Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [122]
As with all criminal cases, we the prosecution got our facts from the investigators and experts who have worked the case, and we had to build these facts into the best case we could at trial. After we had gotten the evidence from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, we knew our strong points and began to develop them. We knew Caylee’s skull had three pieces of duct tape across the nose and mouth. We had Casey’s tattoo, “Bella Vita,” so we had a strong motive that Casey desired a life not burdened by having a child. We had lots of evidence tying Casey to the homicide, the Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, the laundry bag, and of course, the duct tape. Furthermore, we had forensic evidence in the form of the odor and the hair analysis which demonstrated that Caylee had been in the trunk of the Pontiac.
Casey had not reported her daughter missing for thirty-one days, a crime in itself in my mind. She had spun lies until they dead-ended and could go no further, about everything from a phantom nanny to where she worked to where she had been those four and a half weeks. In our opinion, none of this was the behavior of a grieving mother. Even though police had not given Casey a polygraph, I believe she was such a good liar she would have likely passed it anyway. A lie detector would only prove just how convinced she was of her own fictions.
As happy as we were with our strong points, we had to consider our weak points as well. After all, absent a cause of death, this was a circumstantial case. To us, the presence of chloroform in the trunk pointed to Casey using it on Caylee, probably to knock her out. However, no chloroform was found in the Anthonys’ home when it had been searched. Similarly, there had been a “how to make chloroform” search performed on Casey’s computer in March of 2008, but three months had gone by before Caylee died, which left a gap between when she conducted the search and when the child was last seen.
It would be harder to argue that Casey had used chloroform on Caylee when she had not made a more recent search, however, we had the evidence of chloroform in the trunk and we had discovered something interesting on Ricardo Morales’s MySpace page. An advertisement-style photo of a man and a woman on an upscale date in a restaurant mentions the powerful anesthetic. The man is leaning over the woman to kiss her neck, and in the hand obscured from her view is a man’s handkerchief. The caption states, “Win her over with chloroform.”
This posting may have aroused Casey’s curiosity about the knockout potential of chloroform, and gotten her to thinking of using it. But we really weren’t sure how our chloroform theory would hold up in court. At the time, our computer forensics person had reported that there had been searches performed on the Anthonys’ home computer that included the word “chloroform,” “how to make chloroform,” and one search for “how to break a neck.”
Another challenge was overcoming the fact that everyone said Casey was a good mother. Caylee never showed evidence of abuse or neglect. Friends of Casey said she was fond of her daughter, nobody had seen her become annoyed or short-tempered with her daughter. Caylee’s room was neat and tidy and filled with toys.
This was an area where more candid testimony from Cindy Anthony would have been helpful. We knew from Cindy’s coworkers that Cindy had her own doubts about Casey’s parenting of Caylee and that Cindy felt Casey wanted to party too much rather than take care of her daughter. We also knew that some had even gone so far as to suggest to Cindy that she seek custody of Caylee, a drastic move to be sure, but also one that Cindy seemed to have considered. If Cindy had owned up to those conflicts with