Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  When I arrived for work on the morning of Thursday, July 17, everybody was commenting on what might have happened to two-year-old Caylee. The story her mother was telling was so far-fetched that any theory we came up with could be entertained. Most of us thought that perhaps Casey had placed the child somewhere to spite her mother. Clearly those close to Casey felt the same way; members of the Anthony family were already on television asking for the public’s help in bringing little Caylee home.

  That morning, Casey Anthony appeared before a judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida for the first time. The purpose of the proceeding is to ensure that arrestees know their rights and why they are in custody. The judge’s role is to review the evidence to ensure that it’s sufficiently strong to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed. A defendant’s first appearance is fairly routine, and he appears by video link from the jail three miles away, which was what Casey did that morning.

  Appearing by video, Casey was accompanied by her newly acquired counsel, Jose Baez, and his associate, Jose Garcia. Casey, who was shorter in stature than either man, stood silently behind the podium looking pale and tired. Few sleep well on their first night in jail. Casey’s cell mate had recommended Baez, who was a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer from Kissimmee, Florida, and whatever arrangements Casey had made to pay him were unknown, since it appeared that she had so little money that she had been stealing from others. Prior to Baez’s arrival that day, I had never heard of him.

  On that first day, Casey’s appearance was brief. In a hearing lasting less than one minute, the judge determined that Casey should initially be held without bond, so she was returned to protective custody at the Orange County Jail, and the search for her daughter continued without her.

  Seeing as how Casey had done more to hinder the search than help it, searching without her didn’t seem like it would be a problem. Indeed, on July 16 following her arrest, Casey had three phone conversations—all of which were attempts not to provide new information about Caylee, but to get Tony’s phone number. Taken together they offered a fascinating look at where her thoughts were as her daughter was missing with presumably the entire Orlando area looking for her.

  The initial call had been to Cindy Anthony and, like all jailhouse phone calls, it was recorded by the police. Strangely, Casey did not begin the call by expressing concern over her missing daughter, but by referring to the fact that she’d been on TV. From there she proceeded to have a conversation with her mother that overflowed with hostility and put the frustrations of the previous month on display yet again.

  CASEY ANTHONY: You don’t know what my involvement is in stuff?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Casey.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Mom!

  CINDY ANTHONY: What?

  CASEY ANTHONY: No!

  CINDY ANTHONY: I don’t know what your involvement is sweetheart.You keep, you’re not telling me where she’s at.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Because I don’t fucking know where she’s at. Are you kidding me?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Casey, don’t waste your call screaming and hollering at me.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Waste my call sitting in, oh, the, the jail?

  CINDY ANTHONY: Well whose fault is it you’re sitting in the jail? Are you blaming me that you’re sitting in the jail?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Not my fault.

  CINDY ANTHONY: Blame yourself for telling lies. What do you mean it’s not your fault? What do you mean it’s not your fault, sweetheart? If you’d have told them the truth and not lied about everything they wouldn’t . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: Do me a favor, just tell me what Tony’s number is. I don’t want to talk to you right now. Forget it.

  Cindy passed the phone to Lee. Once again the conversation was an attempt to try and get Tony’s phone number, and once again, Casey’s family member seemed incredulous that at a time like this, Casey was trying to get Tony’s number rather than strategizing a way to find her daughter. The anger that Casey displayed with her mother carried over to her brother, as she appeared adversarial because her family seemed to care more about Caylee than they did about the fact that she was in jail.

  LEE ANTHONY: Hey?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Hey, can you give me Tony’s number.

  LEE ANTHONY: I, huh, I can do that. I don’t know what real good it’s going to do you at this point.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Well, I’d like to talk to him anyway.

  LEE ANTHONY: Okay.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Because I called to talk to my mother and it’s, it’s a fucking waste. Oh, by the way, I don’t want any of you coming up here when I have my, my first hearing for bond and everything else. Like don’t even fucking waste your times coming up here.

  LEE ANTHONY: You know you’re having a real tough, you’re making it real tough for anybody to want to try to, even assist you with giving you somebody’s phone number.

  CASEY ANTHONY: See, that’s just it. Every single thing . . .

  LEE ANTHONY: You’re not even letting me finish. Like . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: Well, well that’s because . . .

  LEE ANTHONY: . . . I really . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: Just go ahead.

  LEE ANTHONY: You’re asking me, first you’re asking me for Tony’s phone number so you can call him and then you immediately want to start cussing towards me and saying don’t even worry about coming up here for all this stuff and trying to cut us out. What . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: I’m not trying to cut anybody out.

  LEE ANTHONY: I’m not going around and around with you. You know, that, that’s pretty pointless. Uh, I’m not going to go through, you’re not going to put everybody else through the same stuff that you’ve been putting the police and everybody else through the last twenty-four hours, and the stuff you’ve been putting Mom through for the last four or five weeks. I’m done with that. So, you can tell me what’s going on. Kristina would love to talk to you because she thinks that you will tell her what’s going on. Frankly, we’re going to find out something, whatever’s going on, it’s going to be found out. So why not do it now and save yourself . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: There’s nothing . . .

