Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [29]
These words were a surprising turnaround for a woman who less than ten days earlier had seemed ready to have her daughter declared an unfit mother. In truth, it was during this time that Cindy Anthony seemed the most ambivalent in her feelings about Casey’s behavior. There had certainly been enough to justify her original feelings. As Cindy had alluded to in her 911 call, Casey had been stealing from her parents for months in amounts totaling several thousand dollars, but more recently they’d learned that she’d been stealing from Cindy’s mother as well. The theft was uncovered before Casey had left with Caylee. Combine this with Casey’s lies over the thirty-one days, and Cindy’s anger on July 15 was understandable. That resentment had probably spilled over into that 911 phone call. A couple of days after Casey’s arrest, however, Cindy was far more protective and defensive of Casey’s actions. She had changed course. No longer did she suspect that Casey had been involved in something nefarious. Instead, she justified Casey’s not coming forward. According to Cindy, Casey’s behavior made sense.
“No one can imagine why you wouldn’t go to the police. Well, I can imagine a reason,” Cindy Anthony later said to the press. She said that Casey’s lack of emotion and odd, conflicting stories only supported the idea that Casey was doing everything she could to protect Caylee and her family from danger. It was a strained logic that neither the court nor the media seemed eager to embrace.
The difficulty for Linda at the hearing was that since Casey was only arrested for child abuse, she was entitled to bond. Under Florida law, generally only persons charged with offenses punishable by life imprisonment or death can be held without bond, and while this was trending toward becoming a murder case, it wasn’t there yet. Linda argued that Casey’s knowledge that this might someday be a murder charge gave her a reason to flee, and thus argued for an extremely high bond.
At the end of the three-hour hearing, Judge Strickland set bond at $500,000 on the felony child neglect count. He also ordered that Casey be placed on home confinement with electronic monitoring, be evaluated by two psychiatrists, Jeffrey Danzinger and Allen Burns, and that she surrender her passport upon her release from jail. Casey’s attorney called the half-million-dollar bond “outrageous,” saying it was more than the Anthony family could afford. That afternoon, Casey was returned to the Orange County Jail, where she remained. No one had $500,000.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JAILHOUSE CONVERSATIONS
In the days following Casey’s arrest, the split personality that the Anthonys had displayed at the bond hearing continued. They wanted to believe Casey, as she held the only clues to finding Caylee, but no one—not George, Cindy, or Lee—seemed convinced that she could be trusted.
Between Casey’s lies and the groundless theories sprouting up around Orlando, the only certain thing about the case was that it was exploding in the media. From the local papers to the national news, everyone, it seemed, had taken up the cause of finding Caylee. It put additional strain on Cindy and George, and as the fervor built around them, made it harder and harder for them to deal with the twenty-four-hour news circus outside their front door. The strange disappearance of Caylee had become a story around the country, and as Caylee’s most public and determined advocates, Cindy and George became the face of the campaign to find her—a role that, understandably, neither of them took to well. Every few days it seemed as if they floated a new possibility about where Caylee was, which would send the media into a frenzy, but they never offered any possibilities of real substance. In truth, they were as clueless as the rest of us. Casey wasn’t giving them much to go on either.
But their difficulties in managing the media did little to discourage their search for