Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  FOUR LIES

  A phone ringing in the middle of the night is never a good sign, but Yuri Melich was used to it.

  A detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Melich had been working cases in Orange County for more than ten years. In that time he’d had his share of calls in the hours before dawn. Earlier in his career with the sheriff’s office he’d been in the homicide unit, but it wasn’t long before he’d been promoted to his current role as a missing persons corporal, a position he’d been in for seven years when his phone rang in the early morning hours of July 16.

  Answering the phone, he got the specifics of the situation and where he’d be headed. A two-year-old child was missing. The dispatcher instructed him to report to the Anthony home on Hopespring Drive, where officers were already on the scene. Melich hung up and started getting ready.

  Melich has the look of a seasoned lawman, with close-cropped hair and a chiseled face. Though he joined the homicide unit after I left it in 2000, I’d known him for a while, having met him through my occasional work on cases in later years. Melich’s wife, Sam, was also a detective in the sheriff’s office. It was on the murder of Deputy Michael Callin, the son of an old friend and former homicide detective, that I’d first met Melich. I’d been impressed with his work then and had continued to hear good things since. All in all, he always struck me as the kind of officer who’s seen it all and then some—confident without being arrogant, and usually in command of the situation. In the years since I first got involved with the Anthony case, I have continued to marvel at the quirk of fate that just happened to place this experienced homicide detective on this call for a missing persons alert.

  When Melich arrived at the house at 4 A.M., he was greeted by Sergeant Hosey, who quickly brought him up to speed. Hosey told him the story of the thirty-one days, the attempts to locate Caylee and Zenaida, and their inability to verify anything that Casey had told them. Before speaking to anyone in the house, Melich took a few moments to read the handwritten statements taken from the four family members.

  Once he’d read the statements, Melich sat down with Casey, explaining that they were going to go through her statement together, line by line, and that this process would be recorded. However, before they began, Melich made it clear that this was her chance to be forthcoming with the truth. He showed her the signed four-page document, and proceeded:

  “You’re saying that everything contained in these statements is true and accurate?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” replied Casey.

  Melich wanted to be certain that Casey knew what was going on before launching into the consequences of lying.

  “I want to explain what happens if you make a false report or if there’s something about this incident that you’re not telling us the truth about.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I want to make sure I make it perfectly clear that if you want to go ahead and rescind this statement and if you want to tell me a different story about what happened, if you’re trying to fabricate a story to kind of make something look a little bit better, now is your time to tell me. Are you telling me that this is the story you want to stick with?”

  “That’s the truth,” Casey said. “It’s the story I’m gonna stick with, yes.” It was an odd choice of words. While on the one hand she was simply parroting back Melich’s language, that wording left open the possibility that there were other versions beyond the one she was selecting. It was the story she was “sticking with,” but did that make it the truth? Either way, she’d been given the chance to correct a story that already stretched credibility, but instead she’d vigorously insisted that her statement was accurate in every way.

  For the next hour, she matter-of-factly took the detective through her version of events, repeating and in some cases elaborating on what she’d said in her initial statement to Corporal Fletcher. When Melich arrived at Zanny, he began to probe a bit deeper.

  “So you knew her before you had your child?” Melich asked.

  “Well, I met her just before. I was actually pregnant at the time,” Casey responded.

  “When did she start watching your child?”

  “It’s been within the last year and a half, two years that she started watching Caylee. I had another friend watch Caylee that I’ve known since middle school. When she went back to school I was looking for a new nanny. Jeff offered to have Zenaida watch both kids. She agreed, and it kind of went from there.”

  Detective Melich asked for Jeff’s phone number, but Casey claimed it was stored in her personal phone, which she had lost. She said she had reported the phone missing to security at Universal Studios nine days earlier. Launching into what proved to be a convoluted explanation, she said that even though she still had the phone’s SIM card, which stored her numbers, she lacked Jeff’s specific number because it had been saved on the internal memory of the phone she’d lost. It was a bizarre explanation, one that was technically problematic but also raised questions about why she appeared to be making it harder to get in touch with Jeff Hopkins. But more to the point, she seemed to have an excuse for everything.

  Melich turned the conversation back to the nanny. Casey said that Zanny had only lived in the Sawgrass complex for four months, but she described in detail going to get Caylee on the day she went missing:

  “I got off of work, left Universal, driving back to pick up Caylee like a normal day. And I show up to the apartment, knock on the door. Nobody answers. So, I called Zenaida’s cell phone and it’s out of service. Says that the phone is no longer in service. Excuse me! So, I sit down on the steps and wait for a little bit to see if maybe it was just a fluke, if something happened. And time passed. I didn’t hear from anyone. No one showed up to the house so I went over to Jay Blanchard Park and checked a couple other places where maybe possibly they would’ve gone. A couple stores, just regular places that I know Zenaida shops at and she’s taken Caylee before. And after about seven o’clock when I still hadn’t heard anything I was getting pretty upset, pretty frantic.”

