Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a whole lot more information than I really needed.’ And by this point, I picked up that Casey likes to tell stories. We started to all pick up that Casey had a little problem with exaggeration.”

  A little problem with exaggeration was an understatement. Richard described one instance in which he caught Casey in a lie. He said that when Casey was engaged to his son, she claimed to work at the Sports Authority, so he went to the store and found out that she was not an employee, nor had she ever worked there. Just as George Anthony had done.

  Picking up where Rick had left off, Richard also shed some light on the relationship between Casey and her mother, telling the investigators that he’d been struck by the stories in the media claiming that Cindy and Casey were best friends. “I can tell you, and will testify to the fact that Casey sat at our table over those months when Jesse wasn’t there to talk to me and repeatedly said, ‘I don’t want to turn out like my mother. I don’t want to be around my mother. I want out of that house.’ ”

  Richard also said that Casey “hated” her father, something about a gambling thing. He said she had even tried to get Jesse to move into a house with her before they got married. “That’s how bad she wanted out. . . . She didn’t like her mother. Didn’t like her father. Now that may have changed in two years, but that was pretty adamant then.”

  On the subject of Cindy’s denial, Richard’s portrait was again consistent with what Rick had said. As Richard saw it, Cindy was unable to deal with the realities of Casey’s bad behavior. Recalling one instance when Cindy had been bragging about how special Casey was, Richard said that he had felt the need to burst her bubble a bit and told Cindy about the time Casey owed Jesse $250 and repaid him with a bad check. According to Richard, Cindy’s reply was “Well, she only did it once.”

  At the time, the exchange had been unsettling for Richard, but to see how this same pattern of denial now appeared to be playing out in Caylee’s disappearance was downright disturbing. Even more disturbing for Richard was a recent conversation he said he’d had with Leonard Padilla, the bounty hunter who had bonded Casey out of jail and who had been staying at the Anthony home during the time that she was free. According to Richard, Padilla told him that the Anthonys were actively trying to frame Jesse for Caylee’s disappearance.

  With all the rumors that Padilla’s involvement had created, it was hard to know whether to put any stock in this one, but one thing was clear to the investigators after speaking with Richard: they needed to arrange a follow-up conversation with Jesse. On September 9, Detective Melich, Corporal Eric Edwards from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, and Agent Nick Savage from the FBI spoke with Jesse at the FBI office in Maitland. In addition to trying to get a fuller picture of the relationship between Casey and Cindy, they wanted to get more information about a specific conversation Jesse claimed to have had with Lee Anthony on July 31. Lee had apparently told Jesse that he believed a fight between Casey and Cindy had been the reason Casey left home with Caylee on June 16.

  “And would you please just explain that incident for me and how you learned of it?” Melich asked Jesse.

  “Shortly after my second interview with Orange County, Lee confided in me that the reason that Cindy confided in him, that the reason he thought she felt that Casey ran off was there was a big fight between the two of them, and the fight concerned Casey not being home a lot and not bringing Caylee by. It got into a very heated argument, which turned physical, and Cindy started choking Casey.”

  “Was there anyone else in the house when this happened?”

  “He didn’t actually expand upon that. As far as I understood, from what he told me, it was just Cindy and Casey.”

  Jesse went on to say that Casey and her mother had a strained relationship but that Casey had never told him anything about a physical confrontation with Cindy. “I mean she [Casey] had been recently in a very much kind of a hatred state for her mother, but she had never mentioned anything in regards to being choked by her mom.”

  While Jesse couldn’t elaborate further on the supposed violence, he could speak to other elements of Casey’s feelings for her mom and corroborate his father’s words in the process. “She’s always had a kind of love-hate relationship with Cindy,” he said to the police. “I mean . . . if you ask my dad or anybody else, when we were together, when we were engaged, she didn’t want to be anything like her mom. She wanted to get out of the house as quick as possible. And then suddenly she wanted to be just like her mom. And then she goes back to hating her mom again. And then she loves her mom and her mom’s going to give her the house and everything’s great. And then she hates her mom again. I believe it goes all the way back to when Caylee was born.

