Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (45 page)

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AY 28, THE DAY
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Anthony took the stand, was emotional for everybody. Linda was leading the questioning, which began with extremely personal treasures. It was necessary for the prosecution to have Cindy identify certain items taken from the house that were related to items found with Caylee’s remains. That meant Cindy needed to look at pictures of Caylee’s room, which brought her to tears. About an hour into testimony, she became so emotional that we took a break to allow her to compose herself.

Cindy remembered her last day with Caylee, Father’s Day, June 15, 2008. She talked about Zanny, saying that Casey had been referencing the invented nanny as far back as 2006. Cindy did her best to recount the thirty-one days Caylee was missing. When Linda started to ask her about a MySpace page she had created on July 3, 2008, just to be able to reach out to Casey, the defense objected on the grounds of hearsay and the objection was sustained.

Linda was only allowed to go into those areas of the MySpace page that had been written by Cindy on her own page. She was limited as to what she could ask Cindy about her and Casey’s communication, because Casey had not posted responses on Cindy’s page. Casey’s own MySpace had postings under the subject line “Diary of Days,” which appeared to be direct responses. Her page had such things as “On the worst of days, trust no one, only yourself,” “What is given can be taken away,” and “Everyone lies. Everyone dies. Life will never be easy.” But Cindy was not allowed to testify to any of that.

These constraints compromised Linda’s ability to bring out a fuller understanding of the mother-daughter relationship. Cindy said the exchange between herself and Casey on MySpace was the first time they had “talked” since Cindy’s attempt to intercept Casey and Caylee at Universal Studios. Cindy’s subject line on her MySpace plea to Casey was “My Caylee is missing,” and Linda asked if she could clarify what she meant by “missing,” if she thought Caylee was safe somewhere with her mother. Cindy said that “missing” meant “missing in my heart,” not “missing” as in disappeared from the face of the earth.

Cindy did say that she had felt betrayed by Casey, which for her seemed like a big leap over positions she’d taken in the past. Linda went through the MySpace posting line by line in an attempt to get Casey’s responses to Cindy’s comments, but presenting the interchange this way was not nearly as effective as having the jury read it. Linda continued asking Cindy about her communication with Casey during the thirty-one days. Cindy said she eventually gave up trying to call her daughter, so started texting her to see if she could talk to Caylee. Casey always had an excuse, any reason why Caylee wasn’t there.

I couldn’t make sense of Cindy’s just accepting Casey’s excuses. I think she feared that if she pushed Casey, then Casey would take Caylee away for good and she would never see her again. After all, Casey had the leverage, she had what Cindy wanted. I just couldn’t understand why Cindy couldn’t be right up front instead of making excuses for Casey.

Linda asked Cindy about the odor in the trunk of the Pontiac, once described to a 911 operator as being like the odor of “a dead body in the damn car.” But Cindy had watered down that strong opinion about the smell considerably over the years. Now she told Linda she accepted George’s explanation that there was garbage in the trunk. She acknowledged that she had some experience with rotting flesh, being in a medical field.

The 911 calls Cindy had made on July 15, 2008, were introduced next. The tapes of these conversations created the most emotional moment in the trial to date. Jurors, who had not shown much emotion before this, seemed to perk up as the first call started to play. Cindy looked uncomfortable as she heard her own voice. There was something about hearing the calls now, knowing that her granddaughter was dead, that was heart-wrenching. She listened with her hand covering her mouth, looking like she was wishing she could retroactively silence herself. Her recorded voice reverberated in the courtroom, becoming increasingly distraught with each additional call. Everyone could hear the voices of Cindy and the different operators as the text of conversations scrolled on a screen. Her first call had reported the stolen car, and she sounded annoyed at her daughter, who was sitting next to her in the car. The second call was from her house. She was quite upset, and mentioned that her granddaughter was missing. In the third call she was frantic, saying Caylee had been kidnapped by the babysitter.

