Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [54]
It was going to be a busy couple of years.
CHAPTER TEN
TRACKING DOWN LEADS
The forensics may have been coming together, but we still couldn’t treat this solely as a homicide. Throughout August and into the early fall, the police continued to chase after leads connected to both a possible kidnapping and a possible murder, while interviewing everyone with a link to Casey and of course trying, without success, to get more information from Casey herself.
At the Anthony home, the public was going nuts, with news trucks on their street night and day. Any time Cindy or George left the house, protesters would scream hateful and often ignorant things at them. One woman in front of their house had a child holding up a sign reading WOULD YOU KILL ME? I was disgusted by some of the things they were doing. I’d been around big trials before, but this was something else altogether.
Part of this display seemed rooted in the way the media’s coverage focused on the anger at Casey. From the beginning, cable TV’s Nancy Grace was the primary person pushing this case, featuring it nightly on her Headline News (HLN) Nancy Grace show. The situation was further enflamed by Jose Baez’s decision to appear on the show himself. That Casey was not telling the truth was the headline and frustration over her lies was eagerly stoked. Soon a lot of the anger toward Casey was spilling into the front yard of the Anthony house on Hopespring Drive. The media was there to oblige the irate bystanders. Anyone who wanted to be on TV could come to the residence and start ranting.
Inside the house, the Anthonys were trying to hold it together. Cindy did most of the talking, especially after George became incensed at the protesters, even pushing someone off his lawn who called his daughter “trash.” Much as the Anthonys frustrated me, I felt for them in this situation. At the end of the day their granddaughter was missing and their daughter was accused of child abuse with the possibility of more on the way. Going through this situation was hard enough, but doing it in front of hostile protesters—well, no one deserves that.
The media frenzy became a magnet for anyone looking for a bit of limelight. With the public uniquely fixated on the case and a general sense of desperation in the search for credible information about Caylee, anyone craving a bit of media attention could grab the spotlight for a day. To that end, one of the more bizarre events of the circus surrounding those early days was Jose Baez’s decision to involve Leonard Padilla in the case. Padilla, a cowboy-hat-wearing publicity hound and “bounty hunter” from Sacramento, California, rode into the case with the purpose of arranging for Casey’s $500,000 bond.
Padilla offered to arrange the bond for the avowed purpose of getting her out and making her reveal Caylee’s true whereabouts. It always perplexed us why Jose would have allowed this character within one hundred feet of his client. Padilla’s condition for this largesse was that Casey would live at the Anthony home under the watchful eye of his associates. Casey accepted, and on August 20, Padilla’s brother, a bondsman, posted the $500,000 bond and she was released from jail to home confinement.
Needless to say, Padilla was no more successful than the police had been in getting any useful information out of Casey. Casey was rearrested on August 29, charged with check fraud and theft related to the $110 purchase she had made at Target on her friend Amy Huizenga’s checking account. However, she was immediately released after being bonded out by Padilla for a second time. Strangely enough, the following day he gave up trying to get anything out of her, revoked her