Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  “Hitting. That’s all I can remember,” Tony replied.

  “What did you take that to mean or did she give you a more specific description of hitting?”

  “I took it as discipline.” Tony answered.

  Judge Perry continued, “Did she tell you . . . besides using the word ‘hitting,’ did she say anything else?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  The judge ultimately agreed that Tony’s information was hearsay and the jury was not allowed to hear the testimony.

  ON DAY FOUR, GEORGE ANTHONY returned to the stand. His testimony this time had to do with the duct tape on the gas cans. Based on the unfortunate way that George had chosen to frame this story at the deposition, I knew this area would be problematic, but I was prepared.

  At the time of his deposition, way back in the summer of 2009, George had been evasive about the duct tape. He’d claimed that some of the tape had been on the gas can for years, but that he hadn’t put that particular piece of tape over the vent hole, seemingly implying it must have been placed there by the police. In this statement, he had put his support behind Casey at great risk to his integrity as a witness.

  Now, with Casey’s allegations against him fresh in everyone’s minds, he told a different story. On the stand, he said that when Casey brought the gas can back to him, it didn’t have a cap on the vent hole, the implication being that Casey had lost it. George then said he’d put a piece of duct tape on the hole, then and there on June 24, 2008. The whole story was completely inconsistent with his deposition. I’d long known that his attempt to help Casey back then would come back to haunt him, and sure enough it had.

  Understandably, Baez picked up on the discrepancy between whether there had been tape on the gas can during his cross-examination of George. He ended up asking the same question that I had asked during the deposition: “When the gas was returned, did it have duct tape on it?”

  Rather than saying, “No, it didn’t,” and staying consistent with what he’d said to me only an hour or so before, George started to be difficult with Baez, answering his questions with questions for the sole purpose of frustrating him.

  This was not helpful to our case. George must have hated Jose, particularly because of the latest allegations. I think George may have believed that it had been Baez’s idea to accuse him of molesting his daughter. In George’s mind, Casey had only submissively gone along with her lawyer’s plan. None of us on the prosecution saw it that way. To us, the molestation accusation had “Casey” written all over it. Regardless, one thing I was sure of was that Baez knew how much George disliked him and used it to his advantage. Baez probably wanted the jury to see George’s hostility, and George took the bait. He was not bright enough to read what was happening. I wanted to say, “George, just stop playing games, just answer the question,” but I couldn’t. I’ve always wondered if on some subconscious level George was trying to look guilty. Maybe this was his way of helping Casey. I didn’t really think so, but I wondered. For someone who was innocent, he had a way of making himself appear suspect. I didn’t think it would seriously hurt our case, or lend any real credence to the defense’s baseless accusations, but I knew this was not the face of George that we on the prosecution team wanted to project.

  Baez knew that George would continue to try and dance around the connection between the tape and his house. By now, we also had a video in which the same duct tape was being used at the “Find Caylee” command center. This further made George look like he was lying. If initially he had been trying to protect Casey, now he was looking as though he was trying to protect himself, something not lost on Baez.

  Ultimately, George said that the gas can didn’t have duct tape on it when Casey brought it back. So why the game? He was playing right into Baez’s hands. I just wanted to slap him, and this wasn’t even the end of it. The next thing I knew, George was arguing with Baez about how often he mowed his lawn.

  “You cut your grass every week?” Baez asked.

  “Well, every week, two weeks, ten days,” George answered instead of just simply saying, “Yeah, I cut my grass every week in the summer.” Baez then brought up George’s call to the police to report that his shed had been broken into, implying that his call was an attempt to set Casey up.

  I could tell that George wanted to spar with Baez about anything. But not only was he not as practiced at the dance as Casey, he didn’t have a motivation to stop. Normally, a lawyer can appeal to a witness’s better judgment by saying, “You’re at risk of allowing the accused murderer to go free by the way you are acting.” But George didn’t have that motivation because the accused murderer was his daughter. Instead, he was exercising his private outrage at Baez, and ended up looking like he was trying to hide something. He was only shooting himself in the foot. All we could hope was that the jury would understand that George’s anger was justified, that it was directed at Jose, and it was not indicative of complicity.

  As much as George wasn’t doing himself any favors, I thought some clear questions with concise answers could help dispel any doubts about George that surrounded him. On redirect, I tried to make the point that in June 2008, there was no way George could have known that the gas can or the tape on it had anything to do with Caylee’s death. I asked George what he had done with the gas cans in the four months between the fight with Casey and the discovery of Caylee’s body. When he said he had stuck them in the shed for four months, I made my point that it would be pretty stupid for someone who was involved in a crime to deliberately keep the evidence around. I wasn’t sure if it had undone George’s struggles with Baez, but hopefully it had helped.

  After George was dismissed, the jury had two questions of its own for Judge Perry. They wanted to know which twelve of the fifteen jurors would deliberate the case and which three were alternates. Would it be the first twelve and the alternates were the last three, or would the order be mixed up? The other question was, Did the alternates get to go home when the jury deliberated? Day Three of the trial and they were already talking about wanting to go home—not a good sign.

