• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In fact, to try and prove this point, the defense even hired an investigator by the name of Dominic Casey to chase down their leads. From the start, this appeared to be another questionable move on the part of the defense. It appeared that he was hired to assist in the search for Caylee. He tried to find all the people Casey said had known Zanny, but none of those people existed. Following in the footsteps of Melich and his team, he went to all the places where Zenaida had supposedly ever gone, but no one at those places had ever heard of her. They checked all the hospitals in Tampa—not just the one where Casey claimed Zenaida had been hospitalized after a car accident—but still no Zenaida. There was another rumor circulating that Zenaida had taken Caylee by plane to Puerto Rico, but that went nowhere, too.

After a few weeks of this, Baez severed his relationship with Dominic Casey, who then went to work for the Anthonys and continued his efforts into the next year, all the while feeding a constant stream of unhelpful information to the sheriff’s office on Cindy’s behalf. The end result was only more wasted hours of investigative resources for both that agency and the FBI.

The defense was also unhappy with the way information about the case made its way into the media. Under our discovery rules, most of the information we were getting about the case was provided as expeditiously as possible to the defense. Under our public records statute, once any information was provided to the defense, it became part of the public record, and anyone who made a request had a right to see it and copy it. There were people at the sheriff’s office who were giving out information to reporters (called “leaks”). Sometimes these revelations seemed intended to rebut claims made by the defense, and sometimes it seemed as if some cop was just trying to get in good with a reporter. These divulgences may not have been authorized by their agency, but they were not illegal. There is no general confidentiality accorded to information obtained in a police investigation, and the information would have been released eventually anyway. At times, I myself learned things from the media that I didn’t know yet—about the tattoo, for instance.

The bizarre part of the whole situation was that the defense team was on TV all the time, giving its opinions on whether Caylee was alive or not and commenting about everything else under the sun. The next thing I’d know, they were coming to court and complaining about leaks inside the sheriff’s office. Yet no one was putting out more rumors and hogwash than members of Casey’s defense team.

In the end, though, none of their actions or their complaining could derail what seemed all but inevitable as September came to a close: we were building a murder case against Casey Anthony. In all of our weekly meetings with Melich, following all of the various leads, both useful and not, we were slowly tracking this case to what felt like an inevitable conclusion: Casey had killed her daughter. We didn’t have a body to prove it, but perhaps that too would come with time. Until then we had to focus on what we did have—solid forensics, a well-executed investigation, and a potential defendant who appeared incapable of telling the truth to anyone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GRAND JURY

As October approached, we had a decision to make. Casey stood charged with child abuse and multiple counts of lying to law enforcement, and she was out of jail on bond awaiting her trial. The trial date for those charges was set for mid-November. The original thinking on the child abuse charge was that by not reporting her daughter missing for a month, she had committed child abuse by neglect. The difficulty for prosecutors was that, unlike defense attorneys, we had to actually believe the theory we were arguing to the jury. Defense attorneys have an obligation to argue their clients’ version of the facts or any alternate version of the facts that benefit their client. Their subjective belief in the