Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  Based on this flawed information, the police performed an investigation into Casey’s computer at home to see whether she had done any searches looking for chloroform. If Vass hadn’t irresponsibly, in my opinion, stated there were high amounts of chloroform, the state wouldn’t have had any case at all.

  Despite the English-speaking media’s attempt to paint me as completely inexperienced, I was actually well-known in the Orlando area, especially in the Hispanic community, long before I took Casey’s case.

  Me at age 17 in the navy.

  Casey had close to a dozen imaginary friends, complete with fantastic detail created over the course of years. If there ever was a girl that had built up a fantasy life to escape from reality, it was Casey.

  There is no evidence of any kind that Casey was anything than a loving mother to Caylee. I kept a copy of this picture in my suit jacket throughout the trial as a reminder of that love.

  Casey and Cindy at Rick’s wedding. In how much denial do you have to be to not see that she is pregnant?

  Caylee’s body was found a stone’s throw from their house and 19.8’ from the road, yet the prosecution maintains that it was there undisturbed for six months, despite at least five searches of that specific location.

  The pool with the ladder down.

  The pool with the ladder up, as it was the day of Caylee’s death.

  Caylee was fully capable of getting to the pool on her own. This picture was taken six months before her death.

  Me at blood spatter school in Corning, NY.

  At blood spatter school, channeling my inner Dexter.

  Studying Low Copy Number DNA in Holland.

  In front of the DNA lab, known as the Crime Farm, in Holland.

  My team of experts at work (from left to right): Henry Lee, Cheney Mason, me, Richard and Selma Eikelenboom, Timothy Huntington, Nicholas Petraco.

  The team of experts (from left to right): Timothy Huntington, Richard and Selma Eikelenboom, me, Cheney Mason, Henry Lee, Nicholas Petraco, Michelle Medina.

  The wet, smelly garbage in Casey’s trunk after three weeks in the Florida sun.

  The sanitized garbage after the police investigation.

  Dr. Henry Lee’s meticulous examination of Casey’s trunk.

  Dr. Henry Lee points out to Orange County CSI’s Gerardo Bloise one of the 14 hairs he found that the police department missed.

  The picture posted on Myspace by Casey’s boyfriend, Ricardo Morales, that led to Casey’s search for the term “chloroform.”

  Bottles of Greased Lighting, which contains chloroform, in the police forensic bay, where the Casey’s car was kept. Chloroform was found in minute quantities in the air in Casey’s trunk, but this could be the result of contamination. They were not happy when I took this picture.

  Trunk of Casey’s car that the prosecution claims had a decomposition stain.

  Trunk of car with decompositional fluid.

  The area where Caylee’s body was found after law enforcement excavated the area. An arrow points to the exact spot. Present are (from left to right): me, Linda Baden, Pat McKenna.

  The photo of Caylee’s smiling face used in the prosecution’s despicable video superimposition.

  With Geraldo on his sailboat.

  George Anthony’s text to Krystal Holloway.

  Nancy Grace and I kiss and make up.

  With William Slabaugh and Michelle Medina, two lawyers in my firm.

  My staff (from left to right) celebrating at a private party right after the verdict: Sallay Jusu, Jeanene Barrette, Michelle Medina, Shakema Wallace. Behind them on the right is Robert Haney, who provided security at the trial. You can see the verdict being replayed on television and Jean Casarez, a reporter, talking on the phone.

  I kept a picture of David on my phone to keep my spirits up. The big guys don’t always win.

  The only piece of evidence linking the crime scene to the Anthony home.

  The duct tape was found one other place—at the Caylee command center, manned by George Anthony, three weeks after Casey was put in jail.

  I created a number of set pieces for the jury to help them follow the complex evidence, thanks to Legal Graphicworks. (Used with permission of the Orlando Sentinel, copyright 2011.)

  I also created a number of charts to help the jury keep track of the complex and conflicting testimony.

  Jeff Ashton and Linda Drane Burdick, after the verdict is read. Behind them are the defense team, celebrating. (Used with permission of the Orlando Sentinel, copyright 2011.)

  Congratulatory texts stream in to my phone right after the verdict.

  Caylee Anthony. Despite all the hatred directed at us, we knew that we were fighting for justice for her, as well as for Casey.

  There was a day when Cindy called me to say that Sergeant John Allen and Melich were at the house and they wanted to know if I knew why Casey would be searching for information about chloroform on her computer.

  “Chloroform?” I said. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. There might be a million ways to kill a child, but using chloroform would be number one million and one.

  I thought the death by chloroform assumption by the prosecution was so ridiculous I couldn’t believe it.

  Understand, with this information, the prosecution had a theory it was more than willing to share with their adoring public: Casey had chloroformed Caylee before she suffocated her. The state had a murder weapon, a cause of death, and an argument for premeditation, something they could hang their hat on when asking for the death penalty. Because of Vass, now they were really into this ridiculous chloroform theory.

