Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  “I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” wrote Bradley. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

  Bradley, who lived in Canada, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to set the record straight.

  Bradley said that the first analysis report, conducted by Stenger, had been hidden from him.

  And this was huge, because once again it showed the pattern of bad faith on the part of law enforcement and/or the prosecution when it came to this case.

  The question arose: Did Linda Drane Burdick know that she was presenting false evidence? Where it gets fishy is that she called Bradley a civilian from Canada (we do not have subpoena powers in Canada) to testify about Sgt. Stenger’s report. Then you have John Bradley’s post trial comments. But I know Linda Drane Burdick, and John Bradley removed his statement off of his website after the New York Times wrote a big article on it and it began to get a lot of attention. Maybe Bradley got scared and back-pedaled because all of his business comes from law enforcement, or maybe he was mistaken. I will never know. If it had been any other prosecutor given these facts I would say absolutely they knew they put on false evidence, but Linda’s character stands in the way of that, and I have the utmost respect for her character. So without first-hand knowledge, I would say no, she did not knowingly introduce false evidence. But nonetheless, the evidence was false.

  AFTER THE COMPUTER TESTIMONY we wanted to delve more into the theme of shady police work. We called Detective Ryan Eberlin, who was the officer who first handcuffed Casey at her house, only to have her uncuffed a few minutes later.

  We wanted to show the perfect example of law enforcement misleading the jury. Sergeant Reginald Hosey had testified that he had never told Eberlin to handcuff her, whereas on the stand, Eberlin testified Hosey had told him to do it.

  That wasn’t huge as it related to the case as much as it said to the jury, “Look, they are lying to you.”

  We then attempted to call to the stand Detective Eric Edwards and Linda Tinelli. We wanted to show that law enforcement wanted Tinelli, one of the women manning George’s search-for-Caylee booth, to wear a wire and question George about Caylee’s disappearance. Outside the presence of the jury, Judge Belvin Perry ruled that it wasn’t relevant, so we never got them to testify.

  We also got Melich to testify that the police had pulled Roy Kronk’s phone records, when in truth they didn’t. I got Melich to return the next day and admit to the jury that he “misspoke.”

  We then turned our attention to Suburban Drive. One of the issues we dealt with was the search in the woods conducted by Dominic Casey and Jim Hoover, who were working for the Anthonys. To bring the issue to the fore, on June 28, we called to the stand Cindy Anthony, Lee Anthony, and Yuri Melich.

  In one of his reports, Melich had written that on December 20, when they went to the house to execute a search warrant, Cindy had said, “I had my people (Dominic and Hoover) search there a month ago, and they didn’t find anything.” Later Cindy would deny making that statement. She had denied it in her civil deposition, so I knew she’d deny it at trial. Sure enough, we called Cindy up, and she denied ever making it.

  During my meetings with Lee, he had told me that in fact she did have Dominic and Hoover out in the woods searching for Caylee sometime in October. And as a result, said Lee, he and Cindy had had a fight, because Lee thought Caylee was still alive, and Cindy was sending Dominic into the woods to search for a dead Caylee.

  How did Cindy know she was dead? While we will never know, you can insinuate in good faith that at some point Cindy learned the truth from George, and that’s when she sent her guys into the woods.

  At any rate, after Cindy testified, I called Lee to the stand. This was right after Cindy had testified, “No, I didn’t make that statement, and no, I didn’t send Dominic Casey into the woods.”

  Lee walked right up there after sitting next to his mother and said, “Yes, she did, and not only that, but we got into a big fight over it, and shortly after that fight I went back to work and stopped searching for Caylee.”

  It was huge, huge, and then I called back Melich, and he said, “Yeah, she made the statement.”

  For me the infighting among those three made such an impactful impression on the jury that it was one of the landmark reasons why Casey was acquitted.

  And once again, not a word of it was mentioned in the media the next day.

  ON SATURDAY, JUNE 24, in court Burdick came up to me, and she said, “You know, all I really want is the truth from Casey as to what happened.”

  When she said that, I thought, This is a plea overture.

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Let’s talk about it,” she said.

  Some other people have said I was the one who approached Burdick, but I will tell you, that wasn’t the case. A plea bargain was the furthest thing from my mind, in large part because Casey had made it clear she was innocent and wouldn’t entertain the possibility of a plea bargain.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m willing to let her plead to count three.”

  Which was aggravated manslaughter of a child, with a thirty-year maximum. The problem was that there’s no minimum, so Judge Perry would have discretion as to how many years he would sentence her to.

  Judge Perry’s involvement, for us, was the tricky part.

  “If Casey will say that she would consider a plea,” said Burdick, “Then we will go to Judge Perry, and he can tell us what he will sentence her to ahead of time, and then she can decide whether to accept it or not.”

  Hmmm. To me this was a no-lose situation, because once Judge Perry announced how many years he would sentence her to, say hypothetically twenty-five years, if afterwards she was convicted of murder and was sentenced to life, I could argue that it was vindictive sentencing in that he had already said, “Twenty-five years.”

