Mommy's Little Girl

by Diane Fanning

  They bounced messages back and forth, talking about her feelings and the alternatives to Tony’s expected departure, and then Casey wrote, “If you’re going to take a risk on something, of all things, why not let it be love? It is the most damaging and rewarding thing in the entire world.”

  “Because it’s the one risk that hurts the most.”

  “It is.”

  “People may not die of a broken heart but they wish they did.”

  “Absolutely,” Casey agreed.

  “The person that can make you the most happiest in this world, is the same person who can make you the most miserable.”

  “It’s a powerful thing to hold someone else’s heart in your hand,” Casey wrote.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jamie and Casey exchanged text messages, on Tuesday, July 15, about the unpleasant incident at Fusian the previous Friday night. Because of what happened, Jamie told Casey that she wasn’t going to work there as a shot girl again. Jamie asked what she was doing that day. Casey said that she was going to work at Universal.

  Jamie mentioned the little girl in the photographs on Casey’s MySpace page. “Is she yours?”

  “Yes,” Casey wrote. “She has a birthday next month. She’ll be three.”

  Casey left the apartment and stopped by the Bank of America branch on South Conway Road. She went up to the teller with one of Amy’s checks and walked away with $250 in cash.

  Her next stop was Cast Iron Tattoos to make an appointment for herself and a friend for Saturday, July 19. Recognizing her as a regular customer, tattoo artist Danny Colomarino came out front to greet her. “Hey, how you been?” he asked, then inquired about her daughter.

  “Caylee is with her nanny. I’ll bring her with me on Saturday,” Casey said. She pointed to the car in the parking lot and said it belonged to a friend. “I’m going to the airport to pick her up, and three other guys who are coming back from Puerto Rico.” She explained that she was supposed to go on that trip, too, but she had to save her money to move out of her mother’s house and into a place of her own.

  Danny thought he heard a bitter edge in her voice, but he didn’t blame her. He knew he’d be “a little bummed” if his friends all went on an island vacation and left him behind.

  While Casey was chatting up Danny at the tattoo parlor, George and Cindy were running head-first into Casey’s lies. Their daughter couldn’t have driven to Jacksonville as she’d said. The car was right here in Orlando at a tow yard.

  Cindy explained the situation to her supervisor, Debbie Polisano. “Go get the car, get Casey and go home,” Debbie advised.

  After retrieving the stench-filled Pontiac, George suggested that they call the police. Cindy refused. She had to find Casey first. Cindy returned to work around 2 that afternoon.

  Co-worker Debbie Bennett was surprised to see Cindy entering the office. She turned away from the copy machine to ask her what happened.

  At this point, Cindy didn’t seem worried, but sounded very angry at her daughter’s irresponsibility. “The car is a mess. Caylee’s car seat, her backpack, her clothes and her favorite baby doll are in there. It smells like a dead body in that car.”

  “Cindy, there’s something wrong. You need to call police,” Bennett urged her. “It doesn’t sound right.”

  “No. I’m going to give Casey a chance to explain herself. I’m going to try to get hold of her. I’ll call her employer.”

  Concerned about Cindy’s state of mind, Bennett went to their supervisor, Debbie Polisano. The supervisor went to Cindy’s office to talk to her.

  “There’s a really, really bad smell in the car,” Cindy told her.

  “Did you open the trunk?” Polisano asked. When Cindy didn’t respond, she asked another question. “Where is Casey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cindy, you need to go home and call the police.”

  “I can’t,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “I have a lot of work to do.”

  Exasperated, Polisano went to the area director, Nilsa Ramos. Nilsa told Cindy she had to go home and deal with her family problems.

  Finally, Cindy relented. She pulled into her driveway and went straight to the car in the garage. She pulled out the purse that Casey had left on the seat and found a phone number for Amy Huizenga.

