Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [14]
“You’re saying that everything contained in these statements is true and accurate?” he asked her.
“Yes,” replied Casey.
Melich wanted to be certain that Casey knew what was going on before launching into the consequences of lying.
“I want to explain what happens if you make a false report or if there’s something about this incident that you’re not telling us the truth about.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want to make sure I make it perfectly clear that if you want to go ahead and rescind this statement and if you want to tell me a different story about what happened, if you’re trying to fabricate a story to kind of make something look a little bit better, now is your time to tell me. Are you telling me that this is the story you want to stick with?”
“That’s the truth,” Casey said. “It’s the story I’m gonna stick with, yes.” It was an odd choice of words. While on the one hand she was simply parroting back Melich’s language, that wording left open the possibility that there were other versions beyond the one she was selecting. It was the story she was “sticking with,” but did that make it the truth? Either way, she’d been given the chance to correct a story that already stretched credibility, but instead she’d vigorously insisted that her statement was accurate in every way.
For the next hour, she matter-of-factly took the detective through her version of events, repeating and in some cases elaborating on what she’d said in her initial statement to Corporal Fletcher. When Melich arrived at Zanny, he began to probe a bit deeper.
“So you knew her before you had your child?” Melich asked.
“Well, I met her just before. I was actually pregnant at the time,” Casey responded.
“When did she start watching your child?”
“It’s been within the last year and a half, two years that she started watching Caylee. I had another friend watch Caylee that I’ve known since middle school. When she went back to school I was looking for a new nanny. Jeff offered to have Zenaida watch both kids. She agreed, and it kind of went from there.”
Detective Melich asked for Jeff’s phone number, but Casey claimed it was stored in her personal phone, which she had lost. She said she had reported the phone missing to security at Universal Studios nine days earlier. Launching into what proved to be a convoluted explanation, she said that even though she still had the phone’s SIM card, which stored her numbers, she lacked Jeff’s specific number because it had been saved on the internal memory of the phone she’d lost. It was a bizarre explanation, one that was technically problematic but also raised questions about why she appeared to be making it harder to get in touch with Jeff Hopkins. But more to the point, she seemed to have an excuse for everything.
Melich turned the conversation back to the nanny. Casey said that Zanny had only lived in the Sawgrass complex for four months, but she described in detail going to get Caylee on the day she went missing:
“I got off of work, left Universal, driving back to pick up Caylee like a normal day. And I show up to the apartment, knock on the door. Nobody answers. So, I called Zenaida’s cell phone and it’s out of service. Says that the phone is no longer in service. Excuse me! So, I sit down on the steps and wait for a little bit to see if maybe it was just a fluke, if something happened. And time passed. I didn’t hear from anyone. No one showed up to the house so I went over to Jay Blanchard Park and checked a couple other places where maybe possibly they would’ve gone. A couple stores, just regular places that I know Zenaida shops at and she’s taken Caylee before. And after about seven o’clock when I still hadn’t heard anything I was getting pretty upset, pretty frantic.”
Casey said she opted to stay with her boyfriend, Anthony Lazzaro, rather than in her own house. “I went