  LEE ANTHONY: . . . some issues.

  CASEY ANTHONY: . . . to find out. There’s absolutely nothing to find out. Not even what I told the detectives.

  LEE ANTHONY: Well, you know, everything that you’re telling them is a lie.

  CASEY ANTHONY: I have no clue where Caylee is. If I knew where Caylee was do you think any of this would be happening? No.

  Finding Lee as much of a “waste” as Cindy, Casey next spoke to her friend Kristina Chester, who was at the house with Cindy and Lee. Casey hoped Kristina would finally give her Tony’s phone number. Once more, Casey ran into difficulty. All Casey wanted was Tony’s phone number, but all everyone else wanted was to find Caylee.

  KRISTINA CHESTER: I said does Tony have anything to do with Caylee.

  CASEY ANTHONY: No, Tony had nothing to do with Caylee.

  KRISTINA CHESTER: Oh, so why, why do you want to talk to him?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Because . . .

  KRISTINA CHESTER: You probably don’t want to tell me.

  CASEY ANTHONY: . . . he’s my boyfriend and I want to actually try to sit and talk to him because I didn’t get a chance to talk to him earlier because I got arrested on a fucking whim today. Because they’re blaming me for stuff that I never would do. That I didn’t do.

  KRISTINA CHESTER: Okay. Well, I’m on nobody’s, I’m on your side. You know that, right?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, uh, sweetie, I know that. I just want to talk to Tony and get a little bit of . . .

  KRISTINA CHESTER: But . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: . . . of, of . . .

  KRISTINA CHESTER: . . . Casey, you have to tell me if you know anything about Caylee.

  CASEY ANTHONY: Sweethe
art, if I . . .

  KRISTINA CHESTER: If anything happens to Caylee, Casey, I’ll die [crying]. You understand I’ll die if anything happens to . . .

  CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, well . . .

  KRISTINA CHESTER: . . . that baby [continuing to cry]

  CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, my God. Calling you guys, a waste. A huge waste. Honey, I love you. You know I would not let anything happen to my daughter. If I knew where she was this wouldn’t be going on.

  It was a striking series of phone calls. As each of her three conversations led her back to Caylee, all she did was try to get to Tony. Even as everyone worried about her daughter, she seemed more preoccupied with trying to sustain her fledgling relationship. Her sense of priorities was baffling, and in the end, this only added to the portrait of her as callous and uncaring about her missing daughter.

  AT THAT POINT THE CRITICAL focus of the investigation was on determining just how much of Casey’s story was a lie. The detectives’ hope was that if they could find a hint of truth somewhere, that hint might lead them to Caylee.

  Ever since Casey had named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, aka Zanny the Nanny, as the person she had last seen with Caylee, Detective Melich had been trying to locate her. While Casey’s wild-goose chase the previous day had yielded nothing of real substance, there was one promising lead on Zanny: the guest card with the name “Zenaida Gonzalez” and a phone number on it that Melich had been given by the manager at the Sawgrass Apartments. Melich had called the number and reached a woman going by the name of Zenaida who lived in Kissimmee, about thirty minutes south of Orlando. She said she was forty-two, had six children, and drove a car with New York license plates. She was friendly and cooperative. However, she denied knowing Casey or Caylee Anthony or having ever been employed as a babysitter.

  Zenaida agreed to give a sworn statement to an investigator, and on July 17, Missing Persons Investigator Awilda McBryde and Investigator Kari Roderick visited her at her home. She was shown photos of Casey and Caylee and denied knowing either. Likewise, Casey was unable to identify this Zenaida from a packet of photos shown to her.

  How and why Zenaida Gonzalez came into Casey’s crosshairs has never been determined. There was speculation that Casey somehow got hold of Zenaida’s guest card at the Sawgrass Apartments and from there came up with the fact that she was from New York by her license plate, or perhaps it was someone from her past and the real Zenaida was just a coincidence.

  While Melich still couldn’t be sure that Zanny was a complete fabrication, Casey’s story had gone from implausible to impossible. But as he’d learned at Universal Studios, he was dealing with a woman who was willing to follow her lies to the bitter end. If he was going to get her to admit the truth about Zanny, it would take more than he currently had.

  In the meantime, he tried to learn a bit more about the person they were dealing with. Casey had no criminal record, and prior to the 911 call two days earlier, she had apparently been an upstanding citizen. And yet there was something unsettling about how easy it had been for her to lie to him and the other police officers. Her determination at the security gate, her confident walk through Universal Studios—it all seemed so comfortable to her. Lies are like muscles: it takes practice to make them strong. Casey Anthony had clearly been giving hers a lot of exercise.

  As news of Casey’s arrest spread, Melich began receiving additional information that fleshed out this portrait of Casey Anthony as a liar. Calls came in to headquarters from close friends of Casey’s, claiming she was a “habitual liar” who had been known to steal from them in the past. One such call was from Amy Huizenga, who’d been one of Casey’s best friends up until a few days earlier. It had been Amy who’d helped Cindy collect Casey at Tony’s apartment prior to her first 911 call. Amy told Melich how Casey had recently driven her and her roommate, Ricardo Morales, to the airport, an apparently thoughtful gesture, as the two roommates were headed to Puerto Rico.

