Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  We like to have as much information as possible in making such an important decision, so we invited Casey’s defense team to provide us with any information they would like us to consider. After some delay they provided us with a document that was largely useless to us since it provided no new information, just a lot of argument. From reading it, we sensed that it was prepared more for the media than for us. We presented the information we had to the state attorney, and from the outset, Linda, Frank, and I knew how it would go. Since we didn’t know how Caylee died, we could not in good faith assert that we could meet any of the criteria related to the crime itself. That left us with only a single criterion met by the case: the fact that Caylee was a child in the care of a caregiver. Strong as that piece was, alone it was unlikely to convince a jury or appellate court that death was justified. On December 3, the state attorney made the decision not to seek the death penalty against Casey.

  Meanwhile, Baez continued to file motions, including a request to use his laptop in jail, another to inspect the evidence, and another to review the credentials of the cadaver dogs. Some of the motions were fairly standard, such as inspection of evidence, while others seemed to demonstrate an expectation that Casey should be treated differently than other inmates. Special privileges were requested, and generally, unless there was some security concern at the jail, they were granted. At one point the defense requested that she not be required to appear in court when the motions were heard. We objected, and her presence was required. Some people wondered why we objected. Why should we care if she did not want to hear her own attorney’s motions? Baez accused us of just wanting to put her on display. In truth, it was not that simple.

  While part of me felt that if I had to sit and listen to him blather on, then she should too, the actual reason was more subtle. We in the prosecution are highly conscious of the accusations that defendants typically make against their attorneys after they are convicted. One way of responding to those allegations is to show that the defendant knew what the lawyer was doing and went along with it. Having her present in the courtroom throughout the trial helps with that argument. As the motions poured in, there was one thing consistent in them all. Every motion attacked somebody. Usually it was the police, but occasionally it was our office. Reading Baez’s motions left you with the distinct impression that he felt there was a conspiracy against his client and against him. We learned to grow a thick skin and consider the source. Many of the motions alleged facts that were just plain wrong; Mr. Baez didn’t always check his facts very carefully before he put pen to paper. On one occasion, I recall, he filed a motion saying that the sheriff’s office had withheld evidence from him when he and a defense expert had come to view it. We decided that our response was going to be: “Prove it.”

  So turning to Baez, Judge Strickland said, “Call your first witness.” He stammered and looked surprised, seeming to be caught off guard. He tried to delay by claiming that he hadn’t expected to have to present a witness. Luckily for him, Linda had brought the witnesses in for him (she is so helpful, isn’t she?), and when he put the witnesses on they testified that the evidence he claimed was withheld was in fact at an out-of-state laboratory being tested. The whole motion fell flat on its face.

  The first trial date was set for January 5, 2009, which was within the six-month window. On December 11, 2008, the pretrial hearing was under way in front of Judge Stan Strickland when Baez came before the judge and asked for a continuance in the case, thereby waiving Casey’s right to a speedy trial and giving everybody more time to prepare their cases.

  For us it was a gift, but not a surprise. In this instance, Baez did the smart thing. When your client’s life is in your hands, it’s no time to play chicken. He needed time to depose all the witnesses and inspect all the evidence. Up to this point he had done very little of either. Any conviction we might get would be far more secure if he left no stone unturned. We could have gotten the state’s case ready to present in time for January, but this extra time would give us opportunities to pursue things in a different way and go at a pace that would be much more conducive to presenting a thorough case. As it turned out, we’d need every second of the extra time.

  At that very moment, Roy Kronk, the Orange County meter reader who’d called the police over the summer about a suspicious bag in a swamp, was revisiting that same swamp on Suburban Drive. He noted that the gray laundry bag he’d phoned in to 911 back in August was still there. Now he had no doubt that the white object he had seen next to the bag was a skull. While Judge Strickland was granting Baez’s motion for a continuance, Roy Kronk was calling his boss at the utility company, leading to the fourth call alerting the police to something important on Suburban Drive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FINDING CAYLEE

  I was sick and had stayed home from work on a very gray, rainy December 11 when my neighbor Dawn Feeser called to alert me to the latest “breaking news” in the Anthony case. I assumed it was another of the false alarms I’d heard so often, but I turned on the news anyway. I was in disbelief. At 9:38 that morning, the skeletal remains of a child had been found in a swamp just off Suburban Drive near the Anthony home. Someone had called 911 about a suspicious bag and something that might have been a skull in that area. The CSI team had already confirmed that it was a skull—a child’s skull.

  I immediately dialed Linda to see what she knew. She had spoken to Melich, who confirmed that a body had been found. Melich told Linda that upon being notified of the find, he had requested CSI Gerardo Bloise to proceed to the scene and verify it. Bloise was there when Yuri arrived, as were the medical examiner’s investigator, the crime scene photographer, and another detective. By that point, they’d taped off the scene and Suburban Drive had been closed, though it wasn’t a much-traveled road to begin with, being frequented only by people going to the elementary school just down the dead-end road.

