by Jeff Ashton
My jaw dropped. He had lost that little battle of wills with the judge and me a month earlier, and now he stood in front of the court to whine about it. Words escape me at times like these, but they did not escape Judge Perry. “Well, I guess I can’t trust any stipulation you get,” Judge Perry said.
In the end, the court ruled that Dr. Vass’s opinions were based upon generally accepted scientific principles, so Vass would be permitted to testify. It was an important victory for us, but we didn’t have too long to savor it. The trial was a little over a month away—more than enough time to get one final, massive curveball thrown our way.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE NUCLEAR LIE
Eight weeks before trial, Linda, Frank, and I were reviewing every defense action that Jose and his dream team might come up with. We had long expected what Linda would call the nuclear lie, the big one. Our job was figuring out what that might be.
With Caylee’s remains found and the crime scene tied to the Anthony home through the duct tape, the argument of abduction by a stranger had become hard to maintain. As late as the late winter of 2011 the defense was still trying to support the theory that Caylee had been alive, abducted by persons unknown, when Casey went to jail. That theory held that Caylee had been killed during Casey’s incarceration and her body then deposited in the Suburban Drive swamp. In this scenario, Casey’s alibi was irrefutable. She was in jail so she couldn’t have murdered her daughter. The poor child’s killers were still at large.
As their Texas EquuSearch witnesses fell apart one by one, the three of us on the prosecution knew that this version of Casey’s lie was dying its inevitable death. In the two and a half years we’d been on this case, we’d seen this all before, whether it was during the role-play with Lee when Casey had first developed the kidnapping story and Casey 2.0 was born, or at Universal Studios, when she’d reached the end of the hall, or when she’d created the Blanchard Park variation of the kidnapping story, Casey 3.0, for Lee. She had nowhere else to go with the mysterious abductor story, so she needed a new narrative. We’d seen it before so many times, we could almost smell it. All the telltale signs were there that Casey’s story was about to change. It had to. But the nuclear lie that was about to be dropped was beyond even our wildest imaginations.
With the Frye hearing finally over, Linda, Frank, and I had submitted the state’s list of witnesses and the defense had submitted theirs. All motions about discovery had been resolved. There was nothing left for either side to do but plan for the logistics of the trial itself.
Yet one complication remained. During the Frye hearing, we’d received a new witness list from the defense with two new names: Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, a psychiatrist from Orlando, and Dr. William Weitz, a psychologist from the Fort Lauderdale area. I had known Dr. Danziger for many years. He was a forensic psychiatrist, and part of his practice was forensic evaluations. He was one of the two doctors who had originally examined Casey in July 2008 by order of Judge Strickland, who had asked both doctors to do a basic competency evaluation. At that time, the only significant finding had been that she was unusually happy for somebody in her circumstances.
Baez had not filed anything about the content of what these two mental health experts were going to testify to, so all signs pointed to another Baez ambush. At the end of the Frye hearing, we raised the issue with Judge Perry: the court had previously ordered that all experts had to provide reports, so we were expecting reports from Danziger and Weitz.
For the defense, Ann Finnell said she was going to contact these doctors and have them submit reports by that Friday, April 8. We had only four weeks till trial, so even Friday was pushing it. We needed to decide if we were going to depose them, but we didn’t know what they were going to say.
That afternoon I was running out of the courtroom to pick up my children from day care. Linda and Frank had already gone home. When I got outside the courthouse, I remembered that my wife was on pickup duty so I slowed my pace. My cell phone rang just as I reached the parking garage. Ann Finnell was asking me to come back upstairs to the courtroom. I walked in to find Finnell, Mason, and Baez standing in the courtroom.
Ann told me she had contacted the two doctors and there was no way they could get their reports to her by Friday. She wanted to go before Judge Perry to explain the delay and she needed a member of the prosecution team in court. We called the judge and he reentered the now empty courtroom, without a court reporter, to see what was up.
We all stood in the courtroom near the jury box as Ann explained the issue with the report. I didn’t have a problem with a slight delay, but time was of the essence.
“What is this about?” Judge Perry demanded. “Why don’t you just tell? Why do we have all this mystery?”
All of us, including Judge Perry, went together into the back jury room. We took seats around a small table. Finnell started by saying that the doctors were important to explaining Casey’s failure to report Caylee’s disappearance for the thirty-one days.
I looked at them in disbelief and said, “Why don’t you quit playing around and tell us what the story is?”
Jose smirked, and said that the story was going to be that Caylee drowned by accident and Casey trusted someone she shouldn’t have to take care of it. I was dumbfounded by both parts of the premise. They were going to concede that Casey knew Caylee had died from the beginning, and they were going to implicate someone else in the cover-up.
“Who would that be?” I asked.
“George,” he replied matter-of-factly, as if this were somehow an obvious answer.
I looked at him and broke out in laughter. “Just bring it on,” I said. “I can’t wait to cross-examine Casey.” It was not my proudest moment, but it had been an exceedingly long day and my feistiness was showing.
