Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  FROM THE TIME I WAS eight years old, I’d had the makings of a lawyer. When I was in fourth grade my grandmother and my great-aunt Thelma were visiting us in Saint Petersburg. After a spirited discussion on some topic, Thelma said to me, “You should be a lawyer.”

  “I think I’d like that,” I responded. There weren’t many cowboys in Florida, and my friends had already cornered the careers of firemen and cops.

  I am a Florida boy, born and raised in the great Sunshine State. I was delivered to Barbara and Richard Ashton on October 3, 1957, in Saint Petersburg, a west coast town on a peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Saint Pete was a retirement mecca for Midwesterners, so my family didn’t quite fit the mold. Mom was an active homemaker, and Dad was working as a CPA. My parents had met at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ten miles north of Dayton, where my mother had an office job and my father was a lieutenant in the air force.

  I grew up in a neighborhood of typical middle-class homes, in a modest three-bedroom ranch on a small lake, with my three sisters: Cindy, the oldest by twenty-one months; Judy, three years younger than I; and Barb, another three years behind her. I was an underachiever in school, but got through the public school system reasonably well. I don’t think I would have been classified as a nerd, but I was on the nerd cusp—not good at sports and a member of the drama club. Oddly enough, while in the drama club, I performed in a play with Angela Bassett—that’s right, the actress. She was a year behind me at Boca Ciega High School, and a very sweet girl. If that wasn’t accomplishment enough, I also captained our High-Q team, which participated in a local TV quiz bowl. Thirty-two teams competed in single-elimination matches over the school year. We won that year—Go, Pirates! Okay, maybe I was a full-on nerd.

  In 1975 I graduated from high school in the respectable upper middle of my class and enrolled at Saint Petersburg Junior College. I started studying philosophy and logic and found it intriguing. I even made some money tutoring in those subjects. For my junior year, I transferred to the University of Florida in Gainesville and graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1978. My father, the accountant, was always nagging me to take business classes, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t like numbers. I liked rational argument and thoughtful discourse. I wanted to be an intellectual. As it turned out, I was the only one in my family who did not go into some aspect of accounting.

  I finished my undergraduate degree in three years, going to school summers and taking tests for college credit without classes. I didn’t know I was allowed to have fun in college. My father never told me that he had been anything less than studious when he was an undergraduate. It was only later, too late for me to follow in his footsteps, that I found out he had quite enjoyed the college life, drank his share, and played poker for spending money. I don’t know why I was in such a rush to complete school, but I kept up the breakneck pace at the University of Florida Law School, completing my J.D. degree in two and a half years. I was even fast-tracking my personal life. Halfway through law school, I married my high school friend and college sweetheart, Amy Brotman. We went on to have two wonderful sons, Adam and Jonathan. Sadly, the marriage didn’t last and we split up after eight years.

  Right out of law school, I was hired by the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando and assigned to the area from which many successful prosecutors have been launched—the traffic division. My buddy Ted Culhan and I shared an office in an old building that used to house the Federal District Court. We were a block from the main office, so we were relatively unsupervised. We weren’t above a good-natured prank or two. Our favorite was waiting until someone was on the phone, and then taping the receiver to his head. I did do serious work, too; I had a chance to prosecute some drunk driving cases, and I actually got my first taste of scientific evidence when I was doing hearings on the admissibility of Breathalyzer machines.

  After eleven months, I moved to a misdemeanor branch, which was out in the western part of the county. Seven months after that I transferred to the felony prosecution division. My father had been somewhat relieved when I went to law school, but he absolutely loved it when I became a prosecutor. My parents were living two hours away, but even then, they would occasionally make the trip to Orlando to watch me in trial.

  In 1983 I prosecuted my first murder case—and won. Two years later, I tried my first death penalty case. The victim was a businessman with a wife and children who took “business trips” to a local gay resort called the Parliament House. On one visit he hooked up with the wrong young man. When they got back to the hotel room, the young man slit his throat and robbed him. The jury convicted the defendant and then recommended the death penalty, which the judge imposed. Before the state could execute him, he hung himself in his prison cell.

