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that Caylee was missing on the day Casey got arrested. Cindy had called their mother on July 16 to tell her that the toddler had disappeared, fearing that Shirley might see it on the news. Their mother then e-mailed him with this information. After watching the news and hearing the stories that Casey had been telling investigators, Rick said he had tried to speak with his sister, but Cindy became upset with him for questioning her. “I talked to my sister once on the phone after all this happened, and then I e-mailed her probably six or seven times. And she wouldn’t listen to me anymore. I was telling her, I said, ‘Cindy you got to wake up. Casey is telling so many lies.’ And I said, ‘You’re right in the center of it. You can’t see what’s going on. You’re in complete denial.’ ”

To hear Rick tell it, Cindy’s denial when it came to Casey was nothing new. Going back a couple of years, Rick informed investigators about an incident that had occurred at his own wedding on June 4, 2005, which Cindy, George, and Casey had attended. Until Casey showed up at his door with her parents that day, he hadn’t thought she was coming.

“I looked up and Casey was at the door. And I go, ‘Oh, Casey, I didn’t know you were coming.’ And when I looked down she had a tight-fitting top on and her stomach was protruding, all right? And her belly button was sticking out at least a half inch,” he recounted.

“So I invited them all in. And we’re all talking because I hadn’t seen them for a long time. And when I got Cindy and George alone I said, ‘Cindy, George, what’s up with Casey? You got something to tell me? What’s going on here?’ And they go, ‘What?’

“And I said, ‘She’s expecting?’ And they looked at me like I was crazy. I looked over at my wife-to-be, and she just rolled her eyes, you know. And I said, ‘Cindy, she looks like she’s pregnant. Come on.’ And Cindy goes, ‘Oh, no, she’s not. She’s just putting on weight.’ I said, ‘Cindy, I’ve seen a lot of pregnant girls. I’m not an expert, but man—she looks pregnant.’ And everyone on my wife’s side said, ‘Who’s the pregnant girl?’ You know, every time they would see her, or they saw pictures of our wedding, ‘Who’s the pregnant girl?’ ”

Rick said that his parents, who were also in attendance at the wedding, agreed with him that Casey looked pregnant. But said that Cindy swore she wasn’t.

“Cindy’s a nurse. And I’m going, ‘Mom, she’s a nurse, for crying out loud. She can’t see it?’ And so I said, ‘Cindy, come on. You’re kidding me? Now tell me, is Casey pregnant?’ And Cindy says, ‘Casey told us that she’d have to have sex first in order to have a baby and that she did not have sex with anyone.’ So I’m thinking, okay, then, if it’s not a baby, then it’s a tumor, and she’s only got a short time to live, because it’s big. Here she was seven months pregnant, because she had [the baby] on August 9.”

His story spoke volumes. This was the same kind of denial that we witnessed in Cindy whenever we spoke to her. The same denial that we’d witnessed in the jailhouse conversation between Cindy and Casey when Cindy had been seemingly incapable of calling her daughter out on the lie about the photograph of Zanny’s apartment. The fact that Cindy’s denial about Casey had apparently been going on for so long was incredible, but it also made me realize just how hard it would be to get Cindy to see her daughter for what she really was.

As he was winding down, Rick also said something interesting about Casey, something that vindicated what we in the prosecutor’s office had been witnessing on our own as we’d sifted through her various lies: “If she sees something or hears something, she will spin it into her own little world to make it work for her, whatever kind of lie it is.” It seemed that Casey’s amazing talent for lying had been mastered after years of practice. The trouble was, none of this was likely to be admissible in court.

After Rick, Sergeant Allen, Agent Bolin, and Detective Melich went to speak with Cindy’s mother, Shirley Plesea, at her residence in Mount Dora, about thirty miles northwest of Orlando.