Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  The detectives left the Anthony house with bags and bags of evidence, not only items linking the two scenes, but also samples for fluid and DNA testing.

  LINDA AND I HAD DECIDED not to attempt going to the crime scene for the first few days. We wanted to let the CSIs do their jobs, and there was enough craziness out there without having us in the way. But finally, on Wednesday, December 17, Linda, Frank, and I decided to go. We came to work in our jeans and headed over in one of the detective’s cars. When we arrived, we were greeted by a horde of news trucks. The restricted zone had been moved back a hundred yards or so to the intersection with Hopespring Drive to keep the media and the curious at bay. The primary crime scene had largely been cleared of debris. Deputies were clearing additional areas, as dictated by the discovery of bones. A blue canopy had been erected over the primary dump site, as well as over the shifting area where technicians picked through debris in search of bones no larger than a dime. An RV, used as a command center, was parked on the road nearby.

  An old homicide detective buddy of mine, Dave Clark, was there wielding a chain saw as he cleared away debris. Another, Don Knight, who had been a CSI years ago and now was a court deputy, was also out digging. It appeared that all hands were on deck for this one. A sifting station was off to the right, as well as an ever-increasing pile of debris. Though it had not rained since the day of the discovery, the ground was still moist. Surveying the landscape, it struck me just what a mess this place must have been during the rainy season. It didn’t surprise me at all that it had taken this long to find anything out here.

  We walked down the incline so that detectives could show us exactly where the remains had been found. Even though it was mid-December, it was still a little warm. Dave Clark was soaked in sweat. Linda and I stood for a time talking to Nick Savage from the FBI about the progress of the evidence that had been sent to the lab. Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist we had enlisted, showed up at the scene shortly thereafter. Dr. Haskell had looked at insect evidence from the car and issued some preliminary findings. By coincidence, we had been planning for a few weeks to ask him to come down this week to inspect the car. It was fortunate that he could be here to see the scene firsthand. We had never met but had spoken on the phone several times and he seemed very likable. He was a barrel of a man, standing six feet two, with a broad smile and an enduring fascination with bugs. He looked every bit the Indiana farmboy that in fact he was.

  After the site visit, Linda, Frank, Dr. Haskell, and I next went to the office of the medical examiner, where we met with Dr. Jan Garavaglia, or Dr. G, as we all know her. Dr. G is a force of nature. Bright, outgoing—she really commands a room. I had presented her testimony at trial in the past. She would never say more than the facts and science would support, and once she arrived at her conclusion, she was a rock. She took all of us into the biohazard bay of the autopsy suite, the one frequently used in skeletal cases. There, laid out before us on a steel table, was the almost complete skeleton of a small child.

  Even now, almost three years later, I have difficulty describing what I felt looking down at that sight. She was so small. For so long we had known that one day we would find her, but I was still not prepared for this moment. I had seen adult skeletons many times, but this was my first time seeing a child’s. How could anyone just throw Caylee away like that, with a laundry bag as her coffin? For a moment, I allowed myself to hate Casey Anthony. It didn’t help me to do my job—in fact, if anything, it made things harder. There was work to be done that required me to keep my emotions out of it. We had to examine the items found with her remains as clinically as possible, and Dr. Haskell picked through the items for bug evidence. Just as quickly as it had risen, I pushed that hatred away. But I will never forget what I felt in that moment, and how then, just as now, there was no doubt in my mind that Casey had killed this beautiful little girl.

  Two days after our visit to the ME’s office, Dr. Garavaglia completed her autopsy. Based on DNA analysis and all the supporting evidence, she positively identified the remains as those of Caylee Marie Anthony. That afternoon, the remains were released to the Anthony family. The body of the little girl with the big brown eyes was delivered to a local funeral home, where Dr. Werner Spitz performed a second autopsy. The remains were then cremated, per the wishes of the Anthony family. Casey had signed some paperwork to allow her parents to determine the disposition, but the family’s decision was unanimous. With that, Caylee was officially discharged to the care of the angels before she even had three years on earth.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE SWAMP

  The discovery of Caylee’s remains altered the case on a fundamental level. Where there had been relative calm, with both sides feeling each other out, figuring out the right strategy, suddenly all that changed. In short, all hell broke loose.