  “When Caylee was born, Casey wasn’t the first one to get to hold Caylee. It was Cindy. Casey’s even voiced to me in the past that Cindy has actually called herself ‘Mommy’ to Caylee in front of Casey. . . .”

  In the coming weeks, investigators followed up on other hearsay tips, including one from a neighbor on Hopespring Drive. The neighbor, Jean Couty, claimed to have overheard two very loud arguments between Casey and her mother that past May or June. He said both had taken place on a weekend while he was outside doing yard work. The discussions had been heated, with Casey doing all the cursing and her mother staying calm but firm. He said that Casey was acting like a spoiled brat both times. She’d huff and rant, then drive off in her car. Couty said that if he had ever talked to his mother that way, he’d have been slapped. Caylee wasn’t present for either of these two arguments, he said. They both took place about one month before police showed up at the house on July 15, but he couldn’t pinpoint the time closer than that.

  As the search widened, investigators also began speaking with Cindy Anthony’s coworkers at her place of employment, Gentiva Health Services, a national home health-care company where Cindy worked as a nursing case manager. Having worked there for many years with no issues, she was extremely well liked by her fellow staff members. Still, the people at Gentiva that Cindy had confided in were able to corroborate much of what Rick, Richard, and Jesse had said. Everyone, it seemed, had the general impression that there were problems at the Anthony home prior to Caylee’s disappearance. Cindy had been doing a lot of complaining about Casey, saying she was spending more and more evenings out of the house, away from Caylee. It seemed like it was a classic case of two people at each other on a downward spiral, Cindy mad at Casey, which made Casey not want to be home, which made Cindy even madder at Casey. In all likelihood, Cindy suspected Casey was out partying based on her behavior, and the tension between the two women was leading to fights.

  When Melich arrived at Gentiva, he sat with Debbie Polisano, Cindy’s direct supervisor. Polisano said that while Cindy was often aggravated about things at home, in late June, she had been more upset than usual. George and Casey were fighting, and it was impacting her relationship with George. Finances seemed to be at the heart of it, but Cindy hadn’t elaborated. Not long after, Cindy confided that Casey had using been Caylee as leverage, trying to keep her from her, while at the same time dumping her with her whenever it was convenient. Cindy was very frustrated. Polisano said that it was not uncommon for Casey to bring Caylee to the office once a week and leave her with Cindy, claiming she had to “go to work.”

  Polisano said that Cindy took the first week of June off, hoping to spend the time with Casey and Caylee. She even had a little trip in mind. It hadn’t turned that way. Instead of spending time as a threesome, Casey hadn’t been around the whole week and had used Cindy as a babysitter. Casey hadn’t even called her mother on her birthday, which was June 5. That month, Polisano said Cindy had mentioned the pool ladder being removed from the pool in the family’s backyard. She suspected a neighbor had been using the aboveground pool while Cindy was at work.

  Prior to taking her next vacation, the first week of July, Cindy told her coworkers that
she hadn’t spoken to Caylee in a while, but she relayed the story that Casey had given her about Busch Gardens, the car accident, and Zanny, who Cindy had been mentioning to coworkers for months, though Cindy admitted she’d never met her. Like so many other people, Polisano thought the story Casey was selling her mother was preposterous. She recalled wondering why Cindy was taking it at face value.

  Cindy took her vacation as scheduled, but when she came back to work, she told her coworkers that she hadn’t seen Caylee. She’d talked to Casey numerous times, but she’d gotten a million excuses why Caylee couldn’t come to the phone. Then Polisano recalled on July 15, Cindy took a call from George. Casey’s car had been found in Orlando. Debbie told her she should get the car, find out what was going on, locate Casey, and go home. A short time later that day, Cindy returned to work (presumably before she went to find Casey at Tony’s house). Cindy said the Pontiac had been found, and there was a “really, really bad smell in the car.” Cindy didn’t answer when her supervisor asked her if she looked in the trunk.