  Then in 1987 came the case in which I’d become the first prosecutor to introduce DNA evidence. That continued a string of successful homicide prosecutions for me, and in 1990 I created the homicide division of the State Attorney’s Office. I was married to my second wife, Joy, and we had two children, Rebecca and Alex, before she and I parted ways.

  It was around that time that Court TV, the twenty-four-hour trial channel on cable TV, came into existence. The channel broadcast some of my cases, and my father loved it. He would watch me from his desk at work. Once, in the late nineties, a trial of mine was moved to Pinellas County, my parents’ neck of the woods, and my father came almost every day to watch it. Those years in homicide were the most enjoyable of my professional career. For starters, no other cases present the challenges that homicide cases present. But I was also damned good at them.

  EVEN THOUGH LINDA WANTED ME on the Casey Anthony case, it was not, strictly speaking, up to her. Linda had gotten the case after Casey was arrested and charged with child neglect, lying to investigators, and interfering with a criminal investigation. Now that it was looking more like homicide, State Attorney Lawson Lamar had the option of turning the case over to the homicide division, headed by Robin Wilkinson, or leaving it with Linda.

  That afternoon at the Daily News Café, I told Linda I wanted to be on the Anthony case, but I was all too aware of the politics that surrounded my name. I was nearing the end of my career with the State Attorney’s Office, so I didn’t need a career boost. I was twenty-eight years into a pension that would allow me to retire at thirty years, and for a while now, that retirement had been my plan. As I explained to her over a burger and fries, I would understand if the pressure made her pick Robin over me. No hard feelings. She could always count on my support and expertise, even if I weren’t on the case with her.

  But Linda was unequivocal: she needed a bulldog and she was going to ask Lawson to have me officially appointed to the team.

  In the end, my arrival on the case turned out to be easier than Linda or I had anticipated. Lawson was very proud of my reputation in the DNA evidence field. He also had great respect for me as a trial attorney, as my prosecution record spoke for itself, one of the best in the state of Florida. A few days later, Linda came to my office.

  “I’ve talked to Lawson,” she said. “He wants you to be involved in the case, and so do I.”

  She handed me the telephone number of Dr. Arpad Vass, the forensic anthropologist, and within an hour I was phoning the distinguished scholar in Tennessee to talk odor and decomposition.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

  Once on the team, I got myself up to speed by unearthing the specifics of the case to date. The whole thing had been put into motion by a 911 call that was made on July 15, 2008, by Casey’s mother, Cynthia (“Cindy”) Anthony. She had made the call to the Orlando police department from her car, saying that she wanted to have her daughter, Casey, who was beside her in the passenger seat, arrested for stealing her 1998 Pontiac Sunfire and withdrawing money from her bank account without authorization.

  Because these thefts were all in the family and Cindy already had her car
back, the 911 call had the trappings of a family fight taken too far. I dug around to determine exactly when Casey had taken her mom’s car without permission and learned that Casey and her daughter, Caylee, had pulled away from the Anthony house in the white two-door Pontiac on June 16, a month before the 911 call. At the time, Casey had informed her parents that she and Caylee would be spending the night at the home of Caylee’s nanny and that they would be returning in a day or two. During the ensuing thirty-one days, Casey’s phone calls provided various excuses why she and Caylee could not return home, including a twelve-day stay in Jacksonville, Florida, with a male friend, but not to worry, she and Caylee were doing fine.

  On July 13, however, Cindy’s husband, George, had found a notice stuck on their front door stating that a certified letter was waiting at the post office. The Anthonys rarely used that door, so the notice had been there for days without anyone seeing it. When they went to retrieve the letter, the contents informed them that their Pontiac Sunfire had been towed to Johnson’s Wrecker Service off Narcoossee Road. The car had been found abandoned in the parking lot of a business located at the intersection of East Colonial Drive and Goldenrod Road. It had been in the impound lot since June 30.