  The problems began with Roy Kronk, the man who found Caylee’s body, but they didn’t end there. From the start, Kronk was an issue for the prosecution. My feeling about Kronk was that it was no coincidence that he called 911 on December 11, 2008, to say that he had come across human remains in a swampy woods not far from the Anthonys’ home. The pretrial conference had just commenced, and once again Casey Anthony, suspected child murderer, was the biggest “true crime” news story out there. Kronk had a female roommate who he later would say was obsessed with the case. She watched it all the time on television. December 11, 2008, was the day Jose Baez went before Judge Stan Strickland requesting more time to prepare the case and waiving the right to a speedy trial. What I suspect is that Kronk must have been back in the Chickasaw neighborhood that day reading meters, and because the Anthonys were in the news again, he basically went back to see if the bag he had seen in August was still there—and it was.

  Ultimately, though, Kronk being attracted by the attention the case was getting was not the real problem; the problem was the information that he misrepresented and withheld from investigators. For starters, that December morning, when the investigators responding to Kronk’s 911 call arrived at Suburban Drive, Kronk did not mention immediately that he had been to the site in August and had called 911 three times over three days to report a suspicious bag next to a white object that looked like a skull. Maybe he was trying to protect the sheriff’s office from an obvious embarrassment, or maybe he was embarrassed that he had let Caylee’s remains lie there for that extra four months. In any case, by temporarily withholding the fact that he’d been to that spot before, he set himself up for a lot of speculation that he was up to something nefarious, maybe even removing the body and bringing it back. It didn’t matter that the physical evidence proved that to be impossible.

  Furthermore, his actual story of finding the body, supposedly for the first time, on December 11, was riddled with inconsistencies. On the afternoon of the discovery, Kronk sat down with Yuri Melich to give a blow-by-blow account in a taped interview. He said he didn’t touch or disturb anything beyond using his meter stick, which had a hooked end, to poke and lift the laundry bag high enough for the skull to drop out.

  Recounting the details for Yuri, Kronk said, “I took my stick and I hit it and it thudded. And it sounded like either plastic or like, you know, hollow bone or something. And so I took my stick, which is curved for pulling meter boxes, and I grabbed the bottom of the bag and I pulled it. And I pulled it the second time and then, uhm, a human skull dropped out with hair around it and duct tape across the mouth. And I went, ‘Oh, God,’ and immediately came up and called my supervisor and then called Orange County Utilities and notified them that I had found human remains and that I needed the police.”

  It was a story that would have fit nicely in an episode of CSI, but the facts at the crime scene made it unbelievable. This version in which he takes a leak in the woods, sees a bag with bones in it, picks at the bag with his meter stick, and watches a skull roll out could not have happened. The physical evidence showed that the skull had vines and vegetatio
n growing through and around it when it was collected. The forensic biologist would address that in his report. Kronk seemed to be embellishing his story, for whatever reason. Personally, I don’t believe that the skull was touched or moved at all; I just wish he had been more candid in his story about what really happened on December 11.

  This flawed version of events, along with the fact that he hadn’t informed investigators about his trips to the same spot in August, became hugely problematic for everyone. Things grew only more confusing a few days later when Kronk finally admitted that he had been the one to make the three 911 calls to police that past August. When Kronk came clean about what he’d seen in August, he also voiced frustration that the deputy who had met him, Richard Cain, had barely taken him seriously and in fact had berated him, making him feel that he was wasting the officer’s time.

  On December 18, Deputy Richard Cain had some explaining to do. During Cain’s interview with Corporal Yuri Melich and Sergeant John Allen, he claimed that Kronk told him he saw a bag in the woods and that it had bones in it.