I thought it was a complete crock of crap. For ages I’d assumed that Casey was going to implicate someone beyond herself as a way to deflect blame. Linda, Frank, and I had been debating for years what her next story was going to be. What was shocking was not that she had a new lie, but that this lie contained the combination of Caylee drowning and Casey blaming George. We had considered both separately, but we had never thought she’d put them both together in the same story.
I left the conversation, went downstairs, and called Linda. I got her answering machine and left a cryptic voice message. “I know what her story is,” I said.
Linda called me back right away. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she exclaimed when I told her. Frank didn’t get back to me until the next day, and he had the same response.
Sometime over the next day or two, Linda spoke to Jose and got a little more detail. The story was going to be that Casey had been awakened on the morning of June 16 by her father, saying that Caylee had drowned in the pool. Everything was on George. Casey took no responsibility whatsoever. That was always her position.
The following week, late as usual, we got the reports from the therapists. Dr. Danziger’s report had a psychological evaluation of Casey and generalizations about maternal filicide. Dr. Weitz’s report, also in very general terms, talked about the ideas of molestation, trauma, and denial. All of these allegations were not unusual to justify a crime. It seemed that Casey saw, as we did, that her prior lies weren’t going to work, so it was time to come up with another one.
Although we will never know the genesis of Casey 4.0, since conversations between Casey and her lawyer are privileged, Linda had a theory. During a deposition of our medical examiner, Dr. G, back in September of 2010, Cheney had probed her about the possibility of drowning. Linda’s theory was that he was exploring a potential defense in the case. Of course at that point, Cheney had still been pushing the stranger abduction story, so at the time it appeared to us that Casey 4.0 hadn’t been born . . . yet.
In early 2011, something else had occurred which supported Linda’s theory. Out of the blue one day, Baez called her. He
was interested in discussing whether we would consider something called a proffer in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. A proffer is essentially an offer of proof, so in other words, Casey would offer her story to us, if we would consider taking the death penalty off the table.
The conversation was incredibly vague. We had a closed door meeting with the defense during which they were evasive about the specifics of her story, but they felt it would be something that would convince us not to seek the death penalty. We discussed it with Lawson as well to get his take. At that point, we all wanted to hear what she had to say, but I must admit I think our motive was curiosity more than anything else. Much like everyone else, we wanted to know what the next lie would be, but of course we had to do what was best for the case, not what was best to satisfy our own interests.
Still, it was an intriguing possibility made all the more interesting because the offer appeared to be unconditional; we could hear the story she had to tell, and if we didn’t buy it, we could still move forward with the death penalty. However, as with many things with the defense, their position changed over time. Eventually a huge caveat was put on their proffer: if we decided to hear her story out, we had to take the death penalty off the table. We had to take it sight unseen, or else the deal was off. In the end, none of us were comfortable striking this ambiguous bargain with a woman who had a documented history of lying, so we let the whole thing go.
But after we learned about the therapists’ reports, suddenly these events from the months prior fell into place. Taken with Mason’s comments about drowning at Dr. G’s deposition, we could suddenly understand what they’d been up to. The way we figured it, Casey’s version of events—blaming George for the abuse and the drowning—probably started coming together around fall of 2010. At some point before Baez called Linda about the proffer, that new version, Casey 4.0, had been pitched to the therapists. Once it was clear that they could get backing from the therapists on it, they tried to serve it up to us. When we wouldn’t take the bait, they simply decided to use Dr. Danziger and Dr. Weitz as mouthpieces for Casey’s story.
After we got the reports, we arranged sit-downs with the two new eleventh-hour witnesses. Dr. Danziger came first. On the morning of his appointment, he arrived before the defense attorneys. I noticed that Dr. Danziger was uneasy that morning. He expressed his apprehension in an odd kind of way. “I am very uncomfortable being the vector for this information,” he said to me.
I was puzzled and went back to my office to look up the word vector. I wanted to be sure of which definition he meant. The one definition that seemed most applicable was “a vehicle to spread disease.”
When the defense attorneys got there, Dr. Danziger repeated his concern about being a vector. He added that he had difficulty being a mouthpiece for these “very, very serious allegations against someone in a situation where there is no other evidence he actually did anything.”
I had known Jeffrey Danziger for twenty years. I had led him in testimony, as well as cross-examined him. He had testified in favor of some of my cases and against others. He had testified in cases where I felt the defendant was feeding him a line, and I called it for what it was. In still others, he had reported the symptoms displayed by a defendant, while questioning their genuineness and suggesting further observation.
And when he thought a defendant was honestly displaying symptoms, he said that, too. On our first case together, involving the brutal rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl, he gave the opinion that the defendant was insane but volunteered he had little factual support for his opinion. While I disagreed with him, I admired his frankness. You don’t find that much in forensic psychiatry. When I did disagree with him, it was in cases where he believed there was genuine mental illness, and our disagreement went more to the legal significance of the illness than to its existence. Yet through all this disagreement, differing opinions, and professional respect, I have always known him to be an honest person—someone I respect immensely, even if I don’t always agree with him.
