Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING the police decided that Casey Anthony was guilty and decided to only focus on evidence that supported this theory. They arrested her prematurely, as I noted earlier, and decided to collect the evidence later. This is not the way to run an investigation. The police work was sloppy throughout.

  When Kronk reported finding a body on Suburban Drive, Melich would later say that that area had been searched, but that wasn’t so. The EquuSearch people didn’t begin searching until September, so there’s no way EquuSearch could have searched that area. Chalk that up to more brilliant detective work by Melich.

  Yet Melich, to my knowledge, never caught any flak for sloppy police work. He was always portrayed as being thorough. In fact, before we went to trial, he was nominated for detective of the year by America’s Most Wanted. That was just and appropriate, if you think about it, because reality shows are about personalities, fame, and show business, not being a good detective. Deputy Richard Cain would take the fall, but nobody gave any shit to Melich for ignoring Kronk’s tip in August.

  Later I would ask for all the paperwork of all the searches by law enforcement around Suburban Drive prior to Kronk’s trip. They gave us nothing, claiming they never searched there. But here was White saying, “That area has been searched.”

  This could have meant one of two things: the police searched there and hid the search records, and all the evidence from the defense, because they didn’t want us to be able to claim, “You searched the area, and the body wasn’t there. Casey was locked up in jail, and therefore she couldn’t have done it.”

  In fact, we did argue that very thing for a long time.

  Choice number two: the police were totally incompetent. No reports of searches exist. Why? I want to know why. Why wouldn’t you search the closest wooded area to the Anthony house? For any police department, that would have been the first place to look. For one thing Kiomarie Cruz, who had claimed to be a close childhood friend of Casey’s, said that’s where they played as kids, and where Casey would eerily bury her dead pets.

  I still have a hard time believing the police didn’t search the area, but maybe they didn’t. Everything at trial is open to interpretation, so here’s my interpretation: they were grossly incompetent, they were lying, or, something more sinister than lying, they destroyed records, and covered it up.

  Despite all of Kronk’s crazy stories and his inconsistencies, and his love of duct tape, the police never thoroughly investigated him. To my knowledge, they never pulled his phone records to see if he had any contact with the Anthonys. He could have known Casey, or George, or Cindy. But they didn’t do that.

  They could have confiscated his computer. Who knows, maybe it might have led to maps he had of the woods, or maybe he had shopped for something incriminating. Or there might have been things he had researched or searched for on his computer. But they didn’t do that, either.

  They could have taken his DNA when it was discovered later that there was foreign DNA on the duct tape. But they didn’t do that.

  They didn’t take his hair samples, which would have come in play when later on an unidentified male hair was found near Caylee’s skull. But they didn’t do that. Nor did they take his fingerprints.

  One can only speculate why they didn’t do any of this. Perhaps, if they had done any of this and found Kronk to be involved, it would have ruined their case. Kronk muddied the waters something awful, yet the police left him alone. They didn’t open any unmarked doors. Was it because they were afraid of what they might find?

  The police didn’t interview Kronk’s ex-wives. We did that.

  I don’t chalk that up to incompetence. No, to me it looked like a deliberate effort to keep the truth at bay, or hide it.

  What’s even more shocking: the prosecution never called Kronk to the witness stand during the trial. We had to call him.

  You would think the first witness—if not the key witness—for the prosecution would be the guy who found the body. The prosecutors never called him, because they knew we’d destroy him on cross-examination. We called him and interrogated him using direct examination, which isn’t nearly as powerful a tool.

  Another thing that shocked me was that it wasn’t until the prosecution’s closing argument that Jeff Ashton finally admitted that the prosecution didn’t believe Kronk.

  Unfortunately, it came after I had closed my case and sat down. If I had had the opportunity, I would have stood and said, “When you’re asking for the death penalty, it takes a lot of nerve to show the jury a crime scene and evidence from that crime scene when the person who gave it to you is, in your own opinion, dishonest.”

  To me, the prosecutors are supposed to be ministers of the truth and justice. I won’t say it was prosecutorial misconduct, but it was certainly deliberate on their part not to call him. I’m sure their response would be, “We didn’t call him because we didn’t believe him, but we don’t believe the scene was staged or anything like that, so we presented everything in good faith.”

  I have a different point of view. To me, what they did was scandalous.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE ANTHONY FAMILY SECRETS

  ON JANUARY 22, 2009, I started getting a series of text messages from George Anthony. The texts were saying in effect, “I’m sorry. Please tell Casey I love her.” These were obvious, “I’m checking out” kinds of messages. Clearly George was intending to kill himself. Frantically, I called his cell phone several times, but kept getting his voice mail.

  He then left me a voice message. He didn’t admit anything, but he wanted me to apologize to Casey for him.

  I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me.

  Apologize for what? I wondered.

