Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (2 page)

If there were gasps in the courtroom, I didn’t hear them. I don’t even remember hearing the guilty verdicts on the misdemeanor counts. I am not even sure if I heard the “not guilty” verdict on Count Three. Linda, Frank, and I all just sat there. I knew that Linda would be an absolute iceberg. She was the consummate professional and kept her emotions to herself. I was completely in my own head.

I knew what was happening, but I don’t remember processing it. It might be egotistical, but it never occurred to me that all twelve of those jurors, in that amount of time, could have rejected all that evidence. It had always been in our minds that they could find Casey guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter, but a complete “not guilty”?
That
was shocking.

P
ART
I

C
HAPTER
O
NE

JOINING THE TEAM

T
he Daily News Café in Orlando is your typical lunch spot. Bustling, people shouting orders, good sandwiches—no matter the day, no matter the season, the counter is always packed and the food is always exactly what you need. Located on Magnolia Avenue just a block and a half from the courthouse, the Daily News has long been a staple for Orlando’s lawyers, and so perhaps it was fitting that my good friend and colleague at the State Attorney’s Office Linda Drane Burdick brought me there one hot day in August 2008 to talk about the case that currently had the entire legal community abuzz: the disappearance of a two-year-old girl named Caylee Marie Anthony.

The Daily News Café was always crowded at lunchtime, so Linda and I ordered at the counter and went to find a table, where we began to talk about the details discovered to date. She was the chief of the sex crimes/child abuse unit, and as such, the Caylee Anthony case had been in her lap since the beginning. I, like everybody else in Orange County, Florida, had been following the story in the newspaper, and I knew the broad strokes, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes that I was unaware of.

Linda had been contacted about the case on July 16, 2008, as a result of the child’s grandmother calling 911 to report Caylee missing. When the call came in, Caylee hadn’t been seen in thirty-one days. The child’s mother, Casey Anthony, told investigators that she had been working at Universal Studios, a local theme park, and Caylee had been staying with various friends and nannies, in particular a twenty-five-year-old woman named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez. According to Casey, she had dropped Caylee with the nanny on her way to work, but when she came back to get her, both of them were gone and the phone had been disconnected. She didn’t report her daughter missing, but claimed that she had been searching for her ever since. However, nothing Casey had told the police since the 911 call had proved true. As if the lies weren’t bad enough, there was forensic evidence from Casey’s car that pointed not only to foul play, but to Casey’s involvement.

In my thirty years as a prosecutor, I’d taken seventy homicide cases to trial; all but two had returned guilty verdicts. I’d also prosecuted twelve capital murder cases and won convictions in all of them. My record was solid, but it was only one of the reasons Linda asked me to lunch that day. In many of those convictions, the innovative use of forensic evidence was where I’d distinguished myself. I had renowned expertise in scientific evidence, and Linda thought my perspective and experience might be helpful.

As a prosecutor, I’ve always been interested in exploring how new scientific techniques could be used to convict guilty suspects. In 1987 I successfully prosecuted the first case in the world in which DNA evidence was used. A man by the name of Tommy Lee Andrews had climbed through a window and attacked a woman, slashing her with a box cutter and raping her repeatedly. Andrews left a fingerprint on the window screen where he’d entered the house, but since it was on the outside of the screen it was hard to connect it to the crime. To positively ID the attacker, DNA was collected from both semen in the rape kit and a sample of Andrews’s blood, and it matched. The jury accepted the new science and found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to prison. It was the kind of forensic evidence that was truly novel in a criminal case, and that perspective was precisely what Linda needed.

For weeks before our lunch, Linda had been hinting about my joining the prosecution team. I had mentored her since she’d joined the office in 1989. We had worked together on many cases in the past, including a cold case murder of a little girl that was solved by DNA. Linda was tough and intense, with a big heart. I called her the marshmallow hand grenade. Frank George, a ten-year veteran of the office, was already on board with her, but as this shaped up to be a homicide, Linda wanted me on the team, too. I was still the go-to man in forensics, and because the case against Casey Anthony was developing with only circumstantial evidence, forensics were going to be of critical importance.

The forensics at the forefront that day in August had to do with a nasty odor and a nine-inch hair, both of which had been found in the trunk of Casey’s parents’ Pontiac Sunfire, the car Casey had been driving the last time she was seen with Caylee. A cadaver dog had alerted on the area and reacted strongly when the trunk had been opened. Despite Casey’s early story that Caylee had been kidnapped, it was beginning to look a lot like a homicide.

Linda told me about the work of Dr. Arpad Vass, a forensic anthropologist who was doing cutting-edge research in decomposition odor analysis. Dr. Vass had examined some of the evidence from the trunk, and Linda wanted me to call him to discuss his findings and see if his science could be admissible. Linda was hoping to bring me into this case, and morsels of forensics like this surely piqued my interest.

I was thrilled to be on Linda’s short list, but before either of us could begin to plan anything, office politics had to be negotiated. In 2002 I’d been made a supervisor, leading the juvenile division of the State Attorney’s Office. The assignment was supposed to have been a promotion, but I’d hated it. I missed trial work, and the following year I asked to return to the felony trial branch. Even though I had founded the homicide division in 1990, I was no longer a member of that department and could not move back. Instead, I was now tucked away in the trial division, even though I had twenty-eight years of service, an unblemished record, and a near-perfect conviction rate. After some difficulties with my supervisors, I’d earned an unwarranted reprimand and been informed I was not a team player. I became an overpaid desk ornament, doing trials I was way overqualified for.

