Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [70]
Roberts said that when he arrived, Kronk was leaning against his truck, smoking a cigarette, and Robinson was sitting in the truck but didn’t want to get out. Only Kronk had gone into the swamp, and he was excited when he told Roberts that the reward for information leading to Caylee’s discovery would be his. “Alex, I just hit the lottery.”
THE REMAINS HAD CLEARLY BEEN in that location a long time. It would have been very difficult to get into the swamp, let alone see something in there, underwater, in very dark conditions. There was a little gap in the air potato curtain, and ironically, there was a discarded yellow sign with black lettering for a day care center just at that opening. But that was the only access point to the woods. You could have walked five feet to the left or right and never seen it, but once the vines and overhanging vegetation were pulled back, the whole gruesome picture became disturbingly clear.
The skull and one of the leg bones were close to the bag. The skull was just behind a log, not quite under it. When Kronk had taken the first officer to show him, they actually walked past it and had to come back. The skull had a hair mat around it, the majority of the hair having fallen to the back of the skull. From above looking down, the hair looked like a halo all around the head, with a few strands stubbornly clinging to the top of the skull along with a few decomposing leaves. The mat of hair and leaf debris surrounded the skull, burying it to about the level of the bottom of the eye sockets. The skull was tilted very slightly upward. A small amount of the hair that had fallen forward collected at the area that had been the nose. Even before the skull was removed, a length of shining gray plastic duct tape, about half an inch from the face of the skull, could be seen through the leaf debris. At first glance, there appeared to be more than one piece.
The rest of the skeleton was extremely scattered, having been distributed by animals as well as Central Florida’s summer rains and flooding. Every summer during the rainy season, low-lying swampy areas and recesses take on an extra four or five feet of standing water, which slowly dries up in the late autumn. Decomposition causes the bones of the body to separate, and the effects of animal activity and flooding led to an overall dispersal of the bones. That made it difficult for the crime scene investigators, though it was not at all startling or unexpected. Over the next ten days they would find that the torso and most of the ribs had been pulled to a secondary location, and the vertebrae had been pulled to a third place. One specific bone, a hip bone, was buried in four inches of muck. This type of accumulation of muck could have occurred only through the movement of water over and around the bone once it had been moved to that location by an animal scavenging. Thus we were able to determine that the body had fully decomposed prior to the rainy season in July and Tropical Storm Faye, which hit in mid-August.
Beyond the actual bones, there was other physical evidence that had been buried along with the body. It appeared that the body had been wrapped in a baby blanket that had a Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet pattern on it, and then stuffed in two garbage bags, one inside the other for extra strength, and all of that inside a laundry bag. About a foot to the left of the skull was