Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [20]
Allen went on to emphasize the contradictions in Casey’s story. She said she was afraid of calling the police, but once they were there, she lied to them. She said she wanted the police to help, but she fed them more lies. In short, she didn’t seem like someone who cared about finding her daughter.
“Now, you know,” Allen continued, “by hiding this, by burying this, you are not going to get yourself to a better place. What you’re going to do is make everybody else around you suffer, and at some point, this thing is going to come out. It always does. It always comes out. Now your best bet is to try to put this thing behind you as quickly as you can. Go to your parents and tell them, you know, some horrible accident, whatever happened, get it out in the open now, instead of letting them worry and worry and worry, okay?. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” Casey answered.
“At some point, you are going to want to mend things with your family. You let this drag out for another three days, another week, another two weeks, and you make us solve this some other way, and we’ll solve it, we always do. There’s no point in coming forward and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is what really happened,’ once we’ve already figured it out.”
In retrospect, this entire scene is astounding. To those of us who have experience with this kind of questioning, at least one of the tactics used by the officers should have gotten through. I have seen countless sessions like this one unfold, and as the evidence mounts, those who have never been through a police interrogation will usually leap at the opportunity to justify their conduct by adopting an explanation that’s less morally repugnant than the facts would suggest. Whether because of guilt, fear, self-interest, or all of the above, sooner or later the truth comes out. However, it seemed that no appeal—not to Caylee’s safety, not to the damaging impact this was having on her family—could stir a reaction in Casey. She remained unmoved by Sergeant Allen’s invitation to explain that what happened to Caylee was an accident and spare her family the pain of not knowing.
Allen moved on to a different tactic, appealing to Casey’s sense of guilt and responsibility over the lies themselves. On a normal person this might have worked. But Casey was far from normal.
“Have you ever had anybody do anything wrong to you?” Sergeant Allen asked. “Have you ever had anybody hurt you in any way?”
“Of course.”
“Let me ask you a question. . . . When someone’s hurt you in the past, and they come to you and say, ‘I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. I’m really sorry for what happened,’ do you forgive them?”
Casey said she would.
“What about if somebody who does something to you and then lies and lies and lies and lies. Do you forgive them?”
“It’s a lot harder to,” Casey replied.
“A lot harder to? Tell me the last time someone hurt you over and over and let you suffer for a long time and then you caught them. Well, once you caught them, that apology doesn’t mean a thing, right?”
Allen let her think about that for a minute before he went on.
“There’s nothing you’re going to tell any of the three of us that’s going to surprise us, okay? I’ve had to sit down with mothers who rolled over on their babies accidentally. I’ve had to sit down with mothers whose kid had drowned in a swimming pool. . . . I’ve had mothers whose boyfriends have beaten their kids to death, who felt horrible about