Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [71]
The obvious pieces were dealt with first. The medical examiner’s investigator, Stephen Hansen, collected the skull with the tape, as well as the leaf debris immediately around it, as one item. Trying as best as he could to keep all the items in their original position, he also collected the bags, clothing remnants, and other debris in the immediate vicinity of the skull. Everything from the scene not collected by Hansen—from the shreds of the garbage bags to the tatters of clothes—was photographed and collected separately by the CSIs and later taken to the crime lab.
As the search expanded to try and locate the other remains, the entire crime scene was cordoned off and set up like an archaeological site. The search area started small, about twenty feet by twenty feet, and expanded as the investigators found more bones. It ended up about eighty feet by forty feet, extending back into the woods. The CSIs would scrape down three or four inches and sift the earth looking for remains. They had a lot of people out there doing it, including people from the sheriff’s office, detectives from the FBI, civilian technicians, and crime scene investigators. The objective was to recover every possible bone of the little girl’s body.
The conditions were horrendous. This area was obviously used by locals as a secluded area to dump garbage and lawn waste. The swamp was a pit of raging poison ivy, nasty insects, poisonous snakes, and disgusting muck. Many of the search team members got poison ivy, and a lot of them got sick. In the end, they recovered almost every single bone, all except two tiny bones from one tiny toe, an unbelievable success given the environment they had to work with.
THE DAY BEFORE THE DISCOVERY, Cindy and George Anthony were in Los Angeles for an appearance on Larry King Live. Once again Cindy had been taking to the airwaves to spread her message and had spent most of her time on Larry King denouncing the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for their indifference to the search for Caylee as they focused instead on proving Casey’s guilt. Cindy and George were in Los Angeles International Airport, ready to board a jet for their flight back to Orlando, when their lawyer, Mark NeJame, called them with the news that a child’s body had been found not far from their home. They were devastated. Without a fraction of a doubt, it was Caylee. They made the long trip back to Florida overwhelmed by the news.
Casey got the news earlier than her parents. The body had been discovered around 9:30 A.M. Around an hour later, the police arranged for Casey to be brought to the clinic in the jail, where they would have a chaplain tell her the news per jail policy. There is a TV in the waiting room of the clinic, and the waiting room is monitored by video surveillance, so they recorded the scene in case the story about Caylee came on. That way, they could catch Casey’s reaction.
Later on, this setup became a subject of great angst to the defense. They said it was a violation of Casey’s constitutional rights. The videotape did not show that much, and we on the prosecution team did not introduce it at trial for precisely that reason. You couldn’t see much because of the distance and the angle of the camera; perhaps most important, you could not clearly see Casey’s face. Basically, she heard a newscaster saying there was breaking news about Caylee Anthony, she looked up at the TV set, and she put her head down and started to cry. Her body language could be equally indicative of “Oh crap, I’m caught” or “Oh crap, my daughter’s dead.” So in the end it didn’t add much information either way. But apparently the defense thought differently, and they got the judge to seal it. I always thought it was amusing that their actions led the public to think the tape was so much more incriminating than it actually was.
Regardless of the videotape, investigators worked quickly to see if there was a link between what they’d found at the scene and the