  Casey said she opted to stay with her boyfriend, Anthony Lazzaro, rather than in her own house. “I went to a neutral place. I didn’t really want to come home; I wasn’t sure what I’d say about not knowing where Caylee was. Still hoping that I would get a call or, you know, find out that Caylee was coming back so that I could go get her. And I ended up going to my boyfriend Anthony’s house, who lives in Sutton Place.”

  “Did you talk to Anthony about what happened with Caylee?” Melich asked.

  “No, I did not,” Casey responded.

  “Had Anthony ever seen Caylee before?”

  “Yes, he has,” she announced, with no further explanation. She claimed that that night she went to the Fusian Ultra Lounge and other bars—places Zanny was known to frequent.

  Melich was puzzled about why Casey’s mother, Cindy, and not Casey had made the 911 call and why it had taken so long for that to happen. “I was naive enough to believe that I could find Caylee myself, which obviously I couldn’t,” Casey told him. “And I was scared that something would happen to her if I did notify the authorities or got the media involved. Or my parents, which I know would have done the same thing. Just the fear of the unknown, fear of the potential for Caylee getting hurt, of not seeing my daughter again.”

  According to Casey, she had confided in two people about Caylee’s disappearance in the weeks following the event. The two people were Jeff Hopkins and Juliette Lewis. She said that Juliette was a coworker at Universal Studios, but then quickly backpedaled, explaining that the woman was actually a former coworker who had moved away some months earlier. Like Jeff’s phone number, Juliette’s contact information had also been lost with her phone.

  “Is there anything about your story that isn’t true?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you harm Caylee in any way, or did you leave her somewhere?”
/>   Casey was unequivocal in her reply. “No, sir.”

  “You’re telling me that Zenaida took your child without your permission?”

  “She’s the last person that I’ve seen with my daughter,” Casey said, without answering the yes or no question.

  They were beginning to wind down, and Melich ran down some final questions. He asked Casey about her employment. She said she’d worked at Universal Studios for about four years and added that Zanny had worked there part-time also, as a seasonal employee. Melich then asked Casey if she had any problems with drugs, or if Caylee took any kind of medication. Casey answered both questions in the negative.

  DAWN WAS JUST BREAKING AS Melich and Casey set off on an investigative tour of the three last known residences of Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez. Casey was going to show the detective Zanny’s former and most recent apartments, as well as the house of Zanny’s mother, where she said the nanny had lived before Sawgrass.

  Melich had instructed uniformed officers to follow behind in a marked patrol car in the event they needed to enter someone’s house or apartment. Their first stop was a building on North Hillside Drive. Casey pointed to a window on the second floor of the structure, which she identified as the apartment where Zenaida had lived in the early part of 2006. She said the units were all three stories and indicated that the window directly above Zenaida’s had belonged to the babysitter’s roommate.

  Moving on, Casey directed the officers to the Sawgrass apartment complex on South Conway. Casey didn’t see anyone she recognized, so they moved on to the Crossings at Conway, a townhouse community on South Conway Road near Michigan Avenue. It was there, Casey said, that Zanny’s mother, Gloria, owned a condo, and Zanny had lived with her mother there for a short time. She recalled dropping Caylee there several times between mid-2006 and early 2007.

  The detective drove slowly through the streets of the complex as Casey tried to find Gloria’s unit. She pointed out three as possibilities. The uniformed officer knocked on all three doors, but none of the tenants knew Zenaida or her mother. Casey apologized for not being able to remember the correct address, saying that she had gone there so often it had been as though she was on autopilot.

  Just before 6 A.M., Melich dropped Casey back home.

  “I’ll call if I need anything,” he said as she climbed out of the unmarked vehicle. Before he pulled away, Melich was approached by George Anthony, who related concern that his daughter was holding back information. Both he and his wife were worried that something might have happened to Caylee. George mentioned the putrid smell in the Sunfire’s trunk. The detective acknowledged their distress and said he would be in touch.

  For the next several hours, Melich set out to confirm Casey’s story. He began at the Sawgrass complex, where he met with the manager, Amanda Macklin, and maintenance man, Dave Turner. Neither knew Zenaida, nor did they recognize the photograph of Caylee given to Melich by Cindy Anthony.

  Macklin stated that Apartment 210 had been vacant for 142 days, and then ran Zenaida’s name through their computer database. Sure enough, they got a hit: a Zenaida Gonzalez who had come to look at an apartment on April 17. She was never a tenant, but she had completed a guest card and left a cell phone number. One lie.

  Next, Melich looked into the apartment on North Hillside Drive. It had been the first apartment Casey visited with him, the location where she said Zanny had lived with a roommate in early 2006. Not only had no one named Zenaida Gonzalez lived there, but the complex itself was a seniors-only facility. Coincidentally, when the initial responding deputies had searched the Pontiac the night before, they’d found an address written on a piece of paper, an address that was right across the street from the seniors facility. It turned out that that address belonged to Casey’s ex-fiancé, Jesse Grund. So not only was there no way Zanny could have lived in the building, but there was another connection to the street that offered a possible hint of where the deception came from. Two lies.

