Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  Over the next several months, we prepared for the depositions of Cindy, Lee, and George. The stretch of time seemed only to entrench their attitudes. During those months, both Cindy and George remained obstinate toward the investigators and the prosecution. Cindy continued to make statements about Casey’s innocence or offer her latest theory about what was going on. Ultimately, we didn’t speak with Cindy directly until we scheduled a deposition with her during the summer of 2009.

  On July 28, 2009, Cindy was at our office for a deposition. She came with Brad Conway, the lawyer who was now representing her, and the usual additional parties were present. Cindy had been subpoenaed, so she had to come, and while she was obligated to answer our questions, she had immunity for herself if she said anything incriminating. But that did not mean that anyone else was protected from what she said.

  From the start of the deposition it was pretty clear that Cindy’s demeanor was largely the same as it had been over the previous year. She remained in denial. Although at least this time she was willing to admit some of Casey’s shortcomings��lying, stealing, and so forth—she still could not confront the reality of Casey’s behavior. She stuck with her story that Casey was a good mom and they were the best of friends, even telling us how, the night before Caylee went missing, the three of them curled up on the sofa together to watch TV.

  Linda led the questioning. She began by asking Cindy about her well-being, and Cindy responded that she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a year, since Caylee went missing. She had slept four hours the night before, so that was good, she said. Cindy then gave us her biography. She was fifty-one, born and raised in Warren, Ohio, not far from the Pennsylvania border. She had three older brothers: Dan, Gary, and Rick. She was the only girl and the baby of the family. She went to three years of nursing school, graduating as an RN. She first specialized in pediatrics, and later orthopedics. She met George when he came to visit his sister at Trumbull Memorial Hospital, where his sister was one of her patients.

  The two were married in a church wedding in Niles, Ohio, in 1981. The marriage was Cindy’s first, George’s second. George was seven years older than she. He was a detective with the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office, working in the homicide division. He eventually reached the rank of deputy sheriff. After thirteen years of service, he left the force at Cindy’s urging. He was getting hurt a lot, and friends of his had even been killed. The job was dangerous: “car accidents, and people throwing bricks through windows, and things like that,” she said.

  George briefly joined his father in the family car business, Anthony’s Auto Sales, before he became a proprietor of his own dealership. In 1989 the family relocated to Orlando. George’s business was dissolving, and Cindy used the chance to be near her parents, who had recently moved to Mount Dora, Florida. Lee was seven and Casey was three. She chose Orlando because she thought it would have lots of job opportunities for both of them. Her job at Gentiva Heath Services, where she still worked, began in 2002. She managed a caseload of 120 patients.

  Linda brought the questioning back to Casey, Caylee, and the recent past. We noticed that Cindy told the truth about all the important stuff that connected Caylee’s body to the house. In fact, she went on to tell us that the duct tape from the house, which matched the tape on the body, had been used at a command post that was established to coordinate getting the word out about Caylee during the days and weeks after they discovered she was missing. This tip about the duct tape would later lead us to a TV news video that showed the same unique Henkel logo on duct tape that had been used to post a “missing child” flyer of Caylee. The ironies in the case never cease to amaze me.

  Cindy’s helpfulness in the deposition didn’t last long, though, once we got to the search for chloroform on the home computer.

  “All right. There is a search for how to make chloroform on your desktop computer,” said Linda. “Did you make that search?”

  “I’m not sure,” Cindy replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I remember looking up chlorophyll back in March of last year, and I am not sure if I looked up chloroform as well. I looked up alcohol and several other things like ethyl alcohol and peroxide, too.”

  “Why?” Linda asked.

  “I was researching things that—as far as the chlorophyll—and possibly chloroform—because of my animals. Because my cocker—or my Yorkies—would eat a lot of bamboo leaves and I know there’s chlorophyll in those leaves and they were getting sick, quite sick.

  “And I had previously lost two cocker spaniels, and I wanted to see if there was any tie. I had never thought about that with the cancer and stuff that I lost the cocker, so I started researching different things.”

  “Do you believe that you could have accidentally looked up how to make chloroform?” Linda asked.

  “Chloroform. I may have looked up the ingredients, but not how to make it.”

  “Okay,” Linda paused. “What did you learn about chlorophyll?”

  “It can make an animal sick, but it wasn’t—it didn’t have, like, drowsiness effects and things that I was concerned with. It did not.”

  When Linda started asking her how she spelled chlorophyll, she stammered, and Baez got involved. Linda handed her a piece of paper and Cindy proceeded with the exercise by spelling it out in longhand.

  “C-h-l-o-r-o-p-h-i-1,” she wrote.

  At this point my reaction was “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Of all the stories we’d heard since this began, this was the lamest one yet. It amazed me that she was being truthful about things that really implicated Casey but then helping her out about something so stupid. It seemed rather desperate. Linda, being the wonderfully tenacious attorney that she is, sensed that the truth was slipping away. She zeroed in on the time of day that Cindy would have done the search. “Now, this computer search you did for chlorophyll . . . what time of day would that have been done?”

