Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [77]
In exchange for his public embarrassment, Kronk did not end up with the money that he had expected to get. He did not collect the $50,000 offered by bounty hunter Leonard Padilla for Caylee’s discovery, because he did not meet the procedural requirement that he initiate the tip with Crimeline. Mr. Kronk had called 911. He did get $5,000 from Mark NeJame, the local lawyer with one client or another attached to the case, for his effort. And he collected $20,000 from Good Morning America for his photograph of the six-foot rattler and an interview.
AS THE DEFENSE TRIED TO cloud Kronk in suspicion, the main counternarrative they stuck to was that the body had been planted. As they laid it out, this premise was based on the fact that in the weeks after Caylee was reported missing, the area where the body was found had supposedly been thoroughly searched, but the remains had not been found. Therefore, they concluded, when the body was found in December within a quarter mile of the Anthony home, it must have been hauled there and planted. Roy Kronk was now their best scapegoat for such an action. Of course, there was no evidence to implicate Kronk beyond his questionable behavior upon finding the body, but the defense’s story did highlight an important question that the discovery of Caylee’s body revealed: how could her remains have gone unnoticed for so long in an area so close to the Anthonys’ home?
Rife with the prerequisites for a good place to hide a body—such as an almost impenetrable air potato curtain obscuring the site from the road—the swamp off Suburban Drive should have been one of the first places checked. It had near-perfect conditions to promote decay, not to mention that its unappealing landscape was scattered with its share of household toss-offs—from old paint cans and beer bottles, to a half-submerged television, to various car parts, hubcaps, and batteries. Amid this mess of artifacts, the laundry bag shrouding the tiny body was in perfect suburban camouflage. Still, it should have been found, because the area should have been searched. But it wasn’t. In the end, Murphy’s Law prevailed: everyone assumed that someone else had searched there, but in fact no one actually had.
One of the first groups to face scrutiny following Kronk’s discovery was Texas EquuSearch, the volunteer search and rescue organization founded by a man named Tim Miller and based in Dickinson, Texas. EquuSearch had dedicated a huge share of its resources to the Find Caylee Marie operation, sending more than forty-two hundred workers and volunteers to Orlando and eating up close to half its annual budget. According to the mission statement of the volunteer group, “We are committed to providing experienced, organized and ethical volunteer search efforts for missing persons, utilizing the most suitable and up-to-date technologies and methodologies.” Beginning in late August 2008 and again in November, three months later, teams from this organization were actively searching vast areas of Orange and Osceola Counties. I recall seeing footage of their efforts on the news in early September of 2008.
EquuSearch hadn’t been able to get their initial teams set up until a week or so after August 20, 2008, when a huge rain maker, Tropical Storm Fay, dumped massive amounts of water on us. When they finally began in late August 2008, there were certain areas that they simply could not search because of the standing water. I recall Miller saying in an interview that they were going to search those areas at a later date. In my opinion, those eleven inches of rain worked in Casey’s favor. Sometimes even bad people have a guardian angel, for whatever reason, and I think Casey had one in that circumstance. When EquuSearch came back, they scoured different areas altogether and never returned to Suburban