  As Melich turned this over in his head, it didn’t add up. Every clue that Casey had given them was looking bogus. That alone was disturbing, but when combined with the fact that the police were trying to use Casey’s clues to find her daughter and kidnapper, it didn’t make any sense. The obvious conclusion was that wherever Caylee was, Casey clearly did not want her found. So either there had not been a kidnapping, or there was some other reason that Casey was hindering their progress. Was she afraid? If she was, she certainly didn’t act like it. Melich had seen people lie out of fear before, and they usually weren’t as calm about it as Casey had been. Another possibility was that this was just a continuation of the power struggle with her mom, and when the right moment arose, Casey would fess up about Caylee’s whereabouts. If that was the case, though, Casey was taking this incredibly far, and was now using police resources to fight with Cindy. It was a concerning possibility, but not nearly as concerning as what actually happened next.

  With new questions arriving by the minute, Melich went about trying to confirm other aspects of Casey’s story; only this time he knew he was dealing with a liar. By 9 A.M. Melich was at Universal Studios, looking for the friends, Jeff and Juliette, whom Casey claimed to have confided in about Caylee. More important, he wanted to see if the suspect, Zenaida Gonzalez, worked there, and if so, to learn more about her. He began with Universal Studio’s security manager, Leonard Turtora, and from Turtora’s office he called Casey, putting her on speakerphone.

  Even though he was already at Universal, Melich lied, telling her that he was about to go to her place of employment and needed to confirm some contact information before he went there. Deception like this is a common tactic during an investigation. You never want a witness to know what you know; otherwise you lose your advantage. The hope is that if you let them lie to you and catch them in some small part of it, they will crack and abandon the lie in its entirety. Most people aren’t good at adjusting their lies on the fly, so their only options are to tell the truth or clam up altogether. At least that’s how it usually works.

  Melich asked for her work number, direct extension, and boss’s name. She provided a number, an extension, and the name Tom Manley, who she said was her direct supervisor. After hanging up with Casey, Melich tried the extension she had provided, but it wasn’t a valid number. The name “Manley” did not exist in the company’s database, and Zenaida Gonzalez, who Casey claimed worked at the park on a part-time, seasonal basis, was also not in the system. A man named Jeffrey Hopkins had worked for Universal, but according to their records, he had been fired in May of 2002. Turtora could find no record of a Juliette Lewis, past or present.

  And then there was Casey herself. There was an entry for Casey Anthony, but she was not an event planner, and even more surprising, she was not a current employee. Apparently she had worked at the park selling photos at a souvenir shop but had been fired on April 24, 2006. Yet more than two years later, she was still claiming that she worked there. Three lies.

  Stunned, Melich leaned back in his chair. Over the course of a few short hours, her entire story had unraveled. Even though she’d sworn up and down that the version of events she’d given was completely true, his preliminary investigation had revealed just about every aspect to be a lie. And not only was she lying to the police, this woman had been playing everyone around her, including her parents and brother, for the last year at least. If not even those closest to her knew her reality, was there anything about her that was true? Did she really want to find her daughter, or was that the biggest lie of all?

  After ten minutes, he called Casey back and asked her to come to Universal, saying he’d send officers to bring her and would meet her there himself. Melich also asked her to bring her Universal ID card, but Casey said she had misplaced it. Still, she agreed to meet him at the theme park, and a few short minutes later Sergeant John Allen and Detective Appling Wells picked her up in an unmarked car.

  The scene at the se
curity gate was almost comical. Sergeant Allen and Detective Wells followed Casey’s directions to the Universal employee parking lot and kept pace as she walked directly to the employee gate. There, they were met by Melich, Turtora, and the security guard working the gate. Everybody except the guard knew that Casey was not an employee there.

  Casey approached the security guard and informed him that she had forgotten her ID card. He took her name and ran it through the computer. When he informed her that they had no record of her, she persisted, stating emphatically that she worked there. The guard requested the name of her supervisor, which she dutifully provided. He ran that name and again was unable to find it in the computer.

  The three cops and Tutora watched the scene unfold, each intrigued to see how and when Casey would relent. She had completely committed to a lie that had no chance of being true—she knew it, and they knew it. Even if she made it past the security guard, what then? There was nothing she could show them that would make her an actual employee of Universal Studios. Their experience, not to mention simple logic, told them that sooner or later Casey would have to admit the truth.

  As a prosecutor, I’ve spent a lot of time around people who aren’t telling the truth and have gotten caught. I’ve seen good liars and I’ve seen bad liars, but regardless of whether they’re good or bad at it, most people, when confronted with such an obvious lie, simply give in. Yet it was clear, even then, that there was something different about Casey. She was completely unwavering. She insisted to the security guard that she worked there, and she refused to accept his answer that neither she nor the supervisor she’d conjured up was in the system. She was adamant that what she said was true. If she wasn’t admitting to the lie now, when would she?

  When this scene had gone on for long enough and everyone’s patience was becoming exhausted, Turtora presented his identification and instructed the guard to allow her to enter under his supervision. But even though she was beyond the gate, that did not make it any easier for her. The cops looked at her and at each other, their eyes speaking the question that no one would say aloud: “Now what?”