Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (9 page)

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Well, well that’s because . . .

L
EE
A
NTHONY:
. . . I really . . .

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Just go ahead.

L
EE
A
NTHONY:
You’re asking me, first you’re asking me for Tony’s phone number so you can call him and then you immediately want to start cussing towards me and saying don’t even worry about coming up here for all this stuff and trying to cut us out. What . . .

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
I’m not trying to cut anybody out.

L
EE
A
NTHONY:
I’m not going around and around with you. You know, that, that’s pretty pointless. Uh, I’m not going to go through, you’re not going to put everybody else through the same stuff that you’ve been putting the police and everybody else through the last twenty-four hours, and the stuff you’ve been putting Mom through for the last four or five weeks. I’m done with that. So, you can tell me what’s going on. Kristina would love to talk to you because she thinks that you will tell her what’s going on. Frankly, we’re going to find out something, whatever’s going on, it’s going to be found out. So why not do it now and save yourself . . .

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
There’s nothing . . .

L
EE
A
NTHONY:
. . . some issues.

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
. . . to find out. There’s absolutely nothing to find out. Not even what I told the detectives.

L
EE
A
NTHONY:
Well, you know, everything that you’re telling them is a lie.

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
I have no clue where Caylee is. If I knew where Caylee was do you think any of this would be happening? No. 

Finding Lee as much of a “waste” as Cindy, Casey next spoke to her friend Kristina Chester, who was at the house with Cindy and Lee. Casey hoped Kristina would finally give her Tony’s phone number. Once more, Casey ran into difficulty. All Casey wanted was Tony’s phone number, but all everyone else wanted was to find Caylee.

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
I said does Tony have anything to do with Caylee.

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
No, Tony had nothing to do with Caylee.

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
Oh, so why, why do you want to talk to him?

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Because . . .

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
You probably don’t want to tell me.

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
. . . he’s my boyfriend and I want to actually try to sit and talk to him because I didn’t get a chance to talk to him earlier because I got arrested on a fucking whim today. Because they’re blaming me for stuff that I never would do. That I didn’t do.

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
Okay. Well, I’m on nobody’s, I’m on your side.  You know that, right?

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Oh, uh, sweetie, I know that. I just want to talk to Tony and get a little bit of . . .

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
But . . .

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
. . . of, of . . .

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
. . . Casey, you have to tell me if you know anything about Caylee.

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Sweetheart, if I . . .

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
If anything happens to Caylee, Casey, I’ll die [crying]. You understand I’ll die if anything happens to . . .

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Oh, well . . .

K
RISTINA
C
HESTER:
. . . that baby [continuing to cry]

C
ASEY
A
NTHONY:
Oh, my God. Calling you guys, a waste. A huge waste. Honey, I love you. You know I would not let anything happen to my daughter. If I knew where she was this wouldn’t be going on. 

It was a striking series of phone calls. As each of her three conversations led her back to Caylee, all she did was try to get to Tony. Even as everyone worried about her daughter, she seemed more preoccupied with trying to sustain her fledgling relationship. Her sense of priorities was baffling, and in the end, this only added to the portrait of her as callous and uncaring about her missing daughter.

A
T THAT POINT THE CRITICAL
focus of the investigation was on determining just how much of Casey’s story was a lie. The detectives’ hope was that if they could find a hint of truth somewhere, that hint might lead them to Caylee.

Ever since Casey had named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, aka Zanny the Nanny, as the person she had last seen with Caylee, Detective Melich had been trying to locate her. While Casey’s wild-goose chase the previous day had yielded nothing of real substance, there was one promising lead on Zanny: the guest card with the name “Zenaida Gonzalez” and a phone number on it that Melich had been given by the manager at the Sawgrass Apartments. Melich had called the number and reached a woman going by the name of Zenaida who lived in Kissimmee, about thirty minutes south of Orlando. She said she was forty-two, had six children, and drove a car with New York license plates. She was friendly and cooperative. However, she denied knowing Casey or Caylee Anthony or having ever been employed as a babysitter.

