Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [74]
Two days after our visit to the ME’s office, Dr. Garavaglia completed her autopsy. Based on DNA analysis and all the supporting evidence, she positively identified the remains as those of Caylee Marie Anthony. That afternoon, the remains were released to the Anthony family. The body of the little girl with the big brown eyes was delivered to a local funeral home, where Dr. Werner Spitz performed a second autopsy. The remains were then cremated, per the wishes of the Anthony family. Casey had signed some paperwork to allow her parents to determine the disposition, but the family’s decision was unanimous. With that, Caylee was officially discharged to the care of the angels before she even had three years on earth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SWAMP
The discovery of Caylee’s remains altered the case on a fundamental level. Where there had been relative calm, with both sides feeling each other out, figuring out the right strategy, suddenly all that changed. In short, all hell broke loose.
The problems began with Roy Kronk, the man who found Caylee’s body, but they didn’t end there. From the start, Kronk was an issue for the prosecution. My feeling about Kronk was that it was no coincidence that he called 911 on December 11, 2008, to say that he had come across human remains in a swampy woods not far from the Anthonys’ home. The pretrial conference had just commenced, and once again Casey Anthony, suspected child murderer, was the biggest “true crime” news story out there. Kronk had a female roommate who he later would say was obsessed with the case. She watched it all the time on television. December 11, 2008, was the day Jose Baez went before Judge Stan Strickland requesting more time to prepare the case and waiving the right to a speedy trial. What I suspect is that Kronk must have been back in the Chickasaw neighborhood that day reading meters, and because the Anthonys were in the news again, he basically went back to see if the bag he had seen in August was still there—and it was.
Ultimately, though, Kronk being attracted by the attention the case was getting was not the real problem; the problem was the information that he misrepresented and withheld from investigators. For starters, that December morning, when the investigators responding to Kronk’s 911 call arrived at Suburban Drive, Kronk did not mention immediately that he had been to the site in August and had called 911 three times over three days to report a suspicious bag next to a white object that looked like a skull. Maybe he was trying to protect the sheriff’s office from an obvious embarrassment, or maybe he was embarrassed that he had let Caylee’s remains lie there for that extra four months. In any case, by temporarily withholding the fact that he’d been to that spot before, he set himself up for a lot of speculation that he was up to something nefarious, maybe even removing the body and bringing it back. It didn’t matter that the physical evidence proved that to be impossible.
Furthermore, his actual story of finding the body, supposedly for the first time, on December 11, was riddled with inconsistencies. On the afternoon of the discovery, Kronk sat down with Yuri Melich to give a blow-by-blow account in a taped interview. He said he didn’t touch or disturb anything beyond using his meter stick, which had a hooked end, to poke and lift the laundry bag high enough for the skull to drop out.
Recounting the details for Yuri, Kronk said, “I took my stick and I hit it and it thudded. And it sounded like either plastic or like, you know, hollow bone or something.