by Jeff Ashton
One bone in particular was of interest to him in dating the placement of the body. One of Caylee’s hip bones was found several feet away from the primary site. It had evidence of animal damage and was found up against a palmetto trunk, buried in four inches of muck. For those not familiar with the term, muck is the product of decomposing vegetation. It occurs when the vegetation is somewhere between being identifiable as what it was and being actual soil. When an area like the swamp off Suburban Drive floods, this fine debris mixes with the water, and as the water recedes, it leaves behind a layer of the fine debris in the form of muck. It is less dense than soil, and in swamps it can be several feet deep. Occasionally, in an extremely dry period, it can catch fire underground, which is what we call a “muck fire.” The fact that the bone was buried in muck meant that it had been deposited in that spot before the rains of summer and in particular before Tropical Storm Fay in August, which allowed the muck to settle over the bone. Based upon his estimate of the time for decomposition and dispersion of the bones, he placed the date of deposit of the remains in late June or early July.
Dr. David Hall, a retired professor from the University of Florida and a renowned expert in forensic botany, was called to the scene to examine the plants growing in the area where the remains were found. He was also sent photographs of the remains and the items found with them. Dr. Hall noted significant plant root growth into some of the bones. The mass of Caylee’s hair that had fallen around the skull was inundated with both small and large roots. Significant root growth could also be found in the baby blanket, laundry bag, and trash bag found with her. He issued an initial report expressing his opinion that the root growth through the items found with the remains would have taken at least four to six months. This was my first time dealing with forensic botany, so I was eager to meet Dr. Hall and explore his opinions further.
In February 2009, Linda, Frank, and I took a road trip to Gainesville to meet with a number of the experts we had working on the case. The University of Florida, my alma mater, has always been a valuable resource for prosecutors in the state of Florida. Over the course of this case, we would consult experts associated with the university in botany, toxicology, anthropology, hydrology, and law. We met Dr. Hall at his home in what appeared to be an older residential area not too far off one of the main roads past the university. His home sat on a multi-acre plot that could only be described as a botanical garden. Let’s just say it made my meager attempts at landscaping look like a dying potted plant. He gave us a tour of the grounds, which included his own private swamp on part of the property. All of the plants were beautiful native vegetation. You could tell that botany was not only this man’s profession, it was also his life.
Dr. Hall may have been retired and looked every bit the grandfatherly figure he had sounded over the phone, but his life was anything but that of a typical retiree. Between lectures, teaching, writing, and consulting, he had a full plate, and we appreciated the time he took with us. Taking us into a wood-paneled room that served as his library and office, he pushed aside the project he was working on—a treatise on some botanical issue I couldn’t possibly understand—and sat us near his desk.
He explained to us that when a human body is in the process of decomposition, the fluids released are actually toxic to plants. If you were to find a body in the middle stages of decomposition, you would find the grass underneath it dead. The importance of that in this case was that the root growth wouldn’t begin until the body was completely skeletonized, meaning that his four- to six-month time frame would have to be tacked on to Dr. Schultz’s two to four weeks for decomposition. That was putting us right about the time Caylee was last seen.
He candidly admitted that there were no published studies on root growth rates that could apply to this issue; his opinions were based upon five decades of studying and working with plants, not on specific documentation. But looking at the man who sat before me and at the lush grounds of his home, I was confident that his opinion would be enough.
With the plant issue settled, we moved on to the insects. When forensic etymologist Dr. Neal Haskell completed his evaluation of the insect evidence at the crime scene, it also dovetailed with Caylee’s body being deposited in the swamp during that midsummer period. Dr. Haskell discovered something else interesting as well, but to explain it I have to talk a little about bugs.
When a human body goes through the process of decomposition, it passes through a number of stages that involve different chemical processes. These five stages are referred to as fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay, and dry remains. I will spare you the disgusting details of each stage, but suffice it to say that different insects are attracted to remains at different stages of this process. At each stage the insect will deposit eggs in the remains, which will then hatch and consume the remains to support its maturation. Once mature, the insect will repeat the cycle. Each stage of that evolution leaves behind some remnant that etymologists can interpret. The first insects to be attracted to fresh remains are referred to as early colonizers.
What interested Dr. Haskell at the scene was what he didn’t find. Had the body been placed in the swamp shortly after death, he would have expected to find evidence of large colonies of early colonizers. Instead he found evidence of very few, and though there had been both flies and maggots in the trunk, these fell into a separate category from the early colonizers that Haskell expected to find. What this indicated was that the remains had been stored in some other location and then moved to the swamp after a few days of decomposition. Even if the body had just been moved from one open area to another, he still would have expected to see evidence of early colonizers from the location. The only conclusion to draw was that wherever Caylee had been, the early colonizers had difficulty getting to her—like, say, if she were in the trunk of a car sealed in multiple plastic bags.