  Beyond that, there was not much more known, but Melich was on the scene and promised to keep us posted. As the morning wore on, the details started coming in. There wasn’t much for me to do yet, even if I had been at the office, so I waited by the phone for updates throughout the morning and afternoon. Roy Kronk had gone back to the Chickasaw neighborhood to read the meters and said he just happened to return to the same spot he’d gone to before to relieve himself again. Once there, he saw the bag, tried to pick it up with the stick he used to open meter boxes, and a skull rolled out. He did not initially tell the deputies that morning that he had called 911 about that same location three separate times back in August. After his discovery, he went back to his utility truck where his partner, Alan Robinson, was waiting. Once there, he called his supervisor, Alex Roberts, who notified the dispatcher, who placed the call to 911.

  Roberts said that when he arrived, Kronk was leaning against his truck, smoking a cigarette, and Robinson was sitting in the truck but didn’t want to get out. Only Kronk had gone into the swamp, and he was excited when he told Roberts that the reward for information leading to Caylee’s discovery would be his. “Alex, I just hit the lottery.”

  THE REMAINS HAD CLEARLY BEEN in that location a long time. It would have been very difficult to get into the swamp, let alone see something in there, underwater, in very dark conditions. There was a little gap in the air potato curtain, and ironically, there was a discarded yellow sign with black lettering for a day care center just at that opening. But that was the only access point to the woods. You could have walked five feet to the left or right and never seen it, but once the vines and overhanging vegetation were pulled back, the whole gruesome picture became disturbingly clear.

  The skull and one of the leg bones were close to the bag. The skull was just behind a log, not quite under it. When Kronk had taken the first officer to show him, they actually walked past it and had to come back. The skull had a hair mat around it, the majority of the hair having fallen to the back of the skull. From above looking down, the hair looked like
a halo all around the head, with a few strands stubbornly clinging to the top of the skull along with a few decomposing leaves. The mat of hair and leaf debris surrounded the skull, burying it to about the level of the bottom of the eye sockets. The skull was tilted very slightly upward. A small amount of the hair that had fallen forward collected at the area that had been the nose. Even before the skull was removed, a length of shining gray plastic duct tape, about half an inch from the face of the skull, could be seen through the leaf debris. At first glance, there appeared to be more than one piece.

  The rest of the skeleton was extremely scattered, having been distributed by animals as well as Central Florida’s summer rains and flooding. Every summer during the rainy season, low-lying swampy areas and recesses take on an extra four or five feet of standing water, which slowly dries up in the late autumn. Decomposition causes the bones of the body to separate, and the effects of animal activity and flooding led to an overall dispersal of the bones. That made it difficult for the crime scene investigators, though it was not at all startling or unexpected. Over the next ten days they would find that the torso and most of the ribs had been pulled to a secondary location, and the vertebrae had been pulled to a third place. One specific bone, a hip bone, was buried in four inches of muck. This type of accumulation of muck could have occurred only through the movement of water over and around the bone once it had been moved to that location by an animal scavenging. Thus we were able to determine that the body had fully decomposed prior to the rainy season in July and Tropical Storm Faye, which hit in mid-August.

  Beyond the actual bones, there was other physical evidence that had been buried along with the body. It appeared that the body had been wrapped in a baby blanket that had a Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet pattern on it, and then stuffed in two garbage bags, one inside the other for extra strength, and all of that inside a laundry bag. About a foot to the left of the skull was a pair of shorts, size 24 months, with a kind of a striped pattern on them. Everything was pretty shredded up.

  The obvious pieces were dealt with first. The medical examiner’s investigator, Stephen Hansen, collected the skull with the tape, as well as the leaf debris immediately around it, as one item. Trying as best as he could to keep all the items in their original position, he also collected the bags, clothing remnants, and other debris in the immediate vicinity of the skull. Everything from the scene not collected by Hansen—from the shreds of the garbage bags to the tatters of clothes—was photographed and collected separately by the CSIs and later taken to the crime lab.

  As the search expanded to try and locate the other remains, the entire crime scene was cordoned off and set up like an archaeological site. The search area started small, about twenty feet by twenty feet, and expanded as the investigators found more bones. It ended up about eighty feet by forty feet, extending back into the woods. The CSIs would scrape down three or four inches and sift the earth looking for remains. They had a lot of people out there doing it, including people from the sheriff’s office, detectives from the FBI, civilian technicians, and crime scene investigators. The objective was to recover every possible bone of the little girl’s body.

  The conditions were horrendous. This area was obviously used by locals as a secluded area to dump garbage and lawn waste. The swamp was a pit of raging poison ivy, nasty insects, poisonous snakes, and disgusting muck. Many of the search team members got poison ivy, and a lot of them got sick. In the end, they recovered almost every single bone, all except two tiny bones from one tiny toe, an unbelievable success given the environment they had to work with.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE DISCOVERY, Cindy and George Anthony were in Los Angeles for an appearance on Larry King Live. Once again Cindy had been taking to the airwaves to spread her message and had spent most of her time on Larry King denouncing the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for their indifference to the search for Caylee as they focused instead on proving Casey’s guilt. Cindy and George were in Los Angeles International Airport, ready to board a jet for their flight back to Orlando, when their lawyer, Mark NeJame, called them with the news that a child’s body had been found not far from their home. They were devastated. Without a fraction of a doubt, it was Caylee. They made the long trip back to Florida overwhelmed by the news.

