Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [93]
“And I had previously lost two cocker spaniels, and I wanted to see if there was any tie. I had never thought about that with the cancer and stuff that I lost the cocker, so I started researching different things.”
“Do you believe that you could have accidentally looked up how to make chloroform?” Linda asked.
“Chloroform. I may have looked up the ingredients, but not how to make it.”
“Okay,” Linda paused. “What did you learn about chlorophyll?”
“It can make an animal sick, but it wasn’t—it didn’t have, like, drowsiness effects and things that I was concerned with. It did not.”
When Linda started asking her how she spelled chlorophyll, she stammered, and Baez got involved. Linda handed her a piece of paper and Cindy proceeded with the exercise by spelling it out in longhand.
“C-h-l-o-r-o-p-h-i-1,” she wrote.
At this point my reaction was “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Of all the stories we’d heard since this began, this was the lamest one yet. It amazed me that she was being truthful about things that really implicated Casey but then helping her out about something so stupid. It seemed rather desperate. Linda, being the wonderfully tenacious attorney that she is, sensed that the truth was slipping away. She zeroed in on the time of day that Cindy would have done the search. “Now, this computer search you did for chlorophyll . . . what time of day would that have been done?”
“I do not recall,” said Cindy. “I just remember sometime in March or—I believe sometime in March. I don’t believe it was April. I believe it was March or—”
Linda jumped in. “By time of day I mean would it have been first thing in the morning? In the evening?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Do you work?”
“Yes,” said Cindy. She agreed with Linda that she worked full-time.
Linda, Frank, and I knew right then that Cindy would go to great lengths to cover for her daughter.
The next day, Lee Anthony came to our office for his deposition. The same parties were present. He was cheerful and cooperative. On the whole, there wasn’t that much that we hadn’t heard before from him, but he did tell us yet another version of the events from the day Caylee went missing. This was something he’d heard from Casey herself when she was out on bond in August 2008. He recounted Casey’s new, very elaborate story about what happened at Jay Blanchard Park, which was where she was supposedly meeting Zanny on that Monday.
“So she goes to Jay Blanchard Park and brings Caylee. . . . Zenaida is there with her sister, as well as her sister has two daughters. I can’t remember the sister’s name, I think it is Jessica or something like that. Jessica was there with her kids, and Casey drops off Caylee, and sits down in the park there with Zenaida.”
Lee said that Casey and Zenaida were watching the kids playing when the nanny grabbed Casey, threatened her, and told her she was a bad mother. She said she was going to take Caylee as punishment.
Lee said that Zenaida told Casey, “I need to teach you a lesson. I will return her to you, but you’ve got to do something for me. You cannot go to the police, can’t tell anybody about this. If this happens, if you do go to the police, if you tell somebody about this, you know, I know where your parents live. I know where your brother lives. I have Caylee, and you don’t want me to find out you told somebody something.”
Hearing this new version of events, I suddenly found myself thinking about the hallway at Universal. In the weeks while she was in jail, the cops had completely debunked her story about dropping Caylee off at Sawgrass and Casey taking on her “own investigation” to find them. That story was no longer tenable. So what did Casey do? She made up a new lie, Casey 3.0. By shoring up the kidnapping story, Casey was finding a way to justify why she didn’t tell anybody why Caylee was missing all that time.
GEORGE ANTHONY HAD HIS TURN on August 5. His attitude from the time his granddaughter’s body was found