ASIDE FROM THE SCENE, THE items found with the body couldn’t tell us much scientifically. Most of their value for us lay in our ability to connect them to the Anthony home and Casey. Investigators had obtained a warrant to search the Anthony house on December 11, the day Caylee was found, and returned again nine days later on December 20. The list of items they were searching for included shoes belonging to Casey Anthony; the original clothing Caylee had been wearing when George last saw her—a pink top, blue jean skirt, white shoes, backpack with a monkey design, and white-rimmed sunglasses; doll clothing that would fit the doll recovered from the Pontiac Sunfire; small plastic toy horses similar to one that had been found at the crime scene; and any prescription drugs, including amphetamines and narcotics.
Every scrap of plastic bag collected at the scene—and there turned out to be over three hundred of them—was tested for prints with no result. The duct tape and laundry bag tested similarly. No surprise there, given the abundance of water and heat, but they were checked anyway. Still, there was a consensus among all of us that the duct tape held a great deal of forensic potential.
When the duct tape arrived at the FBI laboratory, a decision had to be made about where to send it first. The condition of the tape was so poor that most of the adhesive was gone and much of the fabric layer had separated from the plastic. The general opinion was that there was virtually no chance of any DNA being found on the tape. As destructive as heat and moisture are to fingerprints, they are twice as destructive to DNA. The decision was made that the tape would go first to the latent print section to be photographed, then to the Trace Evidence Unit for removal of any adhering hairs or fibers, and finally to the Chemistry Unit for comparison of this sample of tape to that on the gas can.
The task of initially examining and photographing the tape fell to Elizabeth Fontaine, a fairly new examiner. One of the processes used in searching for fingerprints is to inspect the object using different wavelengths of light, some of which are beyond the human visual spectrum. During these examinations she observed no fingerprints, but she did notice a peculiar artifac
t on the tape, residue that appeared to be in the shape of a small heart. She would describe it as similar in appearance to what you would see after removing a Band-Aid that had been on your skin for a period of time: as if dirt had adhered to the residue of adhesive. She dutifully noted it in her report and showed it to her supervisor. Since there was no policy in place about photographing nonprint impressions, she did not photograph it, and instead she passed the tape along to trace. When trace returned it, she proceeded to the next stages of processing, using various chemicals to enhance otherwise invisible prints. The additional methods met with negative results as expected.
When news of the heart-shaped impression reached investigators, they asked Fontaine to try and photograph the impression. Unfortunately, by the time the attempts were made, the impression could no longer be detected. In an attempt to record the impression, the tape was diverted to Lori Gotesman, a documents examiner, to see if she could do anything with it. She was also unable to visualize the impression.
A big part of the investigators’ interest in the heart-shaped residue was that a red heart sticker had been found at the crime scene on a piece of cardboard some distance from the primary site, a find that had raised eyebrows. Indeed, for this reason, among the list of items on the search warrant when investigators entered the Anthony house had been scrapbooking and arts and crafts supplies. The searchers did find a roll of heart stickers in Casey’s room that were of similar size to the one found at the crime scene.
Despite the lack of clear connection to the Anthony home, this concept of the heart sticker resonated, both in the media and with investigators. It was a disturbing image, and combined with Fontaine’s heart-shaped residue findings, it suggested a surprising possibility: someone, presumably Caylee’s killer, had placed the heart sticker on the duct tape over her mouth.
INVESTIGATORS CONTINUED TO SEARCH FOR a way to connect the Anthony home to the crime scene, and so the next step was to compare the tape at the crime scene to the tape from the gas can. The chemical comparison of the tapes from the scene and the gas can revealed that they were identical in composition and were manufactured the same way.
After those analyses were completed, it was determined that DNA testing should be attempted no matter how improbable, but in the end it only further muddied the waters. A foreign DNA profile was found on the sticky side of the tape that did not match any of the known samples submitted in the case. In addition, the opposite side of the tape had an indication of a very minuscule amount of DNA that was different both from that on the sticky side and from all known samples in the case. After testing the DNA of all those who had examined the tape, it was determined that the DNA matched examiner Lori Gotesman, the documents examiner, and the other trace was accounted for by a second examiner from the Chemistry Unit. The ability of DNA testing to detect extremely small amounts of DNA is both a blessing and a curse. Contamination, as hard as one might try to prevent it, is a fact of life. Forensically insignificant, but embarrassing to the FBI.
The last examination of the tape was done by Karen Lowe, the hair and fiber analyst who had originally examined the hairs from Casey’s car. Lowe’s report threw us for a bit of a loop. She compared the fibers in the tape found on the remains to the fibers in the tape from the gas can. Shockingly, even though the logos matched precisely, the fibers themselves did not match. The report said that the fabric portion of the tape from the scene was composed of only polyester fibers, while the tape from the gas can was cotton and polyester. After reading those words, I was quickly on the phone with Karen. I knew that the cotton in Caylee’s shirt had completely decomposed, leaving only the lettering and the elastic collar. If that cotton had decomposed, wouldn’t the same have happened to the cotton in the tape?