  Casey drove Amy’s maroon four-door compact to the airport and met Amy and the other three returning revelers. It wasn’t possible to fit everyone and their luggage into Amy’s small car. Rico, Troy and J.P. waited at the airport while Amy drove Casey to Tony’s apartment. On the way, Amy listened to Casey’s excited chatter about a cell phone call she’d received that day from Caylee. Amy then returned to the airport to pick up the guys.

  After they got back to their apartment, J.P. wanted to get an iPhone, and Amy went with him to The Florida Mall. Twenty minutes after they arrived, Amy received a harried phone call from Cindy Anthony.

  At Sutton Place Apartments Tony and Nathan played MLB 2K8, a major league baseball video game while they waited for the All Star game to commence on the television. Casey sat beside them on the sofa tapping on her laptop.

  When he heard a knock, Tony shouted, “Come in.” The door opened and he looked up at Amy, who appeared totally miserable.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said to Casey.

  Casey went outside and closed the door behind her. Nathan and Tony returned to their game. Drama intruded on their concentration just two minutes later as the door flew open and Casey came inside loudly arguing with her mother. As Casey rushed back to the bedroom, Cindy spoke to Tony. “I hope you’re rich, ’cause Casey’s going to take all your money and leave you high and dry.”

  Tony and Nathan exchanged looks of bewilderment. “What are you talking about?” Tony asked.

  Casey zoomed back into the room and told her mother to shut up. The door slammed and they were gone. What was that all about? Tony wondered. He waited for Casey to contact him with an explanation. After two hours, when it hadn’t come, he picked up his cell and wrote a text message. Just a moment after he hit send, he heard a tone across the room. Casey had forgotten her phone.

  He picked it up, looked for Amy’s number and gave her a call. She told him that Casey had taken her checkbook and used it to steal money from her. Cindy’s last words before leaving now made sense. But what else was going on? He remained in the dark until he got a call from Casey’s brother Lee.

  CHAPTER 27

  After dropping off Amy, Cindy said, “Casey, I’m going to take you to the police department. Maybe they can talk some sense into you and tell me where Caylee’s at.”

  “Mom, go ahead, go ahead. I can’t take you to see Caylee tonight.”

  Cindy pulled into the parking lot of the Orlando police substation on Pershing Avenue, but the office was closed for the day. Cindy turned to her daughter. “Casey, come on, tell me what’s going on.”

  “Mom, I can’t.”

  “Someone’s going to help me,” she said as she called 9-1-1. When the operator answered, Cindy didn’t quite know what to say. She won’t take me to see my granddaughter? she thought. That isn’t a crime. But I need to talk to a detective. She blurted out, “My car was stolen.”

  Cindy and the operator went back and forth in a confusing dialogue about where she could meet the officers. Cindy called it quits, deciding she’d just call them back when she got home. She wanted to shake Casey and force the answer out of her, but she was afraid if she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop. In her current state of rage, she worried that she could not trust herself to maintain her self-control.

  Back on Hopespring Drive, Lee waited outside for his mother and sister. Once there, Cindy questioned Casey again, hoping Lee’s presence would get her to talk. But it didn’t. Frustrated at her inability to get satisfactory answers from her daughter, Cindy called the police again to report her car stolen.

  While Cindy was on the phone, Casey spewed out her kidnapping scenario to Lee. She repeated the tale to he
r mom. Cindy punched 9-1-1 again—this time in an all-out panic. She informed the authorities that her granddaughter had been missing for thirty-one days—she’d been kidnapped by the baby-sitter. At the operator’s request, she put Casey on the phone.

  George pulled into the driveway and saw his wife pacing, crying and waiting for the police to arrive. “Someone’s got Caylee. Caylee’s gone! Someone took her,” she wailed.

  A police car pulled up just moments after George. The responding officer took statements from everyone. When Detective Yuri Melich got to the scene, he sat down with Casey and a tape recorder.

