“You have to confront your demons. You have to confront what’s there.”
“He touched me,” Casey began, “and then it went a little bit further than touching.”
That was the first conversation. A little bit came out at a time. Slowly she would tell me more and more, how it first started with inappropriate touching when she was eight years old, then he made her touch his penis, and then he made her jerk him off. She said he even named his penis “Baldy” and used to tell her to play a game called “pet the bald-headed mouse.”
“Pet it until it sneezes milk,” he would say to his eight-year-old daughter.
When she was eight, Casey said, her father started having intercourse with her, three and four times a week, until she was twelve. I assume he stopped the habitual abuse at that age because she had gotten her period, and he was afraid of getting her pregnant.
I began to loathe George, but I couldn’t let my emotions get the better of me. I didn’t want to push Casey too much or ask her too much, as I wanted the mental health professionals to get an unfiltered version. I knew all I needed to know. From that day on, the entire defense team called George “Baldy,” a constant reminder of the child molester and rapist we believed him to be.
During the summer of 2009, the defense team had a retreat off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and to the amazement of all, our computer expert found the pictures taken on the day Caylee was born. Casey delivered Caylee by natural childbirth at the hospital, and standing right there on the receiving end, as the baby was coming out, was none other than her father, George. We all thought it was disgusting. I have a daughter who’s an adult and I would never consider putting her in that situation. Tell me, how many women have their fathers attend the birth of their children?
Now we wondered, was George Anthony Caylee’s father? Casey had said that Caylee’s father had been a man by the name of Eric Baker, but I never believed that. Her story was that Baker, whom she said was married and had a son, came over for a one-night stand, got her pregnant, and then went back with his wife. She said he and Casey agreed he would not be part of Caylee’s life. Then conveniently, Baker tragically died in an automobile accident.
The cops verified that a kid named Eric Baker did die in a car accident, but no one who knew Casey knew who he was. No Eric Baker had been part of Casey’s life that anyone could recall, so I never bought that story. If I couldn’t verify the story, I didn’t believe her. I was convinced that Baker, like Zanny the nanny, was another of Casey’s many imaginary friends.
As we looked at the birth pictures, we could see that everyone was happy and smiling about the new addition to the Anthony family—everyone but George, that is. That’s when Smith, our investigator, quipped, “Look at George. He’s pissed off. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Goddammit, I’m my own son-in-law and I don’t even like him.’”
We all laughed, even though it wasn’t at all funny.
CASEY’S ALLEGATION of sexual abuse at the hands of her father wasn’t out of the blue. It actually explained a great deal. It was the reason Casey left the house every day for two years, letting her parents think she was working at Universal Studios when in fact she was unemployed. She didn’t want to leave Caylee alone with George. She said she feared that George would molest her daughter, as he had molested her. Recall that at this time George was working the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift.
It explained why the family was in denial about Casey’s pregnancy. It explained why George and Lee left the home after Caylee’s birth.
After Caylee was found, law enforcement took DNA samples from the entire Anthony family, but they delayed giving us the results. We had to file a motion to get them, and Judge Stan Strickland gave the prosecutors twenty days to comply. It was right around the twentieth day that George made his suicide attempt. I thought, he must have tried to commit suicide because he feared the test would prove that he’s Caylee’s father.
Casey had told a psychiatrist who interviewed her that George had had sex with her when she was eighteen, and she felt there was a good possibility he was the father. She also told the psychiatrist that she actually told George he was Caylee’s father.
The DNA test came back after George’s suicide attempt, and it turned out that neither George nor Lee was the father. But even if George wasn’t the father, his suicide attempt in close proximity to the DNA test was proof enough for me that he had been having sex with Casey. But how would we be able to prove it? That would be our biggest challenge, especially given Casey’s history for lying.
The incest would also explain why Casey had such a love/hate relationship with George. It would also explain so much of her behavior and her promiscuity. Like most victims of sexual abuse, Casey didn’t know the sexual boundaries with men. I could see that with the men she was dating. It was all about sex. For the most part, the relationships were superficial; I didn’t see any deep love for these individuals. I could have been wrong, but when she spoke of them, she didn’t speak highly of them. It’s as if they all reminded her of her father.
I had gotten to know Casey through two ways. One way was through talking to her in jail. I really thought very highly of her. I thought she was a kind and gentle person and just wasn’t buying the murder accusations against her.
The other way was through discovery—reading the testimony of others.
I was reading what her parents were saying about her, what her boyfriends were saying, and what she was saying about Zenaida and her other imaginary friends, and I began to see classic signs that she was leading a double life, something victims of sexual abuse often do. They don’t want to face their reality—it’s far too painful—so sex abuse survivors learn to lie to cover up the truth. They also put on a facade in an effort to hide their pain and compartmentalize their feelings. And that’s what I was seeing with Casey. We were truly in a “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” position. Was she lying about being abused or lying because she was abused?