  And sure enough, the prosecution released the report on Casey’s computer usage and found she had made two searches for chloroform.

  Those occurred in March 2008, three months before Caylee disappeared. Casey’s boyfriend at the time, Ricardo Morales, had posted on his Myspace page a photo of a man and a woman entitled, “Win her over with Chloroform.” The man is giving the woman a kiss on the cheek while taking a facial tissue and getting ready to put it over her mouth to subdue her.

  Casey, who was twenty-two at the time, told me she had no idea in the world what chloroform was, but after seeing her boyfriend’s post about chloroform, she searched online for “chloroform” to find out what Morales was talking about. By sheer bad luck, Morales had given some credence to the prosecution’s utterly ridiculous theory of premeditated murder via chloroform. I would later write in a motion that this whole chloroform line of argument was one of the biggest frauds ever pulled on the American public.

  To this day I can’t understand how so many people ended up buying the chloroform argument. Even now people think chloroform had something to do with this case. The cops said it, and the media regurgitated it. In this age of reality television, where news is entertainment, we question neither the authorities nor the media.

  The waters became even muddier when Vass’s colleague, Dr. Neal Haskell, a forensic entomologist expert, suggested to Vass that the fruit flies from the trash in the trunk of Casey’s car, “might be coffin flies.” Haskell volunteered that he would be more than happy to take a look at them. (If you’ve ever left a doggie bag in your car, or thrown out old trash from your home, you know what these fruit flies look like.)

  Vass emailed Orange County Sheriff’s Department Crime Scene Investigator Michael Vincent. He wrote, “Mike, forgot to mention something in my last email. I finally got a call back from Dr. Neal Haskell, my entomologist friend, and he said that the ‘fruit flies’ may really be coffin flies and that might be significant. He said that if you still have them to please send them to him at the following address and he will check them out.”

  Haskell did check it out, and he concluded that the flies recovered from the garbage bag were Megeselia scalaris, a species from the family of flies known as Phoridae. Coffin Flies, Cornicera tibialis, are from the same family, but are from a different genus. There are more than two hundred genera and three th
ousand described species within the family of Phoridea, which is why this doesn’t make any sense. If you took high school biology, you know that’s like saying an orangutan is the same species as a human being. No matter. In his report, Haskell went on for two or three paragraphs talking about coffin flies, and how they are known to get into areas such as car trunks. The police, of course, let the media in on their little secret. This “information” gave the media more fuel to say Caylee’s body was in the trunk.

  “Coffin Flies Found in Trunk of Casey Anthony’s Car,” was the headline.

  As it would turn out, there were no coffin flies. Not one. Did the media report “Not One Coffin Fly Was Found in Casey Anthony’s Car” in a future headline? Of course not.

  What’s most important for me to note here is that the flies they found didn’t come from the trunk of Casey’s car. They came from the garbage bag that was in the trunk. These flies are commonly found in garbage and are not specific to human decomposition.

  With the coffin fly theory at a dead end, Haskell was struggling to find a way to tie the smell in the trunk to Caylee’s body, so he came up with yet another half-baked theory about how the decomposition in the trunk could have been Caylee, not the garbage found inside. This time the evidence concerned a blowfly, or rather the leg of the blowfly.

  The most common fly associated with human decomposition is called the blowfly, but they are also commonly found most everywhere. Check your windowsill and you might find a dead one. When a person dies, blowflies are early colonizers to the corpse. They come by the hundreds to lay their eggs on and feed off it.

  Haskell reported that investigators found a leg of a blowfly attached to a napkin in the trash. The napkin was sent to Vass, who found that the napkin contained what are called fatty acids, which, he said, were commonly found with human decomposition. What Vass conveniently didn’t mention was that fatty acids are also commonly found in cheese, meat, and other normal food products like pizza, which is what Casey and her boyfriend had eaten before throwing the box in the trash bag that lay moldering in Casey’s car for three weeks.

  The far-fetched conclusion reached by both Vass and Haskell was that there was a body in the trunk because of the chemical composition (chloroform) and the fatty acid on the napkin.

  Here’s how far they went in trying to tie Caylee to Casey’s car: The prosecution’s scenario was that because blowflies don’t travel at night as frequently (this was a weak attempt to try to explain why there was only one), Casey had opened the trunk, tried to clean out the decomposition with a napkin, and accidentally caught the leg of a blowfly as she was cleaning up. Then she threw it all in the trash and immediately closed the trunk so no other flies or insects could get into the trunk. This is another huge leap, but somewhere out there is a blowfly missing a leg that knows the true story.

  This was the state’s case as it related to Casey’s car.

  I needed help and proceeded to seek out experts in the various fields to disprove their “science.” I knew I needed to find an entomologist, a bug expert. I had never worked on a case with entomological evidence before.

