Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  Cindy began to sob again on the witness stand, head hung low, when she heard her daughter so callously dismissing her friend’s emotional state. She also sobbed when Casey talked about how her family had let her down. Casey, sitting at the defense table only a few feet from her mother, made no response or reaction at all to the tape or her mother.

  During cross-examination, Cindy’s ambivalence that we’d been witnessing for the last three years came roaring back. She spent some time painting an idealistic picture of Casey as a mother, and even when talking about why she thought Casey’s long-term lies were so elaborate and detailed, she couldn’t help but excuse Casey. To her, the scope and intricacy of the lies implied that they were illusions, not lies. Cindy equated them to a situation where children create imaginary people.

  Once again, Cindy appeared to be whitewashing every bad behavior her daughter demonstrated. The codependency between Cindy and her daughter was striking. She was finding it impossible to make Casey accountable for anything. Maybe she was putting a lot of the blame for Caylee’s death on herself: if only she had not pushed Casey so hard, if only she had been more generous with her time, then maybe no one would be here. I was finding it hard to stomach the fact that Casey was sitting so close to her mother, who was falling on the sword for her, with a derisive sneer on her face.

  Even Cindy’s testimony about the pool ladder was suspect. When Cindy had originally told coworkers about coming home to find the ladder on the pool, she had not pinpointed an exact date. But now, in response to questions from Linda, she was claiming that it was the evening of June 16, when she arrived home from work, that she found the ladder on the pool and the access gate to the backyard open. Cindy said she was absolutely certain she had put the ladder down, therefore making it inaccessible, the night before.

  One point she remained steadfast on was the smell. Baez tried to get Cindy to say that the odor in the trunk didn’t smell like rotting flesh. He asked her to choose which it resembled more—garbage or rotting flesh. “The closest thing I could resemble it to was rotting flesh,” she honestly answered. That was her strongest statement on the issue. It shows why sometimes it’s better to quit while you’re ahead.

  Frank was the man to examine the next witness, Amy Huizenga. Amy had been the person who took Cindy to Tony Lazzaro’s apartment to get Casey on July 15. After Casey came out and saw her mother waiting for her, Amy said there was a massive mother-daughter explosion. She described Casey’s demeanor in the car with Cindy after the three of them left Tony’s together. She said Casey sat in the front seat with her arms crossed, giving glaring looks, “like a sixteen-year-old who’d been caught doing something bad.” The conversation between the two in the car was either one-way or circuitous, Casey only speaking when her mother demanded to know where Caylee was. Her responses contained very few words, saying things like, “She’s with the nanny.”

  Lee Anthony, Casey’s brother, was another of Frank’s witnesses. Casey briefly broke down in tears as he settled himself into the box. He was a very different Lee Anthony from the one we had seen at his deposition during the summer of 2009. He had refused to meet with Frank before the trial, so we knew something was up. We had to consider him a somewhat hostile witness.

  In deposition nearly two years prior, Lee had been cooperative and relatively neutral in tone. He gave testimony consistent with his prior statements to investigators. But now in trial, Frank found it much more of a chore pulling the facts out of him. In deposition, Lee had told his story in a conversational, informative narrative. Very early in his trial testimony, however, it became clear from his four-word-or-fewer answers that he was less willing to volunteer information. Lee gave the facts without the same emotional tone he had shown in deposition. Then, he had demonstrated a frustration with his sister. Anything resembling that emotion was gone from his testimony at trial. Right off the bat, Frank’s questions received a response of “I don’t remember,” and Frank had to refresh his memory. In fact, he acted like he was having trouble remembering a lot of things. Frank finally decided to give him his deposition to refer to in an effort to help him along.

  As a prosecutor, these kinds of situations were never easy to deal with, but Lee’s attitude surprised us. Perhaps, in some way we were so focused on George and Cindy, on their record of standoffishness, that we simply took Lee for granted. It wasn’t clear to me what had changed in his attitude, but something was decidedly different, and his testimony was not producing the effect that we’d hoped for.