  And if she was handed a death sentence, I could make an argument that might save her life.

  All five of us on the defense team, Cheney, Lisabeth, Dorothy, Michelle, and I went to see Casey. I told her about the offer and that all she had to do was consider it.

  “No,” she said right away.

  “Casey, you have got to at least think about it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I just thought about it. The answer is no.”

  We all went round and round talking to Casey, how this was a no-lose situation, but in the end, even listening to a plea deal was something she just couldn’t do.

  “No, I’m not guilty. I’m innocent,” she said. “And I don’t care what anyone has to say. I feel this jury is on our side. I’ll plead guilty to lying to the cops, but I won’t plead guilty to something I did not do.”

  Cheney and I left the room, and he said, “I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Casey was taking a huge risk by not considering the deal, innocent or otherwise. Her life was at stake here, and she was trusting twelve strangers to decide whether she would live or die.

  “I’m going to the judge,” Cheney said. “I have issues about her competency.”

  We went to sidebar. Cheney was about to tell Judge Perry when I said, “Wait a minute, Cheney.” And I asked the judge to give me a couple more minutes. I wanted another chance to talk to Casey.

  I did, and I still didn’t get anywhere with her. I went back, and Cheney and I told the judge.

  “I have questions about her competency,” said Cheney.

  And whenever a lawyer does that, the trial has to stop, because any evidence that gets presented if the client isn’t competent—it’s a waste of time.

  Judge Perry called a recess.

  “I’ll have some people go in and evaluate her today. We’ll stop and say it’s a legal issue. They’ll evaluate her tonight, and tomorrow we’ll see what the reports have to say.”

 
We told Casey what they were doing, and she said, “Fine.”

  Doctors went in and talked to her, and they found her competent. The next day the trial continued.

  When Judge Perry called off court for the day, saying it was a “legal issue,” the media went crazy, inventing all the events it might be including Casey pleading guilty and one of the lawyers quitting the case. It was the usual garbage by reporters who needed a story for the news, whether there was truth to that story or not.

  I can say a lot of things about Casey, but one thing I can never say is that she lacked courage. She looked death in the face and said, “A plea? Absolutely not.” I know I wouldn’t have had the same courage. To this day I’m amazed at how strong she was, and maybe that’s what life taught her: how to be a survivor. But to this day I’m amazed for her actions on that day.

  WHEN WE RESUMED, we called Kronk to the stand. Because of my fatigue, I turned over the questioning of Kronk to Cheney, who got Kronk to testify to all his calls in August. We outlined all the Kronk madness, went through the Kronk chronicles where he admitted to sticking his meter reading stick into the eye socket of Caylee’s skull, lifting her up. We brought out his discussions of money. He denied that money was his motivation, denied calling his son, Brandon Sparks, around Thanksgiving and telling him he was about to become famous. He testified the cops never pulled his phone records, that the cops never spoke to him between August and December, the two times he called in to say he had found bones and remains.

  He admitted his car needed $1,000 in repairs on December 10, and calling the police to report he had found Caylee’s remains on December 11.

  When Kronk finished testifying, I think it was clear to the jury that something was just not right about any of this.

  We called Roy Kronk’s son Brandon Sparks to the stand. Sparks, a very straightforward military kid, said that his father had called him a month before Caylee had been found in December and told him, “I’m going to be rich and famous.”

  We then called George to the stand to talk about his relationship with Krystal Holloway, whom he had met at the command center during the search for Caylee. It was a relationship that he denied. We showed that George sent her a text message in which he wrote, “I need you in my life,” and he denied telling Krystal that Caylee’s death was “an accident that snowballed out of control.”

  On the stand George began by saying Krystal was no different from any other volunteer. He denied ever being intimate with her and said he only went to her condominium on two or three occasions. And then he said something almost comical.

  “She had relayed to me just a few days prior to me going there for the very first time that she has a brain tumor. She was dying,” George said. “She needed someone to comfort her, and I felt as being a good guy or someone who had come to know a lot of people volunteered for us, I became very connected with a lot of people and her, and I felt because she was giving of herself to me and my family to help with my granddaughter, that’s the least I could do.”

  As he was giving his ridiculous recitation, I thought to myself, In the closing argument I’m going to shove it right up this lying SOB by saying, “His wife was the one who needed comforting. They had a missing granddaughter, not this woman who he barely knew. And not only that, she didn’t have a tumor. She’s still alive three years later. She didn’t have any brain tumor.”

  I pressed him.

  “Is it your testimony to this jury that you weren’t going there for any romantic interludes? It was just because you were going there to console her for her brain tumor?”

  Ashton objected; his objection was overruled.

  “Sir, yes, I did go there just to console her because she had confided in me that she had a brain tumor, or she was having medical issues, and she also explained that to my wife.” He added, “I had nothing to hide, sir. Never have.”

  There isn’t a man in American who has more to hide, I thought to myself.

