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At this point, I don’t think we’ll ever find out what really happened that night. As I’ve revisited the verdict in the months since, I think somewhere along the way everyone—from Cindy and George Anthony to the media to the people trying the case—lost sight of Caylee. That, along with her death, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

PART II

CHAPTER NINE

DEALING IN FORENSICS

After getting word from Linda that I was on the case, my first call was to Arpad Vass, a forensic anthropologist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where many of the country’s scientific breakthroughs occur. Vass, an expert in the odor of decomposition, was in the process of developing a standard for decomposition odor analysis, or DOA. This standard was being designed to help identify the more than four hundred chemical compounds that emanate from a decaying human body. I needed to know if he thought his new technology could be of help in determining whether the odor in the Pontiac was undeniably that of human decomposition.

Prior to my conversation with Dr. Vass, I reviewed some of his published writing so that I wouldn’t sound like a complete moron when we spoke. His work is based on the principle that all odors are simply combinations of different chemical compounds released into the air through chemical and/or biological reactions. Some of those compounds are detectable by human beings, and we perceive them as smells. My mom’s spaghetti, the odor of which is instantly recognizable to me, is simply a group of chemical compounds in a certain concentration that my brain has learned to interpret, recall, and react to. Similarly (and I hope Mom forgives my use of her delicious spaghetti in this analogy), the odor given off by a human body during decomposition—which, if you have ever experienced it, is instantly recognizable—is also simply a combination of chemical compounds.

The challenge of the work is that our brains can’t distinguish individual compounds in the odors themselves. The goal of Vass’s work is to determine which compounds are most common. Once those compounds can be determined, a device can be developed to detect them in the air, in much the same way machines at the airport examine our luggage for the presence of compounds found in explosives. It was the first part of his research, the isolation of the common compounds, that had potential application to this case.

When I reached Dr. Vass at his office, he was happy to talk science, but he did not warm to the idea of testifying. It was out of his comfort zone. He had testified only once before, sixteen years earlier, in a case based on the chemical analysis of soil near a body, called postmortem interval testing. I recall him repeatedly telling me that the thought of testifying was not making him feel “warm and fuzzy.” I liked him from the beginning.

Dr. Vass was an unapologetic science geek. He pursued scientific investigation for the pure fascination of it, loved solving scientific problems, and discussed them with an addictive passion. Speaking with a slight affect, a disarming quality that made him accessible, he seemed to me very atypical of a forensics expert. I have dealt with forensic experts for decades, good ones and bad ones, honest ones and dishonest ones. Regardless of their reliability, one thing that these experts usually have in common is that they’re applying the research of other experts to forensics problems. Rarely had I worked with a forensics expert like Dr. Vass, a man who had actually invented the process of which he spoke. True scientific innovation is rare in professional expert witnesses.

In order to reassure him that I was up to the task of shepherding him through this process, I talked to him about my prosecution of the first DNA case, the Tommy Lee Andrews trial. In a sense, my use of DNA started with an NBC news story about a man named Colin Pitchfork in England. Two girls from two small towns in the county of Leicestershire had been raped and murdered in a similar