewed Hoover, he told me the following:
On November 14, Dominic had asked Hoover to come into his office and take a seat. When Hoover sits down Dominic tells him, “I know where Caylee is.” Dominic doesn’t say anything further, and Hoover thinks, Well, fine, let’s go get her. Then Dominic adds “she’s dead.” Dominic tells Hoover that he got a tip revealing the location of the body.
They went to the woods on Suburban Drive to find her. Hoover said that Dominic brought a small garden tool with him for the purpose of digging up her body. Once they were in the woods Dominic told him they were looking for three flat pavers in the woods and a large black trash bag. He said Dominic had gone into the woods earlier and had already removed three wooden two-by-fours, which, he said, the pavers were under. Hoover said that Dominic was intermittently talking to someone on his cell phone during the time they were in the woods. He said he talked to the person on the other end of the phone about six times. He said they found a dirty blanket with a rose on it under the pavers, but no Caylee.
From his testimony, it was clear to me that Hoover and Dominic had looked for the burial site, but Caylee was nowhere to be found.
So that’s at least five searches of the area where Caylee was ultimately found. The prosecution had its own theory. It was determined to prove that the body hadn’t been found by these other searchers because heavy rain had flooded the area, thereby keeping her hidden. The prosecution was hot on proving this because it was afraid we were going to parade all these people before the jury and tell them about the fruitless searches in the general area where Caylee’s body had been found by Kronk.
To this end the prosecution hired a hydrologist from the University of Florida to run tests about the water levels in the area. He did a really sophisticated study to calculate the rainfall and to measure the amount of rain. Unfortunately for the state, his conclusion was that in the area where Caylee’s remains were found, it was wet only ten days during those six months, and it wasn’t during the critical period when the searchers had been out there.
This was significant evidence that multiple searchers had looked in the area where Caylee was found on December 11, but had failed to find her. This was making the prosecution very nervous, and when these prosecutors became nervous, there was no telling what they would do.
They went after Laura Buchanan, accusing her of presenting false evidence in a capital case. Of course, they leaked what they were doing to the media. They conducted controlled phone calls, in which people would call her and have her talk about what she did. They also had a fellow searcher call her and say, “You know, if you tell the cops that someone from the defense put you up to this, or told you a lie, they will probably leave you alone.”
I was lucky. Buchanan, like Pamela Porter, was a stand-up woman. Her response was, “I know I could do that, but I’m telling the truth.” If she hadn’t said that, they would have come after me.
Her lawyer, Bernard Cassidy, called me on the phone and said, “Sergeant [John]Allen called me and told me they were going to charge Laura with a life felony unless she gave you up.” Meaning they wanted her to testify that I had put her up to her testimony. If she didn’t, he said, she was told she would be looking at life in prison.
I was livid. It appeared they were so desperate that they were going to charge this woman and then use her to take me out. I planned on using this at trial, so I listed Cassidy as a witness. This is certainly one of those moments where you ask yourself, Is the fight worth the effort? Would I go to jail for Casey? I had a wife and child and a practice, everything I needed. Why should I risk it for someone I don’t know? These are the risks that defense lawyers take every day across this country, as long as prosecutors and law enforcement are allowed to investigate defense lawyers who they have cases against.
As Albert Krieger, a great defense lawyer, says, “A defense lawyer is literally in harm’s way. If you ignore this and do not have your guard up, you are skydiving without a parachute.” My family will tell you that I was stupid for not getting out. But I had meant it when I took that oath to be a lawyer. I thought I was being brave. Maybe I was a little of both.
And here’s the funny part. After the trial was over and the prosecution had lost, the police held a press conference. I’ve never seen prosecutors and cops hold a press conference after losing a trial. They were trying to save face and one of the statements they made was, “There is still an ongoing investigation.” Meaning they were still investigating Bu
chanan. Their actions were so disgraceful, but apparently they wanted their pound of flesh.
LET ME TELL YOU what we found later on: The police and prosecution had taken complete control of the area and then destroyed it before we had our chance to look at it. All we had to go on were the hundreds of photos the police had taken of the site. When Dr. Henry Lee came down in late December, after our failure to get access to the crime scene, he started looking at the crime scene photographs. When Lee began studying the photos and saw the large tree at the site, the tree that was removed before we were allowed to visit, the first thing he said was, “That tree that’s fallen there was used to hide the body.”
A group of us were seated around my conference table in my office, and when he said that, we all got up to take a look. That made complete and perfect sense; if you want to hide a bag containing a body, you either bury it or put it underneath something. There was something else we found interesting about that tree: it was apparent in some of the crime scene photos, but it was missing in others. We later learned that the photographer had it moved in order to take better pictures of Caylee’s remains.
We learned from a report written by one of the crime scene investigators that Stephen Hanson, who worked for the medical examiner, and another crime scene person picked up the tree and moved it. In other words, the person who hid Caylee under that tree had to be pretty strong to lift it up in order to place the bag and body under it. Did anyone think 105-pound Casey had the strength to be able to do that?
I spent a full week, eight hours a day, looking at each and every one of those photos. I sat in my office with my door closed, flicking back and forth from photo to photo. It’s grunt work, but very important work because the crime scene photos are the first images. They can tell you a great deal about the crime scene. And one of the things I noticed was the lack of the white board that Kronk had described in his 9-1-1 call. It had apparently disappeared, as though it was never there. In my opinion, the purpose of that white board was to be an X marking the spot. I don’t know who put the white board there and I don’t know who removed it. Even today I don’t know for sure whether someone put it there with the intention of using it to help relocate the bag and the body at a later date, or whether it had been placed there by whoever put the body there.