Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [138]
The phone conversation between Kristina Chester, a friend of hers, and Casey provided me with one of the quotes I found most telling about the young mother at the defense table. Kristina had been trying to get Casey to talk about Caylee, but Casey only wanted to talk to Tony and was desperate for somebody to give her his phone number. Kristina kept asking if Tony was involved in Caylee’s disappearance, and Casey kept answering in the negative. Finally, after Casey asked for Tony’s number for the umpteenth time, Kristina asked, “So why do you want to talk to him?” and Casey answered narcissistically, “Because he’s myyyyy boyfriend.”
Kristina said, “If anything happens to Caylee, I’ll die,” and started to cry. Casey seemed quite annoyed by her friend’s tears. “Oh my God, calling you guys? A waste, a huge waste,” she said in reply.
Cindy began to sob again on the witness stand, head hung low, when she heard her daughter so callously dismissing her friend’s emotional state. She also sobbed when Casey talked about how her family had let her down. Casey, sitting at the defense table only a few feet from her mother, made no response or reaction at all to the tape or her mother.
During cross-examination, Cindy’s ambivalence that we’d been witnessing for the last three years came roaring back. She spent some time painting an idealistic picture of Casey as a mother, and even when talking about why she thought Casey’s long-term lies were so elaborate and detailed, she couldn’t help but excuse Casey. To her, the scope and intricacy of the lies implied that they were illusions, not lies. Cindy equated them to a situation where children create imaginary people.
Once again, Cindy appeared to be whitewashing every bad behavior her daughter demonstrated. The codependency between Cindy and her daughter was striking. She was finding it impossible to make Casey accountable for anything. Maybe she was putting a lot of the blame for Caylee’s death on herself: if only she had not pushed Casey so hard, if only she had been more generous with her time, then maybe no one would be here. I was finding it hard to stomach the fact that Casey was sitting so close to her mother, who was falling on the sword for her, with a derisive sneer on her face.
Even Cindy’s testimony about the pool ladder was suspect. When Cindy had originally told coworkers about coming home to find the ladder on the pool, she had not pinpointed an exact date. But now, in response to questions from Linda, she was claiming that it was the evening of June 16, when she arrived home from work, that she found the ladder on the pool and the access gate to the backyard open. Cindy said she was absolutely certain she had put the ladder down, therefore making it inaccessible, the night before.
One point she remained steadfast on was the smell. Baez tried to get Cindy to say that the odor in the trunk didn’t smell like rotting flesh. He asked her to choose which it resembled more—garbage or rotting flesh. “The closest thing I could resemble it to was rotting flesh,” she honestly answered. That was her strongest statement on the issue. It shows why sometimes it’s better to quit while you’re ahead.
Frank was the man to examine the next witness, Amy Huizenga. Amy had been the person who took Cindy to Tony Lazzaro’s apartment to get Casey on July 15. After Casey came out and saw her mother waiting for her, Amy said there was a massive mother-daughter explosion. She described Casey’s demeanor in the car with Cindy after the three of them left Tony’s together. She said Casey sat in the front seat with her arms crossed, giving glaring looks, “like a sixteen-year-old who’d been caught doing something bad.” The conversation between the two in the car was either one-way or circuitous, Casey only speaking