  Linda Baden knew Haskell, but obviously he was working for the prosecution. Nevertheless, they were friends, and she asked him who he would recommend. Haskell touted one of his former students, Dr. Timothy Huntington, the youngest of the fifteen board-certified entomologists in the country.

  I liked Tim right away. He’s a tall, thin, and honest guy from Nebraska.

  “All I want from you is the truth, whether it helps or hurts,” I told him.

  “Great,” he said, “because that’s all you’re going to get from me.”

  He took a look at the evidence, everything Haskell was saying, and the very first thing he told me was, “I can’t believe Neal is taking these tremendous leaps in his report.” He had a lot of respect for Haskell, but he couldn’t go along with his conclusions about the flies coming from a dead body.

  Tim said to me, “If I go outside to my backyard, and I see shit in the grass, why would I assume it’s the neighbor’s kid and not my dog?”

  What he was saying was, If you find flies that are normally found in trash, and you find trash in the trunk, why would you assume the flies come from a dead body and not from the trash?

  I NEEDED TO HIRE SOMEONE to combat this “air science.” I called Vass and asked for a referral, which he offered, and was someone who lived in Belgium. I then did some research and consulted with Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, an expert in DNA from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He looked up who had done work in the area and advised me to hire Dr. Ken Furton, an expert in chemical compounds as it relates to dead bodies. He used the chemical compounds as training aids for canines in finding dead bodies. Furton, a member of the faculty at Florida International University in Miami, did a lot of work for the FBI.

  These scientists are really dedicated to their field, and when cases come along that offer interesting issues, they want to be involved. When I called Furton, he said he was shocked that the FBI hadn’t called him to look into their air issue because in fact he had done more work in that area than Vass, the prosecution’s expert.

  “Well, my friend,” I said, “Here’s your chance to get involved.”

  We also consulted with Dr. Barry Logan, chemistry director at one of the largest private labs in the country, NMS Labs. Logan was a toxicologist who did extensive work in forensics and ran the forensics division in his lab. We asked him to talk about the different protocols and methodologies of the prosecution’s scientific studies as they related to this case.

  With Logan and Furton, we mounted a double-barreled attack on Vass’s “evidence.” Furton would attack the actual chemistry, and Logan would attack his methodologies, comparing Vass’s research to what was done at other forensic laboratories.

  Logan confirmed for me that the prosecution’s case didn’t even rise to the level of junk science. At trial he said the tests “lacked organization and planning, [were] poorly documented, and did not follow even minimal standards of quality control.”

  Step one, collect the samples. Step two, put it in a Tedlar bag. Step three, do this, and so on.

  We did find written protocols that Vass used in another case he worked on just four months before he got involved in our case. That case had to do with the Charles Manson murders back in 1969. After cadaver dogs had alerted in several areas at the Barker Ranch, the police called Vass to see if he could collect samples and check his database to see if there were dead bodies buried there.

  Vass ran soil samples and concluded, based on his database, that there were dead bodies buried at several locations. The investigators then used ground-penetrating radar and performed an excavation. They found no dead bodies.

  In this case, when sending law enforcement written instructions (or protocols) on how to collect the samples, Vass warned them not to collect samples anywhere near—drum roll, please—garbage and gasoline! The reason Vass gave for these instructions was that even something as small as a can of soda could contaminate the sample, creating a false reading.

  I argued that Vass violated his own protocols. Furthermore, according to Logan, Vass had zero quality control for something as volatile as chemicals, which could be exposed so easily to contamination.

  In one experiment, the goal was to identify the chemicals inside the trunk of Casey’s car. Furton said that Vass went to a junkyard in Tennessee and collected carpet samples from other cars and tried to compare the chemical makeup among the carpets. They found chloroform in one of the other trunks. Once again, they were out to prove that the chemicals in the trunk came from Caylee’s dead body and not from the garbage.

  Vass claimed there were 484 chemicals that come from human decomposition. In one of his papers, he narrowed it down to thirty important ones. In the carpet sample from Casey’s car, only five of those thirty were found. And, said Furton, if you excluded overlap from chemicals found in the garbage as well as in the air and gasoline, only three of t
he chemicals in the top thirty were found.

  And despite all of this, it was Vass’s conclusion that the chemical signature from the carpet sample from Casey’s car was consistent with a human decompositional event.

  I asked Furton to review Vass’s findings. Furton compared Vass’s work with key publications that contained the study of chemical compounds of human decomposition. There were fifteen in all, which isn’t a lot, but it tells you this is a new area of study. Further, as reported by ABC News (and others), Vass’s “emerging research had never been used in a criminal trial before.” Furton made a chart and listed the compounds that each study associated with human decomposition. To his amazement, he discovered that each study listed different compounds. While there was no apparent consensus on the subject, Vass had proclaimed that certain compounds could determine the presence of decomposition—something he did in this case—but as Furton explained it to me, “Dr. Vass has no scientific basis for his conclusion.”