Presumed Guilty

by Jose Baez

  “Do you not trust me? Do you feel I’ll walk away?”

  “No, no, no,” Casey said, “I don’t feel that way.”

  I surmised at this point that she didn’t want to disappoint me. As we sat in the jail, she began to tell me what happened the day Caylee disappeared.

  “Let’s start from the moment you woke up,” I said. “What happened?”

  “On the 16th [of June] I had fallen asleep,” Casey began. “I dozed off, and when my father woke me up, he started yelling at me, ‘Where the hell is Caylee? Where the hell is Caylee?’

  “I got up. Usually I locked the bedroom door, but on this morning the door had been ajar. Caylee usually slept in my bed, but on this morning I was alone. I’m a light sleeper, but I couldn’t recall Caylee leaving the bedroom. My father and I started looking around the house. We looked in all the rooms, and she was nowhere to be found. We went into the garage. She wasn’t there either. Then we both went outside. I looked to the right. My father looked to the left, by the pool. At the end of the house there’s a path, which leads to a shed. I walked down around the corner and looked down the path toward the shed. I didn’t see her. When I walked toward the pool, I noticed that the pool ladder was still attached. Caylee and my mom had been swimming the night before. I couldn’t believe it was still up. Caylee loved to swim, but once she got into the pool, she had no way of getting out, so I always made sure someone was there with her.

  “I turned around and started to walk toward the house when I saw my father carrying Caylee. I could see Caylee was dripping wet. I could tell she was dead. She had passed away. You could tell she had been in the water a long time.”

  Tears flowed from Casey’s eyes. I’d never seen her break down like this.

  I had my eyes locked on her. I didn’t take a single note.

  She said, “My father started yelling at me, ‘It’s all your fault. Look what you’ve done. You weren’t watching her. You’re going to go to fucking jail for child neglect. You weren’t watching her, she got out of the house, and look what happened. It’s all your fault. Your mother will never forgive you, and you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.’”

  Casey said she just cried the whole time he was yelling at her.

  Casey said her first reaction was to blame her father. Why hadn’t he kept an eye on her? She said she went so far as to ponder whether he had molested her and then killed her.

  Maybe he was doing something to her and he tried to cover it up, she thought.

  Casey said she went inside the house and laid down on her bed. She said her father walked into her room and told her, “I’ll take care of her.” Those were words he had often said to her. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I’m taking care of it. Don’t say a word of this to anyone, especially your mother,” and he walked away.

  Casey said that after George went to work later in the afternoon, she remembered he called her on her cell phone and told her, “I took care of everything.” And again he warned her not to tell her mother.

  Casey said she was frantic and did not know what to do. After pacing and crying for about an hour, she said she could not hold it in any longer and wanted to tell her mother and began to frantically call her. She tried Cindy at work and when she couldn’t get ahold of her there, she tried her cell.

  “I desperately wanted to tell her and I called her a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.” Casey said. When she couldn’t get hold of Cindy, Casey said she just “went to Tony’s house and acted like it never happened.”

  Casey’s phone records would show that she was telling the truth. She had called her mother a total of six times in a matter of four minutes. And the call from George was there at 3:04 P.M., exactly when he would have arrived at work. One thing you should know is that during the months of June and July 2008, Casey and George spoke on the phone a total of two times—June 16 and July 8. This struck me as extremely odd, given that his daughter and granddaughter were missing and not living at home, as they had all their lives. By comparison, in March 2008, they spoke a total of thirteen times. When looking at these records, it seemed clear that George was avoiding Casey as much as she was avoiding him. (Casey never had a copy of her phone records in the jail—they were too voluminous—nor did she ever have access to them when she was out on bail, so she could not have tailored her story to match the phone records.)

  Finally, I had what I believed to be the truth. I wanted more, but then she said that was all she could remember about that day.

  After arriving at Tony’s apartment, they later went to Blockbuster, but she said she had no memory of having done so. She said she remembered going to Tony’s house, but otherwise it was all a blur to her. She said that during the thirty days she stayed away from the house when her mother was there, most of it was a blur. I would ask her specific questions about her activities, and most of the time she would say, “I don’t remember.”

  “Casey,” I said, “that’s not good enough. We need to explain why you went to a nightclub. We need to talk about that.”

  “We can talk about it all day,” she said, “but the fact of the matter is, I don’t remember who that person is [meaning herself], or what that person was doing.”

  I believed her. It all made sense. The prosecution’s contention that Casey had killed Caylee was made from whole cloth. Casey had loved that child. Her whole life revolved around her and protecting her from abuse from her family. But I still couldn’t condone how she acted during the thirty days.

  Prior to that time I had gone into Casey’s room, and it was a shrine to Caylee. Casey took so many pictures of Caylee and put them up on the wall that the room oozed of her love for her daughter.

  When I saw it months earlier, I had said to myself, There’s no way this girl murdered her daughter.

  When she was done telling me the whole story, I kept telling myself, It all makes sense. And I told myself something else too: The reason the prosecution has no proof that Casey murdered Caylee is because the charges brought against her simply aren’t true.

