Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  CASEY ANTHONY: Thirty-one days.

  911 OPERATOR: Who has her? Do you have a name?

  CASEY ANTHONY: Her name is Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez.

  911 OPERATOR: Who is that, the babysitter?

  CASEY ANTHONY: She’s been my nanny for about a year and a half or two years.

  911 OPERATOR: Why are you calling now? Why didn’t you call thirty-one days ago?

  CASEY ANTHONY: I’ve been looking for her and have gone through other resources to try to find her—which is stupid.

  Just then a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the Anthony home, and the 911 call came to an end. The three 911 calls amounted to only a few minutes of audiotape and transcript, but there was a lot to find suspicious in them. Most obviously there was Casey’s calmness: most parents would be in hysterics if their child was missing. I have six children (I remarried again in 2005, and my wife, Rita, and I have two adopted children, David and Emma), and I cannot imagine one of them going missing for five minutes, let alone thirty-one days. I once lost track of my son Jon on a crowded beach one summer afternoon. I was diligently watching him, and he disappeared from one second to the next. I was panicked beyond words; every horror story I had ever heard and then some was taking residence in my head. Within minutes he was escorted back to us, but those few moments of paralyzing panic are eternally etched in my memory.

  As a prosecutor and a parent, I was left incredulous by Casey’s reaction—even by her explanation that Caylee was with a babysitter. How was it even possible for a loving, caring parent to take that long to report a missing child? Helping herself to her mother’s money and credit cards may be acts of a young person angry at an authority figure, especially when it’s a family matter and the young person lives at home with easy access to the monies and wheels she covets. But to me, accusing someone of kidnapping a baby a month ago, without any sense of urgency or emotion, seemed completely incomprehensible. Casey had much to answer for. Of course, as investigators quickly found out, her answers had some serious problems.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHERE IS CAYLEE MARIE?

  One weekend shortly after Linda put me on the case, I got into my 2002 Sebring convertible and went on the eleven-mile ride to the Anthonys’ part of town. I’d been catching up on the case, talking to the people involved, and reading the various reports that had been filed, but I thought it would be helpful to get a view from the ground, of the house where so much of the initial action in the case had taken place.

  The Anthonys lived in Chickasaw Park, a pleasant neighborhood of well-kept ranch houses and manicured lawns southeast of downtown Orlando. Their ranch was prettier than any other on Hopespring Drive—meticulous, well-orchestrated landscaping with lots of cacti, red elephant ear, and a towering palm tree to the left of the front door. The walkway had a brick border lined with solar-powered lights, the front yard nary a weed. The grass was well watered and evenly mowed. The house was board and batten siding, painted a soft shell pink. The front door matched in color but in a deeper tone, and a welcoming plaque of flowers and a blue butterfly hung beneath its arched window. I couldn’t see the aboveground pool and toolshed. They were tucked behind the house in a backyard protected by a wooden stockade fence.

  I had heard that the Anthony family was well liked by neighbors on the block. They were charter residents of the subdivision. They’d moved into the just-built four-bedroom, two-bath, L-shaped ranch when Casey was only three. It was a quiet, family-oriented community then, as it is now. Whereas George had once helped Casey ride her tricycle, more recently he had often been seen helping his little granddaughter, Caylee, ride hers. He had even assembled a playhouse in a corner of the backyard for her, with its own landscaped border, tiny mailbox, and meticulously installed pavers under the playhouse so that she would never have to play on a dirt floor.

  There had never been any trouble at the house, even when Casey and her older brother, Lee, were at the height of their teenage years. The Anthonys seemed the definition of blissful suburbia, especially with the addition of the angelic, bright-eyed baby girl. I could only imagine what the neighbors must have thought when that first squad car showed up at their curb, lights flashing, shortly before 10 P.M. on July 15, 2008.

