Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [109]
We had asked Dr. Danziger to bring us copies of his notes from his interview with Casey, and we started out just going through them. A lot of them were biographical and background information, easy stuff. Then we got to the bombshell. Part of Casey’s new claim was that at age eight, her father had begun molesting her. The abuse had included oral sex, vaginal—everything. It lasted until she was in her early teens, and then it stopped. According to Danziger’s notes, her father was not the only abuser in the house. When she was a young teenager, her brother, Lee, had entered her room and felt up her breasts. She claimed she woke up and he was standing there, but he had not done anything other than that.
Then Danziger went over Casey’s claims for the scenario that had played out on June 16, 2008. What follows is my best recollection of our conversation during the deposition with him. Casey was asleep in bed at 9 A.M. She was awakened by her father screaming at her, “Where is Caylee?”
Casey said that she would have Caylee sleep with her for Caylee’s protection because she was afraid her father might try to molest Caylee. That morning, Casey slept very hard and very late for her. The subtext was that it was unusual for her to be that sound asleep, and we believed this was meant to imply that she had been drugged. Her father then began to search the house and he found Caylee in the pool.
Reading Danziger’s report, we now had two versions of who found Caylee. Jose had told Linda that it had been Casey who found Caylee in the pool. But Casey’s version to Danziger had George finding Caylee in the pool. In Danziger’s version, George walked in with Caylee in his arms. She was dripping wet. He laid her on the floor and he began to scream, “This is your fault!”
Casey ran to her room, and that was the last she ever saw of Caylee.
Danziger said he interviewed Casey three times. We went methodically through the notes. During all three of her meetings with him, she consistently stuck with the exact same scenario.
That was the bombshell, but we still had the mushroom cloud.
Dr. Danziger went on to say that Casey told him she did not believe that Caylee drowned by accident. She did not believe that Caylee could have gotten into the pool on her own, because she couldn’t have gotten the ladder up. Casey believed that her father drowned Caylee deliberately or drowned her while he was molesting her, even though she had no evidence that George had ever molested Caylee in the past.
This allegation of abuse was particularly alarming because in Danziger’s interview with Casey when she was first arrested he had asked her specifically if she had ever been sexually abused and she had said no. Dr. Danziger had given her the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standard tool for a psychologist that he had taken special training to administer. Comprised of five hundred questions, the test is designed to discover mental illness or personality disorder. In all respects, she scored within normal ranges, Dr. Danziger said. He described her demeanor during the interviews as pleasant and happy, saying that the only emotion she showed was anger when she was describing her father.
That day, we did not complete Dr. Danziger’s deposition, because we weren’t anticipating the volume of information that he gave us. We agreed to reset it a few days later.
We didn’t have much time to process everything we had heard. Dr. William Weitz was scheduled to talk with us that same day after lunch, and to the best of my memory, that deposition went like this:
We went through the same procedure with him as we had with Dr. Danziger, slowly and carefully reviewing his notes. He did not have the same reluctance as Dr. Danziger to relay his information to us.
As far as molestation went, Casey had basically told him the same story she had told Danziger: the abuse started when she was eight and included all manner of sexual activity. But she told him that the sexual activity