Throw in Kronk’s crazy testimony, and the prosecution had a complete and total mess. Death by duct tape? Only in the mind of Ashton. But, the theory played well to the media which was always hungry for a “let Casey Anthony die” angle.
Once we went to trial, my method of attack had one focus. I was going to show the jury that only one reasonable conclusion could be reached about the duct tape found near Caylee’s remains. Using the photos and evidence at the crime scene, I would show it was a staged crime scene.
There were two other pieces of duct tape evidence. There was an identical piece of duct tape on one of George’s gas cans. Another piece of the identical duct tape had been used to put up a poster at the command center manned by George. The evidence showed that this was George’s duct tape, not Casey’s.
By this time our defense was beginning to take shape, and we didn’t just have Casey’s word; we now had solid forensic science backing up her story.
CHAPTER 16
THE PROSECUTION’S EVIDENCE WAS GARBAGE
NUMEROUS TIMES I heard this case being referred to as a circumstantial case, but I never thought of it that way. I always looked at it as a forensic case rather than a factual one. The reason is the only real, factual witnesses who were relevant were George and Cindy. Even Lee wasn’t particularly relevant to exactly what happened to Caylee.
All the other evidence in the case came down to science.
Science was the key factor in determining Casey’s guilt or innocence—it always has been and always will be.
To better understand the prosecution’s case in terms of the forensics, the best and clearest way is for me to break it down into two strands. The first strand has to do with the information the police investigators gleaned from going over Casey’s car after it came back from the tow yard.
The second strand comes from the recovery site of Caylee’s body off Suburban Drive. (I’ll present that evidence in the next chapter.) But first, let’s talk about Casey’s car, and why what was in the trunk was so crucial to the prosecution.
The prosecution based its entire case on a theory that after Casey killed Caylee, she dumped her into the trunk of her car for a couple of days and drove her to the woods where she disposed of her body.
Shortly after Casey was arrested, Deputy Charity Beasley went and picked up her car. She secured it with evidence tape, made sure everything was sealed, and followed the tow truck to the forensics bay.
With the car in hand, the prosecution had to somehow prove there had been a body in the trunk and that it was Caylee’s. Since it was Casey’s car, the link was obvious. But knowing what I know now, it’s interesting to see the lengths to which the prosecution had to go to make its case.
The areas the prosecution dealt with to try to prove its case that there was a body in the trunk had to do with cadaver dogs, a stain, hairs, and the air in the trunk of Casey’s car.
Their first line of “evidence” came from the dogs, who, the prosecution contended, alerted to the trunk of the Casey’s car and in the backyard of the Anthony home.
Deputy Jason Forgey arrived with his dog, Gerus, who supposedly alerted to human decomposition in both the trunk and the backyard. Later that day, Forgey went to the Anthony home and deployed Gerus, who again alerted in the backyard. He then called in another cadaver dog by the name of Bones. Bones went to the backyard and alerted as well.
The next day the crime scene investigators returned with their two cadaver dogs and found—nothing. This time neither dog alerted. How do we account for this? What’s the explanation? How can a dog find evidence of decomposition one day and nothing the next?
There are several reasons, all having to do with the nature of cadaver dogs.
The first reason is that a cadaver dog can be inconsistent. Cindy told me that, according to a police officer at her home, the reason the police brought Bones in was because Gerus was not being consistent in his alerts.
Here’s another example of just how unreliable these dogs can be: after Caylee’s remains were found and most of her remains had been recovered, there were still a few bones missing, so the police recruited Forgey and Gerus to help find them. Gerus was deployed to the woods off Suburban Drive, where there was a 100 percent certainty that a dead body had been.
After sniffing around, Gerus did not alert in the area.
The second reason cadaver dogs can be inconsistent has everything to do with their training. Studies have shown that there’s a tremendous amount of unreliability when it comes to dog handlers, because often they cue their dogs. I did extensive research on cadaver dogs and the kind of training they receive, and I learned that cadaver dogs are most reliable when using double-blind testing.
How does double-blind testing work?
Dogs are very smart and can read their handler’s body language, so it’s crucial when deploying a dog to a vehicle for the dog to have to choose among several cars, not just the target car. Thus, it’s important that the handler not know which car belongs to the suspect.
The police didn’t do this when they inspected Casey’s car. In this case Gerus was only given one car—Casey’s car—to explore, and he alerted. Forgey testilied there were two cars for his dog to sniff when he deployed Gerus on Casey’s car. However, every other witness said there was only one car for Gerus to sniff—Casey’s.
The second piece of evidence had to do with evidence concerning a stain found in the trunk. Crime scene investigator Gerardo Bloise processed the trunk by spraying it with Bluestar Forensic, which is very similar to luminol. It can identify human stains not noticeable to the naked eye using an instrument called an alternating light source (ALS). It works like a black light, so that if you wipe away a bloodstain, the ALS will reveal it anyway. The police got a slight reaction in the trunk, but eventually the stain they found was determined not to be human.
