Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [59]
A little problem with exaggeration was an understatement. Richard described one instance in which he caught Casey in a lie. He said that when Casey was engaged to his son, she claimed to work at the Sports Authority, so he went to the store and found out that she was not an employee, nor had she ever worked there. Just as George Anthony had done.
Picking up where Rick had left off, Richard also shed some light on the relationship between Casey and her mother, telling the investigators that he’d been struck by the stories in the media claiming that Cindy and Casey were best friends. “I can tell you, and will testify to the fact that Casey sat at our table over those months when Jesse wasn’t there to talk to me and repeatedly said, ‘I don’t want to turn out like my mother. I don’t want to be around my mother. I want out of that house.’ ”
Richard also said that Casey “hated” her father, something about a gambling thing. He said she had even tried to get Jesse to move into a house with her before they got married. “That’s how bad she wanted out. . . . She didn’t like her mother. Didn’t like her father. Now that may have changed in two years, but that was pretty adamant then.”
On the subject of Cindy’s denial, Richard’s portrait was again consistent with what Rick had said. As Richard saw it, Cindy was unable to deal with the realities of Casey’s bad behavior. Recalling one instance when Cindy had been bragging about how special Casey was, Richard said that he had felt the need to burst her bubble a bit and told Cindy about the time Casey owed Jesse $250 and repaid him with a bad check. According to Richard, Cindy’s reply was “Well, she only did it once.”
At the time, the exchange had been unsettling for Richard, but to see how this same pattern of denial now appeared to be playing out in Caylee’s disappearance was downright disturbing. Even more disturbing for Richard was a recent conversation he said he’d had with Leonard Padilla, the bounty hunter who had bonded Casey out of jail and who had been staying at the Anthony home during the time that she was free. According to Richard, Padilla told him that the Anthonys were actively trying to frame Jesse for Caylee’s disappearance.
With all the rumors that Padilla’s involvement had created, it was hard to know whether to put any stock in this one, but one thing was clear to the investigators after speaking with Richard: they needed to arrange a follow-up conversation with Jesse. On September 9, Detective Melich, Corporal Eric Edwards from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, and Agent Nick Savage from the FBI spoke with Jesse at the FBI office in Maitland. In addition to trying to get a fuller picture of the relationship between Casey and Cindy, they wanted to get more information about a specific conversation Jesse claimed to have had with Lee Anthony on July 31. Lee had apparently told Jesse that he believed a fight between Casey and Cindy had been the reason Casey left home with Caylee on June 16.
“And would you please just explain that incident for me and how you learned of it?” Melich asked Jesse.
“Shortly after my second interview with Orange County, Lee confided in me that the reason that Cindy confided in him, that the reason he thought she felt that Casey ran off was there was a big fight between the two of them, and the fight concerned Casey not being home a lot and not bringing Caylee by. It got into a very heated argument, which turned physical, and Cindy started choking Casey.”
“Was there anyone else in the house when this happened?”
“He didn’t actually expand upon that. As far as I understood, from what he told me, it was just Cindy and Casey.”
Jesse went on to say that Casey and her mother had a strained relationship but that Casey had never told him anything about a physical confrontation with Cindy. “I mean she [Casey] had been recently in a very much kind of a hatred state for her mother,