Mommy's Little Girl

by Diane Fanning

  “What about Jeff?” Melich pressed. “You said Jeff worked here about two months ago?”

  “No. He hasn’t worked here for quite a while.”

  “Ten months? How long?”

  “It’s been at least ten months,” Casey stalled.

  “Okay, he got fired in . . . 2002. He hasn’t been employed here since 2002. What about the girl?”

  “Juliette?”

  “Yeah. What about her?” Melich asked.

  “She left two months ago. That’s exactly what she told me,” Casey said.

  “Juliette Lewis never worked at Universal Studios.”

  Detective Appie Wells spoke for the first time in the interview. “Yuri. I’m sorry. Is the baby’s daddy actually dead?”

  “I still have a copy of the obituary at home,” Casey said.

  “Alright. Well, you’ve told us so many untruths right now, I’m confused . . . Would your parents be upset if you had given the baby back to the daddy to take back for . . . his parents to take care of?”

  “He passed away last year. We hadn’t even talked much before that,” Casey said.

  John Allen asked, “Let me ask you this: Is the obituary in your office?”

  “No, I think I have a copy of the obituary at home. There’s no office, so there’s no anything, anywhere. We’ve made that clear already,” she snapped.

  “Right,” Allen said.

  “So if I have a copy of it still, it would be on my computer at home. I’m pretty sure I kept that. I don’t think that’s something I would’ve gotten rid of.”

  Melich jumped back in, changing the subject. “Zanny’s never worked here. How do you explain that?”

  “She has an I.D. She has an I.D. with her name on it.”

  “Just like you have?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Casey stated, daring him to contradict her.

  “Just like you have an I.D.?” Skepticism etched a roughness into the tone of Melich’s voice.

  “I do have an I.D.—somewhere at my house. Both of my parents have seen it. Both of my parents know . . .”

  Melich interrupted. “Just like you have an office.”

  “. . . that I worked here. I used to have an office.”

  “Now, just like you have an office?”

  “No. I don’t have an office now.”

  Allen spoke up again. “We’re here because, why?”

  “To try and put things together,” Casey said.

  “. . . Our purpose of coming here was to do what? Go where?”

  In a surprising moment of honesty, Casey said, “I guess there wasn’t a purpose. There wasn’t a purpose whatsoever to come up here.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Casey rambled on again, insisting that her prevarication was all a desperate attempt to reach for alternate solutions. Melich cut her off with a blunt demand: “I want you to tell me how lying to us is going to help us find your daughter.”

  “It’s not going to,” Casey said.

  “Well, then . . . if the main thing you want to do is find your daughter, and you don’t think lying to us is gonna help us find her, why would you do that?”

  “Because I’m scared, and I know I’m running out of options. It’s been a month.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “I’m scared of not seeing my daughter ever again.”

  John Allen began, “Okay, and if you’re scared . . .”

  “And I’m honestly petrified . . .” Casey insisted.

  “. . . if you’re scared of not . . .”

  “. . . of not seeing her again,” Casey said, completing Allen’s sentence.

  “Seeing your daughter again, okay?” Allen echoed. “I want you to tell me how lying is going to solve that problem and help find your daughter quicker.”

  “It’s not,” Casey said.

  “Then why would you do that?”

  “See, I don’t know,” Casey answered. “I’m telling you that I just dropped her off and that was the last time that I seen her. Even starting with that, everybody else is like, ‘Well, and what happened after that?’ ”

  Frustration and bafflement grew with each word out of Casey’s mouth. Appie Wells asked, “You remember the phone call you were telling us about?” alluding to her alleged brief phone call with Caylee.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “. . . What day was it you talked to her?” Appie asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “You remember what time of day?”

  “Around noon. It was from a private number.”

  “Okay, what did she tell you? What’s your daughter say to you?”

  “She said, ‘Hi, Mommy.’ ”

  “And that’s it?” Appie asked.

  “And she started to tell me a story, talking to me about her shoes and books and . . .”

  “It’s important that you tell me,” Appie pushed. “I mean, maybe there’s something in what she said that can help us figure out where she is. What did she say?”

  “I tried to ask her where she was.”

  “Okay.”

  “And she just kept talking about the book that she’s . . . reading. We have videos of her reading the story, and she’s telling me the story.”

  Allen spoke up again. “So she seemed happy and . . .”

  “. . . fine,” Casey said with a jolting nonchalance.

  “She’s fine, she’s happy?”

  “She seemed perfectly fine . . . There was nothing in the background.”

  “. . . No sign of any type of stress at all?”

  “Not at all,” Casey said.

  “Great, that’s wonderful,” John Allen continued. “Let me ask you a question: Your daughter hasn’t seen you in over a month, and she’s not, she . . .”

  Casey interrupted, “She was excited . . . to talk to me. But at the same time, it’s crazy that she didn’t get upset when she talked to me. Which . . . had it been my mom . . . I know it would have been totally different.”