  ACCORDING TO THE POLICE REPORTS from that night, Corporal Rendon Fletcher was the first officer to go up the home’s cement walkway. His knock was answered by Cindy Anthony, and he was surprised to find her sobbing and distraught. Based on the 911 calls, Fletcher had thought he was responding to a stolen vehicle report, but from the moment he walked through the door, Cindy didn’t say a thing about the car. She looked like a wreck. Her short blondish hair was as combed as it could be at that hour, but she was pale, her blue eyes bloodshot and swollen.

  In between sobs, Cindy explained to the officer that she had just learned that her two-year-old granddaughter, Caylee, had been missing for thirty-one days. Choking out the words, Cindy said that her daughter, Casey, had dropped Caylee with her babysitter a month earlier and had not seen the little girl since. As Cindy told it, for the past few weeks whenever she’d called Casey, Casey had said that she and Caylee were vacationing in Jacksonville. But Cindy had dreaded that something was wrong when her requests to speak with Caylee were met with excuses every time. Cindy then went on to tell Fletcher about retrieving the Pontiac at the tow yard and confronting Casey at her boyfriend’s apartment. What seemed odd to me was that Cindy failed to mention to the officer the sickening smell emanating from the Pontiac’s trunk, which she had described with horror in her 911 call, although later on George would share that detail with another detective.

  George’s demeanor that night was in stark contrast to his wife’s. Standing behind her in the living room with his gray hair groomed back, he appeared calm and in control. Investigators later learned that he had been a detective in Ohio and had been involved in a few homicide investigations before the family moved to Orlando in 1986. His stoicism had been learned from years on the job, but he was just as devastated as his wife. Yet, ever the cop, George had already moved into investigation mode. Emotions would get in the way of finding the facts, and finding Caylee was all that mattered at that moment. He had to be the strong one, since clearly Cindy could not.

  George agreed with his wife that Casey had been very vague about why they couldn’t speak to Caylee. He said the last time he’d seen the child was on June 16 around 1 P.M. He had no idea she was missing until he’d come home, just minutes before Corporal Fletcher arrived, to find his wife crying in the garage. The Pontiac he had picked up at the impound was parked there, where he had left it, but Cindy had found Caylee’s favorite doll in the still-buckled car seat, which put her over the edge. She had tried to reach him at work, but he had missed her call. When George had called her back, there was no answer, so he called their son, Lee, who lived about a half mile away and told him to go to the house and check on everybody.

  As Corporal Fletcher interviewed Cindy and George Anthony, other police officers began to arrive. Though the precise order was not totally clear, Deputy Adriana Acevedo, Deputy Ryan Eberlin, still in training, and his sergeant, Reginald Hosey, showed up on the scene within minutes of each other. The sergeant instructed his officers to take written statements from everyone at the house. Eberlin began with Lee, interviewing him in the living room. Lee was almost four years older than Casey, tall and stocky, with dark brown hair and bushy eyebrows. He told the deputy that he had his own place now, but he knew his sister had not been around for the last couple of weeks. When his father had directed him to stop by the house to check on his mother and sister, he’d learned for the first time that something was wrong.

  Lee had arrived at the house minutes before Cindy and Casey. When they came in, they were in the midst of a heated argument. Casey didn’t stop to explain but blew by him, heading straight for her room and leaving him alone with their mother. Despite her rage and frustration, Cindy told Lee everything
she knew, including the fact that Caylee was apparently at some unknown location. It was clear to Lee that his mother was not going to be able to get a straight answer from Casey, so he decided to talk to his sister himself.

  Lee was often the intermediary between the two hotheaded, obstinate women. Cindy and Casey argued a lot, and Lee was the peacemaker, when possible. He headed for Casey’s room, assuming that his sister was simply trying to upset his mother by hiding Caylee somewhere. He didn’t actually believe that Caylee was missing in the classic milk carton “Have you seen me?” sense. To Lee, this was a typical Cindy-Casey power play, and Caylee was only a pawn.

