Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [124]
In Casey’s eyes, Ricardo was a potential dad to Caylee. He wasn’t much of a party guy, preferring to stay home in the evenings. Casey, Caylee, and Ricardo were like a little family unit. Caylee fit right into this lifestyle. The next problem started when Casey started dating Tony Lazzaro.
Tony was different from Ricardo. He was a night owl and a nightclub promoter. He had a totally different lifestyle that had no room for a little kid. Why not just leave Caylee with Cindy in that case? We thought it was probably because Casey didn’t want her mother all over her about ignoring Caylee, but we also knew that Cindy was growing frustrated with Casey’s entitled behavior. For a while, Casey had been dropping Caylee off at Gentiva, where Cindy worked, and basically taking advantage of Cindy as a babysitter whenever she wanted. We knew this from the depositions of Cindy’s coworkers, but Cindy herself always stonewalled inquiries about any conflict in the relationship, so we were left with just hearsay. However, something happened the night of June 15 that triggered a blowout.
Cindy had become increasingly exasperated as one thing piled on another: missing money; unauthorized charges on her credit card; either dumping Caylee on her or withholding Caylee from her, whatever suited Casey’s fancy; and generally irresponsible behavior. The only specific rumor that we had heard about that meltdown on the fifteenth was that Cindy had found pictures of Casey at an “anything but clothes” party on Facebook and had lost her last bit of patience. In the photos, Casey was wrapped in an American flag and holding a beer. Cindy was enraged. Our theory held that Casey decided that night of June 15 that she was going to take Caylee from the household for good.
I imagine Casey told herself some lie to rationalize that murdering her baby was best for Caylee. Maybe she told herself that she didn’t want Caylee to grow up with Cindy, as she had. Or maybe she knew that it wouldn’t be long before Caylee began to really talk, and once that happened, the made- up babysitter, the fake job, the whole world would come crashing down. When you are that good at lying to other people, you get really good at lying to yourself. This was all guesswork on our part. What Casey was actually thinking, we will never know.
I would tell the jury that Casey used chloroform to put Caylee to sleep so she wouldn’t suffer, put duct tape over her nose and mouth, wrapped her in her favorite Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, and put her in the trunk to die. She went off to Tony’s and went on with her life with Caylee dead in the trunk. The next day, she went back to her house after George and Cindy had left for work and backed the Pontiac into the garage. She got the laundry bag and garbage bags off the shelves where they were kept, and took Caylee into the backyard to bury her. The shed was locked, so she couldn’t access the tools. She went next door to borrow a shovel from their neighbor, Brian Burner, telling him she was transplanting bamboo.
Back in her own yard, which was protected from view by a six-foot high stockade fence, she laid Caylee’s lifeless body on the grass. It appeared to us that she started a grave, based on the cadaver dog alert, but she got lazy or scared and decided against burial there. She put Caylee back in the trunk, and either that day or the next, snuck out to the woods, walked twenty feet in, and dumped her body.
I don’t think that Casey thought through how she would get away with this in the long run. Her ability to adapt and lie had always gotten her through to this point, so why should it fail her now? It always reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara—“I’ll think