by Jeff Ashton
To their surprise, Casey strode confidently through the maze of office buildings that housed the business side of Universal Studios. She took a left at the first building, walked to the end of the roadway, and took them left again. At the next intersection, they crossed to the opposite side of the street through a parking lot, passed the first of two connected buildings, and entered the door of the second. Turtora knew that the building did not contain the event planning division, where Casey claimed she worked.
By this point, the cops’ curiosity had morphed into incredulity. As they went through doors and turned corners, each of them silently tried to figure out how far she was going to take this. Somehow, the charade that should have ended back at the security gate was still going on, and no one, perhaps not even Casey, could predict when or how it would stop. What kind of person would do this—and to what end? It was no longer a mystery whether she was lying; the real mystery was why.
Just as confident as she had been when she left the security gate, she led them halfway down the building’s main hall, and then she stopped suddenly. Shoving her hands in her back pockets, she turned to them, flashed her cutest shy-girl grin, and said the words they’d been waiting to hear ever since she’d arrived: “Okay, I don’t really work here.” Four lies.
No one was shocked by the revelation itself. Indeed, more than anything they were confused by why she’d chosen that moment to fess up. Only in retrospect would the answer become clear: she’d backed herself into a corner. She’d reached the end of the hall, and with literally nowhere else to take the lie, she gave up on it. It was the same thing that had happened with Lee the night before, shifting her story just before the police arrived, from Caylee being with the babysitter to Caylee being kidnapped. It was the second time in as many days, and it would not be the last. It was a pattern that we would become all too familiar with over the next three years.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAUGHT
Turtora found Detective Melich a room inside the Universal offices with nothing in it but a white plastic couch and armchair, and Turtora said the investigators could use it for speaking to Casey. Melich wanted to get to her while she was vulnerable, before she had time to think. Whether because of her guilt over being caught in a lie or her fear of arrest because of the lie, experience told him that her defenses should be lowered, and this was probably his best opportunity yet to get at the truth. There was no way she would be able to maintain her story once such a large part of it had given way beneath her; they’d have Caylee back home by the end of the day.
Casey and Melich sat on the couch, and the two detectives perched on either arm of the chair. The ensuing conversation was taped.
“I know and you know that everything you’ve told us up to now has been a lie. Correct?” Melich began.
“Not everything I told you.”
“Okay, uh, pretty much everything, including where Caylee is right now.”
“That I still . . . I don’t know where she is.”
“Sure you do.”
“I absolutely do not know where she is.”
Detective Melich asked Casey about Caylee’s father. She told him that he had died in a car accident. When Melich asked if she had proof, she said she had an obituary from the newspaper in her bedroom.
“Let me explain something,” the detective continued. “Together, combined experience in this room, we have thirty years of doing this. Both myself and Sergeant Allen worked in the homicide division for several years. We’ve dealt with several hundred people and conducted thousands of interviews, the three of us. . . . I can tell for certainty that right now, looking at you, I know that everything you’ve told me is a lie, including the fact that your child was last seen about a month ago and you don’t know where she is. I’m confident you know where she is. We have to get past that. We can sit here and go back and forth with ‘I don’t,’ ‘I do,’ ‘I don’t,’ ‘I do.’ It’s pretty obvious that you know where she is.”
If Casey was surprised by his words, her face didn’t show it. Collected as ever, she allowed the detective to continue.
“Now, my question to you is this: We need to find Caylee. I understand that right now Caylee may not be in very good shape, you understand what I’m saying? She may not be the way you and your family last saw her. We need to understand right now, from you, where Caylee is. This has gone so far downhill and become such a mess that we need to end it. It’s very simple. We just need to end it.”
“I agree with you, but I have no clue where she is,” Casey replied.
“Sure you do.”
“If I knew in any sense where she was, this wouldn’t have happened at all. It wouldn’t have happened whatsoever.”
The fact that she was still sticking to the same story, even after being caught in a lie, was frustrating. Changing course, Melich decided to show his hand a bit. Maybe if he showed her that more of her stories were lies, the dominoes would all fall.
“Listen, this stuff about Zanny the caretaker, the nanny, is not the truth, because I went to the apartment complex and no person that’s ever lived there went by that name. The apartment’s been vacant since March, that same apartment. Now, the apartment you pointed out to me, the two-story apartment, that’s an old folks’ home. It’s right across the street from your ex-boyfriend’s house, who you never mentioned. And you said you wrote the address down because it was across the street, that’s a lie, because I’ve already talked to him, and we’ve already been by the house, and, you know, we’ve looked at everything we could look at over there.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Everything you’ve told us is a lie.”
And yet, when she was confronted with these facts, they seemed to do little to sway her. Shifting directions once again, Melich tried to give her an out and allow her to admit to something, something that would help her save face and paint herself in a sympathetic light. He was essentially inviting her to tell him that if Caylee was dead, it was an accident.