  Cindy and George drove to the towing yard to retrieve their Pontiac. By this point, Cindy was frantic. She had been under the impression that Casey and Caylee were in Jacksonville, yet the car was in Orlando. In the fine print, I read that she snapped at the tow yard supervisor, and George had to instruct her to wait in his car while he claimed their vehicle. As he approached the Pontiac, he became aware of an unmistakable smell emanating from the trunk. Having worked as a law enforcement officer, George thought he recognized the odor as that of a decomposing body.

  By his own admission, he whispered, “Please God, don’t let this be Casey or Caylee,” as he raised the trunk. Relieved to find only a bag of trash, along with some flies and maggots, he watched the tow yard manager toss the bag into a nearby Dumpster. He drove the Pontiac home, while Cindy returned in the other family car. The smell was so strong and unpleasant that he had to open all the windows and the skylight to get the car the seven miles to their house.

  Once George had the car back at the residence, Cindy inspected it and found a piece of paper in a bag on the front seat with the cell phone number of Casey’s friend Amy Huizenga. Cindy dialed Amy and reached her at the Florida Mall, Central Florida’s largest mall, with more than 260 stores. Amy told her that Casey had been staying at the home of her boyfriend, Anthony, who went by the name Tony Lazzaro, a guy Casey had met on the Internet. A twenty-one-year-old transplant from Long Island, New York, Lazzaro wanted to be a club promoter and was currently working at the Fusian Ultra Lounge, a sushi bar by day and a club by night.

  Cindy picked up Amy at the mall, and the two drove together to Tony’s apartment. Amy did the knocking, and when Casey answered, Cindy surprised her by popping out from around the corner, ordered Casey into the car, and demanded to be taken to Caylee. Finding Casey’s responses regarding the little girl’s whereabouts grossly unsatisfactory, Cindy dropped Amy back home and started for a satellite office of the Southeast Community Police on Pershing Avenue. However, the satellite office had closed at 5 P.M., three hours earlier. Without another clear option, Cindy called 911.

  CINDY ANTHONY: Hi. I drove to the police department here on Pershing, but you guys are closed. I need to bring someone in to the police department. Can you tell me the closest one I can come into?

  DISPATCHER: What are you trying to accomplish by bringing ’em to the station?

  CINDY ANTHONY: I have a twenty-two-year-old person that has grand theft sitting in my auto with me.

  DISPATCHER: So, the twenty-two-year-old person stole something?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Yes.

  DISPATCHER: Is this a relative?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Yes.

  DISPATCHER: Where did they steal it from?

  CINDY ANTHONY: My car and also money.

  DISPATCHER: Okay, is this your son?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Daughter.

  DISPATCHER: So your daughter stole money from your car?

  CINDY ANTHONY: No, my car was stolen, we’ve retrieved it today, we found out where it was at, retrieved it, I’ve got that and I’ve got an affidavit from my banking account. I want to bring her in, I want to press charges.

  Reading the transcript of this first 911 call after knowing so much about the case, I was impressed by the omission of significant details, like the trunk odor and the amount of time that had elapsed before Cindy reported the “grand theft auto.” To me, Cindy’s call presented like an annoyed mother hell-bent on consequences for her unruly daughter. Since Cindy was in the car with the person she was accusing, the dispatcher tried to establish in what jurisdiction the alleged crimes had occurred. Cindy explained that the car had been taken from her home, and provided an address on Hopespring Drive in southeast Orlando.

  The dispatcher told Cindy that she needed the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, and he patched her through. During the transfer, the 911 recording machine picked up bits of a conversation between Cindy and her passenger:

  CINDY ANTHONY: . . . ’cause my next thing . . . we’ll be down to child . . . and we’ll have a court order to get her. If that’s the way you wanna play, we’ll do it.

  Casey’s voice was heard in the background, but it was unclear exactly what she said.

