Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [110]
As to the day of the tragedy, she added a few additional details to the version she’d told Danziger. She began by talking about being awakened by George and by him coming into the house with Caylee. Those details were the same.
The new detail was about the clothing. She told Dr. Weitz that Caylee went to bed wearing a nightgown, but when George brought her into the house in the morning she was wearing different clothes, striped shorts and a pink shirt, implying that George had changed her clothes. She explained in great detail that George’s upper body was wet but that his lower body was not. The doctor took that as an indication that George held Caylee underwater while he himself was outside the pool. It seemed important to Casey to say that only her father’s shirt was wet. She repeated her assertion that Caylee could not have died by accident and that George had murdered her.
She said that George yelled at her, “It’s your fault. It’s your fault. You’re a bad mother.” She said that she saw George carrying Caylee out of the house. She also told Dr. Weitz that she wasn’t sure Caylee was dead, that in fact she thought Caylee might actually have been alive. From time to time during the thirty-one days, George would tell her that Caylee was okay.
She claimed that for the next thirty-one days, she was in a fog. She did not have a clear recollection of what she did or why she did it. She did tell him that she was not a “party girl.” In explaining the “Bella Vita” tattoo, she said it was an ironic comment on the fact that her life hadn’t been beautiful. Dr. Weitz could not elaborate further on what she meant by that statement. This was as far as we got in our first interview with him.
The goal of our initial interviews had been to gather the basic facts with the intention of conducting more probative examinations in the days ahead. But on the morning of our next scheduled appointment with Dr. Danziger, we received a call from Jose Baez saying that he wanted to withdraw him as a witness. There was no need for deposition, he said. No sooner had he dropped the eleventh-hour witness on our doorstep than he whisked him away.
I wanted to proceed, and when Jose and Danziger arrived at our office I insisted we continue the questioning. We questioned him briefly, but then Jose said he wanted to call Judge Perry to prevent me from asking another question. We did, and the judge said that just to be safe, if I wanted to continue, I’d have to file a motion, and we of course complied.
Dr. Weitz was also scheduled to give a deposition that day. When he arrived at the office, Jose did not interfere. Dr. Weitz told us that he had reviewed Dr. Dangizer’s report. He brought to our attention Dr. Danziger’s MMPI results and agreed they were normal. Dr. Weitz had given her a battery of tests, including one designed to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by trauma like sexual victimization. The test did not support the conclusion that she had been victimized. Weitz explained it this way to me: I am not diagnosing her as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but all of these things that she did were as a result of the denial of having been sexually molested. You can understand all of this behavior by denial and suppression.
“So, when Casey said that Caylee was with the nanny, she believed it?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Weitz said.
“When she was taking the cops through Universal, did she believe she worked there?”
“Yes.”
“So what happened when she got to the end of the hall?” I questioned.
“Well, people can go in and out of denial” was his easy answer.
I didn’t know denial could ebb and flow like that, but I was no psychologist.
After we took the doctors’ depositions, both