By the time the third 911 call was played, Cindy was a mess. Looking down at her hands through her tears, she related the first time she had heard that Caylee was missing. With her head nodded down toward her chest and her face red from sobbing, she put one hand over her eyes and her mouth, her entire face, really and hung her head completely below the bar of the witness stand. She looked like she was trying to hide from her own words.

The taped conversation reached the point where Casey took the phone from her mother to tell the 911 operator what was going on with Caylee. Anyone who knows the tapes knows how calm Casey is when she tells the operator that Caylee has been missing for thirty-one days, but she’s been looking for her herself. Meanwhile, in the courtroom, Casey’s calm voice on the tape, juxtaposed against the sight of her mother sobbing and doubled over in emotional pain on the witness stand, was wrenching indeed. When the tapes were finally over, Cindy popped her head back up and sat up straight, trying to regain her composure as Judge Perry called a quick recess.

I thought Cindy’s reaction to the tapes was telling. She was so willing to go after Casey when she had thought her daughter was withholding Caylee from her. When it turned out Casey was keeping Caylee away from everybody, she was not quite as overcharged and frantic.

Next Linda played back the jailhouse calls between Casey and her parents and friends when she had first been arrested for child neglect and lying to the police, right after the lies had unraveled. To me, these conversations show the true, unvarnished Casey, Casey at the core. They show how thoroughly selfish she is, turning talk about Caylee back to her and her own plight. Cindy was better prepared to listen to these tapes. She sat stoically, not covering her mouth like before. Her expression was blanker than before, though; she looked exhausted.

The phone conversation between Kristina Chester, a friend of hers, and Casey provided me with one of the quotes I found most telling about the young mother at the defense table. Kristina had been trying to get Casey to talk about Caylee, but Casey only wanted to talk to Tony and was desperate for somebody to give her his phone number. Kristina kept asking if Tony was involved in Caylee’s disappearance, and Casey kept answering in the negative. Finally, after Casey asked for Tony’s number for the umpteenth time, Kristina asked, “So why do you want to talk to him?” and Casey answered narcissistically, “Because he’s myyyyy boyfriend.”

Kristina said, “If anything happens to Caylee, I’ll die,” and started to cry. Casey seemed quite annoyed by her friend’s tears. “Oh my God, calling you guys? A waste, a huge waste,” she said in reply.

Cindy began to sob again on the witness stand, head hung low, when she heard her daughter so callously dismissing her friend’s emotional state. She also sobbed when Casey talked about how her family had let her down. Casey, sitting at the defense table only a few feet from her mother, made no response or reaction at all to the tape or her mother.

During cross-examination, Cindy’s ambivalence that we’d been witnessing for the last three years came roaring back. She spent some time painting an idealistic picture of Casey as a mother, and even when talking about why she thought Casey’s long-term lies were so elaborate and detailed, she couldn’t help but excuse Casey. To her, the scope and intricacy of the lies implied that they were illusions, not lies. Cindy equated them to a situation where children create imaginary people.

Once again, Cindy appeared to be whitewashing every bad behavior her daughter demonstrated. The codependency between Cindy and her daughter was striking. She was finding it impossible to make Casey accountable for anything. Maybe she was putting a lot of the blame for Caylee’s death on herself: if only she had not pushed Casey so hard, if only she had been more generous with her time, then maybe no one would be here. I was finding it hard to stomach the fact that Casey was sitting so close to her mother, who was falling on the sword for her, with a derisive sneer on her face.

Even Cindy’s testimony about the pool ladder was suspect. When Cindy had originally told coworkers about coming home to find the ladder on the pool, she had not pinpointed an exact date. But now, in response to questions from Linda, she was claiming that it was the evening of June 16, when she arrived home from work, that she found the ladder on the pool and the access gate to the backyard open. Cindy said she was absolutely certain she had put the ladder down, therefore making it inaccessible, the night before.