The third piece of evidence had to do with hairs in the trunk—actually one hair that belonged to Caylee.
When the crime scene investigators were about to start processing the car, they advised the media that if they parked across the street behind the gate, they could film them inspecting Casey’s car. This was at night, and they opened the garage doors so the film crews could get them on camera working. They did this strictly for publicity, and you could argue they also did it to intimidate us. Or both.
While they were processing the trunk, they found some hairs. It’s not uncommon to find hairs in the trunk of a car, not only the car owner’s but others. Our bodies shed more than a hundred hairs a day. They found Caylee’s hair, Casey’s hair, and dog or cat hair. They took a mini vacuum and swept up the rest of the evidence for later inspection.
Early on, the prosecution sent the hairs it had found to the FBI lab at Quantico, Virginia. The FBI lab would find one lone hair of Caylee’s that had a darkening band around the root end of the hair.
Around this one hair, the prosecution decided to build its case against Casey.
I needed an expert on post-mortem root banding and reached out to the man who basically discovered it, Nicholas Petraco. He wrote the first peer-reviewed article on it about twenty years ago. It was important to bring him in because this was going to be a key issue.
Many times after someone dies, scientists will find a dark band around the root of the hair. They call this the “death band” or “the dead man’s ring,” but the scientific term is post-mortem root banding.
Now the thing about post-mortem root banding is that nobody knows where it comes from. We don’t know how it’s caused. We don’t know if you only get root banding from a dead body. We don’t know when it begins to turn black. We know very little about it, except that it’s been seen on dead bodies.
As for the one hair, there was no way for anyone to know how long the hair had been in the trunk. It could have been there a year. And no one knew the condition of the trunk, what else was thrown in there, what chemicals were in there, how often the trunk was open, whether any moisture got in through the rai
n. The banding of the one hair could just as well have been caused from environmental conditions as from post-mortem root banding.
There have been two studies to see whether hairs from live people also develop root banding from being left out in the elements. One study was done by a grad student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She found this was the case. A second study conducted by FBI analyst Steven Shaw, who actually worked on our case and did the study subsequent to my taking his deposition, found that hairs from live people left out in the elements developed these so-called “death bands.” Shaw’s team performed a blind study where examiners took hairs from living people and exposed them to the elements like being outdoors, in a trunk, etc. His team then took hairs that came from dead people and asked the examiners to determine which ones came from dead people and which did not. Two FBI analysts studied two different hairs that came from a live person and called it post-mortem root banding. The end result is this “science” isn’t very scientific at all—it’s completely subjective, relying on the opinion of the examiner.
There was another issue connected to the root banding, and that had to do with the questionable actions of prosecutor Jeff Ashton.
Ashton was the liaison between the state attorney’s office and the FBI. It was my understanding that the FBI didn’t trust him.
When the results of a new FBI hair banding study was released, to their credit, the FBI held a conference call and made sure we were on the call. This ensured we had equal access to information.
Despite any lack of scientific certainty, the prosecution stubbornly stuck to its guns when it talked about the post-mortem root banding, arguing the hair had come from Caylee’s dead body, when the evidence was neither proven science nor verifiable. Of course, when the prosecution alerted the media to its “find,” the public was convinced of its probity as well, despite the weakness of the evidence.
I ask you: If Caylee’s body had been in Casey’s trunk, bouncing along, decomposing, wouldn’t investigators have found more than one hair displaying root banding? The root banding issue really posed more questions than it answered, though the most likely scenario was that the single strand of hair had been in the trunk a long time, and moisture, heat, and other environmental conditions caused that hair to look very similar to post-mortem root banding.
So after all that posturing, the prosecution had no body, a negative confirmation for the stain in the trunk, and one hair that it was determined to show came from a dead Caylee.
The prosecution had one last chance at a conviction. One of the few shreds of “evidence” the prosecution had left was the smell in the car. According to the prosecutors, this terrible smell was proof Casey had kept Caylee in the car while her body decomposed and started to smell. After Casey dumped her daughter’s body in the woods, they contended, her car retained the foul odor of death.
To win its case, the prosecution had to prove that the terrible smell in the car came from a dead body.
There was only one problem: Casey had left a large bag of garbage in the trunk of that car for three weeks in the hot sun. If the smell came from the garbage and not Caylee’s body, then the prosecution had no case, because it really had no other way to tie Casey to her daughter’s disappearance and death.
Was it a body, or was it garbage?
That was the $64,000 question.
George was the first person to say the car “smelled like death.” However, once we began to investigate this, the “evidence” lost most of its effect. First of all, not a single police officer who responded to the Anthony home the night of July 15, 2008, noticed “the smell of death.” The car was parked in the garage and the garage door was open—the police went in and out of the house and past the car through the garage door many times that night. Add into the mix that George was telling them that the car smelled like a dead body, then that really makes you wonder. George said he had opened the trunk expecting to find a dead body. Instead, he had found moldering garbage.