  When Frank asked Lee what he and Casey talked about on the evening of July 15, Lee said he asked Casey why she wouldn’t let them see Caylee. Frank asked him, “What was her response?” Lee’s answer was “I don’t recall.” With way more memory refreshers than we thought were necessary, Frank finally got Lee to say Casey had told him, “Maybe I’m just a spiteful bitch,” something he had said in a previous deposition.

  The same thing was true when Lee was asked about Casey’s comments about Cindy. “I don’t know,” he told Frank. Frank again helped him find what he had said in prior statements, and Lee then remembered saying that his mother had thrown it in Casey’s face that she was an unfit mother. He said Cindy told Casey that Caylee was the best mistake her daughter ever made.

  During Jose’s cross-examination of Lee, Baez tried to introduce some statements that Casey had made to Lee. It was the same tactic of introducing hearsay that Baez had attempted when Tony Lazzaro was on the stand. Because Baez had already been warned by the judge, we let him move forward and then sprang into action, asking the judge to allow us to introduce Casey’s criminal past. I recall seeing the amusement on the judge’s face as we approached the bench—Judge Perry had of course seen this coming, but Baez seemed clueless. We explained that we were requesting admission of Casey’s prior convictions on check fraud. Baez looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. Judge Perry acknowledged that the prior convictions might now be admissible, but he said he wanted to consider the significance of what Baez had brought out before he ruled. Over the course of the evening, the prosecution team did the same and concluded that the statements Baez had elicited were so innocuous that it wasn’t worth the risk of a postconviction incompetence claim, so we withdrew our request. Once again, the judge gave Baez a warning about the consequences of introducing hearsay. We all hoped that this time Baez would actually listen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PROVING THE INVESTIGATION

  With the initial testimony from Lee out of the way, we segued from the family and “friends of Casey” witnesses to the witnesses who were related to evidence from the investigation.

  After Lee Anthony, jurors heard from Orange County Sheriff’s officers Rendon Fletcher, Adrianna Acevedo, Amanda Macklin, and Reginald Hosey, who all testified to the arrival at the Anthony house on July 15, 2008. Yuri Melich, the lead investigator on the case, was then called to the stand to address his first interview with Casey on July 15, describing his general opinion of Casey as well as the trip they’d taken to the Sawgrass Apartments in search of Zanny. He told the jury that from this first interview he thought Casey’s story about the nanny was suspect.

  When the defense had its turn to cross-examine, Baez dropped a hand grenade, saying he had evidence that Melich was biased toward the prosecution. His attack was based on a blog posting the officer had once made where he referred to himself as “Dick Tracy Orlando.” The court asked the defense to point out specific statements that showed bias, per its accusation. After a lot of downtime, the court found that the issue might certainly go to the professionalism of Melich, but not to his credibility.

  One of my favorite courtroom moments, though, was later on during the cross-examination when Baez was asking Melich questions about his first recorded interview with Casey. Melich had asked her if she had drug problems.

  “Then you asked her if she’s ever committed suicide?” Jose said.

  Melich p
aused, with a quizzical look on his face. “I don’t think I could have asked her if she ever committed suicide, ’cause if she had she wouldn’t be there,” he intelligently replied. Everyone in the courtroom had a chuckle during that moment of levity. At the close of Yuri’s first testimony, June 2, Day 8 of the trial, we let Judge Perry know that we were halfway through our case. We thought we were moving forward at a very expeditious rate. We were doing our best to be mindful of everybody’s time, especially the jury’s.

  Our next witness was Jeff Hopkins, the subject of many of Casey’s alibis. We called Hopkins to show how Casey used details from her past to craft plausible lies, and he told jurors that he and Casey had met in middle school, though they were not friends. He had worked at Universal in 2002, years before Casey had worked there, but she had referred to him as a coworker. Reiterating what we’d learned three years earlier, Hopkins said he didn’t have any children, so the nanny connection was puzzling, but he did relate the story of running into Casey at a bar in Orlando in July 2008, after not having seen her for years.