  Ricardo had once been Casey’s boyfriend. They had met in January at a birthday party for Ricardo, and went out for five months. On at least one occasion, Casey and Caylee had spent the night at Ricardo’s place, three in a bed, Casey in the middle. Casey and Ricardo broke up in June, but they remained friends. But shortly after Casey dropped them off at the airport, she’d started forging checks from Amy’s account. It had been only a few days since Amy had returned home to Florida and discovered the fraud, but already she had discovered seven hundred dollars missing from her account.

  Meanwhile, Casey’s boyfriend, Tony Lazzaro, also shed light on Casey’s fabrications. He called the police the afternoon she was arrested, telling Melich that he’d met Casey on Facebook in May, and they’d been dating since early June. Even though Casey had basically been living with him since June 16, she had never mentioned that Caylee was missing or in any type of danger. He claimed that he first learned of the toddler’s disappearance from sheriff’s deputies who had shown up at his apartment on the morning of July 16. The last time he’d seen Caylee had been when he invited Casey and Caylee to swim in the pool at his apartment complex on June 2. Casey had never introduced him to a babysitter named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, nor did he know where Zenaida lived. And yet during the time Casey had been living with him, she’d told him on multiple occasions that Caylee was with the nanny, either at Disneyworld, Universal Studios, or the beach.

  When authorities obtained Casey’s cell phone records, they found that Tony had exchanged text messages with Casey shortly before her arrest. Casey seemed to expect more consolation from him than he was interested in providing. The texts showed Tony’s understandable anger both that Casey had been lying to him for a month, but also that Casey wasn’t saying where Caylee was. Like Cindy Anthony, he too had been deceived:

  TONY: Where is Caylee?

  CASEY: I honestly don’t know.

  TONY: I don’t know . . . are you serious?

  TONY: When did you find out?

  CASEY: been filling out reports all night and driving around with multiple officers looking at old apartments I had taken her to. I am the worst fucking person in the entire world. I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to her.

  CASEY: Too long let’s just leave it at that.

  TONY: Y wouldn’t you tell me of all people? I was UR boyfriend that cares about you and UR daughter. Doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you lie to me thinking she was fine and with your nanny?

  CASEY: I lied to everyone what was I supposed to say I trust my daughter with some psycho how does that look?

  TONY: I don’t know what to say . . . I just hope your daughter is OK and I’m going to do whatever i can to help your family and the cops.

  CASEY: I was put in handcuffs for almost ten minutes and sat in the back of a cop car the best thing and the most important person in my life is missing and god only knows if I’m ever going to see her again.

  CASEY: I am the dumbest person and the worst mother I honestly hate myself.

  CASEY: The most important thing is getting Caylee back I truly hope that you can forgive me granted I will never be able to forgive myself nor will my family.

  TONY: Who is this Zanny nanny person?

  CASEY: Someone I had meet thru a personal friend almost four years ago she used to be my buddy Jeff’s nanny before she became mine.

  CASEY: I’m scared.

  TONY: Are you home?

  CASEY: Yeah almost twelve hours of stuff finally getting a shower I feel like hell.

  TONY: Where did you dropoff Caylee last time you saw her?

  CASEY: At her apartment at the bottom of the stairs

  TONY: Specifically where?

  CASEY: Sawgrass Apartments

  CASEY: Have told and showed the police the apartment

  CASEY: told them and drove out there with two different officers I just got back from the second drive.

  CASEY: If they don’t fin
d her guess who gets blamed and spends an eternity in jail.

  TONY: Yea no shit, this is serious why would U say something sooner about this? To anyone?

  TONY: Oh and why are you texting me and not calling?

  CASEY: I talked to two people that have been directly connected to Zannie how can I sit there and be so blind and stupid it’s all my fault.

  CASEY: I was scared to admit it I was scared something was going to happen to my baby.

  The deeper Melich dug into Casey’s past, the more other stories arose. Casey’s former fiancé, Jesse Grund, also reached out to the police. He and Casey had met three years earlier, when they were both nineteen. She’d been a seasonal worker at Universal Studios, where he was a security guard. They had dated for a while and he had strong feelings for her. Then Jesse had moved to Tampa for a time and they drifted apart. When he received a call from Casey that she was pregnant and that he was going to be a dad, they rekindled the relationship. They were engaged at the time Caylee was born. After she was born, a paternity test determined that Caylee was not his child, but by that time he was hooked on Caylee’s adorable smile and agreed to raise her as his own.

  However, Jesse noted a change in Casey after Caylee was born. The sweet young woman he’d fallen hard for had turned selfish and untrustworthy. He’d ended the relationship, but they maintained a friendship. Supporting Amy’s characterization, Jesse also said that Casey had been a frequent liar during the time he’d known her. When they were engaged, she had stolen $250 from him with every excuse in the book why she couldn’t pay him back. He told Melich about a phone call he’d received from Casey on June 25, when she’d called him in an attempt to cheer him up over a recent job loss. She said that if he wanted to get together, she was free that weekend because Caylee and her nanny had gone to the beach.