  Lee was hoping to talk to Casey alone in her room, but Cindy kept slamming in and out, venting her frustration and threatening to call the police. Once he convinced her to stay out, he attempted to talk with Casey, brother to sister. He pleaded with her to tell Cindy where Caylee was. He even offered to go and see her by himself so he could reassure everyone that she was safe. He couldn’t fathom why Casey was going to such great lengths to upset their mother. Yet he received the same response that Cindy had: Caylee was with her babysitter, probably asleep, and should not be disturbed.

  Cindy continued with her angry outbursts while Lee and Casey talked. During one of her rantings, she informed them that she had called the police and they were on their way. Still, Casey’s story stayed calmly consistent.

  Lee didn’t think the situation warranted the police. As a last-ditch effort, he decided to try role-playing, and he told Casey to imagine he was a police officer.

  In the voice of an imaginary cop, he introduced himself and informed Casey that her mother had contacted law enforcement, concerned about the welfare of Caylee. He acted coplike as he explained that the best way to quickly resolve the matter would be for Casey to take him to Caylee so he could see the little girl for himself.

  For her part, Casey sat stone-faced, not revealing anything, but giving Lee’s logic some consideration. After ten to fifteen seconds of silent reflection, she began to cry.

  “You want to know the truth?” she asked him. “I haven’t seen my daughter in thirty-one days.” Believing that he had finally broken through, Lee leaned in, whispering to keep Cindy from hearing, and questioned Casey more. All she would say was that “she was kidnapped.”

  Lee was stunned. For all his commitment to resolving the conflict between his sister and his mother, he had never entertained the thought that Caylee was actually in danger. How could his little niece be missing? How could she have been kidnapped, and how could Casey keep that fact a secret?

  What Lee didn’t realize was that he was witnessing the birth of a lie.Something had made Casey determine that she wasn’t going to be able to produce Caylee under any circumstances, and so she made up a story about a kidnapping. In the coming months, we in the prosecutor’s office would title this first spontaneous fabrication, sprung from desperation, Casey Anthony 2.0.

  WHILE LEE WAS GIVING HIS statement about the events of earlier in the evening, Casey was being interviewed by Corporal Fletcher. She told him that on the Monday after Father’s Day, sometime between 9 A.M. and 1 P.M., she took her daughter to the apartment of her current babysitter, Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, also known as Zanny. She had been introduced to the woman eighteen months earlier by her friend Jeffrey Hopkins, who had also hired Zanny to babysit his son, Zachary. She said that Zanny was half black and half Puerto Rican, twenty-five years old, and originally from New York. She described her as being five feet seven and 140 pounds, with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes. She even said that her birthday was in September. She gave Zanny’s address as the Sawgrass Apartments on South Conway Road in Orlando. There, she said, Zanny and two roommates, Raquel Flora and Jennifer Rosa, shared Apartment 210.

  After dropping her daughter off at Zanny’s that Monday, Casey said, she had gone to her job at Universal Studios, where, she claimed, she was an event planner. At the end of the day, around 5 P.M., Casey drove straight back to the Sawgrass Apartments to pick up her daughter, but no one was home. She tried Zanny’s cell phone number and was surprised to learn that the line was out of service, since it had been working earlier in the day. Casey said that she spent two hours on the steps to the second floor of the building waiting for Caylee and Zanny to return, thinking they were either having car trouble or were just running late. It seemed odd to me that Casey’s story now failed to mention the two roommates she had earlier created for Zanny, who should have been home or come home sometime that evening.

  As time passed, Casey said, she became increasingly worried, so she spent the next few hours going to familiar places in the area looking for Zanny and Caylee. She started at Jay Blanchard Park, one of Caylee’s favorite spots, and moved to other places where she thought Zanny might be. After she gave up, she spent the rest of that evening at Tony’s, pacing and worrying. His apartment was, in her words, “one of the few places she felt at home.” To me, saying that reconfirmed that things weren’t great at her parents’ house, and spite and retaliation might be at work.