  Lee called Tony and got the go-ahead to come over to Sutton Place and pick up the rest of Casey’s things. He arrived at 2 in the morning. The laptop sat on the kitchen counter, plugged into an outlet. He started it up, but only got a blue screen. A message popped up warning that the computer had been shut down improperly. Lee rebooted. The plain screen came up again, followed by the error message. He assumed that a virus had deleted or corrupted some of the files needed to open Windows. He turned off the computer.

  He couldn’t ask Casey about the cause of the problem when he returned to the house because she was out with the detectives, pointing out the current and past addresses of Zenaida Gonzalez. On another computer, he logged into Casey’s Yahoo! account and discovered a total absence of incoming and outgoing messages dated before July 15—even all the spam was gone. Lee knew someone had to have manually removed them from the account. He began to doubt that a virus caused the problem with the laptop. It appeared as if the damage might be intentional.

  Before dawn on July 16, Cindy’s mother, Shirley Cuza, sat down at her computer and sent an email to her sister. In the middle of her update about her cat’s health and questions about her sibling’s dog, she wrote:

  I guess you haven’t heard from Cindy? I just can’t imagine what’s going on with Casey??? Unless she and Cindy had a “spat” before she left last time, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for her to do this to her mom???

  For now, Shirley simply believed that her granddaughter Casey was playing games with Cindy. She did not suspect that her great-granddaughter Caylee had come to any harm.

  A little before 7 that morning, Casey began a text message exchange with Tony. “I’m so sorry for not telling you what happened. We obviously need to talk. I need you and I love you more than you know.”

  “Where is Caylee?” he asked.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? R u serious? When did u find out?”

  “I’ve been filing reports all night and driving around with multiple officers looking at old apartments I had taken her to. Everything. Too long. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “Y wouldn’t u tell me of all people? I was ur boyfriend that cares about you and ur daughter. Doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you lie to me?” Tony asked.

  “I lied to everyone. What was I supposed to say? I trusted my daughter with some psycho? How does that look?”

  “Idk [I don’t know] what to say. I just hope your daughter is okay and I’m gonna do whatever I can do to help ur family and the cops.”

  “I was put in handcuffs for almost 10 minutes and sat in the back of a cop car. The best and most important person in my life is missing. I am the dumbest person and the worst mother. I honestly hate myself. The most important thing is getting Caylee back but I truly hope that you can forgive me. Granted, I will never be able to forgive myself.”

  “Who is this Zanny Nanny person?” he asked.

  “Someone I had met through a mutual friend almost 4 years ago. She used to be my buddy Jeff’s nanny before she became mine. I’m scared.”

  “R u home?”

  “Yeah. Almost 12 hours of stuff. Finally getting a shower. I feel like shit.”

  “Where did u drop off Caylee last time u saw her?”

  “At her apartment. At the bottom stairs.”

  “Where?!”

  “Sawgrass Apartments. Have told and showed police the apartment. Told them and drove out there with two different officers. I just got back from the second drive. If they don’t find her, guess who gets blamed and spends eternity in jail?”

  “Yeah, no shit,” Tony agreed. “Why wouldn’t u say something sooner bout this? To anyone? Oh and why are u texting and not calling?”

  “I talked to two people that have been directly connected to Zanny. How can I sit there and be so blind and stupid? It’s my fault. I was scared to admit it. I was scared that something was going to happen to my baby.”

  Iassen Donov received a call from a friend telling him to check out Casey’s MySpace page. He did. Everything had changed. “Caylee’s missing,” dominated the page. He called Lee’s girlfriend, Mallory Parker. She explained what was going on with Casey and Caylee. Later, Lee called asking him to spread the word.

  Matthew Crisp read the message on his cell phone. “Caylee is missing. She has been for thirty-two days now. Please if you have any information call me on cell or at home.”

  “Are you serious?” he typed.

  “Yes,” she responded.

  “I believe we had lunch since then and it never came up.”

  “It’s a long story,” Casey typed. “Posting on MySpace and Face Book shortly. Please pass it on.”