Later, when we got the letters that Casey had written to inmate Robyn Adams, we got the judge to give us fifteen days before releasing them to the public. That is when co-counsel Cheney Mason and I decided this would be a good time to speak to George and confront him about the sexual abuse.
We were in Cheney’s office. He was behind his desk, and George and I sat in chairs next to each other. We told George about the letters in which Casey wrote to another inmate whom she befriended about the abuse.
“Casey said she’s been sexually abused by you, George,” I said.
George sat there for perhaps forty seconds, his head bowed. He didn’t say a word. We certainly noted that he didn’t deny it. Cheney and I looked at each other in wonderment.
“Oh my God,” is what George finally said. He slapped his leg with his hand and he asked, “What else did she say?”
After he left I said to Cheney, “Did you hear him deny the sexual abuse?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”
“I have a daughter who’s an adult,” I said, “and if anyone had ever accused me of having sex with her, I’d have gone nuts. I would have lost it. But this guy just sat there.”
Several days later George wrote Casey a letter.
Casey Marie,
Where do I begin???
Well, met with Jose & Cheney Mason on Wednesday March 24th.
Jose in Cheney Mason’s office delivered me disturbing news & ask me 2 heartbreaking questions?
You know what 2 questions he asked, and I am num …..
Why, why also destroy Lee …
Why, why also destroy Mom …
Why, why also destroy me, your family …
Why, why also destroy Caylee Marie …
After all I have tried, sacrificed, continued to love you, my daughter, why???
Continually coming to court, continually wanting to see you, why???
Read it and ask yourself: how would Casey know what the two secrets were unless the two of them shared those secrets? The two qu
estions were, “Was Casey sexually abused?” and, “How did Caylee die?”
I hadn’t told Casey I was going to confront George. She wouldn’t have known what the two questions were—unless George knew the answers to both those questions.
Second, there was yet another nondenial from George. If he wasn’t an abuser, he would have written, “What are you talking about, Casey? I never abused you. Why are you telling these lies?” He didn’t do that, did he?
The rest of the letter is a total guilt trip to make it seem as if it was all her fault, which is another characteristic of a sexual abuser.
Toward the end of the letter he writes about how gracious he had been to show up in court to see Casey. He then writes of his continually wanting to see Casey. What a trooper he was, considering he had refused to post her bail and help her out in any way financially.
But George never saw himself as the bad guy. Instead, as is common with abusers, he saw himself as the victim of Casey’s treachery.
And like most abusers, he also was a coward. After the letter was made public, George never again came to court to see Casey.
When the trial was over, George and Cindy gave an interview with Dr. Phil McGraw. McGraw asked George about the first time he heard that Casey was accusing him of sexually abusing her.
His answer was that he learned of it when he read the letters that were released in discovery. That was a lie. I guess he forgot about us confronting him and also forgot about the letter he wrote Casey. Even after the trial, George continues to lie and gets a pass every time.
CHAPTER 14
WHAT HAPPENED ON JUNE 16, 2008
(THE EVIDENCE NO ONE EVER TOLD YOU ABOUT)
BEFORE CASEY OPENED UP TO ME and told me what happened on June 16, 2008, I felt horrible for her. One thing about her that I found shocking was that she didn’t have a soul in the world who was there for her. Not a single friend came to me and said, “I’m Casey’s friend. I appreciate everything you’re doing for her, and if you ever need anything from me, I’m here.”
One afternoon I was in the office talking to members of my staff about this. “This girl doesn’t have a friend in the world,” I said.
That’s so unusual for a girl of twenty-two. Girls that age usually have tons of friends. Casey knew a lot of people, but she wasn’t close to one of them.
And her family? Her very own family was throwing her to the wolves. To this day I find it incredible that not a single member of the Anthony family ever handed me a check and said to me, “Please use this to try and save Casey’s life.”
Despite all of the Anthonys’ showboating for the media about Casey’s innocence, they never put their money where their mouths were. Yet they sold pictures of Casey and Caylee to CBS for $20,000 and took that money and went on a lavish cruise. Not a penny was spent to save their daughter, who was facing the death penalty. I have clients who are migrant farmworkers who don’t have a decent place to live but who each week, like clockwork, come in and hand me fifty bucks in cash, or even twenty, to help a family member in need of legal help. This was truly a first for me.
Early on, after seeing she was fighting this world all alone, I decided I would be there for her.
I’m not going to abandon her, no matter what, I told myself.
Slowly, but surely, she began trusting me. I never take a client’s trust lightly, especially Casey’s. She could have hired any lawyer in the country and her parents were encouraging her to fire me. But she remained loyal. Unbelievably loyal. For a girl who never had anyone show her any loyalty, she was incredibly loyal to me.
We were sitting in the jail one day when she said to me, “I have something to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said, bracing myself, because I had no idea what she was going to say.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” she said. “I want to know if you’ll do me a favor. I’d like you to be my godfather.”
“Wow.” I was so touched.
Casey wanted to have some connection to a person who was always there for her, and while I was flattered by the request, I could never cross the attorney-client relationship. She needed an attorney way more than she needed a godfather.