  Despite George’s denials, I got everything I needed from him. I got that he had a relationship with her, though he denied it, and he also denied he ever made the statement to Holloway, “It was an accident that snowballed out of control.”

  I then called Krystal. I had met with her beforehand, and I found her to be a colorful character. She was who she was, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

  A scorned lover, she had a lot of anger toward George. Out of the kindness of her heart, during a period when George was telling Cindy he was working but really wasn’t, she lent him more than $4,000 so he could keep his head above water financially.

  Initially, she had wanted to protect George. When the relationship was made public, George not only kept denying its existence, he insulted and bad-mouthed her, claiming she was a criminal and a liar. As a result, she lost all sympathy for him. That and the fact he never paid her back.

  Describing how their relationship ended, Krystal said, “Shortly after the memorial service for Caylee, I blew him, and he blew me off.”

  AFTER KRYSTAL WE CALLED Dominic Casey, who was the Kato Kaelin of our case. He was such a wacky character. A number of times during his testimony, the jury couldn’t stop laughing at how crazy he was. I called him because he had emailed a psychic and included a Google map. Right where Dominic put the pin was where Caylee’s remains were found, and this was in November, a month before she was found.

  I showed the jury a blowup of an email with the spot where Caylee had been found. I had had Kronk’s coworkers circle the area, had Melich do the same. And I got Dominic to say, “Yes, I sent this to a psychic because this was the area I had searched …” Right then and there, the jury and everyone in the courthouse knew there was something fishy going on.

  I summarized it when I asked him, “This was the only time you searched for a dead Caylee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Orlando is a hundred square miles?”

  “Yes.”

  “The only place you searched was where she ultimately was found?”

  “Yes.”

  The jury could have come up with but one explanation: either George or Cindy had told him, “Hey, you need to go to this spot and search.”

  Either they wanted Dominic to find her or wanted Dominic to be able to testify that he had searched the area and there was no body there.

  Neither George nor Cindy have ever come forth and actually spoken about this. But, I have just about run out of excuses for all the coincidences.

  I CALLED CINDY TO THE STAND to advance our theory that Caylee’s death was an accident. She and I were talking about the layout of the house, the fact that there were no child-safety locks, and that Caylee was able to open the sliding-glass doors to the pool. It was at this point we introduced one of the most important exhibits in our entire case—the photo of Caylee opening the sliding-glass doors.

  We didn’t have this photo until the middle of the trial. Casey had been an inveterate photo-taker, taking thousands of photos of herself and Caylee, and she had had a lot of photos taken of herself, photos like the ones at her high school senior prom. Cindy had sold some of these photos to CBS, and we wanted to see them so we could use these photos to show to Cindy so she could talk about Casey being a good mother. At the same time I wanted to show Cindy had sold the photos.

  There was a huge batch of photos that I put under the care of William Slabaugh, who was in charge of the Casey Anthony file.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” I said to him. “Go through these photos and pull out the ones that show Caylee by and in the pool so we have proof the ladder was always off.”

  “Sure, no problem,” he said.

  We worked weekends, and this was a Sunday. He was working on his assignment, and I was in my office preparing for upcoming witnesses, when William came over to me and said, “Jose, you’ve got to see this.”

  “What?” I said, walking over to his computer.

  He clicked the button for the photo to come up, and just as it appeared, he slapped his h
ands together and yelled, “Pow, there it is.”

  And we couldn’t believe it.

  We sat around the conference room staring at a picture of Caylee opening the sliding-glass door to the pool. I have a three-year-old, and I have hundreds of pictures of him, but I don’t have one of him opening a glass door.

  No one had ever showed the picture because in and of itself it was so inconsequential. Caylee’s face doesn’t even show in the picture.

  We all just stared.

  It was the coup de grâce for the entire case.

  We all sat in dead silence.

  “It’s as if she’s trying to tell us something,” said one of our interns.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE PET CEMETERY

  AFTER WE FOUND THE PHOTO of Caylee opening the glass door on the way to the pool, we decided to look for more photos that would substantiate what George told Holloway, “It was an accident that snowballed out of control.”

  Casey had told me the same story, so I knew this to be the truth. But for the jury to believe it, we needed more, and we got it. We not only found the sliding door photo, but we also found a photo of Caylee walking up the ladder with Cindy, with Cindy barely touching her, we also found ones of Caylee jumping into the water and swimming in the pool.

  We called Cindy to the stand to discuss these photos, which we blew up for all to see. Cindy talked about Caylee’s ability to get out of the house on her own, that she had to be watched, that there were no locks to keep her from leaving. I showed her the photos and it was clear the jury was beginning to understand that this notion of ours that Caylee had drowned in the pool was not something we had pulled out of thin air.

  It was huge.

  We then talked about the shorts that had been found along with Caylee’s remains. She had outgrown them. They were size twenty-four months, when Caylee wore a 3T. Whoever put them on her hadn’t had much experience dressing her.