Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  After I checked out Dominic’s license, I called him and invited him to join me. When he came to meet me, he seemed capable enough, so I welcomed him to my team.

  My first assignment for him was to look into whether a former fiancé of Casey’s, a man by the name of Jesse Grund, might have abducted Caylee.

  “Jesse met Casey while he was working in loss prevention at Universal Studios,” I told him. “They began a relationship, and then he went to Florida State University in Tallahassee. Shortly after he left, Casey found out she was pregnant and she told him he was the father. They started seeing each other again, and he offered to marry her.

  “Cindy didn’t like him,” I told him. “While they were dating, Jesse was at the police academy, and then he got a job working for the Orlando Police Department, and he was working there when Casey broke it off. Jesse underwent a DNA test to see if Caylee was his, and even though she wasn’t his child, he still wanted to marry Casey and raise Caylee as his own. They were engaged, but after Caylee was born, they broke up because of Cindy.”

  I told Dominic that, according to Cindy, Jesse had been very possessive of Caylee, that he was jealous when Casey found a new boyfriend, and that Cindy suspected that it might be Jesse who took Caylee. (None of this turned out to be true, of course.)

  “See what you can find out about Jesse,” I said to Dominic.

  About a week later, Dominic and I met in my conference room. I was curious as to what he had found.

  “I think I’ve solved the case,” said Dominic. “I’ve been doing some research, and the word on the street is that ‘Zanny’ is actually a code name for Xanax. I believe what happened was that Casey was giving Caylee Xanax to sleep. That’s what she meant when she said ‘Zanny the nanny.’”

  I thought to myself, Number one, that’s not what I asked you to do, and number two, that could very well be the second-most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Number one, of course, was that there ever was a Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez in the first place. I also realized that this guy was not the type of investigator I wanted working for me on a case like this. But I had a problem. He was out there doing work for me, and if I let him go and the media found out about it, I couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.

  At that point, I had lost complete confidence in him. I didn’t think he was useful so I gave him menial tasks like running a license plate or standing outside the Anthony home and keeping his eye on the protesters.

  “If something happens, give me a call,” I said.

  I just kind of blew him off, and he became increasingly frustrated with me because I wasn’t including him in anything important. I really wanted to divorce myself from the guy.

  It was tough, because I had never been in a situation with this amount of media scrutiny. Trying to keep things private was a major undertaking.

  Dominic’s full name was Dominic Anthony Casey. You cannot make this stuff up. Down the road, Dominic Anthony Casey would almost destroy me and my case.

  Another of the colorful characters to come along was Gale St. John, who billed herself as a psychic dog handler, meaning she owns dogs which she claims are trained to find dead bodies. Her search team was known as “The Body Hunters.”

  On August 11, 2008, a man by the name of Roy Kronk called 9-1-1 to report seeing something suspicious in the woods near the Anthony home. On this same day, St. John was driving herself and a couple of her psychic associates when she videotaped herself pulling up to the Anthony home. You can see the media trucks on her tape, and she says, “I’m getting a feeling.” Then she says, “Let’s turn left over here,” and she starts heading toward Suburban Drive. When she stopped there, she said, “My feelings are getting stronger.” She pulled to the right, and on the tape you can hear the dogs breathing heavily.

  St. John said the feeling she got that day was overwhelming.

  “You get very sick to your stomach,” she said. “You feel as though you’ve been punched in the stomach and something knocks the air out of you.”

  “I’m getting a feeling right here,” she said, and everyone got out of the car. The dogs searched around and stopped at the exact spot where Caylee would eventually be found months later in December. Her dogs found no body.

  I don’t believe in psychics, but I had to give it to her. This was not the first beyond-bizarre experience in this case and would not be the last. She was right there, but the question we would later ask was, Where was Caylee?

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of turning up nothing, people stopped volunteering to work for Texas EquuSearch, and it was then that Miller went on TV talking about how much money the company had spent. Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary stepped up, donated $5,000 to the company, and asked Miller not to leave. Miller stayed a few more days, announced he would come back in November, and then returned to Texas.

  Also going on the TV and making a name for himself was Leonard Padilla, the bounty hunter with the reality show who had dropped his bond on Casey when she was arrested on the bad check charges. I was able to get another bondsman to post the money, and Padilla, in search of a new path to publicity, joined Miller in the search for Caylee. Padilla and Miller announced that when they returned in November, they were going to launch the biggest search in U.S. history. In fact, they did come back and had a huge turnout—more than thirteen hundred volunteers—though no one ever found anything, including those who searched on Suburban Drive where Caylee would later be found.

  One morning in November, I was eating my breakfast and turned on the news to find Padilla standing on the banks of a lake inside Jay Blanchard Park in Orlando. He had hired divers to search that lake because he believed Caylee’s body was hidden there. Why, I was never sure, though perhaps it was because that was the park Casey had mentioned as the place where Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez kidnapped Caylee.