  “I do not recall,” said Cindy. “I just remember sometime in March or—I believe sometime in March. I don’t believe it was April. I believe it was March or—”

  Linda jumped in. “By time of day I mean would it have been first thing in the morning? In the evening?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Do you work?”

  “Yes,” said Cindy. She agreed with Linda that she worked full-time.

  Linda, Frank, and I knew right then that Cindy would go to great lengths to cover for her daughter.

  The next day, Lee Anthony came to our office for his deposition. The same parties were present. He was cheerful and cooperative. On the whole, there wasn’t that much that we hadn’t heard before from him, but he did tell us yet another version of the events from the day Caylee went missing. This was something he’d heard from Casey herself when she was out on bond in August 2008. He recounted Casey’s new, very elaborate story about what happened at Jay Blanchard Park, which was where she was supposedly meeting Zanny on that Monday.

  “So she goes to Jay Blanchard Park and brings Caylee. . . . Zenaida is there with her sister, as well as her sister has two daughters. I can’t remember the sister’s name, I think it is Jessica or something like that. Jessica was there with her kids, and Casey drops off Caylee, and sits down in the park there with Zenaida.”

  Lee said that Casey and Zenaida were watching the kids playing when the nanny grabbed Casey, threatened her, and told her she was a bad mother. She said she was going to take Caylee as punishment.

  Lee said that Zenaida told Casey, “I need to teach you a lesson. I will return her to you, but you’ve got to do something for me. You cannot go to the police, can’t tell anybody about this. If this happens, if you do go to the police, if you tell somebody about this, you know, I know where your parents live. I know where your brother lives. I have Caylee, and you don’t want me to find out you told somebody something.”

  Hearing this new
version of events, I suddenly found myself thinking about the hallway at Universal. In the weeks while she was in jail, the cops had completely debunked her story about dropping Caylee off at Sawgrass and Casey taking on her “own investigation” to find them. That story was no longer tenable. So what did Casey do? She made up a new lie, Casey 3.0. By shoring up the kidnapping story, Casey was finding a way to justify why she didn’t tell anybody why Caylee was missing all that time.

  GEORGE ANTHONY HAD HIS TURN on August 5. His attitude from the time his granddaughter’s body was found until the case went to trial changed from friendly to adversarial and back again. The first time I’d talked to him had been before he testified at the grand jury, when he was more than willing to help. I hadn’t spoken to him since then, so I was taken aback when he started giving me a hard time during the deposition. Now I was more like the enemy. That Caylee was dead and we had our sights on his family wasn’t sitting well with him.

  In all fairness, the intervening months had been difficult for him. After Caylee’s body was found, his life had been like a cliff jump. In January 2009, he had made a serious attempt to kill himself. The suicide attempt was an eye-opener for me. I came to realize just how despondent he was. His world had been torn to shreds and was as public a spectacle as the OJ trial. He didn’t want to live without his granddaughter. He was overwhelmed with tremendous guilt and pain.

  I felt really bad for him. I am a father of six, and have never had a situation close to as despairing as his, but I could only imagine the pain he must have been in, having his granddaughter die and his daughter the only suspect. The Anthony family lawyer, Brad Conway, was the one to call 911 on Saturday, January 22, with the alarm that George had left the house at 8:30 that morning with several bottles of prescription medication and some photos. No one had seen or heard from him since. “We are worried that he has done something to himself,” Conway told the dispatcher.

  The following day George was located by police in a motel room in Daytona Beach. He was despairing and barely coherent. A six- to eight-page suicide note addressed to his wife was unfinished. In it, he apologized to Cindy for all the disappointments he had caused her over the years.

  “This should be no surprise that I have decided to leave the earth, because I need to be with Caylee Marie. I cannot keep on going because it should be me that is gone from this earth, not her.

  “I have lived many years, I am satisfied with my decision because I have never been the man you, Lee, Casey & especially Caylee Marie deserved.”

  George blamed himself for the child’s death and Casey’s incarceration. “For a year or so I brought stuff up, only to be told not to be negative. . . . I sit here, falling apart, because I should have done more. She was so close to home, why was she there? Who placed her there? Why is she gone? Why? . . .”

  George was taken to a medical center for evaluation and held for a short time before he was released and returned home to Cindy. The next time we spoke was at his deposition in August 2009.

  George had been cooperative with law enforcement when Caylee was first reported missing. His early statements and the fact that he’d sought to speak to investigators without Cindy present reflected the conflict between the logical assessment of facts from the view of someone with law enforcement experience, and the desperate hope of a loving father and grandfather. Emotionally, he hoped that his granddaughter was alive and well and his daughter was not some murderous monster. But logically, especially from the perspective of someone with a law enforcement background, things looked dire.

  I have always believed that there came a point when, either consciously or unconsciously, George was faced with a choice: either to follow the facts and fight for the truth or to drink the Kool-Aid that Casey was serving and Cindy was enjoying, to buy into Cindy’s denial and let the truth be damned. If he followed his intellect, it meant that he had lost his granddaughter to the grave, his daughter to prison, and his wife to her unfounded theories—which might lead to divorce.