  “So, we enter the woods, I saw a bag, it was not a big bag, it was like a trash bag, like a leaf bag.”

  “What color?” Melich asked.

  Cain said it was a black plastic bag. He then said he went into the woods, careful of his footing, stepping where he could without falling in the water. “I reached down, lifted the bag up. It was pretty heavy. But when I lifted it up, it tore, you know, the bottom. All leaves fell out, some sticks.

  “I took my baton out, I kind of poked around. I didn’t see anything. And I went back to Suburban.” Cain claimed that Kronk was right behind him when he entered the woods.

  That was not the way Kronk told it. On January 6, 2009, Corporal Mike Ruggiero talked to Kronk with the objective of evaluating Cain’s conduct. There was a disconnect between Cain’s and Kronk’s stories about what happened when they met by Suburban Drive that day. Cain’s account had both men traveling into the marshy area together to look around. Kronk’s version had neither man venturing in, scared off by a six-foot diamondback rattler Kronk had photographed two days earlier. Kronk said that Cain gave him the brush-off, was doubtful that there was a skull, threw a cursory glance into the woods, and somewhat rudely dismissed Kronk and his find.

  A second deputy, Kethlin Cutcher, was also questioned that same day about Kronk’s August 13 call to police. He confirmed Kronk’s story, saying that Deputy Cain was already exiting the swamp when he arrived and that Cain had told him it was just a bag of trash in the swamp. Deputy Cutcher never entered the wooded area, but he was able to see some “black plastic bags around.” At first it was hard to know for sure what happened that day in August, but eventually, too many discrepancies in Cain’s story made his account unravel. He finally agreed that neither he nor Kronk had gone into the swamp the day he met the meter man by his work truck on the afternoon of August 13. He was suspended from his duties for not investigating a lead properly, and had a disciplinary investigation pending when he put in his resignation with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

  EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMED AS if Kronk’s version of the events was correct, the original issues with his story of finding the body were glaring, and—perhaps most unfortunately for both Kronk and us—they gave the defense an opening.

  Throughout the case, the defense had been floating different theories about what had happened to Caylee. Kronk’s inconsistencies gave them a totally new narrative to grab hold of. Suddenly Kronk might have had something to do with Caylee’s death. Suddenly Kronk could have planted the body in the swamp in the fall of 2008, after Casey had been arrested. Suddenly the defense had a whole new argument to obscure things with.

  Between Kronk’s disingenuous behavior and his exaggerations, the skeptics had a field day. At every turn, Kronk was vilified and had to defend himself. However, as bad as he got it from the media, the pundits, and the bloggers, nothing was as bad as the blindsiding he endured at the hands of Jose Baez.

  It wouldn’t happen until nearly a year later because it took until November 2009 for the defense to set Kronk up for deposition. On November 19, 2009, Kronk appeared in our office accompanied by David Evans, a local attorney representing him. David had originally been hired for Kronk by the county because of all the media attention, but he stayed on pro bono. During the meeting, Kronk was deposed at length by Jose Baez, who inquired in very general terms about Kronk’s past years in the Coast Guard, his marriage back in the 1990s, and his son by that relationship. The process continued until 4:30 P.M., when the defense team abruptly called it a day, saying they’d pick it up again later that week, date to be determined.

  None of us thought anything of it, but when the deposition was over, Baez quickly walked over to the clerk’s office and filed a motion in limine, which is a generic motion that asks for a pretrial ruling on the admissibility of certain evidence. He attached affidavits from Kronk’s ex-wife and every woman he’d supposedly ever wronged, statements filled with nasty stuff about him—he was a terrible person; he was a liar; fifteen years before he had supposedly used duct tape to restrain a girlfriend after a fight. The filing even went so far as to quote his ex-wife’s statement that Kronk’s sister wouldn’t let him be alone with her daughter, implying some suspicion on the sister’s part.

