Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [140]
After Lee Anthony, jurors heard from Orange County Sheriff’s officers Rendon Fletcher, Adrianna Acevedo, Amanda Macklin, and Reginald Hosey, who all testified to the arrival at the Anthony house on July 15, 2008. Yuri Melich, the lead investigator on the case, was then called to the stand to address his first interview with Casey on July 15, describing his general opinion of Casey as well as the trip they’d taken to the Sawgrass Apartments in search of Zanny. He told the jury that from this first interview he thought Casey’s story about the nanny was suspect.
When the defense had its turn to cross-examine, Baez dropped a hand grenade, saying he had evidence that Melich was biased toward the prosecution. His attack was based on a blog posting the officer had once made where he referred to himself as “Dick Tracy Orlando.” The court asked the defense to point out specific statements that showed bias, per its accusation. After a lot of downtime, the court found that the issue might certainly go to the professionalism of Melich, but not to his credibility.
One of my favorite courtroom moments, though, was later on during the cross-examination when Baez was asking Melich questions about his first recorded interview with Casey. Melich had asked her if she had drug problems.
“Then you asked her if she’s ever committed suicide?” Jose said.
Melich paused, with a quizzical look on his face. “I don’t think I could have asked her if she ever committed suicide, ’cause if she had she wouldn’t be there,” he intelligently replied. Everyone in the courtroom had a chuckle during that moment of levity. At the close of Yuri’s first testimony, June 2, Day 8 of the trial, we let Judge Perry know that we were halfway through our case. We thought we were moving forward at a very expeditious rate. We were doing our best to be mindful of everybody’s time, especially the jury’s.
Our next witness was Jeff Hopkins, the subject of many of Casey’s alibis. We called Hopkins to show how Casey used details from her past to craft plausible lies, and he told jurors that he and Casey had met in middle school, though they were not friends. He had worked at Universal in 2002, years before Casey had worked there, but she had referred to him as a coworker. Reiterating what we’d learned three years earlier, Hopkins said he didn’t have any children, so the nanny connection was puzzling, but he did relate the story of running into Casey at a bar in Orlando in July 2008, after not having seen her for years.
Jeff Hopkins was a perfect example of the collateral damage of Casey’s narcissism. He had known her as a cute kid in middle school, hadn’t seen her in years, ran into her by pure coincidence in an Orlando hot spot, and now here he was three years later, practically a household name. The havoc one person spewing lies could wreak on the normal lives of so many others always amazed me.
Yuri Melich was much more seasoned in the witness box than Hopkins. When he was recalled to the stand after the Hopkins’ testimony, he described the walk-through of Universal Studios. Recalling that bizarre day, Melich relayed how Casey “walked with purpose through Universal.” He figured he’d let her go and see where the lie would end. During his testimony, we took an hour to play the video of the interview he had conducted with Casey right at the theme park. Just how far-reaching the scope of the search for Caylee had been came out in Melich’s second testimony. He said his office had received more than six thousand tips of Caylee sightings from all over the country in the weeks and months after her disappearance. To me, this number was such a testament to how much people had invested themselves in finding Caylee alive, because there was not a chance that even one of the six thousand tips was a match.
Baez’s cross-examination took the questioning to the family pool. He was curious why Melich had never questioned Casey about her mother Cindy’s reference to the occasion when the pool ladder had been in the pool and the side gate was open.