  As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, George’s choice became clear. During his recovery following his suicide attempt, he had apparently made the decision to get behind his wife and daughter. In public appearances, he always stood at Cindy’s side and supported her in her denial. When he spoke, he echoed her sentiments, although with a little less conviction. His relationship with law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office became more adversarial.

  He demonstrated this in his attitude at his deposition. The duct tape on the gas can in the shed was a perfect example. When Caylee went missing, the police had asked George about any unusual activities around the property in the prior month. He told them about the stolen gas cans he had reported to the police, which Casey had then returned to him.

  As a result of that information, the cans had been photographed at that time during the summer. In December, after it was clear that the tape on the cans matched the tape at the crime scene, the cans were seized because of the tape. Obviously the tape had been on them since June.

  But when I asked George about the tape on the cans during the deposition, he was evasive. He admitted that it was his habit to cover the vent hole of the can with tape since he had lost the plug.

  But I wanted him to confirm the obvious: that the duct tape on Caylee’s remains came from his home. I showed him photographs of a number of items involved in the case, including the two metal gas cans. George knew that the tape was a key element in connecting Casey to Caylee’s body and was ready with a surprising explanation.

  Identifying the gas can with a small piece of tape, I asked, “Now, that gas can appears to have a piece of duct tape on it. Do you recognize that?”

  “I didn’t put the duct tape on there,” George responded.

  “Do you recognize it, though?”

  “I recognize this can, but I didn’t put that duct tape on there. I wouldn’t do a sloppy job like that.”

  “Okay, have you ever seen that piece of duct tape on that can before?” I prodded.

  “Not this particular size, no. No, sir.”

  Rather than argue with George, I backed up. “So, at some point, you say you had put a piece of duct tape over the vent of that can; is that correct?”

  “Uh-huh . . . I don’t know when I specifically did that, but I know that I did it. Because whenever I put the duct tape over that particular vent hole that you’ve described or told me about, I did it very neatly. That’s not my style,” he explained.

  “What’s not neat about it?” I asked.

  “It’s too big. I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have put the tape there. I would have been neater than that. I would have cut it neater, more precisely than that to just cover the hole.”

  It was a strange statement, one that between the lines pretty much accused the police of planting the piece of duct tape on the can. I pointed out that in August, when the police first photographed the cans, the police had no reason to believe the duct tape had anything to do with the case. Caylee’s body hadn’t even been discovered, so it wouldn’t have made sense for them to plant it. He had no real answer for the question, and the look on his face told me he knew he had nowhere to go with his story.

  He next tried to deny using the cans from that date in June until the first of August, when he gave them to the cops, but he missed the fact that he would have had to mow the lawn in that period of time. When he realized the mistake, he tried to bring two supposedly newly purchased cans into the story. But when I asked when he had purchased the new ones, he had to admit that he’d bought those before the old ones were taken, which made no sense.

  I asked him, “Okay, but why did you buy them if you did not yet know that these were missing?” I asked.

  “Okay, I’m going to be very, very blunt with you,” George responded. “Don’t try to confuse me.”

  It was sad to witness how much George wanted to protect his daughter.In
stead of changing course, though, he just looked at the table and stuck to his answer. This was not an argument that logic was going to win. He was trying to help Casey, much as Cindy had when she tried to take credit for the searches for chloroform. The tape on the gas can was one of the most important pieces of evidence, and he was trying to keep it from being connected to the crime scene. Suggesting that the police put it there was his only option, and it wasn’t a particularly good one. While he didn’t go as far as Cindy had, he was walking a questionable line.

  It was easy to see that the cornerstone of the Anthony family dysfunction was Casey. If one looks at the Anthony family dynamic without Casey, they were really quite normal. Both Cindy and George had steady employment, working for many years in their fields. They were both well liked at work, in their neighborhood, and in general. Nobody came forward with any horror stories about either one of them. When you listened to friends, family and coworkers, they were the picture of a loving and committed couple raising two children into young adulthood. Even Lee seemed a genuinely well-adjusted young man. Indeed it was Casey alone that appeared to be the anomaly.

  It’s hard to say what it was about Casey that impacted everyone in the family so dramatically. My feeling is that Cindy’s very real, very serious issues with denial when it came to Casey infected the entire family. When George would attempt to explore Casey’s lies, Cindy would stymie him at every turn, telling him to “stop being a detective.” I felt that Cindy was scared of pushing Casey too far because she didn’t want her daughter to take Caylee out of her life. It was a misdirected love, and Cindy didn’t want to lose either of them—Casey was her daughter and Caylee was her light and joy.

  As a parent, I can only imagine how difficult a situation it is to look in the mirror and entertain the possibility that your daughter killed your granddaughter. There’s no protocol for that . . . no guidebook for the correct emotional response. As irrational as the responses of Cindy and George were, I always tried to remind myself that I was not in their shoes. Still, it was hard to fathom the lengths they seemed to be going to in order to disrupt the conversation. As an attorney on the other side, it was hard to watch them fight us like this. If Cindy and George were lying to us, they were laughably incompetent at it; they’d had a lot more practice lying to themselves.