The tow yard manager took the bag of smelly garbage from Casey’s car and threw it into his trash bin. The police sent an officer to retrieve the bag and bring it to the forensics bay. A woman from CSI testified that the trash smelled horrible. The police then emptied the bag, looked at all its contents, and then did something very unusual: they set out to destroy our argument that the garbage was causing the bad smell by deodorizing it. They literally put it in what they called an air room where they separated the trash and aired it out, thereby drying it. The smell disappeared after a short period of time. And what was the reason for their doing that? With the smell gone, it would be a lot harder for a clever defense lawyer to argue that the smell from the car trunk came from the trash.
We only got to see to pictures of the trash when it was initially brought in. We could see this moist wet bag of trash, which I was told had meat and other food products in it, and the next picture taken showed it to be completely dry with no food whatsoever. I have a hard time believing that three college kids had such clean trash with not a drop of leftover food in it.
When we looked at the photos of the trash when they got it, and then the trash afterward, they couldn’t even be compared. When their anthropologist, Dr. Arpad Vass, asked for air samples from the trash, they sent him samples from after it was aired out. They also took samples from the forensic bay—six weeks later. You might ask, What kind of science is this? My answer: garbage science.
The prosecution knew it had a bad smell in the trunk. They also knew they had a smelly trash problem. So it was something of a leap to accept that the smell came from a body in the trunk, rather than the trash bag. Clearly, any decent defense lawyer was sure to argue the point. If you have a bag of moist trash in a trunk of a car for three weeks in the hot sun, you can expect it to stink—perhaps as much as a dead body.
The prosecution’s argument that the smell of the car proved Casey’s guilt would have gone nowhere, except that one of the CSI personnel had heard there was a scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who was studying the odor of human decomposition. So they contacted anthropologist Arpad Vass.
I called it “fantasy forensics.” Vass’s experiments were, in my opinion, no better than a high school science research project.
Vass is a forensic anthropologist who studied at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility. The facility was given the nickname the “Body Farm” by author Patricia Cornwell. This is a place where people donate their bodies to science so students can study how a body decomposes in numerous settings, including being buried underground, wrapped in a blanket, and in the trunk of a car.
Vass studied the chemical compounds a body releases after dying. In his study he buried four different bodies at different levels, one at two feet, one at six feet, and so on. He then stuck tubes just above the bodies; above the tubes he placed Tedlar gas sampling bags that caught whatever chemicals flowed from the bodies as they decomposed. He would then take the bags and run them through a machine called a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer (GC-MS) to obtain the chemical breakdown of the chemicals caught in the bag.
What Vass did was create a database that would attempt to determine the chemical signature of the bodies at different states of decomposition.
In 2004 he published the first of two peer-reviewed papers that explained his results. He then repeated the study in 2008, adding a couple of bodies, and concluded that there was still no signature for human decomposition and that the chemicals coming from decomposition are varied. He wrote that they are also affected by numerous factors such as soil and weather.
Vass wasn’t able to come down and personally take air samples from Casey’s car, so the prosecution called upon Dr. Michael Sigman, a chemist from the University of Central Florida. Sigman took air samples and then ran the chemicals in the Tedlar gas sampling bag through the GC-MS at his lab at the University of Central Florida. He also sent additional samples to Vass.
Sigman concluded that the m
ain component in the trunk was gasoline, and while he found levels of chloroform, he said that they were at very low levels. Vass labeled the results “useless.” He then asked the Orange County CSI unit to cut a piece of carpet from Casey’s trunk liner and send it to him.
He heated it up in a Tedlar gas sampling bag at 130 degrees—a temperature that he said he assumed was the same temperature as the trunk of a car in summer in Florida. His associate Dr. Marcus Wise, a chemist, then ran the results through a GC-MS and reported that the main component was chloroform.
This is crucial: with a GC-MS you can run a qualitative analysis, which tells you which chemicals are present, or you can run a quantitative analysis, which tells you how much of the chemical is there. All Dr. Wise did was a qualitative analysis. So they knew that chloroform was there. What they didn’t know was how much was present. Was it a lot or was it a trace amount? The answer was critical, and no one had any idea.
Wise sent the results to Vass, who reported to the prosecution—without any evidence to back up his statement—that there were high amounts of chloroform in the trunk of the car.
It’s important to note that Vass’s study, since it gave no amounts—he had no idea how much chloroform was in that trunk—was weak, if not useless, as evidence. It meant nothing because chloroform is a very common component found everywhere, including in household products, degreasers, and even drinking water in very small doses. It might have been significant only if he had found chloroform in large, concentrated amounts.
So the question was, How much chloroform was there? Vass just made the assumption it was in large amounts because it was the main component, but in science you can’t make assumptions. You have to verify, or else, as in this case, you can be very wrong. The best way I can describe Vass’s experiment was shooting from the hip. It was junk science at best. And with a woman’s life at stake, at worst it was negligence.
Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story Page 24
