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Detective Melich asked Casey to accompany him back to the Central Operations Building to work on missing child fliers. There, Melich and Casey walked into the glassed entrance, past the reception area and a store selling T-shirts, patches, and other law-enforcement-related items. While Casey stayed in the division’s waiting room with Sergeant Wells, Melich went to talk to Sergeant Allen.

Their conversation didn’t last long. Melich believed that Casey had committed the crime of child abuse in leaving Caylee for so long without reporting her missing. Even if the story she’d told had been true, her failure to do anything to find her child would have constituted child abuse. While Caylee’s actual fate was unknown, no matter what had happened to her, Casey was, at the very least, guilty of neglect. She had lied to law enforcement about dropping Caylee at a nanny’s house, about alerting two friends that Caylee had been kidnapped, and about having recently spoken to her daughter. Clearly, leaving her out of jail was not going to get them any closer to finding Caylee. They discussed a concern that, if left on her own, Casey would take her own life, like Melinda Duckett, another Central Florida mother whose toddler had gone missing. After the disappearance, Melinda taped a segment on Nancy Grace to help get clues to bring her two-year-old son home. She committed suicide after Nancy pointed out inconsistencies in her story and exposed her embarrassing past as a porn star.

No one wanted that to happen to Casey, so Melich did the logical thing. He decided to arrest Casey Anthony then and there.

CHAPTER SIX

KIDNAPPED OR MURDERED?

From the beginning, there was something about this case that drew people to it, something in the story that simply struck a nerve. While I’ve always understood that fascination, what astounded me was how quickly Caylee’s disappearance affected people. It was literally overnight. As early as the morning after Casey’s arrest, I remember that Caylee was the topic of the day at the Orange County State Attorney’s Office—just as she would be almost every day for the next three years.

When I arrived for work on the morning of Thursday, July 17, everybody was commenting on what might have happened to two-year-old Caylee. The story her mother was telling was so far-fetched that any theory we came up with could be entertained. Most of us thought that perhaps Casey had placed the child somewhere to spite her mother. Clearly those close to Casey felt the same way; members of the Anthony family were already on television asking for the public’s help in bringing little Caylee home.

That morning, Casey Anthony appeared before a judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida for the first time. The purpose of the proceeding is to ensure that arrestees know their rights and why they are in custody. The judge’s role is to review the evidence to ensure that it’s sufficiently strong to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed. A defendant’s first appearance is fairly routine, and he appears by video link from the jail three miles away, which was what Casey did that morning.

Appearing by video, Casey was accompanied by her newly acquired counsel, Jose Baez, and his associate, Jose Garcia. Casey, who was shorter in stature than either man, stood silently behind the podium looking pale and tired. Few sleep well on their first night in jail. Casey’s cell mate had recommended Baez, who was a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer from Kissimmee, Florida, and whatever arrangements Casey had made to pay him were unknown, since it appeared that she had so little money that she had been stealing from others. Prior to Baez’s arrival that day, I had never heard of him.

On that first day, Casey’s appearance was brief. In a hearing lasting less than one minute, the judge determined that Casey should initially be held without bond, so she was returned to protective custody at the Orange County Jail, and the search for her daughter continued without her.

Seeing as how Casey