  The reporters came in droves, and one of them asked him, “Mr. Padilla, are you going to search again today?”

  He said yes.

  “How many days do you plan on searching?” he was asked.

  “We’re going to stay until Tuesday,” he said.

  “Why Tuesday?”

  “Because the flights are cheaper on Tuesday,” he said.

  I cracked up watching this. And then the reporter asked him, “Are you back out here trying to redeem yourself because you didn’t find anything last time?”

  “Fuck you,” he shouted over the airwaves live across Orlando. “I don’t have to redeem myself for anyone.”

  I almost spit out my cereal. I couldn’t believe Padilla had said “Fuck you” on live TV. The commentator had to apologize for his language.

  At any rate, Padilla and his divers went into the lake searching, and in the afternoon on TV there was breaking news. At the bottom of the lake he had discovered a waterlogged sack. Padilla was certain he had found Caylee’s body.

  After the discovery, he took a large roll of crime scene tape and cordoned off an area so no one could get close to him. There were hundreds of people crowded behind the tape, but not one of them crossed it, not realizing that Padilla and his divers weren’t cops but civilian searchers.

  The large bag was pulled out of the water, and the call was made to the police, who came out. I watched all of this unfold on television. As I said, everything about this case was televised. It was by far the most popular reality show on local, if not national, TV. This was huge, breaking news in the middle of the day, and everyone was looking in. The station broke into its regular programming, and talking heads were opining away about what was happening at this lake in Jay Blanchard Park.

  As I watched the television, I could see Sergeant John Allen and Special Agent Nick Savage from the FBI pull up in their squad car. They walked over to speak with Padilla. Hovering above, helicopters were following their every move. I watched as the cops looked in the bag, walked back to their squad car, and left.

  Later on Allen told me, “Oh my God, it was ridiculous. What a joke.”

  Inside the bag
was a pile of rocks and a green Gumby doll.

  At one point the police asked Padilla to stop his antics, but there was nothing legally they could do about it. And even though the effort was a wild goose chase, Padilla and the divers went on TV and gave interviews. It was all so absurd.

  Later on, however, the event took on much more importance, because of what the commentators said about it.

  When Caylee’s remains were eventually found, the police took Casey into a room and recorded her reaction to the news coverage. She was close to hysterical and had to take a sedative.

  After that happened, and the police leaked her reactions, one of the local commentators observed, “Casey didn’t react that way when nothing was found at Jay Blanchard Park because she knew Caylee’s body wasn’t there. And the reason she reacted so strongly when they found Caylee’s remains,” the commentator said, “was because she knew they were Caylee’s.”

  That wasn’t bad enough. After he said that, the copycats on the other stations immediately repeated it like it was a fact.

  The truth is that on the day they found the bag of rocks at Jay Blanchard Park, Casey didn’t react because she never saw it reported on TV that day. She was locked in her cell for twenty-three hours a day, and when I went to see her that evening, she said, “The night before, they brought in an inmate who was screaming all night, and finally they took her out, so I slept all day.”

  It was late in the afternoon.

  “So you just got up?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I just got up a half an hour ago.”

  She never saw that news report.

  The commentary “proving” Casey knew where Caylee’s body was buried was an out-and-out fabrication by that news reporter, and it was the kind of nonsense that went on constantly throughout this case. It’s an important story to tell, however, because the running commentary about how Casey didn’t react to Padilla’s discovery because she knew the body wasn’t there is one of the huge misconceptions about the case.

  It’s weird to me how so many people can allow news reports and press reports to color their thinking. What people forget is that the media have a bias, and that bias is on the side of drama and effect. If it bleeds, it leads, as the saying goes, and controversy creates ratings. If there’s no high drama, ratings fall. Nobody watches, so the way people get their information is not from an unbiased source, but rather from a business that needs to generate revenue by way of ratings to make money.

  The common person doesn’t give it that much consideration. Most don’t think the media are that way; I didn’t either until I got involved in this case. Before that, I never really gave it any thought. I would watch the news and thought I could rely on it. I never looked any deeper, the way I do today.

  I NEVER BECAME INVOLVED with the searchers. I knew Texas EquuSearch was attracting a large group of people, including the groupies—like Dominic—who volunteered and followed the case. Dominic, as much as anything, was a groupie addicted to the Casey Anthony case. He followed the case on the TV and on the Internet, and after he left me, he offered his services for free to the Anthonys. He got in on the inside and stayed there. To my knowledge, he wasn’t paid by anyone, but he stuck around. And in an odd way, he would end up being an important part of the story.

  These groupies, I have to say, also included lawyers. The Anthonys were sucked into hiring a criminal lawyer by the name of Mark NeJame. An organization called the Never Lose Hope Foundation contacted the Anthonys and offered their help in finding Caylee. A member of the organization took the Anthonys to NeJame’s office, where the charity organization allegedly paid $5,000 to NeJame to represent the Anthonys. Nejame hated me. He stood about five foot two in heels, and Casey would refer to him as “fun-sized.” A witness, Krystal Holloway, called him “the lawyer who looks like a woman,” and I’ve heard he thought I put her up to it. But I had never met her when she said that. I fear a lot of his animosity towards me came from that.

