Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  Weitz, like Danziger, was extremely excited to be part of the case.

  I always had my reservations about Weitz, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. But he went to see Casey and reported the same thing as Danziger. He said she showed classic signs of being a victim of sexual abuse.

  “I couldn’t be more certain that Casey was sexually abused by George,” he said.

  After getting their reports, we made the determination that we were going to put them on our witness list. We weren’t sure how this was going to play out, but the trial was right around the corner, and we needed to make a decision, so we decided to go with them. After all, we could always decide not to call them if we so wished.

  We filed their names on the witness list, and the prosecution took its depositions, and the day Danziger was to show up for his deposition, I felt a shiver down my spine that something was very wrong because when I arrived, Danziger was already in a room in the state attorney’s office with Ashton and Linda Drane Burdick, the prosecutors.

  What’s going on? I asked myself.

  I would soon find out.

  His testimony was certainly promising and would have helped us tremendously with the jury. In his deposition with Ashton, Danziger described Casey’s ambivalence toward her father. He said Casey talked about finding emails from women on his computer, and how when her mother found them, her father blamed Casey, saying Casey had been the one setting him up.

  Danziger said Casey hated the fact she could still love him, that she was a little girl wishing he could be her dad.

  “I can’t figure out why I don’t hate him,” Danziger quoted Casey. “Years of anger, frustration, hurt and pain, finally openly speaking about it, but it’s painful and distressing.”

  Danziger related that Casey’s great fear was that her father would sexually abuse Caylee, the way he had abused her. He said that was why she always locked her door at night, why Caylee ordinarily never went outside by herself, and why she had Caylee shower with her.

  Danziger then recounted Casey’s events of June 16, how she saw her father carrying Caylee’s limp form, and how George had said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  He also quoted Casey as saying she didn’t think it was an accident. She posited that her father had held Caylee underwater and drowned her. He quoted Casey as saying her father’s suicide attempt was his way of trying to force her to take the rap for Caylee’s death.

  But the jury, I knew, would hear none of this, because toward the beginning of his deposition, Danziger began by backpedaling furiously.

  “Jeff, let me just say something parenthetically here,” he said to Ashton, who was doing the interrogation. “And this is something that has caused me great distress and places me in a bit of an ethical bind and concern.

  “In my meetings with her, with Casey, she said things that accuse others of criminal behavior. I am deeply troubled, and I don’t know how to handle this. I realize you’re entitled in the deposition to know what she said to me, but I am very troubled about being a vector by which statements she made may accuse others of crimes past and present. I don’t know what to do.”

  He continued, “I am very nervous and reluctant to say things she told me [knowing] what the media would do with it. [I’m not sure] I am ethically doing the right thing by reporting things she said that accuse others of crimes that may never have happened. I don’t know what to do, and I’ve expressed my concern about this.”

  He concluded, “I am just deeply worried that I’m doing the wrong thing.”

  Added a smug Ashton, “We are equally concerned with unsupported allegations of criminal conduct being thrown around in this case.” The irony of his sanctimonious statement by the guy who had been bashing Casey without remorse for the last three years almost knocked me over.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe Danziger was behaving this way. He was a professional. He had a reputation to uphold. If he was going to in effect recuse himself, why didn’t he at least have the decency to call me and let me know beforehand. There would have been no point to his testifying.

  As I was listening to him, I became so angry that I wanted to jump up and punch him. How could he tell me one thing and then get up there and testify in a deposition to the same thing, but put so many qualifications to his answers that they were worthless? It was disgusting. He was making it clear that there was no point whatsoever for us to put him on the stand.

  After his testimony, we told Ashton to take him off our witness list. When we arrived back at my office, Cheney, Dorothy, and I talked about why he did what he did. We decided it was remotely possible that his conscience got the better of him at the last minute, but that didn’t make any sense. He knew the topics of conversation. He knew the parameters of the testimony. We were certain that Danziger did his about-face because he gets most of his work from the prosecution, not from defense lawyers. We figured that someone had threatened him and said something like, “If you testify for Casey Anthony, you can forget about getting more business from us.”

  Of course, we didn’t have any proof of that, but that’s certainly what we thought. He’ll deny that, but that’s his business. It turns out I couldn’t have made a worst choice.

  I could only hope I’d have better luck with Weitz, an older gentleman who had retired from private practice.

  His deposition turned to the subject of incest.

  “She told me that her father had physically and sexually abused her back to the age of childhood,” Weitz said. He said that took place from the time she was eight until she was twelve.

  “What sort of physical abuse was described to you?” asked Ashton.

  “She described physical touching and involvement all the way to sexual intercourse,” Weitz said.

  “When you say physical, do you mean striking her?” asked Ashton.

  “No. I would say … physical, sensual. More of a sexual assault or sexual—in a sexual connotation.”

  “To include fondling and intercourse?”

  “Yeah, fondling, touching, hugging, kissing, all the way to intercourse, correct, on multiple times.”