  “That makes sense to you?” Allen asked.

  “She never gets upset when she talks to me—whether I haven’t seen her for an entire day or if I had to work late at night and didn’t see her almost an entire day until the next one.”

  “That last time . . . somebody took her and you didn’t see her for five weeks was, when?”

  “Never.”

  “Okay. She’s been with . . . somebody for five weeks. Hasn’t been in her own home, hasn’t seen her mother in five weeks . . . That didn’t upset her?”

  “She was fine.”

  Allen repeated the line of questioning. “She went on about, you know, ‘I miss you, Mommy,’ none of that? She just talked like you said? She talked about that book and all that stuff, right? That’s it?”

  “And when I asked her to give the phone to another adult, to somebody else, she was fine, she was willing to do it. But the phone hung up. She doesn’t hang up phones.”

  Yuri Melich interrupted. “And that’s the phone she called you on? On your cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see that real quick?” Melich asked as he picked up the cell and walked out of the room. When he checked Casey’s phone, he found no record of that phone call—he hadn’t thought he would.

  He called Zenaida Gonzales, tracking her down with the information on the guest card he’d picked up at Sawgrass apartments. She denied knowing Casey or Caylee. She also said that she didn’t baby-sit for anyone. She agreed to provide a sworn statement.

  Then Melich’s own phone rang. It was from the detective who was interviewing Rico Morales at the station. Rico was bothered by a text message he’d gotten from Casey earlier that day that read: “If they never find her guess who spends eternity in jail?” He also told the detective that Casey and Caylee had spent the night at his house on June 9, and left on the morning of June 10.

  While Melich was out of the room, Sergeant Allen continued the interview. “
Okay. You have this conversation with her after not seeing her or hearing from her for five weeks. The phone call’s terminated. You don’t get a chance to talk to an adult . . . The very next thing you do after that is what? Call the police—because now something really strange has happened, so you must’ve called the police right after that. Did you call the city police or do you remember who you called? Which police agency did you call yesterday?”

  “I didn’t call anybody at noon after I got that phone call. I sat down . . .”

  “You—Whoa! You didn’t think that was odd . . . ?”

  “I thought it was extremely odd,” Casey said.

  “But not odd enough to call the police and try to get help?”

  Casey did not respond. In the moment of silence, Yuri Melich stepped back into the room. “Let me throw something in, if you don’t mind,” he said to the other detectives, then turned to Casey. “You know Ricardo, right? Obviously, your ex-boyfriend?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “We brought him down to the office and he’s been busy talking to a couple of detectives down there. And he was able to help us because he’s telling us something obviously, completely different than what you’re telling us.” He told her that the video from the surveillance camera across the street would corroborate Ricardo’s story of the events of June 9–10.”

  “I was not at his place the ninth of that month.”

  “So, you stayed at your ex-boyfriend’s the ninth of this month when you are staying at your other boyfriend’s house—Tony—the rest of the month?”

  “He’d been out of town, so . . . I wasn’t staying in his apartment. I was staying with Amy and Ricardo and J.P. J.P. and Ricardo own the house.”

  “So why didn’t . . . you tell us you were staying there? We drove right by that house this morning, didn’t we?”

  Casey didn’t answer the question, so Melich continued. “Okay, why were you pointing at this old folks’ home and saying Zanny lived there at one point, when she didn’t?”

  “Because she had gone there before. I seen her there.”

  “She went to the old folks’ home?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you never dropped your kid off to her at an old folks’ home. You never went into the old folks’ home . . . Yet across the street from this old folks’ home, right there on Glenwood, is where Ricardo lives.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “With Amy and J.P.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “All of whom are at our station talking to our detectives right now. So, obviously, you know, we’re not stupid. Okay? And what you’re doing right now is treating us like we’re stupid, which—I take that, you know, to be a personal insult . . . And unless we start getting the truth, we’re going to announce two possibilities with Caylee. Either you gave Caylee to someone that you don’t want anyone to find out because you think you’re a bad mom. Or something happened to Caylee, and Caylee’s buried somewhere, or in a trash can somewhere, and you had something to do with it. Either way, right now, it’s not a very pretty picture to be painting . . . Everything you told us is a lie . . . Every single thing.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Casey stubbornly insisted.

  “. . . This needs to end,” Melich demanded.

  “The truthful thing . . .” Casey began.

  “This needs to end.”

  Casey continued, “. . . is, I have not seen my daughter. The last time that I saw her was on the ninth of June.”

  “And what happened to Caylee?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “. . . Listen, something happened to Caylee. We’re not gonna discuss where the last time you saw her. I’m guessing something bad happened to her some time ago and you haven’t seen her. So, that part is true if you say you haven’t seen her, because she’s somewhere else right now.”

  “She’s with someone else,” Casey said again.