  Jeff Hopkins was a perfect example of the collateral damage of Casey’s narcissism. He had known her as a cute kid in middle school, hadn’t seen her in years, ran into her by pure coincidence in an Orlando hot spot, and now here he was three years later, practically a household name. The havoc one person spewing lies could wreak on the normal lives of so many others always amazed me.

  Yuri Melich was much more seasoned in the witness box than Hopkins. When he was recalled to the stand after the Hopkins’ testimony, he described the walk-through of Universal Studios. Recalling that bizarre day, Melich relayed how Casey “walked with purpose through Universal.” He figured he’d let her go and see where the lie would end. During his testimony, we took an hour to play the video of the interview he had conducted with Casey right at the theme park. Just how far-reaching the scope of the search for Caylee had been came out in Melich’s second testimony. He said his office had received more than six thousand tips of Caylee sightings from all over the country in the weeks and months after her disappearance. To me, this number was such a testament to how much people had invested themselves in finding Caylee alive, because there was not a chance that even one of the six thousand tips was a match.

  Baez’s cross-examination took the questioning to the family pool. He was curious why Melich had never questioned Casey about her mother Cindy’s reference to the occasion when the pool ladder had been in the pool and the side gate was open. The detective explained to Baez that Casey had been questioned about the pool. That afternoon in the interview at Universal, Sergeant John Allen had, in fact, asked Casey about the possibility Caylee had drowned. But the defendant had been so adamant that Zanny had kidnapped the child, no one pursued it further. There was no reason to think she had drowned in the pool if her mother said she had been kidnapped.

  CSI experts familiar with the evidence collected from the car, the computers, and the Dumpster followed Yuri Melich on the stand. Deputy Charity Beasley took the stand about collecting the computer from the Anthony home, Awilda McBryde introduced the trash retrieved from the Dumpster, and Gerardo Bloise testified about the Pontiac. These witnesses all provided testimony about the long and boring process of meticulously identifying and documenting the precise location and appearance of each item found. Although Frank did the questioning, my muscle was needed briefly, when help was needed to open an evidence box containing the trunk liner and spare tire cover. It was taped up pretty well, and it took us a while to coax it open. The instant it did, I could smell the decomposition. It seemed there was no escaping it.

  Decomposition odor was the specialty of the cadaver dog handled by our next important witness, Jason Forgey of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office canine unit. Jurors seemed genuinely interested in this testimony. When he took the stand on June 7, Deputy Forgey told the enrapt courtroom about how his cadaver dog, Gerus, had alerted on the trunk of the Pontiac and in the Anthonys’ backyard. Forgey said that Gerus, whose search command was “Find Fred,” was trained to find blood, bones, and human remains. After relating the dog’s credentials, we played a videotape taken from a helicopter that showed an actual cadaver search conducted at night. In the video, you could see the figure of the dog handler glowing in an infrared light. He was moving back and forth through a heavily wooded area that surrounded a lake. The dog was unable to see the figure of someone in the lake, newly drowned, but the person was visible on the infrared camera. Watching the dog working his search and finally alerting near the body was totally fascinating. What a credit to their training and abilities to be able to locate a body in such conditions.

  Baez had tried to block Forgey’s testimony on qualifications, and later criticized him for having failed to videotape Gerus’s search for Caylee’s remains. Still, he made a point when he got Forgey to admit that Gerus did not alert on his second day back to search the Anthonys’ yard.

  Karen Lowe was also a widely respected expert in a very specialized field. She was the FBI hair analyst at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, who had analyzed the nine-inch hair that was found in the trunk of the Pontiac and linked it to Caylee. In her testimony on June 4, she described the microscopic banding on it, which was termed the “band of death,” explaining to jurors that only hairs that have come from a decomposing body exhibit this dark marking. Hairs with these colorations cannot have come from a living person, she said. Her testimony would later be backed up by Stephen Shaw, a hair and fiber examiner from the FBI lab. Shaw had examined the hairs from the skull itself. He testified that despite his best efforts, he could not re-create conditions under which a hair might acquire a “band of death” other than in decomposition.