  When Melina Calabrese heard the news of Caylee’s disappearance, she was perplexed. Oh my gosh, why didn’t she call me? My gosh, why didn’t you call anybody? Five weeks? I mean, I’m one of her best friends. Melina could not understand why Casey had not reached out to her, her parents, her brother or the cops in all that time.

  Lauren Gibbs received the message about Caylee and called Casey right away, breathless. “Omigod, Casey.”

  Casey was matter-of-fact in her response. “Yeah. Caylee’s missing. I haven’t seen her. I talked to her yesterday, so I know she’s fine. It was from a private number.”

  “Do you have any idea who it could be?” Lauren asked.

  “No,” Casey said.

  Childhood friend Brittany Schrieber woke up that morning to discover the same text message from Casey waiting on her cell phone.

  Brittany typed, “Caylee missing?”

  “Yes, she has been for a few weeks.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her nanny. Someone I trusted took her. No calls until yesterday,” Casey claimed.

  “I’m sorry. If you need anything, let me know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is there anything I should keep my eye open to watch out for.”

  “A silver Ford Focus, four-door,” Casey responded.

  A lot of people received a similar text message that morning. Some received similar responses from Casey, some got no response at all and others received a phone call from Lee explaining the situation and asking for assistance to find Caylee.

  Brittany seemed to get everyone’s attention. After she’d texted with Casey, she received two calls from Lee. The first was an explanation and a plea for help. The second was a wrong number—he thought he was calling someone else—and a complaint about Casey giving the family false phone numbers. Cindy made contact with her as well. She walked the short distance up the street to visit in person after Casey left on another excursion with the police just after noon. “Casey is hiding something,” Cindy told Brittany. “She told me she was going to Jacksonville for a month for a job, and was going to drop the baby off with a sitter.”

  Cindy explained that she hadn’t offered to take care of Caylee while Casey was out of town because of the jealousy issue over Cindy’s relationship with her granddaughter. Cindy said they knew Casey wasn’t in Jacksonville when they found out that her car had been towed from Amscot.

  “The car seat, diapers and Caylee’s baby doll were in the car—Caylee never leaves without her baby doll. It’s been her baby since she was born.”

  Cindy moved on to Casey’s behavior in the last month. “She made sure I wasn’t there before she came to the house. She’d go and
take the stuff she needed, and stole money every time. But she never took anything for Caylee. No shoes, no pajamas, no dolls, no anything.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Detective Yuri Melich spent the day of July 16 chasing down leads and talking with Casey Anthony. It was clear to him that every detail provided by Casey turned into a dead end. The claim of the last place she’d seen Caylee, the tale of the kidnapping nanny, the story of a job at Universal—one falsehood piled upon another.

  Melich gave Casey the opportunity to change her story—again and again. She stubbornly persisted, as if repetition could magically transform reality.

  Although the investigator hoped for Caylee’s safe return, he feared that the prospect of finding her alive was already passing through the improbable phase, and quickly approaching the impossible. He didn’t have the evidence to charge Casey for her daughter’s death, but he could arrest for her false statement and child neglect.

  As he prepared the charging document, he called George Anthony and asked for permission to pick up everything that had been in the white Pontiac Sunfire at the time George retrieved it from Johnson’s Wrecker service.

  With George’s agreement, Melich sent Detective Charity Beasley to the Anthony home. George wrote a statement affidavit for the detective allowing the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to “search and provide evidence to help bring back my granddaughter—Caylee.”

  Beasley pulled evidence tape across the doors and trunk of the Pontiac. From inside the home, she recovered Caylee’s cloth-body, unclothed baby doll, a Dora the Explorer backpack, a child’s toothbrush, a dinnerware knife and a leather bag containing papers, along with other miscellaneous items. The Anthonys volunteered a Compaq laptop used by Casey.

  Cindy told the investigator that she’d already washed a vile-smelling pair of pants she’d found in the car, as well as all of Casey’s smoke-filled clothing, which Lee had picked up at Tony’s apartment. Because of the laundering, Detective Beasley did not confiscate them.