Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [24]
CASEY ANTHONY: There’s nothing . . .
LEE ANTHONY: . . . some issues.
CASEY ANTHONY: . . . to find out. There’s absolutely nothing to find out. Not even what I told the detectives.
LEE ANTHONY: Well, you know, everything that you’re telling them is a lie.
CASEY ANTHONY: I have no clue where Caylee is. If I knew where Caylee was do you think any of this would be happening? No.
Finding Lee as much of a “waste” as Cindy, Casey next spoke to her friend Kristina Chester, who was at the house with Cindy and Lee. Casey hoped Kristina would finally give her Tony’s phone number. Once more, Casey ran into difficulty. All Casey wanted was Tony’s phone number, but all everyone else wanted was to find Caylee.
KRISTINA CHESTER: I said does Tony have anything to do with Caylee.
CASEY ANTHONY: No, Tony had nothing to do with Caylee.
KRISTINA CHESTER: Oh, so why, why do you want to talk to him?
CASEY ANTHONY: Because . . .
KRISTINA CHESTER: You probably don’t want to tell me.
CASEY ANTHONY: . . . he’s my boyfriend and I want to actually try to sit and talk to him because I didn’t get a chance to talk to him earlier because I got arrested on a fucking whim today. Because they’re blaming me for stuff that I never would do. That I didn’t do.
KRISTINA CHESTER: Okay. Well, I’m on nobody’s, I’m on your side. You know that, right?
CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, uh, sweetie, I know that. I just want to talk to Tony and get a little bit of . . .
KRISTINA CHESTER: But . . .
CASEY ANTHONY: . . . of, of . . .
KRISTINA CHESTER: . . . Casey, you have to tell me if you know anything about Caylee.
CASEY ANTHONY: Sweetheart, if I . . .
KRISTINA CHESTER: If anything happens to Caylee, Casey, I’ll die [crying]. You understand I’ll die if anything happens to . . .
CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, well . . .
KRISTINA CHESTER: . . . that baby [continuing to cry]
CASEY ANTHONY: Oh, my God. Calling you guys, a waste. A huge waste. Honey, I love you. You know I would not let anything happen to my daughter. If I knew where she was this wouldn’t be going on.
It was a striking series of phone calls. As each of her three conversations led her back to Caylee, all she did was try to get to Tony. Even as everyone worried about her daughter, she seemed more preoccupied with trying to sustain her fledgling relationship. Her sense of priorities was baffling, and in the end, this only added to the portrait of her as callous and uncaring about her missing daughter.
AT THAT POINT THE CRITICAL focus of the investigation was on determining just how much of Casey’s story was a lie. The detectives’ hope was that if they could find a hint of truth somewhere, that hint might lead them to Caylee.
Ever since Casey had named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, aka Zanny the Nanny, as the person she had last seen with Caylee, Detective Melich had been trying to locate her. While Casey’s wild-goose chase the previous day had yielded nothing of real substance, there was one promising lead on Zanny: the guest card with the name “Zenaida Gonzalez” and a phone number on it that Melich had been given by the manager at the Sawgrass Apartments. Melich had called the number and reached a woman going by the name of Zenaida who lived in Kissimmee, about thirty minutes south of Orlando. She said she was forty-two, had six children, and drove a car with New York license plates. She was friendly and cooperative. However, she denied knowing Casey or Caylee Anthony or having ever been employed as a babysitter.
Zenaida agreed to give a sworn statement to an investigator, and on July 17, Missing Persons Investigator Awilda McBryde and Investigator Kari Roderick visited her at her home. She was shown photos of Casey and Caylee and denied knowing either. Likewise, Casey was unable to identify this Zenaida from a packet of photos shown to her.
How and why Zenaida Gonzalez came into Casey’s crosshairs has never been