  I kept calling him and calling him to no avail. Later that day I got a call from Cindy that George had driven to Daytona Beach, Florida, rented a room at the Hawaii Motel, and swallowed enough pills to kill himself. An alarmed Brad Conway, the Anthonys’ third lawyer, called Sergeant John Allen, and through George’s cell phone pings, the police found him in his motel room. He was taken into custody under the Baker Act, and the rescue squad rushed him to the Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach. He was held there for a couple of days before being evaluated and released.

  I wondered, Why did George Anthony try to kill himself?

  There was always something hard to understand about George’s behavior. Nine days after Caylee’s disappearance, George called the police. Not to report Caylee missing. Rather, he called to report the theft of gas cans from his garage. George knew that Casey also used these cans, so their disappearance wasn’t exactly a major mystery. So why did he report them missing? George had once been a cop and knew reporting stolen gas cans to the police wouldn’t amount to anything. There was no Gas Can Task Force to solve that crime. He knew all that would happen was that police would come, take a report, and that would be the end of it. No detective would be assigned to the case. I would later ask the jury, “Who in the world would report twenty-year-old gas cans missing?” And if you like coincidences, the officer who responded to the call was none other than Deputy Richard Cain.

  George’s suicide attempt was very upsetting. I had loved George. I had thought him to be a phenomenal guy. I even bought him a birthday card and wrote some really kind things about how much I respected him as a father and as a man. And I don’t usually buy anyone a birthday card. It’s just not me.

  But I never gave it to him. Something held me back—maybe it was the day I had mentioned sexual abuse in the living room and the place went silent. Or maybe it was the business with the gas cans. Or possibly it was because of my staff’s research on George, which had started to reveal some character issues.

  George had grown up in Warren, Ohio; when he was a young adult, he joined the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy. He was an officer for approximately ten years, working mainly in auto theft, narcotics, and homicide. Then suddenly, he resigned.

  Cindy said the reason was
that after Lee was born, she persuaded him to quit because the job was too dangerous. But I had also heard from one of the Anthonys that he quit because he was involved in a car accident in which two people were killed. My investigator, Mort Smith, interviewed a survivor in the crash, and apparently George was responding to a call when he went through a red light and crashed into another vehicle. Two passengers in the other car died.

  I’ve never heard of a cop simply quitting after ten years, especially to become a car salesman. We wanted to find out if perhaps he had been fired, but unfortunately the building that housed the records had burned down, and all the records were destroyed. The police chief had gone to the academy with George and was a friend, so we got nowhere talking to him.

  George was married to another woman before he was married to Cindy. We interviewed her. She told Smith that George was nothing short of a pathological liar. She said, “George couldn’t tell the truth to save his life.” She said he was a compulsive liar. I had only heard those words used to describe one other person—Casey.

  After leaving the department, George went to work for his father in the car sales business, which apparently didn’t go too well. George was married to Cindy by this time, and Cindy’s brother, Rick Plesea, said that George got into a huge argument with his father and threw him through a plate-glass window. After that George took out a second mortgage on their home and went into car sales on his own. He opened Anthony Auto Sales, but the business went under, and George and Cindy lost their home. In 1989, when Casey was three, they relocated to Orlando, where Cindy’s parents had moved. From then on George bounced around from job to job.

  “George was collecting unemployment and worker’s comp,” she said. “George could have worked. He didn’t work because he didn’t want to work.”

  George had worked in distribution and as a security guard for the Orlando Sentinel. He had also worked as a fumigator, and then he worked in security as a guard. That’s what he was doing when we met him. He was working the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift.

  George, Cindy, and Casey arrived at the home of Cindy’s brother, Rick, the day before his wedding. Rick was surprised to see Casey was obviously pregnant. In his sworn statement, he told police, “She had a tight-fitting top on and her stomach was protruding. Her belly button was sticking out at least a half inch.”

  Rick invited them all in. He hadn’t seen the Anthonys in a long time, and he said to George and Cindy, “What’s up with Casey? You got something to tell me? What’s going on here?”

  According to Rick, their response was, “What?”

  “She’s expecting?” he asked.

  “They looked at me like I was crazy,” Rick said.

  Rick looked over at his wife, who rolled her eyes at their answer.

  “Cindy,” her brother said, “She looks like she’s pregnant. Come on.”

  “Oh no,” said Cindy, “she’s not. She’s just putting on weight.”

  “Cindy,” said her brother. “I’ve seen a lot of pregnant girls. I’m not an expert, but man, she looks pregnant.”

  Everyone on his wife’s side of the family wanted to know, “Who’s the pregnant girl?”

  Rick said he told Cindy that his mom and dad also thought she was pregnant.

  Commented Rick, “Cindy’s a nurse for crying out loud. She can’t see it?” So he said to Cindy, “You’re kidding me. Now tell me, is Casey pregnant?”

  And Cindy, either in denial herself or lying, said to him, “Casey told us that she’d have to have sex first in order to have a baby and that she did not have sex with anyone.”

  Thought Rick, If that’s not a baby, it’s a tumor, and she only has a short time to live because it’s big. It was June, and she was more than seven months pregnant.