“I’ve never met you before, and I could look at you as a person who’s scared, who’s concerned, and who’s kind of afraid of what’s going to happen because of something bad that’s happened before. Or we can look at you as cold, callous, and a monster who doesn’t care, who’s just trying to get away with something bad that’s happened and is trying to cover it up.”
Casey sat closemouthed as she listened to the detective before saying, “I’m scared that . . . I don’t know where my daughter is. I would not have put my entire family—”
Sergeant Allen interrupted. “Whoa, whoa . . . I want to ask you something.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Like he said,” Allen continued, “you seem like a pretty bright person. You’re willing, right. You’re here to try to help, right?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Your whole reason of talking to us is to try to help. Right?”
“Um-hmm.”
“No one’s forcing you to talk to us, right?”
“No.”
“You want us, you’re here because you called, and you want us to help find your daughter, right?” Sergeant Allen asked.
“Um-hmm.”
“Now, let me ask you something. I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a minute, okay.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Since you’ve talked to him this morning,” Allen said, motioning to Detective Melich, “in an attempt to try to find your daughter, you’ve given him bad addresses, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You drove me all the way out here, we walk from the gate back here, all the way to your office, right?”
“Mmm.”
“Okay, to an office that you don’t have. We got all the way into the building, into the hallway out here, before you finally say, ‘Well, I don’t really have an office here.’ Prior to that, we were walking to your office, right?”
Casey nodded in the affirmative.
“Okay, does any of this make any sense to you?”
“I understand how all that sounds. I—”
Sergeant Allen grew stern. “No, no, no. Here’s the problem with that, here’s the problem with that, okay? Um, you can carry the weight of this around for a long time. It’s not going to get any easier, okay? What he’s trying to tell you right now, I’m going to tell you, you know, in the amount of time I’ve done this, almost thirty years, I’ve learned this: People make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. All the three of us, we have all made mistakes in our lives. We’ve done some things that we’re not proud of, okay? But there comes a point in time when you own up to it, you say you’re sorry, you try to get past it, or you lie about it and you bury it, and it just never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, EVER goes away, that’s it. Okay?”
Allen went on to emphasize the contradictions in Casey’s story. She said she was afraid of calling the police, but once they were there, she lied to them. She said she wanted the police to help, but she fed them more lies. In short, she didn’t seem like someone who cared about finding her daughter.
“Now, you know,” Allen continued, “by hiding this, by burying this, you are not going to get yourself to a better place. What you’re going to do is make everybody else around you suffer, and at some point, this thing is going to come out. It always does. It always comes out. Now your best bet is to try to put this thing behind you as quickly as you can. Go to your parents and tell them, you know, some horrible accident, whatever happened, get it out in the open now, instead of letting them worry and worry and worry, okay?. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” Casey answered.
“At some point, you are going to want to mend things with your family. You let this drag out for another three days, another week, another two weeks, and you make us solve this some other way, and we’ll solve it, we always do. There’s no point in coming forward and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is what really happened,’ once we’ve already figured it out.”
In retrospect, this entire scene is astounding. To those of us who have experience with this kind of questioning, at least one of the tactics used by the officers should have gotten through. I have seen countless sessions like this one unfold, and as the evidence mounts, those who have never been through a police interrogation will usually leap at the opportunity to justify their conduct by adopting an explanation that’s less morally repugnant than the facts would suggest. Whether because of guilt, fear, self-interest, or all of the above, sooner or later the truth comes out. However, it seemed that no appeal—not to Caylee’s safety, not to the damaging impact this was having on her family—could stir a reaction in Casey. She remained unmoved by Sergeant Allen’s invitation to explain that what happened to Caylee was an accident and spare her family the pain of not knowing.
Allen moved on to a different tactic, appealing to Casey’s sense of guilt and responsibility over the lies themselves. On a normal person this might have worked. But Casey was far from normal.
“Have you ever had anybody do anything wrong to you?” Sergeant Allen asked. “Have you ever had anybody hurt you in any way?”
“Of course.”
“Let me ask you a question. . . . When someone’s hurt you in the past, and they come to you and say, ‘I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. I’m really sorry for what happened,’ do you forgive them?”
Casey said she would.
“What about if somebody who does something to you and then lies and lies and lies and lies. Do you forgive them?”
“It’s a lot harder to,” Casey replied.
“A lot harder to? Tell me the last time someone hurt you over and over and let you suffer for a long time and then you caught them. Well, once you caught them, that apology doesn’t mean a thing, right?”
Allen let her think about that for a minute before he went on.
“There’s nothing you’re going to tell any of the three of us that’s going to surprise us, okay? I’ve had to sit down with mothers who rolled over on their babies accidentally. I’ve had to sit down with mothers whose kid had drowned in a swimming pool. . . . I’ve had mothers whose boyfriends have beaten their kids to death, who felt horrible about what happened.