  That night, they started sending out requests for DVDs that they wanted to watch. Some of them were kids’ movies, which was kind of weird. Judge Perry pointed out that they had already agreed on a list of movies, two hundred in all, but there apparently were some additional ones that they wanted. As I look back on it, I understand that the jury was sequestered and it was a long trial, but they were a rather high-maintenance bunch. There seemed to be a lot of thought and discussion about what entertainment they wanted, which movies they wanted to watch, and which restaurants they wanted to go to. Yet, as we would learn later, when it came time to deliberate, they never asked a single question about the evidence.

  There was another mentionable high-maintenance incident when one of the jurors ran out of water during testimony. He looked at the court deputy, held up his empty water bottle, and shook it, like the court deputy was his personal butler and should fetch him a new one. The court deputy was annoyed at being treated like a servant.

  Throughout the trial, Judge Perry was very accommodating of the jury, really wanting to keep them happy, satisfied, and reasonably entertained. They wanted to watch the finals of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game on television, so Judge Perry was going to get somebody from the cable company to acquire a tape of the game for them to watch. In the end, the local cable company hooked them up so they could watch the game live and on national television. Judge Perry gave the company a nice nod for their kindness. When the jurors wanted pretzels in the break room, he provided them. He spent a lot of time on their comfort. I now wonder if the judge made it too comfortable for them.

  WHEN THE TRIAL RESUMED, FRANK called more “friends of Casey” to the stand. One of them was her ex-boyfriend Ricardo Morales. Frank asked him general questions about the Anthony family and the relationship between Casey and Caylee. He said he had last seen the to
ddler on June 10, the day he and Casey broke up. During the cross, I thought Baez behaved inappropriately toward Morales, drilling him about selling a photo he had taken of Caylee wearing the pink “Big Trouble Comes in Small Packages” shirt and others of Caylee to a magazine. He acted all indignant that this man would sell photographs of this poor dead child for $4,000. It was so hypocritical, when Jose had brokered the sale of photos of Caylee for $200,000 on Casey’s behalf. You wonder, how does he live with that?

  Ricardo’s friend Troy Brown, Troy’s ex-girlfriend Melissa England, and four friends of Casey’s—Iassen Donov, Dante Salati, Christopher Stutz, and Matthew Crisp—followed Ricardo Morales. All of them testified to Casey’s lies. On cross-examination, Jose did manage to get the majority of them to say that Casey was a good mother.

  In retrospect, I think the sheer quantity of lies might have taken away some of the impact of the individual lies. Almost like in aversion therapy, exposing someone to something that bothers him enough makes it seem not quite as bad. After about a dozen of these witnesses, I thought it got little boring to keep going over and over the same questions and the same points. We stressed to the jury that Casey was a woman who went on as if nothing had happened after Caylee disappeared; in fact, her life got better. Looking back on it, though, it was probably overkill. I thought we had made the point and I suggested we could cut out a few. Linda decided we should stick to the plan, and she was the boss. I did suggest to Frank that he tighten it up, which he did.

  This was around the time I began to tell Linda and Frank that I thought Casey was not going to testify. I was feeling stronger and stronger in my conviction that she wasn’t going to take the stand. I thought Jose’s whole opening statement was probably something that he was going to put out there and never prove. They both thought I was crazy, and that based on what Baez said in opening, she had to back it up on the stand. I completely agreed with the logic of what they were saying. But I pointed out that in the three years we had been dealing with this guy, he had filed motions or made statements time and time again, and got indignant when we made him back them up. I had this gut feeling that he thought he could just say anything, and people would believe him.

  On May 27, Simon Birch took the stand. He was the manager of Johnson’s Wrecker, the place where George and Cindy came to retrieve the Pontiac. He testified that the smell from the Sunfire to him was foul and potent, like that of decomposition. He said he had been in the towing business for more than twenty years, with a two-year stint in waste management, and had smelled everything you could imagine in a car. He was firm in his belief that the odor in the Pontiac was from a dead body. He related that when he and George Anthony opened the trunk, lots of flies flew out. There was a bag of garbage in the trunk, which they tossed into the Dumpster. It did not help the smell in the trunk at all.

  MAY 28, THE DAY CINDY Anthony took the stand, was emotional for everybody. Linda was leading the questioning, which began with extremely personal treasures. It was necessary for the prosecution to have Cindy identify certain items taken from the house that were related to items found with Caylee’s remains. That meant Cindy needed to look at pictures of Caylee’s room, which brought her to tears. About an hour into testimony, she became so emotional that we took a break to allow her to compose herself.

  Cindy remembered her last day with Caylee, Father’s Day, June 15, 2008. She talked about Zanny, saying that Casey had been referencing the invented nanny as far back as 2006. Cindy did her best to recount the thirty-one days Caylee was missing. When Linda started to ask her about a MySpace page she had created on July 3, 2008, just to be able to reach out to Casey, the defense objected on the grounds of hearsay and the objection was sustained.