  Casey got the news earlier than her parents. The body had been discovered around 9:30 A.M. Around an hour later, the police arranged for Casey to be brought to the clinic in the jail, where they would have a chaplain tell her the news per jail policy. There is a TV in the waiting room of the clinic, and the waiting room is monitored by video surveillance, so they recorded the scene in case the story about Caylee came on. That way, they could catch Casey’s reaction.

  Later on, this setup became a subject of great angst to the defense. They said it was a violation of Casey’s constitutional rights. The videotape did not show that much, and we on the prosecution team did not introduce it at trial for precisely that reason. You couldn’t see much because of the distance and the angle of the camera; perhaps most important, you could not clearly see Casey’s face. Basically, she heard a newscaster saying there was breaking news about Caylee Anthony, she looked up at the TV set, and she put her head down and started to cry. Her body language could be equally indicative of ��Oh crap, I’m caught” or “Oh crap, my daughter’s dead.” So in the end it didn’t add much information either way. But apparently the defense thought differently, and they got the judge to seal it. I always thought it was amusing that their actions led the public to think the tape was so much more incriminating than it actually was.

  Regardless of the videotape, investigators worked quickly to see if there was a link between what they’d found at the scene and the Anthony home. Back at the medical examiner’s office, deputy chief medical examiner Gary Utz and investigators on the scene were inventorying the canvas laundry bag. The bag had a metal reinforced top and a brand tag identifying it as a Whitney Design. Along with the bag, they itemized the collar and tag from a size 3T shirt, as well as the iron-on letters that appeared to belong to that shirt. The letters spelled out the words BIG, TROUBLE, comes, and small. In addition, there were the remnants of a diaper or pull-up, a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, and at least two black trash bags with yellow tie handles.

  When the skull was examined more closely, the duct tape was found to be three partially overlapping pieces with the brand name Henkel and with the text “Consumer Adhesives Inc. max temp 200 f Avon Ohio 44011” stamped on the back. The three pieces spanned the area from the jaw just below the right ear to the jaw just below the left ear. Small strands of hair still adhered to the tape, and the lower edge of the lowest piece of tape was bent in slightly, as if it had been pressed under the jaw. Though the tape was not adhering to the jawbone (also known as the mandible), some strands of the tape were. Dr. Utz found it unusual that the jawbone was still in its natural position in relation to the rest of the skull. He would later explain that during decomposition, when the strands of tissue holding the jawbone to the skull decompose, it always separates from the skull. The only time the mandible and skull are found in proper position is when there is something keeping them in place throughout that process, which in this instance was the tape.

  There was still a lot to comb through, but even just these pieces of physical evidence were enough for us to begin relating things back to the Anthony house. A search warrant on the home was executed that very afternoon, specifically looking for those kinds of things that had been recovered at the site: any and all varieties of garbage bags or laundry bags; adhesive tape to include duct tape; all photos and photo albums, videos or CDs containing photos; Winnie-the-Pooh clothing, towels, blankets, or similar cloth items; toothbrushes and hairbrushes; and components that could be used to make chloroform, such as bleach and acetone. Even though Dr. Vass had discovered large amounts of chloroform residue in the carpet sample taken from the Pontiac, police had not returned to the Anthony home to initiate a chloroform search. The Dec
ember search turned up nothing except household bleach. No acetone was found.

  During the search, detectives found a number of items that connected to the crime scene. A laundry bag of the same Whitney Design brand as the one with Caylee’s remains was found in the garage. Whitney Design was a Target product, and the canvas bags lined with coated plastic were sold in sets of two, one rectangular and one cylindrical. Caylee’s remains were in a cylindrical one. A rectangular one was found in the house. Cindy would later acknowledge having purchased the cylindrical bag as well. She said that a neighbor, Brian Burner, had given her a whole bunch of plastic balls for a ball crawl for Caylee, and Cindy had used the bag for the balls. However, now she couldn’t say where it was.

  Moving to the shed in the backyard, they found boxes of trash bags like the ones at the crime scene: giant-size standard black trash bags. Although they were the same kind, the product was so common that it would have been impossible to say definitely that the ones at the crime scene had come from the home. Perhaps more definitive was that they found the same brand of duct tape that had been attached to Caylee’s skull. The tape from the crime scene had been Henkel, not a common brand, and the words stamped on the back made it fairly easy to match. This same information and logo appeared on a swatch of duct tape that was stuck to the vent hole on one of the two red gas cans in the Anthonys’ back shed—the gas cans that Casey had taken from George when her car ran out of gas.

  Venturing back to the house, the search warrant specifically singled out items with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, based on the blanket found around the skeleton. The identical pattern of the two characters was in numerous places in Caylee’s room, from her curtains to the bolster on her bed. Cindy would later acknowledge that a blanket that went with the bed set was missing.