  When asked how frequent the incest was, Weitz said Casey had told him her father had raped her “a few times a week” over the course of four years, from the time she was eight until she turned twelve. And when he stopped, Weitz said, Casey said her brother Lee, who was four years older than she was, began coming into her room at night while she lay in bed, and he would fondle her breasts. Weitz said Lee did this from the time she was twelve to when she turned fifteen.

  Weitz testified that years later Casey tried to tell Cindy about Lee’s sexual abuse, and that her response was to call Casey a whore. Rather than protect her from Lee, said Weitz, she attacked Casey. She was getting no nurturing from her mother, she told Weitz.

  According to Weitz, Casey indicated that sex with her father continued on a less frequent basis up to the time she became pregnant with Caylee. Casey was twenty. When Weitz asked her who was the father, she told him she thought it could have been her father, but she said she also could have gotten pregnant at a party with coworkers from Universal Studios, during which her date drugged her drink, she passed out, and he raped her.

  Said Weitz, “She only had two beers yet she felt kind of woozy and drugged, and basically she doesn’t remember when she woke up the next morning. She doesn’t recall what happened the previous night.”

  Weitz said she wasn’t dating anyone regularly at that time. She didn’t have a romantic interest at that time.

  “As the discussion comes up,” said Weitz, “she’s not sure of the biological father. She believes she could have been impregnated at that party.”

  Her father was also suspect, but as I said, he was ruled out as the potential father after the discovery came out in the case and her DNA didn’t match his.

  Weitz cited a couple of examples of George’s questionable behavior.

  Weitz said Casey told him that both her parents
went to the hospital with her when she gave birth, and her father was in the delivery room with her when she gave birth.

  At Caylee’s funeral, the tape of which Weitz watched, he noticed that when George got up to talk about Caylee, he talked about the sweet smell of his granddaughter, the smell of her sweat.

  “That is not, in my estimation,” said Weitz, “descriptions that grandfathers make of their granddaughters.”

  “Meaning?” asked Ashton.

  “Meaning it had a sexual connotation,” said Weitz, “in my professional opinion, based on thirty-five years of study as a psychologist, and based upon my experience, training, and knowledge and education as a psychologist.”

  Weitz said Casey described to him, from the time Caylee was born, her fear of leaving Caylee in the house alone with George. He said she feared he would molest Caylee the way he had molested her.

  “She never felt comfortable and wouldn’t leave her—if at all possible—leave her alone with George,” Weitz said. “She felt George was a threat to her daughter.”

  Weitz said that sometimes Casey would be “mad and angry,” and sometimes she’d be “sad and overwhelmed.”

  Later Weitz testified, “According to Casey, her father had sexually assaulted her many times over a number of years; that she felt that he was highly impulsive, erratic; that … he could lose control over his behavior easily, and so she feared him and feared for her daughter’s safety.” When asked what he meant by “Poor control” over his behavior, Wise replied, “Poor impulse control.”

  Ashton then had the gall to say to Weitz, “I did not hear anywhere in your recitation before that about any physical abuse by the father.”

  When I heard that, I almost lost it. Cheney chimed in.

  “Just one second,” Cheney said.

  “Mr. Mason, is there something that you wanted to …” said Ashton.

  “Yeah,” said Cheney, “for you as a prosecutor to think that sexual assault is not violent is pretty bizarre.”

  “So is that an objection or just a …” said Ashton, refusing to answer.

  The two then bickered for a while before moving on.

  Weitz quite rightly told Ashton, “The whole culmination of any kind of sexual assault would be seen by her as physically violent.”

  According to Weitz, Casey was normal in every way, except for exhibiting behaviors associated with being a victim of sexual abuse. Weitz listed the mental illnesses and diseases and dismissed them one by one. She wasn’t antisocial, he said, nor did she have borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality, narcissism, she didn’t have avoidant personality disorder, nor dependent personality disorder, she didn’t have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and most importantly, her test scores showed no signs of malingering, meaning she wasn’t lying.

  She has “no mental disease or defect,” he said. Rather, he said, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Weitz testified that Casey’s behavior was consistent with being a victim of sexual abuse.

  He said when she talked to him about the abuse, “she was almost in a kind of a daze or fog and that she could present it as information but with no real facial response, any kind of nonverbal behavioral response showing any kind of anxiety or disturbance or upsetness and stripped of emotion.”

  He said that during the thirty days she was away from home after Caylee died, “She was basically still in emotional shock and traumatized, and she was basically functioning in denial, suppressed mode. Essentially she was dealing with, one way or another, the loss of a child she loved.”

  He said, “She basically talked about being numb.”

  He explained why Casey lied to her mother and to the police. He said Casey used lies as a “protective measure,” a way to dull the pain of the death of her daughter.

  He said she lied to protect herself.

  “She’s acknowledging to me that she tells untruths, that she lies, and she’s aware of some of that, and she sees it as using it for her protection,” said Weitz.

  Ashton asked him whether she believed what she was saying when she was telling people that Caylee was with Zenaida the nanny.