“And I’ve had to help them try to explain it to their families, okay? And then I’ve also had to deal with people who have done horrible, unspeakable things to children, and have lied about it and lied about it and lied about it. And I’ll bet you that somewhere in there I’ve probably dealt with somebody who maybe made a mistake but continued to lie about it, and maybe they weren’t such a bad person, but maybe the whole world didn’t see it that way. Maybe their family didn’t see it that way because they kept lying about it.”
And then, for the first time, Casey gave an answer that wasn’t either an “uh-hmm” or a lie. She said her mother was having a horrible time with the news.
“My mom,” she began, “told me flat out yesterday that she will never be able to forgive me, and I even told her, I am never going to be able to forgive myself. Every single day I have been beating myself up about this. I’ve been running in circles, it’s all I can do at this point. I learned the biggest lesson from all this. I made the greatest mistake that I ever could have made as a parent.”
It appeared that she was getting more comfortable, but as with everything they’d heard that day, there was a question about honesty. Casey was either opening up with real emotions for the first time in the interview or aping the emotions that she felt the officers expected of someone in her position. Regardless, nothing the officers said convinced Casey to talk or explain where Caylee was. One of the things that struck Detective Melich was that at no time during any of his discussions with Casey did she show any obvious emotions about the loss of her child. She did not cry or give any indication that she was legitimately worried about her child’s safety. In fact, in his official report he noted that Casey remained “stoic and monotone during a majority of our contacts.”
They were trying to get her to confess to what had really happened to Caylee, but she remained emphatic about her original story. Her words were just as resolute as they had been earlier in the morning when she was trying to convince the guard at the security gate that she worked there. It was the same determination, the same steadfast belief she’d displayed then, only this time she was attempting to persuade them that Zanny had taken Caylee. But she didn’t realize how little the words of a liar are worth. The detectives weren’t biting.
“I think you have been in here a long time,” Sergeant Allen said, rising from the chair. “I appreciate you talking to us.”
One thing that is clear from the tape of this encounter is the sense of relief in Casey’s voice when she realized the interview with the detectives was drawing to a close. She was convinced that the officers were on board with her story, and that her biggest failure was not reporting Caylee missing earlier. The fact that she then went on to apologize for giving them the runaround was almost comical. As was the fact that she said she was available to help in any way.
“I just wish I honestly had more things to help with,” she added. “We’ve talked about going through my computer, maybe trying to find past conversations through instant messenger or through e-mails, something. I’ll offer up my computer in a heartbeat, just like with my phone logs and anything else, anything that can possibly help. That’s why we set up websites and have been making phone calls and trying to get ahold of people.
“I had such a limited number of people that I was actually trusting that could help at this point, thinking maybe they had some insight. I didn’t want to involve a bunch of people who maybe didn’t know the situation. The mistake was not calling you guys right off the bat. I understand all of that. It’s the biggest slap in the face to have done that to myself. The worst part is what I’ve done to my daughter by allowing her to sti
ll be with someone else.”
Sergeant Allen agreed. “By failing to notify somebody, you put your daughter in greater risk.” He said he was going to return to headquarters and try to track Zenaida down, first by putting her name in the department’s database.
Detective Melich asked Casey to accompany him back to the Central Operations Building to work on missing child fliers. There, Melich and Casey walked into the glassed entrance, past the reception area and a store selling T-shirts, patches, and other law-enforcement-related items. While Casey stayed in the division’s waiting room with Sergeant Wells, Melich went to talk to Sergeant Allen.
Their conversation didn’t last long. Melich believed that Casey had committed the crime of child abuse in leaving Caylee for so long without reporting her missing. Even if the story she’d told had been true, her failure to do anything to find her child would have constituted child abuse. While Caylee’s actual fate was unknown, no matter what had happened to her, Casey was, at the very least, guilty of neglect. She had lied to law enforcement about dropping Caylee at a nanny’s house, about alerting two friends that Caylee had been kidnapped, and about having recently spoken to her daughter. Clearly, leaving her out of jail was not going to get them any closer to finding Caylee. They discussed a concern that, if left on her own, Casey would take her own life, like Melinda Duckett, another Central Florida mother whose toddler had gone missing. After the disappearance, Melinda taped a segment on Nancy Grace to help get clues to bring her two-year-old son home. She committed suicide after Nancy pointed out inconsistencies in her story and exposed her embarrassing past as a porn star.
No one wanted that to happen to Casey, so Melich did the logical thing. He decided to arrest Casey Anthony then and there.
CHAPTER SIX
KIDNAPPED OR MURDERED?
From the beginning, there was something about this case that drew people to it, something in the story that simply struck a nerve. While I’ve always understood that fascination, what astounded me was how quickly Caylee’s disappearance affected people. It was literally overnight. As early as the morning after Casey’s arrest, I remember that Caylee was the topic of the day at the Orange County State Attorney’s Office—just as she would be almost every day for the next three years.