  “. . . No. She’s either in a Dumpster right now or she’s buried somewhere. She’s out there somewhere and her rotting body is starting to decompose, because what you’re telling us . . .” Melich said, stunned that those words did not provoke an emotional reaction from Casey. “And here’s the problem, the longer this goes on, the worse it’s gonna be for everyone . . . Right now, it’s gonna be one of two things. Either we find Caylee alive, which is gonna help you out extremely by telling us the truth. Or we find Caylee not alive, which, if you start telling us the truth, might still paint you in a better picture. But here is where it needs to end. Here’s where the truth needs to come out. No more lies. No more bull coming out of your mouth. We’ve been very respectful. We’re taking our time and talking to you. But we’re tired of all the lies. No more lies. What happened to Caylee?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “What happened to Caylee?”

  “. . . where she is. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “Okay, where was she the last time that you put her somewhere? Where was she?”

  “The last time I saw her was on those steps at that apartment that I took you to this morning . . .”

  “But you didn’t give her to anyone while you were there.”

  “I did.”

  “. . . Listen to me,” Melich pleaded. “We even pulled a surveillance video from an apartment complex . . . and we’re not seeing you over there . . . all that day. You think that we’re stupid, and we’re not gonna . . .”

  “I know you’re not stupid.”

  “Remember we had those two people that we were talking about: the person who had an accident or . . . made a bad decision, and a person who’s just a cold-blooded monster? That’s telling me that you’re the second person. This cold-blooded monster . . .”

  “I’m not.”

  “. . . who doesn’t care and doesn’t want to help because she’s afraid that something so heinous happened, that everyone’s gonna look at her and say, ‘She’s a monster—she deserves to go away—she deserves to never see the light of day—this bad thing should happen to her.’ I don’t want to believe that right now, but you’re not giving me a choice . . . We know that everything you told us is a lie. Tell us what happened to Caylee. Tell us what happened to Caylee.”

  “I dropped off Caylee. And that’s the last time that I’ve seen her. I dropped her off . . .”

  “Where did you drop her off?”

  “I dropped her off at that apartment.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “That’s exactly where I dropped her off.”

  “No, you didn’t. And who’d you drop her to?”

  “With Zenaida.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  John Allen asked, “Zenaida give you any money that day?”

  “No. I would not have sold my daughter. If I wanted to really just get rid of her, I would’ve left her with my parents and I would’ve left. I would’ve moved out. I would’ve given my mom custody.”

  Appie Wells had another question: “What about the baby’s dad’s parents? Would you have left her with them, too?”

  “I haven’t talked to them since we were probably six or seven years old—since we were little kids. That was probably the last time I saw . . .”

  “You don’t have a phone . . . for ’em?”

  “No I do not. I would not have let anything happen to my daughter—except I made the mistake of trusting another person with her. That’s it.”

  Melich told her about her mother’s constant calls to his cell phone and that her parents and all her friends know that she’s lied “completely and absolutely from the get-go.”

  Again, she insisted she was telling the truth.

  “You could have called your mom five weeks ago,” Melich said.

  “I was scared.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I saw my mom’s reaction right off the bat, and it would’ve been the same from the get-go.”

  “. . . So, wa
it a minute. So you’re more afraid of your mom’s reaction than you are if you’ll ever see your daughter?”

  “No. I’m absolutely petrified. Absolutely petrified. I know my mom will never forgive me. I’m never gonna forgive myself, because there’s that chance that I might not see Caylee again, and I don’t want to think about that.”

  Melich jumped on her again about bringing them to Universal Studios on a wild goose chase. “You brought us here ’cause she might be here?”

  “She could be anywhere.”

  “Boy. That’s true, but why here? . . . Why would a person who has hid your daughter from you for five weeks . . . bring her to the building that you used to work at?”

  Melich waited for Casey’s response, but got nothing.

  “I mean, did you think we’d walk in here and she’d be sitting in the lobby or . . .”

  “No,” Casey snapped.

  The three detectives reminded her of the evidence that proved that she was not telling the truth. In rebuttal, Casey said, “I will lie. I will steal. Or do whatever I can to find my daughter . . . I put that in my statement, and I mean that with all my heart.”

  “But . . . we work off of the truth,” Appie Wells said.

  “I know that.”

  “And we want to find your daughter as much as you do. And I don’t think you’re a monster or anything like that. I think you might have some pressures in your life. Who . . . exerts the most pressure on you . . . ?”

  “My mom does, absolutely.”

  “. . . You’ll never live up to your mother’s expectations, right?”

  “At least not right now,” Casey admitted. She went on to talk about taking advantage of her mother, leaving the car in the Amscot lot when it ran out of gas and sending emails to Zenaida that bounced back, undelivered.

  Appie proposed a scenario involving the safe return of Caylee, and then asked what Casey would do if her daughter ever disappeared again.

  “I wouldn’t hesitate to talk to my parents this time if something happened . . . I learned the biggest lesson from all this. I made the greatest mistake that I ever could’ve made as a parent.”