  CINDY ANTHONY: . . . No, I am not giving you another day. I have given you a month!

  The operator at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office instructed Cindy to go home and call back from there. Deputies would be dispatched once the call was made. There seemed to be no urgency to any of it, since no “suspect” was at large. Cindy did as instructed, only this time when she called, the crime she was reporting seemed to have mushroomed into something bigger than a car “borrowed” without permission. I noticed that Cindy was finally mentioning her granddaughter.

  CINDY ANTHONY: I have someone here who I need to be arrested in my home.

  911 OPERATOR: They are there right now?

  CINDY ANTHONY: And I have a possible missing child. I have a three-year-old who has been missing for a month. [Though Cindy said Caylee was three in this phone call, Caylee was still technically two. Her third birthday was to be in early August.]

  911 OPERATOR: A three-year-old? Have you reported that?

  CINDY ANTHONY: I’m trying to do that now.

  I sensed that Cindy was bringing Caylee into the conversation not so much to alert the operator to a dire, potentially tragic situation, but more to let Casey know she meant business. She wanted to see her granddaughter, even if that meant she had to call the police about something else. After Cindy had informed the operator of Caylee’s name and status, she went on to repeat her primary accusations—Casey had stolen her car and her money—and asked the police to send someone to the house. Two hours passed before a third call was urgently placed from the Anthony home. This time, Cindy was hysterical.

  CINDY ANTHONY: I called a little bit ago to the deputy sheriff’s and I’ve found out that my granddaughter has been taken—she has been missing for a month. Her mother has finally admitted that she had been missing.

  911 OPERATOR: What is the address you are calling from?

  CINDY ANTHONY: We are talking about a three-year-old little girl. My daughter finally admitted that the babysitter stole her. I need to find her.

  911 OPERATOR: Your daughter admitted that the baby is where?

  CINDY ANTHONY: She said she took her a month ago and my daughter has been looking for her. I told you my daughter has been missing for a month and I just found her today. But I can’t find my granddaughter. She just admitted to me that she’s been trying to find her by herself. There is something wrong. I found my daughter’s car today and it smells like there’s been a dead body in the damn car!

  911 OPERATOR: OK, what i
s the three-year-old’s name?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Caylee, C-A-Y-L-E-E, Anthony.

  911 OPERATOR: How long has she been missing for?

  CINDY ANTHONY: I have not seen her since June 7.

  The call became inaudible when Cindy started addressing her daughter in the background, but the operator coaxed her back to the phone.

  911 OPERATOR: Can you calm down for me for just a minute? I need to know what is going on. Is your daughter there? Can I speak with her? Do you mind if I speak with her?

  Casey took the phone. Her voice was casual, almost uninterested. When I heard her one word, “Hello?” starting low and then rising quietly, as if “hello” were a question, I was stunned. She was the polar opposite of frantic and was clearly on the line against her own volition. She calmly and deliberately answered the operator’s questions as if she were letting someone know about a missed manicure appointment. There was no sense of panic, just a hint of fear and a dash of annoyance.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Hello?

  911 OPERATOR: Hi. Can you tell me what’s going on a little bit?

  CASEY ANTHONY: My daughter has been missing for the last thirty-one days.

  911 OPERATOR: And, you know who has her?

  CASEY ANTHONY: I know who has her. I tried to contact her and I actually received a phone call today from a number that is no longer in service. I did get to speak to my daughter for about a minute.

  911 OPERATOR: Did you guys report a vehicle stolen?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Yes, my mom did.

  911 OPERATOR: OK, so there has been a vehicle stolen too?

  CASEY ANTHONY: No. This is my vehicle.

  911 OPERATOR: What vehicle was stolen?

  CASEY ANTHONY: It’s a 1998 Pontiac Sunfire.

  911 OPERATOR: We have deputies on the way to you for that, but now your three-year-old is missing—Caylee Anthony?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Yes.

  911 OPERATOR: You lost her a month ago?