  In an email to Cindy, Rick wrote, “You guys will go down in history as the stupidest parents in the universe.”

  Someone was keeping secrets. I knew I was on to something.

  Every time I would see Casey in jail, she would be happier than a pig in shit. She was almost ecstatic to be there, and for a long time I couldn’t understand why. When you go see a client in jail, they may be happy to see you, but inevitably the client is angry to be in there. But unlike all my other clients, Casey was happy in jail because she had structure and she was safe. A couple times she even said to me, “I feel safer in here than I do out there,” and I thought to myself, That’s a weird thing to say. She even said it to her parents during one of their early visitations. I also picked up on it when she told Detective Yuri Melich the first night the police were called that she had gone to her boyfriend’s house because she felt “safe.” At the time I asked myself, What does that mean?

  The prosecution made a big deal of the fact that there were searches on her computer for chloroform and neck breaking, but they were among a slew of searches on topics like self-defense for women and how to use household items as weapons for self-defense. These searches were indicating someone who didn’t feel safe at home. The neck breaking search had to do with the art of kung fu, used for self-defense.

  I was asking myself, These searches indicate someone who doesn’t feel safe at home. Why is she so afraid of being home? Why does she feel safe somewhere else? Why does she feel safe in jail? Why is she making these searches?

  Another interesting thing I learned: once Caylee was born, both Lee and George moved out of the house.

  Lee moved out, I was told, because one more person in the house was too much for him. That was also around the time George and Cindy separated. I would later hear that George left at the insistence of Casey. Eventually George worked his way back home, but that was one more event I found suspicious. Why was the man being kicked out of his own home? Why were Lee and George moving out?

  THE MYSTERIES WERE PILING UP. Why did George attempt suicide? Why was he apologizing to Casey? Why did he report the gas cans missing? How did he know to bring a gas can to pick up Casey’s car at Johnson’s Wrecker Service? Why did Casey feel unsafe at home and safer in jail? Why did Casey leave every day for two years to an imaginary workplace, taking Caylee to an imaginary nanny? Why did Lee and George leave when Caylee was born? Why was the family in denial about Casey’s pregnancy?

  Eventually, the answers began to come together.

  We received some shocking information from Jesse Grund, one of Casey’s former boyfriends. Jesse was Casey’s fiancé at the time Caylee was born. He was around the Anthony family a lot and noticed that after Caylee was born, Casey was careful never to leave Caylee alone with Lee.

  Jesse asked her point-blank what the deal was with Lee.

  Casey told Jesse that when she was a teenager, Lee would touch her inappropriately. She said she didn’t want him doing that to Caylee. We began to wonder if Lee was actually Caylee’s father.

  Casey’s critics in the public and in the media have said she made up these charges to get herself acquitted of murder charges, but nothing could be further from the truth. This was no recent fabrication. The conversation with Jesse took place two-and-a-half years before Casey was charged with murder. These allegations were made long before anything ever happened to Caylee. Casey had also told her most recent boyfriend, Tony Lazzaro, about Lee fondling her as a teen.

  There was further testimonial evidence of the sexual abuse. Casey had befriended one of the inmates at the Orange County Jail, and the two had exchanged letters. In one of those letters, Casey had stated that Lee had abused her and that she was starting to feel her father had abused her too. The inmate had kept the letters and given them to prosecutors in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence for herself. We were able to read the letters through discovery.

  I became even more suspicious because when the FBI asked Lee about the incest with his sister, the FBI said his response was, “We’ll talk about it when the time is right.” (Why the FBI accepted this answer without following up, I don’t understand.) If true, I could not believe this response. It was a tacit admission in my opinion. I don’t know a
brother in the world who would give an answer like that unless the charge was true, and that’s why I started my discussion about Lee with Casey. I had learned that Casey had told Jesse about Lee abusing her. I figured if she could tell Jesse, maybe she’d feel comfortable enough to tell me about it. I figured it may have been too soon to ask her about her father, but perhaps she’d tell me about Lee.

  “Casey,” I said, “I understand Lee sexually abused you.”

  Hesitantly, she began to talk about it, saying that Lee had fondled her, touched her, felt her up.

  But Casey had stayed away from home for thirty days because she feared someone at home, and Lee didn’t live at home. There had to be more to it. I didn’t think the abuser was Cindy. I had seen her in interactions with Cindy, and I didn’t feel that Casey feared Cindy.

  “Where do you think Lee learned it from?” I asked her.

  “Well, what do you think?” she said sharply.

  I said to her, “Tell me about the first time your father touched you.”

  She slouched in her chair.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Casey said. She was embarrassed. What girl was ever comfortable talking about having sex with her father?

  “Listen, all of our experiences in life make us who we are today,” I said. “I am who I am because of my past mistakes, my past life, the way people treated me,” and I told her about some of the things that happened to me, including my long quest to become a lawyer.

  “I’m a persistent person,” I said, “and I’m the type of person who doesn’t give up, because that’s what life taught me. And I can tell you’re the same, that you’re a fighter.”