Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [121]
“I know that Casey did something to Caylee,” he told me. “I just don’t know what.”
Hearing him utter those words was actually heartbreaking because he seemed very torn between the real affection he still felt for his daughter and the greater affection he had for his granddaughter.
“We don’t expect you not to love your daughter,” I told him. “Or have any of this affect your feelings for her.”
“This case has been about Casey for far too long, and not enough about Caylee,” he replied.
I couldn’t have agreed with him more and I told him so, which seemed to please him.
I shared a few things with him that we were planning on doing at the trial, and he seemed comfortable with all of it. George lit up when I told him the first part of his testimony would be about Caylee. He really seemed to miss talking about her. For so long, everybody had been talking so much about Casey that Caylee was often forgotten.
I told him how we had to prepare for the worst, even though the defense had withdrawn the names of Dr. Danziger and Dr. Weitz from its witness list. Now that we knew they had the molestation card in their hand, we didn’t know how or when they would play it. I told George how we would handle these accusations of sexual abuse, if they were made. That we were going to allow him to immediately deny and refute them. We were going to address them head-on if they were brought up. I took him through the various stages of his testimony, and what he should expect. All he needed to do was be truthful.
George definitely seemed like he wanted to tell his story and tell it for the last time. He just wanted it done. The hardest part of our conversation was when I had to bring up his suicide attempt. I told him that if the defense was going to accuse him of killing Caylee, the strongest piece of evidence refuting that was the suicide note, and that really seemed to hit him hard.
He made a comment along the lines of “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” that kind of thing. I think he was prepared to deal with it. It was best for both of us that he was prepared to talk about it, if it came up.
As we were wrapping up, George turned to me and said, “I’m happy this trial is finally happening. This way I can finally know the truth.”
I looked at him, and spent a brief moment looking into the eyes of a man that I’d spent nearly three years grappling with. In that time, I’d found him both maddeningly frustrating and tragically relatable. He didn’t deserve what he’d been put through—no one did. But still it was hard to ignore how even now, he could not totally confront what I felt was the plain, undisputable truth: that Casey killed Caylee. Still, even if Casey was found guilty, even if the jury believed our version of the truth, that didn’t mean he’d be able to completely embrace the idea that his daughter was a killer, and it didn’t mean all his questions would be answered. That’s the tricky thing about justice. As much as I wanted to assure him that everything was going to be okay, I knew from every trial I’d ever worked on—from the traffic division to homicide—that justice rarely feels like you expect it to. I wanted to tell him that we’d finally know the facts, but I also had a responsibility to be brutally honest with this man, who’d spent too much time being lied to and lying to himself.
“We probably will never really know the truth. The truth was buried inside Casey, and we just have to accept that we may never get to the bottom of it.”
BUT WHAT OF OUR TRUTH? What about the truth that we on the prosecution had come to believe in? What was our version of the events? The evidence in the case told us that Casey had murdered her daughter, and the State had committed to allowing the jury to decide