Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [61]
Prior to taking her next vacation, the first week of July, Cindy told her coworkers that she hadn’t spoken to Caylee in a while, but she relayed the story that Casey had given her about Busch Gardens, the car accident, and Zanny, who Cindy had been mentioning to coworkers for months, though Cindy admitted she’d never met her. Like so many other people, Polisano thought the story Casey was selling her mother was preposterous. She recalled wondering why Cindy was taking it at face value.
Cindy took her vacation as scheduled, but when she came back to work, she told her coworkers that she hadn’t seen Caylee. She’d talked to Casey numerous times, but she’d gotten a million excuses why Caylee couldn’t come to the phone. Then Polisano recalled on July 15, Cindy took a call from George. Casey’s car had been found in Orlando. Debbie told her she should get the car, find out what was going on, locate Casey, and go home. A short time later that day, Cindy returned to work (presumably before she went to find Casey at Tony’s house). Cindy said the Pontiac had been found, and there was a “really, really bad smell in the car.” Cindy didn’t answer when her supervisor asked her if she looked in the trunk.
Polisano told her Cindy needed to go home and contact the police, but Cindy refused, claiming she had too much work. Polisano was so concerned she went to Nilsa Ramos, the area director, who demanded Cindy go home. Later that night, Polisano received a hysterical call from Cindy. She was almost incoherent. “I found Casey and the baby’s gone,” she screamed. “The baby’s missing. We can’t find the baby.
“Oh my God, Debbie. If something happened to the baby or if the baby’s dead, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”
Next, Melich met with Debbie Bennett, a coworker of Cindy’s for the previous six years. Cindy had told Bennett that she had been babysitting Caylee a lot recently. Bennett also said Casey often dropped Caylee off at the office at around 5 P.M. on her way to work to be watched by her grandmother. Casey even wore a laminated ID card around her neck, reinforcing the image that she was on her way to a job. In June, Bennett said Cindy told her she hadn’t seen her granddaughter in two weeks because Casey said she needed “time and space” away from her and had taken Caylee with her.
Another coworker, Charles Crittenden, also recalled the laminated ID badge that Casey wore when dropping off Caylee. In addition, he remembered a day in the summer of 2005 when Casey came to Gentiva wearing a long coat and looking pregnant. She didn’t stop by his desk to say hi, like she usually did, which he found odd. According to Cindy, her daughter wasn’t pregnant. Charles couldn’t understand how she could not notice the obvious bulge. Once the pregnancy was common knowledge, Cindy told co-workers that Jesse Grund was the baby’s father. When that turned out to be wrong, she went along with Casey’s story that the father lived in Tennessee.
All this information about the inner workings of the Anthony family was fascinating. Hearing the echoes in each of the witnesses’ words and seeing the parallels develop allowed a more defined picture to emerge: the elements of suspicion, the pattern of lies, even the fact that the people immediately around Cindy seemed to be able to see what Cindy herself could not. Suddenly we could see clearly that the dynamic between Casey and Cindy that we’d been witnessing for weeks had in fact been playing out over the course of the last several years. Cindy was in denial about her daughter on a colossal scale.
As much as this explained what we’d been experiencing with Cindy, it was ultimately frustrating as well because we knew that none of it would be admissible in court. I’d been doing this so long that my brain was accustomed to instantly assessing information and sifting out that which would most likely be inadmissible. Under the rules of evidence, the jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear witnesses’ opinions about