Part of the problem was that there were two distinct camps in our office: those who wanted every case that came across our desks to go to trial and those who wanted to be more discriminating. Those who thought that whoever got arrested should get prosecuted didn’t like my vociferous objection to that policy. I was of the belief that we should choose the crimes that warranted prosecution and prosecute them appropriately, without buckling to public pressure. We shouldn’t just rubber stamp what the people who had the case before us had done; we needed to look at the merits of every case to determine if a crime had been committed before we prosecuted it. I honestly think that State Attorney Lamar Lawson, who headed our whole office, agreed with me, but the people below him supported the “prosecute all” philosophy.

Maybe I was too abrasive in my conviction and rubbed those on the other side the wrong way. For whatever reason, my successful record as a prosecutor seemed to have been overshadowed by my beliefs. The political players in the office clearly wanted me buried, and so I was. Nevertheless, the 120 trial lawyers on staff still held me in the highest regard, and most important, one of those was Linda Drane Burdick.

F
ROM THE TIME
I
WAS
eight years old, I’d had the makings of a lawyer. When I was in fourth grade my grandmother and my great-aunt Thelma were visiting us in Saint Petersburg. After a spirited discussion on some topic, Thelma said to me, “You should be a lawyer.”

“I think I’d like that,” I responded. There weren’t many cowboys in Florida, and my friends had already cornered the careers of firemen and cops.

I am a Florida boy, born and raised in the great Sunshine State. I was delivered to Barbara and Richard Ashton on October 3, 1957, in Saint Petersburg, a west coast town on a peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Saint Pete was a retirement mecca for Midwesterners, so my family didn’t quite fit the mold. Mom was an active homemaker, and Dad was working as a CPA. My parents had met at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ten miles north of Dayton, where my mother had an office job and my father was a lieutenant in the air force.

I grew up in a neighborhood of typical middle-class homes, in a modest three-bedroom ranch on a small lake, with my three sisters: Cindy, the oldest by twenty-one months; Judy, three years younger than I; and Barb, another three years behind her. I was an underachiever in school, but got through the public school system reasonably well. I don’t think I would have been classified as a nerd, but I was on the nerd cusp—not good at sports and a member of the drama club. Oddly enough, while in the drama club, I performed in a play with Angela Bassett—that’s right, the actress. She was a year behind me at Boca Ciega High School, and a very sweet girl. If that wasn’t accomplishment enough, I also captained our High-Q team, which participated in a local TV quiz bowl. Thirty-two teams competed in single-elimination matches over the school year. We won that year—Go, Pirates! Okay, maybe I was a full-on nerd.

In 1975 I graduated from high school in the respectable upper middle of my class and enrolled at Saint Petersburg Junior College. I started studying philosophy and logic and found it intriguing. I even made some money tutoring in those subjects. For my junior year, I transferred to the University of Florida in Gainesville and graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1978. My father, the accountant, was always nagging me to take business classes, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t like numbers. I liked rational argument and thoughtful discourse. I wanted to be an intellectual. As it turned out, I was the only one in my family who did not go into some aspect of accounting.

I finished my undergraduate degree in three years, going to school summers and taking tests for college credit without classes. I didn’t know I was allowed to have fun in college. My father never told me that he had been anything less than studious when he was an undergraduate. It was only later, too late for me to follow in his footsteps, that I found out he had quite enjoyed the college life, drank his share, and played poker for spending money. I don’t know why I was in such a rush to complete school, but I kept up the breakneck pace at the University of Florida Law School, completing my J.D. degree in two and a half years. I was even fast-tracking my personal life. Halfway through law school, I married my high school friend and college sweetheart, Amy Brotman. We went on to have two wonderful sons, Adam and Jonathan. Sadly, the marriage didn’t last and we split up after eight years.

Right out of law school, I was hired by the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando and assigned to the area from which many successful prosecutors have been launched—the traffic division. My buddy Ted Culhan and I shared an office in an old building that used to house the Federal District Court. We were a block from the main office, so we were relatively unsupervised. We weren’t above a good-natured prank or two. Our favorite was waiting until someone was on the phone, and then taping the receiver to his head. I did do serious work, too; I had a chance to prosecute some drunk driving cases, and I actually got my first taste of scientific evidence when I was doing hearings on the admissibility of Breathalyzer machines.

After eleven months, I moved to a misdemeanor branch, which was out in the western part of the county. Seven months after that I transferred to the felony prosecution division. My father had been somewhat relieved when I went to law school, but he absolutely loved it when I became a prosecutor. My parents were living two hours away, but even then, they would occasionally make the trip to Orlando to watch me in trial.

In 1983 I prosecuted my first murder case—and won. Two years later, I tried my first death penalty case. The victim was a businessman with a wife and children who took “business trips” to a local gay resort called the Parliament House. On one visit he hooked up with the wrong young man. When they got back to the hotel room, the young man slit his throat and robbed him. The jury convicted the defendant and then recommended the death penalty, which the judge imposed. Before the state could execute him, he hung himself in his prison cell.

Then in 1987 came the case in which I’d become the first prosecutor to introduce DNA evidence. That continued a string of successful homicide prosecutions for me, and in 1990 I created the homicide division of the State Attorney’s Office. I was married to my second wife, Joy, and we had two children, Rebecca and Alex, before she and I parted ways.

It was around that time that Court TV, the twenty-four-hour trial channel on cable TV, came into existence. The channel broadcast some of my cases, and my father loved it. He would watch me from his desk at work. Once, in the late nineties, a trial of mine was moved to Pinellas County, my parents’ neck of the woods, and my father came almost every day to watch it. Those years in homicide were the most enjoyable of my professional career. For starters, no other cases present the challenges that homicide cases present. But I was also damned good at them.