One point she remained steadfast on was the smell. Baez tried to get Cindy to say that the odor in the trunk didn’t smell like rotting flesh. He asked her to choose which it resembled more—garbage or rotting flesh. “The closest thing I could resemble it to was rotting flesh,” she honestly answered. That was her strongest statement on the issue. It shows why sometimes it’s better to quit while you’re ahead.

Frank was the man to examine the next witness, Amy Huizenga. Amy had been the person who took Cindy to Tony Lazzaro’s apartment to get Casey on July 15. After Casey came out and saw her mother waiting for her, Amy said there was a massive mother-daughter explosion. She described Casey’s demeanor in the car with Cindy after the three of them left Tony’s together. She said Casey sat in the front seat with her arms crossed, giving glaring looks, “like a sixteen-year-old who’d been caught doing something bad.” The conversation between the two in the car was either one-way or circuitous, Casey only speaking when her mother demanded to know where Caylee was. Her responses contained very few words, saying things like, “She’s with the nanny.”

Lee Anthony, Casey’s brother, was another of Frank’s witnesses. Casey briefly broke down in tears as he settled himself into the box. He was a very different Lee Anthony from the one we had seen at his deposition during the summer of 2009. He had refused to meet with Frank before the trial, so we knew something was up. We had to consider him a somewhat hostile witness.

In deposition nearly two years prior, Lee had been cooperative and relatively neutral in tone. He gave testimony consistent with his prior statements to investigators. But now in trial, Frank found it much more of a chore pulling the facts out of him. In deposition, Lee had told his story in a conversational, informative narrative. Very early in his trial testimony, however, it became clear from his four-word-or-fewer answers that he was less willing to volunteer information. Lee gave the facts without the same emotional tone he had shown in deposition. Then, he had demonstrated a frustration with his sister. Anything resembling that emotion was gone from his testimony at trial. Right off the bat, Frank’s questions received a response of “I don’t remember,” and Frank had to refresh his memory. In fact, he acted like he was having trouble remembering a lot of things. Frank finally decided to give him his deposition to refer to in an effort to help him along.

As a prosecutor, these kinds of situations were never easy to deal with, but Lee’s attitude surprised us. Perhaps, in some way we were so focused on George and Cindy, on their record of standoffishness, that we simply took Lee for granted. It wasn’t clear to me what had changed in his attitude, but something was decidedly different, and his testimony was not producing the effect that we’d hoped for.

When Frank asked Lee what he and Casey talked about on the evening of July 15, Lee said he asked Casey why she wouldn’t let them see Caylee. Frank asked him, “What was her response?” Lee’s answer was “I don’t recall.” With way more memory refreshers than we thought were necessary, Frank finally got Lee to say Casey had told him, “Maybe I’m just a spiteful bitch,” something he had said in a previous deposition.

The same thing was true when Lee was asked about Casey’s comments about Cindy. “I don’t know,” he told Frank. Frank again helped him find what he had said in prior statements, and Lee then remembered saying that his mother had thrown it in Casey’s face that she was an unfit mother. He said Cindy told Casey that Caylee was the best mistake her daughter ever made.

During Jose’s cross-examination of Lee, Baez tried to introduce some statements that Casey had made to Lee. It was the same tactic of introducing hearsay that Baez had attempted when Tony Lazzaro was on the stand. Because Baez had already been warned by the judge, we let him move forward and then sprang into action, asking the judge to allow us to introduce Casey’s criminal past. I recall seeing the amusement on the judge’s face as we approached the bench—Judge Perry had of course seen this coming, but Baez seemed clueless. We explained that we were requesting admission of Casey’s prior convictions on check fraud. Baez looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. Judge Perry acknowledged that the prior convictions might now be admissible, but he said he wanted to consider the significance of what Baez had brought out before he ruled. Over the course of the evening, the prosecution team did the same and concluded that the statements Baez had elicited were so innocuous that it wasn’t worth the risk of a postconviction incompetence claim, so we withdrew our request. Once again, the judge gave Baez a warning about the consequences of introducing hearsay. We all hoped that this time Baez would actually listen.

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