  “I think she wanted to believe it,” said Weitz. “I think she was in total suppression and denial. Denial, as you’re aware, is an unconscious process, and people who are in denial basically can act as if certain things never took place. So I think she wanted to believe that her child was alive, I mean, on a certain level. But I think that the behavior’s explained, in my professional opinion, by suppression and denial.”

  He said that Casey’s reaction to her pregnancy was to deny it was happening.

  “She was pregnant, and she was showing and everything, and even the parents, everyone was in denial about that she was in pregnancy; that they didn’t think she was pregnant even though she was well into term.”

  Weitz said Casey told him of a wedding she had gone to, and though she was showing, her parents were making excuses for her.

  Late in the deposition Ashton asked Weitz “if Miss Anthony would have had the same behaviors of denial and compartmentalization if she had killed Caylee.”

  Weitz said it was possible. However, it seemed unlikely given that she showed “absolutely no motivation to want to do that in any personality, behavioral, or emotive capacity.”

  He continued, “To do that it would almost suggest if she did kill her child and there was nothing more than what currently is on the plate, then I almost would be tempted to think of some psychotic reaction. Because I can find and see, professionally, no motive, no baseline for why, given the nature of the relationship, her behavior, the responses of people about her being a mother and how she interacted with her child, no underlying motive for doing so.

  “So therefore to answer your question, rather than being in denial and defensive, I would almost think that for her to kill her child, she would almost have to go through a psychotic episode.”

  Ashton pushed Weitz to get him to say that it was possible that Casey killed Caylee. But Weitz wouldn’t buy it. He told Ashton, “There is nothing that I could see in this case that would suggest that your hypothesis about her acting in that way comes to merit. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Ashton, but of course for him, it certainly wasn’t okay.

  “I don’t want to overstate what you’re telling me,” said Ashton toward the end of the questioning. “Your opinion is that every untruth she said about Caylee between her death and the police being notified, that thirty-one days, every untruth she said about Caylee was not a deliberate untruth?”

  Answered Weitz, “I can say to you that since Caylee’s the most threatening, traumatizing, potentially overwhelming issue that would confront her, anything that had to do with her daughter or her daughter’s death would be the most likely suppressed or that she’d be in denial about, so information around her would more likely be not accurate.”

  Later on, under his breath, Ashton called Weitz an asshole.

  I heard him say it. Michelle Medina, one of my associates, also heard him say it.

  Ashton denied saying it, and Burdick denied hearing it.

  But he said it all right. Weitz was taking apart his case, point by point, and Ashton, the quintessential bully and sore loser, didn’t like it.

  One of the most important things Weitz said had to do with a refutation of another of Ashton’s nonevidentiary-based (fantasy) accusations that Casey had killed Caylee because Caylee was a burden, something getting in the way of her partying.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth, said Weitz. After she became pregnant, said Weitz, she never once considered having an abortion or putting the baby up for adoption. Even though she thought she might have been impregnated through rape or incest, she was very clear she never considered an abortion.

  “She wanted the child,” said Weitz.

  Weitz said definitively that Casey did not consider Caylee a burden, something to be discarded like old luggage because she interfered with social relationships,
romantic relationships, job opportunities, or travel, as the police and the prosecution so callously and wrongly declared.

  “Having that child for some very specific reasons was very important to her,” said Weitz. “Having a daughter was important. It was significant to her. She said, ‘I loved her at first sight, and that child was the most meaningful part of my life for three years.’ That to me is important.”

  Casey was a loving mom, a very protecting mother, said Weitz.

  Said Weitz, “She immediately had love for her child. Her child meant everything to her, and the three years were the best that she ever had and she never regretted not having an abortion or adopting.”

  Does this sound like a mother who killed her baby because she wanted to go out and party?

  Moreover, said Weitz, she was never the partier the prosecution contended she was, but a mother who spent most of her time at home taking care of Caylee.

  The prosecution made a big deal out of the fact that Casey got tattoos while she was away for the thirty days, but Weitz said that the tattoo on her shoulder that read “La Bella Vita” was actually a tribute to Caylee.

  “It was obtained … after her daughter passed away,” said Weitz. “She told me La Bella Vita would mean the good life or the wonderful life. She said she contrasted that with the way her life had turned, the juxtaposition of how lousy her life had become. She said her life had been relatively normalized, moving in the [right] direction, and then it had catastrophically changed, both in terms of what had [happened] in her life legally and also the loss of her daughter.

  “She represents it to be the irony in how her life had transpired,” he said.

  There had been some talk that Lee might be the father, because Casey named her daughter Caylee, but Weitz said that was not the case at all.

  Weitz explained how Caylee got her name.

  “She said it has nothing to do with Lee,” said Weitz. He said Casey wanted to name her after herself and with a similar meaning. She wanted a name that sounded Irish, that she had considered Riley, but that she decided against it because she wanted her child to have the initials C.M.A. Her mother had that, and she wanted to pass it on to her daughter.