  Their intent was to file the documents moments before the court closed but in time for the media to get their hands on them for the five o’clock news. This was classic Baez, filing motions without telling the prosecution just in time for the evening news and making headlines out of irrelevant matters. We were convinced that the only reason he had filed this was to publicly discredit Kronk, to get people talking and thinking that he was shady enough to at least take a second look at.

  I didn’t learn of the scurrilous remarks about Kronk until the next morning when I opened the newspaper and read them. I had even been at the deposition and it was news to me. The defense was giving information to the media I believed that they knew would never be admitted at trial, but they were using the court to promote their media agenda. It was one of the most disgusting abuses of the court system I had ever seen.

  Not one word of it had anything to do with the case. I may have had my own concerns about Kronk’s credibility, but the guy didn’t deserve that—nobody did. Support for my belief that their intention was merely to throw mud came more than a year later when the defense waived its right to a hearing on the admissibility of the nasty hearsay evidence. They didn’t even try to defend the evidence once its media relevance had passed, and of course the judge excluded it.

  In the end, we wouldn’t call Kronk in the case—not because of his past, but because of his words and his alleged “character” issues. That he embellished his story on December 11 was very frustrating for us, so we decided not to use him as a prosecution witness. We did not want to be vouching for his credibility when we didn’t believe him ourselves. It would have hurt us more to put him on the stand. Of course, there was a hundred miles between embellishing a story to make it look better and the ludicrous claim that he took the skull home for three months and then brought it back—a claim which the defense eventually made.

  In exchange for his public embarrassment, Kronk did not end up with the money that he had expected to get. He did not collect the $50,000 offered by bounty hunter Leonard Padilla for Caylee’s discovery, because he did not meet the procedural requirement that he initiate the tip with Crimeline. Mr. Kronk had called 911. He did get $5,000 from Mark NeJame, the local lawyer with one client or another attached to the case, for his effort. And he collected $20,000 from Good Morning America for his photograph of the six-foot rattler and an interview.

  AS THE DEFENSE TRIED TO cloud Kronk in suspicion, the main counternarrative they stuck to was that the body had been planted. As they laid it out, this premise was based on the fact that in the weeks after Caylee was reported missing, the area where the body was found had supposedly
been thoroughly searched, but the remains had not been found. Therefore, they concluded, when the body was found in December within a quarter mile of the Anthony home, it must have been hauled there and planted. Roy Kronk was now their best scapegoat for such an action. Of course, there was no evidence to implicate Kronk beyond his questionable behavior upon finding the body, but the defense’s story did highlight an important question that the discovery of Caylee’s body revealed: how could her remains have gone unnoticed for so long in an area so close to the Anthonys’ home?

  Rife with the prerequisites for a good place to hide a body—such as an almost impenetrable air potato curtain obscuring the site from the road—the swamp off Suburban Drive should have been one of the first places checked. It had near-perfect conditions to promote decay, not to mention that its unappealing landscape was scattered with its share of household toss-offs—from old paint cans and beer bottles, to a half-submerged television, to various car parts, hubcaps, and batteries. Amid this mess of artifacts, the laundry bag shrouding the tiny body was in perfect suburban camouflage. Still, it should have been found, because the area should have been searched. But it wasn’t. In the end, Murphy’s Law prevailed: everyone assumed that someone else had searched there, but in fact no one actually had.

  One of the first groups to face scrutiny following Kronk’s discovery was Texas EquuSearch, the volunteer search and rescue organization founded by a man named Tim Miller and based in Dickinson, Texas. EquuSearch had dedicated a huge share of its resources to the Find Caylee Marie operation, sending more than forty-two hundred workers and volunteers to Orlando and eating up close to half its annual budget. According to the mission statement of the volunteer group, “We are committed to providing experienced, organized and ethical volunteer search efforts for missing persons, utilizing the most suitable and up-to-date technologies and methodologies.” Beginning in late August 2008 and again in November, three months later, teams from this organization were actively searching vast areas of Orange and Osceola Counties. I recall seeing footage of their efforts on the news in early September of 2008.