From the product information we’d received from the tape’s distributor, it appeared that the tape was made only with both polyester and cotton. It did not appear that they manufactured tape using just polyester, but we didn’t know for sure. I questioned Karen on the phone about the possibility of decomposition affecting the comparison, and she seemed unimpressed with the idea, but when I suggested that she call the manufacturer to determine whether the tape had ever been made with only polyester, she did not seem willing to investigate the matter more fully. It took me six months, a dozen calls, and actually sending a sample of the tape to the manufacturer to establish what I’d been suspecting since I first read Lowe’s report: the tape from the crime scene had originally been manufactured as a cotton/poly blend, and the cotton had merely decomposed. As such, it was a match to the tape from the gas can.
The duct tape was the smoking gun, or as close to it as we were going to get. It was the primary piece of evidence that led me to the firm conviction that Casey had committed premeditated murder. In my opinion, its position over the nose and mouth was no coincidence; it was murder. The jawbone being in the position it was, anatomically correct on the skull, proved this. For the jawbone to stay in place after decomposition, the tape had to be there before the decomposition began.
Part of interpreting a crime scene is eliminating things that don’t make sense. You hope to convince jurors to use their common sense as well. So is there any reason someone would put duct tape over the nose and mouth of a dead child? Only if someone wants to make it look like a murder. But why would anyone want to do that?
People don’t make accidents look like murder unless they are covering something up. If Caylee had died accidentally and Casey didn’t want to take any responsibility, maybe Casey thought staging a murder that could be blamed on Zanny or a stranger could get her off the hook. That way, she’d be able to argue that someone else had abducted Caylee, suffocated her with duct tape, and dumped her in the swamp. But why do that, since the accident wasn’t a crime?
Still, I didn’t really buy her using the duct tape as a cover-up. In my mind, the only reason there was duct tape on Caylee’s nose and mouth was to keep her from breathing. Preventing someone from breathing means premeditation, plain and simple. When I thought it through, it was the only reason that made sense to me.
There was one rather odd item of evidence from the scene. About a foot from Caylee’s remains was a red Disney World bag. Neither the bag nor its contents was ever tied to anyone involved in the case, but they’re odd enough that they bear mentioning. Inside the bag was a Gatorade bottle with a murky translucent liquid inside. When the bottle was opened at the lab, also found inside the bottle were a syringe and its wrapper. The liquid contents of the bottle were tested and found to be consistent with a cleaning product that contained trace amounts of chloroform. Dr. Michael Rickenbach, who had separately confirmed Dr. Vass’s findings of chloroform in the trunk of Casey’s car, attributed the chloroform in the bottle to a component of the cleaner.
Even odder was that the liquid, in small amounts, and the syringe showed the presence of four testosterone compounds. When I received Dr. Rickenbach’s report, I did a little Internet research and discovered that the combination of compounds was found in a male hormone supplement that a young man might take to enhance muscle mass or an older one might be prescribed as a hormone supplement that is available legally only by prescription. I tried to trace the syringe through the manufacturer, but the items could not be tracked to the direct purchasers. We wondered if maybe it was tied to something George had been prescribed, but we found no evidence of it. Just a big ole red herring. Still don’t have any idea how it got there or if it was related, but I sure would like to know.
The final items were Caylee’s bones and hair. There was the formal matter of identification to be determined. One of the bones was transported to the FBI lab, where a portion of the marrow was removed and tested. The results were compared with a DNA test that had been performed on Caylee’s toothbrush a month before as well as with Casey’s genetic profile. A positive identification was made: the remains in the woods were Caylee Marie Anthony.
That would appear to be the e
nd of the forensics on the crime scene, but sometimes peculiar things can be found in looking deeper into test results. For purposes of elimination, DNA samples were taken from Cindy, George, and Lee Anthony. Having done as many of these as I have, I am able to read and compare the profiles pretty well. The cops had always wondered if Lee or George was Caylee’s father. They like to think the worst of people sometimes, and their opinion of the Anthonys was not great anyway. One look at the DNA profiles and I assured them there was no way. I had in the past been involved in two cases where these types of elimination tests of relatives had exposed some unpleasant surprises to men who thought they were the father of someone they weren’t. One, tragically, was the father of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been murdered. Ever since then, I’d gotten in the habit of checking these things.
When I looked at Casey’s profile, she checked out as the child of George and Cindy. Likewise, neither George nor Lee was Caylee’s father.
Caylee’s hair was the last to be examined. When it arrived, Karen Lowe was out of the lab so the case was assigned to Stephen Shaw, another hair and fiber analyst. The hairs on the body matched the hair from the trunk, in length, color, and microscopic characteristics, and they both had the death band. The only difference was that the hair from the swamp showed more advanced decomposition—after all, it had been there for almost six months.
EVEN THOUGH WE DIDN’T LEARN volumes from the remains, their discovery impacted every aspect of our case—especially our decision to seek the death penalty. Once Caylee’s remains were found and analyzed, we had to make a sober assessment of the story the evidence was telling us and readdress the penalty issue.