Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [31]
“The wrecker, I don’t know what the gentleman’s name [is]. I still don’t know. But he and I opened up the door and he said, ‘Whoa, does that stink.’ I sat in the car for a second. I opened up the passenger door because I was trying to vent that thing.
“You know and I smell and I’m like, ‘Oh, God.’ I tried to start the car for a second and I said, ‘No, George, if there’s something wrong. You got to find out now. You can’t take it away.’ I told the guy, I said, ‘Will you please walk around to the back of this car and look inside this with me?’ As I walked around, I don’t believe I said to him, you know, aloud, and I think I whispered out to myself, ‘Please don’t let this be my Caylee.’ That’s what I thought. That’s what my heart was saying. I opened it up and that’s when I seen that bag. I did see a stain. I think it’s right about where the spare tire was at.”
“The guy said, ‘Sir, I’ll take care of it. I’ll get rid of it.’ But the smell never went away. When I drove around I told my wife, I said, ‘This car stinks so bad I can’t, I don’t know how I can drive it home.’ It’s raining outside. Oh, well, I have the windows down in the car probably about this much,” he explained, gesturing about halfway. “I couldn’t freaking breathe. The air conditioning and stuff . . .”
Melich asked if Cindy had noticed the smell.
“Oh, after we pulled inside the garage she said, her exact words were, ‘Jesus Christ, what died?’ That’s exactly what she said. But then she said it in a way, she says, ‘George, it was the pizza, right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it was the pizza.’ And I let it go at that, but I’m sitting here, as the grandfather, as the father, as George Anthony, and as a guy who smelled the smell before years ago, and you just never forget it. I even stuck my nose down on it and I’m concerned.”
Melich let that thought sink in before continuing, “Do you think the reason your daughter doesn’t want to tell us what happened is for fear of what her mom might do? Might say I told you so, or something along that? Do you think that it would be so disappointing to mom and that’s why [Casey’s] taking this to the bitter end?”
“Now, my daughter lives on the edge. You know that from all the lies. All the contradictions. And like my daughter takes things as far as she can take them. And then she piles on some other stuff. This is going to sound really crazy at the point, but my wife and I still believe that Casey still resents my wife [from] the day that our granddaughter was born.”
George next described the tension between Cindy and Casey. “A lot of times they’ve gotten into it because of Casey not being where she’s supposed to have been. The lying about working . . .”
George told the investigators that when it came to Casey, he had played the role of detective himself. A while back, he’d suspected she was lying about a supposed job at a local Sports Authority, so he had gone to the store and confronted the manager. He asked if Casey worked there, and was told she did not.
Bringing the conversation back to Caylee, Sergeant Allen asked George if he thought that his daughter “believes that nobody would forgive her if something happened, if some accident happened, some bad thing?”
“I’m not able to answer.” George responded. “I’m going to have to think about that . . .” It seemed at this point that George wasn’t sure about many things about his daughter. He brought up the money she’d stolen, catching her in lies. There was a whole backstory of Casey’s lies that the investigators were just learning. Before long Allen steered him back to the search for Caylee.
“Well, you understand we keep looking for Zenaida but if she doesn’t exist, we’re going to continue looking in the wrong places. And you know what? It isn’t the manpower. It isn’t our time. It’s that if we continue with all these resources. If we focus all these resources in the wrong