Zenaida agreed to give a sworn statement to an investigator, and on July 17, Missing Persons Investigator Awilda McBryde and Investigator Kari Roderick visited her at her home. She was shown photos of Casey and Caylee and denied knowing either. Likewise, Casey was unable to identify this Zenaida from a packet of photos shown to her.

How and why Zenaida Gonzalez came into Casey’s crosshairs has never been determined. There was speculation that Casey somehow got hold of Zenaida’s guest card at the Sawgrass Apartments and from there came up with the fact that she was from New York by her license plate, or perhaps it was someone from her past and the real Zenaida was just a coincidence.

While Melich still couldn’t be sure that Zanny was a complete fabrication, Casey’s story had gone from implausible to impossible. But as he’d learned at Universal Studios, he was dealing with a woman who was willing to follow her lies to the bitter end. If he was going to get her to admit the truth about Zanny, it would take more than he currently had.

In the meantime, he tried to learn a bit more about the person they were dealing with. Casey had no criminal record, and prior to the 911 call two days earlier, she had apparently been an upstanding citizen. And yet there was something unsettling about how easy it had been for her to lie to him and the other police officers. Her determination at the security gate, her confident walk through Universal Studios—it all seemed so comfortable to her. Lies are like muscles: it takes practice to make them strong. Casey Anthony had clearly been giving hers a lot of exercise.

As news of Casey’s arrest spread, Melich began receiving additional information that fleshed out this portrait of Casey Anthony as a liar. Calls came in to headquarters from close friends of Casey’s, claiming she was a “habitual liar” who had been known to steal from them in the past. One such call was from Amy Huizenga, who’d been one of Casey’s best friends up until a few days earlier. It had been Amy who’d helped Cindy collect Casey at Tony’s apartment prior to her first 911 call. Amy told Melich how Casey had recently driven her and her roommate, Ricardo Morales, to the airport, an apparently thoughtful gesture, as the two roommates were headed to Puerto Rico.

Ricardo had once been Casey’s boyfriend. They had met in January at a birthday party for Ricardo, and went out for five months. On at least one occasion, Casey and Caylee had spent the night at Ricardo’s place, three in a bed, Casey in the middle. Casey and Ricardo broke up in June, but they remained friends. But shortly after Casey dropped them off at the airport, she’d started forging checks from Amy’s account. It had been only a few days since Amy had returned home to Florida and discovered the fraud, but already she had discovered seven hundred dollars missing from her account.

Meanwhile, Casey’s boyfriend, Tony Lazzaro, also shed light on Casey’s fabrications. He called the police the afternoon she was arrested, telling Melich that he’d met Casey on Facebook in May, and they’d been dating since early June. Even though Casey had basically been living with him since June 16, she had never mentioned that Caylee was missing or in any type of danger. He claimed that he first learned of the toddler’s disappearance from sheriff’s deputies who had shown up at his apartment on the morning of July 16. The last time he’d seen Caylee had been when he invited Casey and Caylee to swim in the pool at his apartment complex on June 2. Casey had never introduced him to a babysitter named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, nor did he know where Zenaida lived. And yet during the time Casey had been living with him, she’d told him on multiple occasions that Caylee was with the nanny, either at Disneyworld, Universal Studios, or the beach.

When authorities obtained Casey’s cell phone records, they found that Tony had exchanged text messages with Casey shortly before her arrest. Casey seemed to expect more consolation from him than he was interested in providing. The texts showed Tony’s understandable anger both that Casey had been lying to him for a month, but also that Casey wasn’t saying where Caylee was. Like Cindy Anthony, he too had been deceived:

T
ONY:
Where is Caylee?

C
ASEY:
I honestly don’t know.

T
ONY:
I don’t know . . . are you serious?

T
ONY:
When did you find out?

C
ASEY:
been filling out reports all night and driving around with multiple officers looking at old apartments I had taken her to. I am the worst fucking person in the entire world. I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to her.

C
ASEY:
Too long let’s just leave it at that.

T
ONY:
Y wouldn’t you tell me of all people? I was UR boyfriend that cares about you and UR daughter. Doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you lie to me thinking she was fine and with your nanny?

C
ASEY:
I lied to everyone what was I supposed to say I trust my daughter with some psycho how does that look?