  The key question everyone asks when they hear this is, Why didn’t either George or Casey immediately call the police?

  The answer has everything to do with the screwed-up dynamics of the Anthony family. Why didn’t George call the police? There are several possibilities.

  Did he fear the police would find out he was abusing Casey? Was he afraid an autopsy would show that the child had been abused? Another possibility: if George called the police, would it later come out that he was Caylee’s father?

  What if George called the police, and Casey was arrested for child neglect? Let me throw out this family dynamic: Casey and George had a love/hate relationship. What if the police arrived and Casey said Caylee drowned because George should have been watching Caylee, and he wasn’t. George surely would have pointed the finger at Casey and accused her of the same thing. Since both were home, it would have been he said/she said. George might have anticipated that Casey would be angry that her daughter had died because her father had been negligent, so George would have feared that Casey would tell the police that he had been sleeping with her since she was eight years old. If I were George, I surely wouldn’t have wanted the police to find that out.

  If abuse had been revealed, George would have faced charges for sexual battery on a minor, a penalty that would have far exceeded any negligent homicide charges that Casey would have faced.

  Whatever the motive, George seemed to do everything he could to hide his involvement in what happened and to make sure that if any blowback came from Caylee’s death, the onus would rest entirely on Casey’s shoulders.

  When questioned about June 16 by law enforcement, George spun the story that would be repeated over and over in the media, a story that would become a “truth” in the reality show chain of events repeated over and over. George said that Casey had told him that she was taking Caylee to the babysitter, Zanny, that she was going for a meeting at work, and that she might stay ove
r at the babysitter’s. He said she told him that Casey would also stay there because Casey didn’t want to come in late to wake them up.

  George said Casey left the house with Caylee at about ten minutes to one that day. He said he knew the time because he was watching one of his favorite TV shows, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on the Food Network.

  “I was watching it,” he said, “and I remember Casey and Caylee, you know, leaving and the last time I saw Caylee.”

  “I walked with Caylee and Casey out when they left to get into their car and go.” He said he held the door open while Casey buckled Caylee in the back passenger seat, and “you know, just blew her a kiss, told her I loved her and, you know, ‘Jo Jo’ will see you later.” Numerous times he also told us that as Casey and Caylee left, he checked his watch to see how much time he had left before he had to get ready to go to work. He was certain of the time they left.

  His cover story went so far as to describe exactly what Casey and Caylee were wearing. He said Casey was wearing gray slacks and a white shirt, and Caylee was wearing a backpack with monkeys on it, a pink T-shirt, and a denim skirt with her hair in a ponytail.

  “She said ‘Bye, Jo Jo,’ and that’s the last I saw her,” he said.

  It was the story that cops bought, and the media spread throughout the blogosphere, and none of it was verified. Or true.

  Why was George able to describe in detail exactly what Casey and Caylee were wearing when they walked out the house on June 16? The way he told it, he didn’t know that would be the last time he would see Casey and Caylee, yet he remembered exactly what they were wearing? It didn’t make sense.

  Later I would ask him what Cindy was wearing that day, and he couldn’t remember. And then I asked him what Cindy was wearing last week, and he couldn’t remember. I didn’t find his testimony to be truthful.

  The shorts were for a 24-month-old child, and Caylee was already a 3T, and you know how fast kids grow. In the trial Cindy testified that Caylee hadn’t worn those shorts in almost a year. This was a critical piece of evidence. But there was more.

  Whoever dressed Caylee after she drowned ripped those clothes as he was putting them on her. And that’s what Dr. Lee was going to testify to.

  No one knew about that, and it never came out in the case. That was a piece of evidence we were really looking to smack them with.

  Our problem was that Dr. Lee quit our team about ten months before the trial. He informed me he just couldn’t continue. The prosecution was going to require him to take his deposition, and he had to submit reports, and he was catching a lot of pressure from his friends in law enforcement for being involved in this case.

  When Dr. Lee said he couldn’t continue, I was so distraught about that I actually flew up to Connecticut to try to get him to change his mind. I went to his institute, and we sat down and we talked.

  “Quite frankly,” he told me, “I just didn’t need the aggravation. And then he recommended that perhaps I should drop out too.

  “You really should consider quitting,” he said to me. “You don’t need this aggravation either. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

  So Dr. Lee never testified to the rips in the shorts. But it was clear that Caylee’s body was found wearing shorts she had stopped wearing long ago, which confirms Casey’s version of events.

  THE HARDER AND MORE IMPORTANT question was: why didn’t Casey call the police after she saw that Caylee had drowned?

  One reason certainly was the guilt Casey felt that she hadn’t been able to protect her child. She had been up most of the night before texting and talking to Tony, knowing she had to watch Caylee in the morning. She had also been on the computer early in the morning, just before seven, figuring Caylee would be okay with George for a little while, and when it turned out she was wrong about that, the guilt ate her up.

  And then there was George telling her that she was going to go to jail for child neglect. People get arrested all the time for not watching their children who get injured or die. Casey must have felt scared about the possibility of going to jail for Caylee’s death.