  Cindy had called me on the phone one day and said that NeJame had offered to represent the Anthonys.

  “What do you know about him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know a great deal,” I said. “I only know his reputation and I’d rather not get into it.” I don’t like talking badly about other lawyers. It’s unprofessional, and I don’t do it. But I did tell her, “Cindy, it will look bad if you hire a criminal defense attorney. It will look as though you have something to hide. You have every right to do it and you should do what’s in your best interests, but realistically, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s a bad idea, and I’m not going to do it.”

  About three weeks had gone by when I heard on the news that the Anthonys went to visit a criminal defense attorney, and it was the same Mark NeJame. Along with the report was another story that I was getting kicked off the case and NeJame was going to take over for me.

  After that story broke, I went to see Casey.

  “You know your parents have hired a defense attorney,” I said. “If you’re interested in someone else representing you, you let me know. I’ll be more than happy to step down.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth, Jose,” Casey said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t want that guy anywhere near me.”

  Again, looking back today, I can see why. She didn’t trust her parents—especially her father—to look out for her best interests. I didn’t know it then, but she was beginning to feel that her father was providing information to the police designed to take the spotlight off him and convince them of her guilt. That was why Casey was so adamant about her staying as far from her parents’ lawyer as she could.

  Now connected to the case, NeJame immediately went on a media blitz. He contacted national shows, which put him up in New York hotels so he could go on TV and defend the Anthonys and, in the process, bash Casey. What he was doing, I could see, was attempting to put distance between the Anthonys and Casey, portraying them as grieving grandparents, while delicately portraying Casey as a cold-blooded killer. And the only reason I say “delicately” is because Cindy would surely have fired him had he been more heavy-handed about it. NeJame’s relationship with me was contentious from the beginning because of his relentless bashing of Casey.

  There were a couple of important aspects of his being their lawyer. One day Cindy came to my office. This was during the period when Casey was out on bail. She told me, “We just left Mark’s office and we took polygraph tests.”

  “Why’s he polygraphing his own clients?” I asked.

  She didn’t give me an answer but then said, “I had to take another one, because the first one was inconclusive. And George did too.”

  “Really?” I said. And then I thought, There’s only one reason why a person takes a second one, and that’s because the first one didn’t turn out the way that person wanted. It’s because someone failed the first one.

  The FBI had asked the Anthonys to take a polygraph test, and they had refused. The only reason to do so would be to release the results. But they never did.

  The red flags kept going up. The first red flag flew when I was talking with George and Cindy in their living room, mentioned George and sexual abuse of Casey, and heard the deafening silence. This was a second one. I was quite sure Cindy didn’t know anything about Caylee’s disappearance. But George?

  What’s he hiding? I wondered.

  And then, just before Caylee’s body was found, the Anthonys fired NeJame. Cindy told me the whole story. She said, “Mark wants me to try and get Casey to hire him and fire you. He also keeps talking against Casey, and I’m not going to let him do it.” She said she and NeJame got into a heated argument, and he went out and issued a press release that he was quitting because his clients wouldn’t follow his advice.

  I had never before heard of a lawyer disclosing reasons to the public as to why he was no longer working for a client. I don’t understand why the Anthonys put up with it—they easily could have
complained to the bar that he was giving away client confidences. But when this was happening, I thought to myself, The reason they’re keeping their mouths shut is because NeJame knows the results of the failed polygraph test, and there must be something incriminating in those tests. I could have been wrong, but that was my logical conclusion. These tests have never been made public.

  After NeJame left the Anthonys, he signed on as the attorney for Miller, the head of Texas EquuSearch. After Caylee’s body was found, I wanted to see Texas EquuSearch’s records, to see where and when they had searched. I wanted to interview those who had searched the area where Caylee was found but who didn’t see a body. But Texas Equu-Search and NeJame refused to turn over any records. For months we had to fight to get those records. We finally got them but under very strenuous circumstances. Fighting us all the way was NeJame, getting his face in front of the camera.

  NeJame later went on to become a TV analyst during the trial. In the end, the guy got the fame and attention he craved.

  NeJame wasn’t the only groupie lawyer in this case. Every time a witness came up, the witness would get a lawyer, and it was always a free lawyer. Someone would volunteer, “I’ll represent you,” and he’d donate his time and go on TV and make a statement. At every turn there was a new lawyer volunteering his services, speaking on someone’s behalf, and getting his mug on TV.

  I found these lawyers to be irresponsible and disgraceful to our profession. The role of the defense lawyer is so misunderstood, and when lawyers go on TV to bash another lawyer, it does the system and the public a major disservice.

  And always, because it was the popular thing to do, and because the “Casey Anthony Show” script demanded that it be that way, the news that these lawyers generated always ran counter to the defense.