  The defense did not have any opposing experts on this issue, so Baez tried to challenge the finding by degrading the science on which it was based. We made the point on redirect that the hair in evidence was not a “shed” hair; it hadn’t fallen out and then decomposed. Also, the hair collected from Caylee’s hairbrush did not have the banding, so it was not a natural characteristic of Caylee’s hair to have this band.

  ON MONDAY, JUNE 6, THE time had come for Dr. Arpad Vass to take the stand. Dr. Vass was our forty-first witness in ten days. He had a very natural and professorial manner of describing even the most disgusting things, like the stages of decomposition. I loved his engaging way of looking at the jury when explaining things. The first hour with Dr. Vass was spent on the background of his work. His presented his credentials without a hitch. The physical evidence that followed was the kind of presentation that tends to be dry and boring, but Dr. Vass, like an eager intellectual, would light up and say to the jury, “Now this is the cool part.” If he had lingering nerves about testifying, he didn’t show them.

  Dr. Vass’s testimony was significant because it was scientific confirmation that what had been smelled by humans and dogs was the odor of decomposition. I wanted to demonstrate to the jury that we had incorporated all that science had to offer as we tried to understand what that smell had been. If they believed Dr. Vass’s findings, they added to the overall quantum of evidence that proved there was a dead body in the car. If they found it too “cutting edge” for their liking, then they were free to ignore it and rely on all of the other witnesses and evidence proving that fact.

  Confident as I was in Dr. Vass’s actual testimony, when dealing with more than one hundred pieces of evidence, mistakes are bound to happen.While Vass was on the stand, I made mine. I had five metal cans, each containing a small piece of the stained carpet. I happened to hand Dr. Vass the wrong one. After we moved the can into evidence and after his testimony was done, I realized I had shown him the wrong can. The one I had shown him was the one that had been sent to the FBI, not the one he had worked on. To my embarrassment, I had to put him on the stand again to introduce the correct can. Of all the witnesses to make a mistake with, why did have to be Vass? We put the correct can into evidence and moved forward.


  Dr. Vass was a foremost expert on odor mortis, the smell of death. He had asked the crime scene investigators at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to collect a carpet sample from the trunk of the Pontiac to test at his lab. There, he used a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to analyze the samples and try to detect compounds consistent with human decomposition. He was successful. In the sample, he found forty-one such compounds, including butyric acid, one of the first compounds released by the body after death.

  Dr. Vass described to the jurors how he jumped back when he first opened the can with the carpet sample, so strong was the odor. Before trial, Linda, Frank, and I had considered the possibility of giving one of the cans containing the odor to the jury to open for themselves. To make sure we didn’t have an OJ Simpson moment, I had opened two of the cans in the company of Mike Vincent of the Sheriff’s Office to confirm that the odor was still detectable. We agreed that the odor was both evident and recognizable. However, during the prosecution’s presentation of Dr. Vass and his odor findings, we decided having the jury smell for themselves might create potential legal problems, and we didn’t want to risk an appeal that challenged the can of odor.

  Later on in the trial, though, when the defense was presenting its case, I actually revisited the idea. During cross-examination of a defense witness, I was showing the jurors the pieces of garbage that had been in the trunk before being retrieved from the Dumpster. I saw a juror smelling one of the garbage pieces that had been handed to her. Because the defense was claiming the odor in the trunk was from the garbage, I thought this might be my opening to say “in that case, smell the can and compare that with the garbage.”

  The idea of having the jury smell the evidence in this trial had originally come from Professor Andy Raum of the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, who was assisting me in the forensics aspects of the case. He mentioned that juries had been allowed to use their sense of smell in the past. These were mostly moonshine cases that had taken place back in the twenties and thirties, where the jurors were allowed to sniff liquids to decide if they were booze or not. But when I asked Judge Perry if I could introduce my cans as sniff evidence, he said no. He would not allow the jury to sniff the carpet samples from the trunk.