In all of those years though, I had never seen him demonstrate the slightest reluctance to testify in any case on any issue. That day as we waited to begin the deposition, his demeanor was truly startling. In my opinion, he saw himself that day, not as a physician giving a diagnosis but as a vehicle for the transmission of a lie and I think the thought sickened him. I think he choose the word vector with great care. In his mind he was spreading the virus of Casey’s lies. He knew that he was chosen because he would make the lie seem credible in a way she never could. In the end, I think he refused to allow himself to be used that way and he spoke his mind. I admire him for that because he was the only one who did.
We had asked Dr. Danziger to bring us copies of his notes from his interview with Casey, and we started out just going through them. A lot of them were biographical and background information, easy stuff. Then we got to the bombshell. Part of Casey’s new claim was that at age eight, her father had begun molesting her. The abuse had included oral sex, vaginal—everything. It lasted until she was in her early teens, and then it stopped. According to Danziger’s notes, her father was not the only abuser in the house. When she was a young teenager, her brother, Lee, had entered her room and felt up her breasts. She claimed she woke up and he was standing there, but he had not done anything other than that.
Then Danziger went over Casey’s claims for the scenario that had played out on June 16, 2008. What follows is my best recollection of our conversation during the deposition with him. Casey was asleep in bed at 9 A.M. She was awakened by her father screaming at her, “Where is Caylee?”
Casey said that she would have Caylee sleep with her for Caylee’s protection because she was afraid her father might try to molest Caylee. That morning, Casey slept very hard and very late for her. The subtext was that it was unusual for her to be that sound asleep, and we believed this was meant to imply that she had been drugged. Her father then began to search the house and he found Caylee in the pool.
Reading Danziger’s report, we now had two versions of who found Caylee. Jose had told Linda that it had been Casey who found Caylee in the pool. But Casey’s version to Danziger had George finding Caylee in the pool. In Danziger’s version, George walked in with Caylee in his arms. She was dripping wet. He laid her on the floor and he began to scream, “This is your fault!”
Casey ran to her room, and that was the last she ever saw of Caylee.
Danziger said he interviewed Casey three times. We went methodically through the notes. During all three of her meetings with him, she consistently stuck with the exact same scenario.
That was the bombshell, but we still had the mushroom cloud.
Dr. Danziger went on to say that Casey told him she did not believe that Caylee drowned by accident. She did not believe that Caylee could have gotten into the pool on her own, because she couldn’t have gotten the ladder up. Casey believed that her father drowned Caylee deliberately or drowned her while he was molesting her, even though she had no evidence that George had ever molested Caylee in the past.
This allegation of abuse was particularly alarming because in Danziger’s interview with Casey when she was first arrested he had asked her specifically if she had ever been sexually abused and she had said no. Dr. Danziger had given her the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standard tool for a psychologist that he had taken special training to administer. Comprised of five hundred questions, the test is designed to discover mental illness or personality disorder. In all respects, she scored within normal ranges, Dr. Danziger said. He described her demeanor during the interviews as pleasant and happy, saying that the only emotion she showed was anger when she was describing her father.
That day, we did not complete Dr. Danziger’s deposition, because we weren’t anticipating the volume of information that he gave us. We agreed to reset it a few days later.
We didn’t have much tim
e to process everything we had heard. Dr. William Weitz was scheduled to talk with us that same day after lunch, and to the best of my memory, that deposition went like this:
We went through the same procedure with him as we had with Dr. Danziger, slowly and carefully reviewing his notes. He did not have the same reluctance as Dr. Danziger to relay his information to us.
As far as molestation went, Casey had basically told him the same story she had told Danziger: the abuse started when she was eight and included all manner of sexual activity. But she told him that the sexual activity continued into her late teens, which was longer than in her other account. She also said she had been concerned that George might be Caylee’s father until the DNA test done by the FBI ruled out that possibility. Casey also told Dr. Weitz about Lee. She said she had tried to tell her mother about some aspect of the abuse, but Cindy had called her a whore.
As to the day of the tragedy, she added a few additional details to the version she’d told Danziger. She began by talking about being awakened by George and by him coming into the house with Caylee. Those details were the same.
The new detail was about the clothing. She told Dr. Weitz that Caylee went to bed wearing a nightgown, but when George brought her into the house in the morning she was wearing different clothes, striped shorts and a pink shirt, implying that George had changed her clothes. She explained in great detail that George’s upper body was wet but that his lower body was not. The doctor took that as an indication that George held Caylee underwater while he himself was outside the pool. It seemed important to Casey to say that only her father’s shirt was wet. She repeated her assertion that Caylee could not have died by accident and that George had murdered her.
She said that George yelled at her, “It’s your fault. It’s your fault. You’re a bad mother.” She said that she saw George carrying Caylee out of the house. She also told Dr. Weitz that she wasn’t sure Caylee was dead, that in fact she thought Caylee might actually have been alive. From time to time during the thirty-one days, George would tell her that Caylee was okay.