  Polisano told her Cindy needed to go home and contact the police, but Cindy refused, claiming she had too much work. Polisano was so concerned she went to Nilsa Ramos, the area director, who demanded Cindy go home. Later that night, Polisano received a hysterical call from Cindy. She was almost incoherent. “I found Casey and the baby’s gone,” she screamed. “The baby’s missing. We can’t find the baby.

  “Oh my God, Debbie. If something happened to the baby or if the baby’s dead, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

  Next, Melich met with Debbie Bennett, a coworker of Cindy’s for the previous six years. Cindy had told Bennett that she had been babysitting Caylee a lot recently. Bennett also said Casey often dropped Caylee off at the office at around 5 P.M. on her way to work to be watched by her grandmother. Casey even wore a laminated ID card around her neck, reinforcing the image that she was on her way to a job. In June, Bennett said Cindy told her she hadn’t seen her granddaughter in two weeks because Casey said she needed “time and space” away from her and had taken Caylee with her.

  Another coworker, Charles Crittenden, also recalled the laminated ID badge that Casey wore when dropping off Caylee. In addition, he remembered a day in the summer of 2005 when Casey came to Gentiva wearing a long coat and looking pregnant. She didn’t stop by his desk to say hi, like she usually did, which he found odd. According to Cindy, her daughter wasn’t pregnant. Charles couldn’t understand how she could not notice the obvious bulge. Once the pregnancy was common knowledge, Cindy told co-workers that Jesse Grund was the baby’s father. When that turned out to be wrong, she went along with Casey’s story that the father lived in Tennessee.

  All this information about the inner workings of the Anthony family was fascinating. Hearing the echoes in each of the witnesses’ words and seeing the parallels develop allowed a more defined picture to emerge: the elements of suspicion, the pattern of lies, even the fact that the people immediately around Cindy seemed to be able to see what Cindy herself could not. Suddenly we could see clearly that the dynamic between Casey and Cindy that we’d been witnessing for weeks had in fact been playing out over the course of the last several years. Cindy was in denial about her daughter on a colossal scale.

  As much as this explained what we’d been experiencing with Cindy, it was ultimately frustrating as well because we knew that none of it would be admissible in court. I’d been doing this so long that my brain was accustomed to instantly assessing information and sifting out that which would most likely be inadmissible. Under the rules of evidence, the jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear witnesses’ opinions about the relationship between Casey and Cindy. Furthermore, thirdhand accounts of fights between Casey and Cindy could be presented only if Cindy was willing to admit that they occurred. From all that we’d seen of their interactions and heard from those around Cindy, it was unlikely that she would ever admit the unvarnished truth about Casey. It was a lethally toxic codependent relationship. One person was skilled at lying to others, while the other was skilled at lying to herself.

  THROUGHOUT ALL THESE INTERVIEWS AND developments, our office was regularly updated on the investigation during frequent meetings with members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. The FBI had become involved in the case early on when Caylee was reported as missing, and they continued to offer their support as the investigation shifted focus. Usually in attendance at the meeting were FBI agent Nick Savage (which I always thought was a great name for an FBI agent or a superhero) and FBI intelligence analyst Karen Cowan. Karen was our liaison to the lab and coordinated the transfer of evidence between the agencies.

  These meetings were usually held in a large conference room at the sheriff’s office, and they were particularly helpful for getting me caught up on the parts of the investigation that I was not directly involved with. Detective Melich and Linda were in constant contact individually on every aspect of the investigation, and while Linda would fill me in during my meetings with her on a day-to-day basis, I had my hands full focusing on the forensics. There were many occasions at those meetings when I’d hear the investigators talk about something seemingly explosive, and excitedly I would turn to her and whisper, “Did we know that?” only to hear her response, “Yeah, that’s old news.” I remember one time in particular dashing into Linda’s office when I knew Frank was there. I was all fired up because I’d just learned about the “Bella Vita” tattoo, but when I got there, they just laughed at me, since they’d known of it for months. Such was the nature of being the case’s resident science nerd, I suppose.