  Here’s another important question: Was there negligence in Caylee’s death? There’s some probability that there was. The real question is, Who was neglectful? Was it Casey or was it George? Given the circumstances and the timing, you have to take a strong look at the concrete evidence we had.

  George said he was having breakfast with Caylee around 7:30 A.M. There were no safety locks on the doors for this child, and Caylee had the ability to open the sliding door to the pool. (We have a photo of her doing so.) She also loved to swim and would sometimes wake George up in the morning and say, “Jo Jo, swim. Jo Jo, swim.”

  While George was with Caylee, Casey was on the other side of the house in Lee’s old room, working on the computer. In looking at the computer records, someone was on the computer that morning from 6:52 A.M. to 7:52 A.M., with visits to Yahoo!, AOL Music, Facebook, and Myspace. Forensic computer experts will always tell you the most difficult thing to do is put a face behind a computer. But you can speculate, based on the type of searches made, creating a profile. The searches that morning fit the profile of Casey, who could spend hours on Facebook and Myspace. The records show that from 9:00 A.M. continuously until 10:59 P.M. she was on Facebook and Myspace. She was researching outfits worn by shot girls in clubs, going to Victoria’s Secret, Frederick’s of Hollywood, and other sites featuring sexy outfits, shot girl outfits, and Tila Tequila. Tony was a promoter for Fusion nightclub, and Casey was helping him out by managing his shot girls. The shot girls are pretty girls who walk around the club selling shots. What she appears to be doing here is legwork for Tony in trying to find the cutest outfits for the girls to wear on the nights he was a promoter.

  These were not the searches of someone out to kill her daughter.

  If Casey was on the computer, who was negligent when Caylee wandered toward and into the pool?

  George himself gives us the answer.

  According to the computer records, at 1:50 P.M. someone got on the computer and signed into AOL Instant Messenger. George had an AOL Instant Messenger account. Casey didn’t. George’s user name was george4937. Right after someone logged in to instant messenger, the first search was to Google. Then someone typed in “foolproof suffocation.” It was misspelled, and George was a poor speller. Google automatically corrected the spelling, and the first link that was clicked was “venturing into the pro-suicide pit.” It appeared that someone was thinking about killing himself.

  “Venturing into the pro-suicide pit” is a blog discussing websites that talk about suicide. Shortly thereafter, the person at the computer went to a page that said “heat can melt disposable breathing circuits.” And then a little later, someone visited a link that appears to be a gardening website (George was an inveterate gardener): ten ways to kill a rhododendron.

  I suppose you could argue these searches were made by Casey, but AOL Instant Messenger had been used on the computer, and this occurred more than an hour after George said she had left the house with Caylee. It wasn’t Cindy. She had left the house and Lee didn’t live there anymore.

  There’s further concrete proof that George was on the computer, not Casey. We checked Casey’s phone records, and at the time these suicide-related searches were being made, Casey was on the phone talking with Amy Huizenga. When we interviewed Amy, she couldn’t recall anything special about the conversation. Would Casey have these morbid thoughts about killing herself at the same time she was talking on her phone with her friend? It didn’t make any sense. Casey’s cell tower records also support her claims that she was at home. The records show her in the vicinity of the home until 4:18 P.M., when she left for Tony’s house. While it was never conclusive evidence, it does support her statements and contradicts George’s testimony. Because they knew it hurt their theory, it’s no wonder that the prosecutors didn’t admit the cell tower evidence during the trial.

  Again, not exactly a search for the
truth.

  It appears suicide had long been on George’s mind, so much so that he tried it on January 22, 2009.

  So who was negligent in Caylee’s drowning? By looking at the websites being researched, all concerned with suicide and death, it certainly appears that the one who felt the blame was a guilt-ridden George Anthony.

  When it came to evidence concerning George and Casey’s computer use on June 16, the police really pulled a fast one. You would think if you were investigating the Anthony computer—very important evidence—that you’d look into and list the computer searches on the day Caylee died. But the police didn’t do that, as my computer expert, Larry Daniel, discovered.

  Sandra Cawn, who did the computer investigation for the police, reported that she had conducted a search of the computer on June 16 and 17, 2008, and in her report she showed that there was NO COMPUTER ACTIVITY between the hours one and seven A.M., and then she said “for the nine o’clock, noon hour, and between three and eleven on the 17th of June, there was NO COMPUTER ACTIVITY.”

  She gave zero evidence as to what the computer activity was. And for a while I couldn’t comprehend what she had done. But by telling the public what time Casey wasn’t on the computer that day, she was hiding the truth: she (or someone connected with the police) had deleted the computer evidence that would have shown that George’s story was a lie and that Casey was telling the truth.

  George said Casey left at 12:50. And yet someone was on the computer over an hour after that time. It had to have been George on the computer because he said Casey was gone, and he was the only one out there trying to kill himself. But Cawn’s report says nothing about his computer use.

  If you look at the discovery you will find that the Anthony computer was in use practically non-stop on the days prior to June 16. If you search June 16, there is only one entry. Where are the other entries?