Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [11]
Lee was hoping to talk to Casey alone in her room, but Cindy kept slamming in and out, venting her frustration and threatening to call the police. Once he convinced her to stay out, he attempted to talk with Casey, brother to sister. He pleaded with her to tell Cindy where Caylee was. He even offered to go and see her by himself so he could reassure everyone that she was safe. He couldn’t fathom why Casey was going to such great lengths to upset their mother. Yet he received the same response that Cindy had: Caylee was with her babysitter, probably asleep, and should not be disturbed.
Cindy continued with her angry outbursts while Lee and Casey talked. During one of her rantings, she informed them that she had called the police and they were on their way. Still, Casey’s story stayed calmly consistent.
Lee didn’t think the situation warranted the police. As a last-ditch effort, he decided to try role-playing, and he told Casey to imagine he was a police officer.
In the voice of an imaginary cop, he introduced himself and informed Casey that her mother had contacted law enforcement, concerned about the welfare of Caylee. He acted coplike as he explained that the best way to quickly resolve the matter would be for Casey to take him to Caylee so he could see the little girl for himself.
For her part, Casey sat stone-faced, not revealing anything, but giving Lee’s logic some consideration. After ten to fifteen seconds of silent reflection, she began to cry.
“You want to know the truth?” she asked him. “I haven’t seen my daughter in thirty-one days.” Believing that he had finally broken through, Lee leaned in, whispering to keep Cindy from hearing, and questioned Casey more. All she would say was that “she was kidnapped.”
Lee was stunned. For all his commitment to resolving the conflict between his sister and his mother, he had never entertained the thought that Caylee was actually in danger. How could his little niece be missing? How could she have been kidnapped, and how could Casey keep that fact a secret?
What Lee didn’t realize was that he was witnessing the birth of a lie.Something had made Casey determine that she wasn’t going to be able to produce Caylee under any circumstances, and so she made up a story about a kidnapping. In the coming months, we in the prosecutor’s office would title this first spontaneous fabrication, sprung from desperation, Casey Anthony 2.0.
WHILE LEE WAS GIVING HIS statement about the events of earlier in the evening, Casey was being interviewed by Corporal Fletcher. She told him that on the Monday after Father’s Day, sometime between 9 A.M. and 1 P.M., she took her daughter to the apartment of her current babysitter, Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, also known as Zanny. She had been introduced to the woman eighteen months earlier by her friend Jeffrey Hopkins, who had also hired Zanny to babysit his son, Zachary. She said that Zanny was half black and half Puerto Rican, twenty-five years old, and originally from New York. She described her as being five feet seven and 140 pounds, with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes. She even said that her birthday was in September. She gave Zanny’s address as the Sawgrass Apartments on South Conway Road in Orlando. There, she said, Zanny and two roommates, Raquel Flora and Jennifer Rosa, shared Apartment 210.
After dropping her daughter off at Zanny’s that Monday, Casey said, she had gone to her job at Universal Studios, where, she claimed, she was an event planner. At the end of the day, around 5 P.M., Casey drove straight back to the Sawgrass Apartments to pick up her daughter, but no one was home. She tried Zanny’s cell phone number and was surprised to learn that the line was out of service, since it had been working earlier in the day. Casey said that she spent two hours on the steps to the second floor of the building waiting for Caylee and Zanny to return, thinking they were either having car trouble or were just running late. It seemed odd to me