  Linda was only allowed to go into those areas of the MySpace page that had been written by Cindy on her own page. She was limited as to what she could ask Cindy about her and Casey’s communication, because Casey had not posted responses on Cindy’s page. Casey’s own MySpace had postings under the subject line “Diary of Days,” which appeared to be direct responses. Her page had such things as “On the worst of days, trust no one, only yourself,” “What is given can be taken away,” and “Everyone lies. Everyone dies. Life will never be easy.” But Cindy was not allowed to testify to any of that.

  These constraints compromised Linda’s ability to bring out a fuller understanding of the mother-daughter relationship. Cindy said the exchange between herself and Casey on MySpace was the first time they had “talked” since Cindy’s attempt to intercept Casey and Caylee at Universal Studios. Cindy’s subject line on her MySpace plea to Casey was “My Caylee is missing,” and Linda asked if she could clarify what she meant by “missing,” if she thought Caylee was safe somewhere with her mother. Cindy said that “missing” meant “missing in my heart,” not “missing” as in disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Cindy did say that she had felt betrayed by Casey, which for her seemed like a big leap over positions she’d taken in the past. Linda went through the MySpace posting line by line in an attempt to get Casey’s responses to Cindy’s comments, but presenting the interchange this way was not nearly as effective as having the jury read it. Linda continued asking Cindy about her communication with Casey during the thirty-one days. Cindy said she eventually gave up trying to call her daughter, so started texting her to see if she could talk to Caylee. Casey always had an excuse, any reason why Caylee wasn’t there.

  I couldn’t make sense of Cindy’s just accepting Casey’s excuses. I think she feared that if she pushed Casey, then Casey would take Caylee away for good and she would never see her again. After all, Casey had the leverage, she had what Cindy wanted. I just couldn’t understand why Cindy couldn’t be right up front instead of making excuses for Casey.

  Linda asked Cindy about the odor in the trunk of the Pontiac, once described to a 911 operator as being like the odor of “a dead body in the damn car.” But Cindy had watered down that strong opinion about the smell considerably over the years. Now she told Linda she accepted George’s explanation that there was garbage in the trunk. She acknowledged that she had some experience with rotting flesh, being in a medical field.

  The 911 calls Cindy had made on July 15, 2008, were introduced next. The tapes of these conversations created the most emotional moment in the trial to date. Jurors, who had not shown much emotion before this, seemed to perk up as the first call started to play. Cindy looked uncomfortable as she heard her own voice. There was something about hearing the calls now, knowing that her granddaughter was dead, that was heart-wrenching. She listened with her hand covering her mouth, looking like she was wishing she could retroactively silence herself. Her recorded voice reverberated in the courtroom, becoming increasingly distraught with each additional call. Everyone could hear the voices of Cindy and the different operators as the text of conversations scrolled on a screen. Her first call had reported the stolen car, and she sounded annoyed at her daughter, who was sitting next to her in the car. The second call was from her house. She was quite upset, and mentioned that her granddaughter was missing. In the third call she was frantic, saying Caylee had been kidnapped by the babysitter.

  By the time the third 911 call was played, Cindy was a mess. Looking down at her hands through her tears, she related the first time she had heard that Caylee was missing. With her head nodded down toward her chest and her face red from sobbing, she put one hand over her eyes and her mouth, her entire face, really and hung her head completely below the bar of the witness stand. She looked like she was trying to hide from her own words.

  The taped conversation reached the point where Casey took the phone from her mother to tell the 911 operator what was going on with Caylee. Anyone who knows the tapes knows how calm Casey is when she tells the operator that Caylee has been missing for thirty-one days, but she’s been looking for her herself. Meanwhile, in the courtroom, Casey’s calm voice on the tape, juxtaposed against the sight of her mo
ther sobbing and doubled over in emotional pain on the witness stand, was wrenching indeed. When the tapes were finally over, Cindy popped her head back up and sat up straight, trying to regain her composure as Judge Perry called a quick recess.

  I thought Cindy’s reaction to the tapes was telling. She was so willing to go after Casey when she had thought her daughter was withholding Caylee from her. When it turned out Casey was keeping Caylee away from everybody, she was not quite as overcharged and frantic.

  Next Linda played back the jailhouse calls between Casey and her parents and friends when she had first been arrested for child neglect and lying to the police, right after the lies had unraveled. To me, these conversations show the true, unvarnished Casey, Casey at the core. They show how thoroughly selfish she is, turning talk about Caylee back to her and her own plight. Cindy was better prepared to listen to these tapes. She sat stoically, not covering her mouth like before. Her expression was blanker than before, though; she looked exhausted.

  The phone conversation between Kristina Chester, a friend of hers, and Casey provided me with one of the quotes I found most telling about the young mother at the defense table. Kristina had been trying to get Casey to talk about Caylee, but Casey only wanted to talk to Tony and was desperate for somebody to give her his phone number. Kristina kept asking if Tony was involved in Caylee’s disappearance, and Casey kept answering in the negative. Finally, after Casey asked for Tony’s number for the umpteenth time, Kristina asked, “So why do you want to talk to him?” and Casey answered narcissistically, “Because he’s myyyyy boyfriend.”

  Kristina said, “If anything happens to Caylee, I’ll die,” and started to cry. Casey seemed quite annoyed by her friend’s tears. “Oh my God, calling you guys? A waste, a huge waste,” she said in reply.