  As Casey recalled her version of the events of the last thirty-one days, she stated that she had lied and stolen from her family and friends during that time, claiming, however, that her actions had been justifiable, desperate as she was to find Caylee. Every day since the toddler’s disappearance, she had gone to malls, parks, even banks, any place that she could remember Zenaida taking Caylee. When asked why she had not alerted authorities, she claimed that it was out of fear for her daughter. She had seen movies and reports on TV in which bad outcomes came about when the police were called, and she was hoping to handle it on her own. I wondered why she didn’t mention a ransom note, that inevitable terror-laced prop in kidnapping movies.

  Her tone contradicted her words of concern. During the ten-minute conversation, the young mother was completely unemotional, her answers flat and unembellished. In many instances, the officer had to prod and pry responses from her. Her presentation didn’t even hint at the hysteria one would expect of a young mother who had not seen her daughter in a month. Even if she were just hiding Caylee, some emotional tone should have been present. Her demeanor just didn’t make sense.

  Her composure was not the only suspicious thing; the story itself grew increasingly more preposterous. By this point, Officer Eberlin had taken over for Fletcher, and Casey informed him that Zanny had made contact once during the last four weeks. She was unable to provide the deputy with the exact date or time of the call and said it had been disconnected before anything was said, so the report was not very valuable. Even more shocking, that very morning, Casey said, she had gotten a call from her daughter. Caylee had started to tell her what she had been doing, but Casey had interrupted her and asked her to put an adult on the phone. The child had hung up without telling her how or where she was, and there was no way to call her back. The number was blocked.

  As odd as this story sounded, members of law enforcement know that it does no good to call your only witness a liar when you are trying to find a missing little girl. By treating Casey like a victim until the investigation proved otherwise, Eberlin was doing his duty as a police officer and following a procedure that’s been proven to uncover the truth. Implausible as Casey’s version of events sounded, there was value for the officers in going along with it. Sooner or later, they hoped, Casey would crack and the little girl would be brought home safely. They just had to be patient.

  In keeping with this protocol, Eberlin took down all her information in his report. He listed the case as a possible kidnapping of a child, and Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez as the prime suspect. Ten minutes before midnight, Sergeant Hosey, the supervisor on the scene, instructed Deputy Acevedo and Corporal Fletcher to escort Casey to the Sawgrass Apartments on South Conway Road so she could point out the location where she last saw her daughter with Zenaida. Casey, dressed in a pale blue short-sleeved football hoodie sporting the number “82” and tight blue jeans, was
in the back of Acevedo’s patrol car, and Fletcher was in his vehicle following behind. She directed them ten minutes away to an appealing and well-maintained three-hundred-unit apartment community with all the amenities—a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a small private lake with a fountain. Each building had three floors, and the units had small terraces with sliding glass doors that opened on a view in one direction or another. Casey directed the deputy over a speed bump and pointed to the first building on the right, just past the WELCOME sign. She did not get out of the patrol car, but simply indicated a unit on the second floor, saying it was Apartment 210.

  Corporal Fletcher walked alone up the stairs to the second floor. He knocked on the door of the apartment, but no one answered. Looking in the window, he saw no furniture or personal belongings anywhere inside. The unit was completely vacant. While Deputy Acevedo took Casey back home about twenty minutes after they arrived, Fletcher remained at the complex to investigate further.

  When Casey and Acevedo arrived back at the Anthony house, sheriff’s deputies were still taking statements from the other family members. Cindy had not calmed down at all, while George remained grim and quiet, and Lee, confused. Sergeant Hosey had now been at the house for two hours, and in that time he’d witnessed a lot of drama.

  There was unmistakable tension between Casey and her mother. Casey was making accusations that Cindy wanted to take Caylee away from her, while Cindy was incredulous and frustrated about her daughter’s behavior. Sergeant Hosey was of the opinion that some undercurrent of a custody battle was playing out, so he invited Casey to walk privately with him, out of earshot of Cindy and the rest of the family. He wanted to reassure her, in case she was hiding Caylee, that no one was going to take her daughter from her. In fact, he was hoping that she was hiding Caylee. The other possibilities were awfully dire.

  CHAPTER FOUR