I had spent months visiting her in jail trying to gain her trust, which is the key to the attorney-client privilege. You always hear about how defense lawyers hide behind it—that’s certainly what the prosecution in this case kept harping upon—but it’s a false argument. What’s so important about the attorney-client privilege is that it allows the client to tell things to the lawyer, knowing that information won’t go any further than their conversation. Without the attorney-client privilege, the client has no one at all to trust. Guiding the client through the legal system and protecting their interests, while doing it within the confines of the law, helps defense lawyers truly evaluate their clients’ cases and assist them in determining if they should plea bargain or take their case to trial. It protects the system as a whole, and without it, individual rights cannot be protected and the system does not work.
Several times I had asked Casey what she knew about Caylee’s disappearance, and always she talked about Zenaida the nanny. I knew it would be quite some time before she would trust me enough to tell me the truth. It began when I sought to eliminate the existence of Zanny the nanny.
When I was in college, I worked as an investigator for a loss-prevention company. The company sent me to a school for interviewing and interrogation, and one of the things I was taught was when you’re interviewing someone, you prevent them from lying by cutting them off, because once a person lies, the guilt of knowing that they lied prevents them from coming forward and telling the truth. You stop them from telling the lie, thereby removing the guilt.
So there came a time when I never allowed Casey to deny that Zanny the nanny was a fictional person. It became a foregone conclusion.
“Even if this nanny does exist,” I told her, “I don’t want to hear about her anymore.” I made it clear to Casey that I didn’t believe that Zanny existed. In fact, one day I said to her, “That’s it, no more, don’t mention her to me ever again.”
There were a couple of times she slipped up and started to say “Zan …” but I would stop her in her tracks, until finally she stopped mentioning her name, and we got past it.
If Zanny didn’t exist, then what happened to Caylee? Who took her? Where was she? Seemingly this was a riddle without an answer, and a number of strange events occurred around this question.
In early 2009, after I learned that Dominic Casey and Jim Hoover had been searching in the woods on November 14, 2008, at the spot where Caylee would be found a month later, I stopped seeing red flags and realized I was on red alert. Meaning, What were the two private investigators working for George and Cindy doing in the woods where Caylee’s body was found? This activity was beyond suspicious.
I wasn’t buying Dominic’s stories about being sent there by a psychic, or the fact that he was investigating whether that was a teenage hangout of Casey’s. Sergeant John Allen said it best when he asked, “Why would you think you would find a teenage hangout when Casey is no longer a teenager?” I was beyond buying stupid reasons as to why they were there. When discussing this video with George and Cindy, George said something that took me to the point of no return.
“You know, during those six months that Caylee was missing, I was down on Suburban Drive too!” George said.
WHAT THE HELL? I screamed to myself. What was he doing there? And why in the world would George admit to walking around near where Caylee’s body was found? I thought about this and decided, Forget red alert, I am now swimming in a sea of red!
Linda Baden and I came to the conclusion that there was only one reason George would say that: to create an alibi for himself. If a witness were to come forward and say he saw George in the woods, George could then say, “I already told you I was down there.”
This had already happened once before—three months earlier. On November 5, 2008
, nine days before Dominic and Hoover searched off Suburban Drive, a news station reported that someone saw George in a wooded area in east Orlando. It was not Suburban Drive, and when I asked George about it, he said he was scouting an appropriate area to put his kid-finders tent, where he passed out flyers for Caylee. I remember thinking, What a strange place to put a tent, but at the time I had no real reason to think it was suspicious.
But now my head was spinning. The imagined scenarios were endless. Did George move Caylee’s skull there and then send Dominic to Suburban Drive to search? If so, why? Was this the area where Caylee was originally hidden and then moved to Suburban Drive to be found? If so, then how does Roy Kronk fit into all this? Is that why Officer Cain couldn’t find her? I thought about it so much my head hurt.
But since I didn’t know the exact location, I couldn’t send our investigator out there to search for clues as to what was going on.
For months I wanted to get George to make this statement on tape, but I couldn’t take his deposition without tipping off the prosecution as to my thinking. I had to sit on this information until just before trial, when we met with the Anthonys and their lawyer, and I finally got George to admit being near the wooded area off Suburban Drive. We recorded it, so if he lied about it on the stand, we could impeach his testimony.
I knew I needed Casey to tell me what happened on the day Caylee died.
Casey and I had discussed her sexual abuse, and I felt it was only a matter of time before she would tell me the truth about what happened to Caylee.
The day I had a major breakthrough with Casey came in the early months of 2009. I had set it up a couple days before when I said to her, “You know, Casey, I’ve never pressed you about what happened. I never asked why you didn’t trust me. You had no reason to do so. But time is running short, and I need to know. You and I have to have a serious conversation about what happened. And I promise you that I will not tell a soul unless you allow me to. There’s so much out there that I could be doing, and I’m not doing it because you’re not allowing me to.”
Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story Page 20