  Sometimes our sessions with investigators devolved into a larger discussion of the issues involving Cindy and Jose Baez. Both of them had used the media quite vocally to criticize how the case was being conducted, and the sheriff’s office was understandably frustrated with these public attacks. Cindy was constantly in the media, perpetuating a mythical image of Casey as the ideal mother and attacking the police for not chasing down the red herrings she threw their way. Whether it was someone who’d supposedly seen Caylee at the airport or witnessed Caylee in some security footage from a convenience store, Cindy always seemed to have some lead about Caylee’s whereabouts that, upon closer inspection, would turn out to lead nowhere. Yet Cindy spoke to the media with such frequency about these “leads” that there was always something she could accuse the sheriff’s office of not following through with. Cindy and George had even gone to the FBI in late August, citing frustration with the sheriff’s investigators who, they claimed, were focused on pinning a crime on Casey instead of finding Caylee.

  All the agencies worked very amicably together and shared any information they had discovered. The FBI knew what the sheriff’s office knew: Cindy’s hints and tips had been tracked down and ruled out at every turn, wasting precious time and resources on what amounted to a lot of smoke and mirrors. Theories abounded that Cindy knew more than she was saying or that maybe George was involved in hiding the remains, though nothing was ever uncovered to indicate that either of those conjectures was true.

  The investigators were equally frustrated with Jose. They perceived his approach to the case as two-faced. In public statements, he would profess a concern for Caylee’s safe return and promise Casey’s cooperation, only to thwart every attempt authorities made to get useful information from her. He, too, would then criticize the investigators for their failure to act on the leads he was giving them.

  In fact, to try and prove this point, the defense even hired an investigator by the name of Dominic Casey to chase down their leads. From the start, this appeared to be another questionable move on the part of the defense. It appeared that he was hired to assist in the search for Caylee. He tried to find all the people Casey said had known Zanny, but none of those people existed. Following in the footsteps of Melich and his team, he went to all the places where Zenaida had supposedly ever gone, but no one at those places had ever heard of her. They che
cked all the hospitals in Tampa—not just the one where Casey claimed Zenaida had been hospitalized after a car accident—but still no Zenaida. There was another rumor circulating that Zenaida had taken Caylee by plane to Puerto Rico, but that went nowhere, too.

  After a few weeks of this, Baez severed his relationship with Dominic Casey, who then went to work for the Anthonys and continued his efforts into the next year, all the while feeding a constant stream of unhelpful information to the sheriff’s office on Cindy’s behalf. The end result was only more wasted hours of investigative resources for both that agency and the FBI.

  The defense was also unhappy with the way information about the case made its way into the media. Under our discovery rules, most of the information we were getting about the case was provided as expeditiously as possible to the defense. Under our public records statute, once any information was provided to the defense, it became part of the public record, and anyone who made a request had a right to see it and copy it. There were people at the sheriff’s office who were giving out information to reporters (called “leaks”). Sometimes these revelations seemed intended to rebut claims made by the defense, and sometimes it seemed as if some cop was just trying to get in good with a reporter. These divulgences may not have been authorized by their agency, but they were not illegal. There is no general confidentiality accorded to information obtained in a police investigation, and the information would have been released eventually anyway. At times, I myself learned things from the media that I didn’t know yet—about the tattoo, for instance.

  The bizarre part of the whole situation was that the defense team was on TV all the time, giving its opinions on whether Caylee was alive or not and commenting about everything else under the sun. The next thing I’d know, they were coming to court and complaining about leaks inside the sheriff’s office. Yet no one was putting out more rumors and hogwash than members of Casey’s defense team.