George Anthony Killed Caylee, Convinced Casey That She Was Responsible, Disposed of Caylee's Body, and Framed Casey for Her Death
In depositions taken in April 2011, Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, a psychiatrist, and Dr. William Weitz, a psychologist, revealed Casey Anthony's recollection of events.
Casey told Danziger she was repeatedly sexually molested by her father, George Anthony. She told Weitz her father did everything from touching her inappropriately to sexual intercourse between the ages of 8 to 12. She also told Danziger she was inappropriately touched by her brother, Lee Anthony, when she was around ages 12 to 15.
Casey told Danziger she slept with Caylee in her bed and locked the bedroom door. Casey said it was "in effort to protect her the way I didn't protect myself. I feared he'd touch her," referring to her father.
"She believes George took Caylee out of the bed, had a sexual experience with her daughter, and in order to cover it up, killed her," Weitz said.
Casey told doctors she does not think it was an accident and that she thinks her father had molested Caylee.
Weitz said Casey asserted “that Caylee could not have died by accident and that George had murdered her.”
"I think he held her underwater, maybe was doing something to her and tried to cover it up" she told Danziger, referring to George.
Danziger said Casey told him she “believed that her father drowned Caylee deliberately or drowned her while he was molesting her, even though she had no evidence that George had ever molested Caylee in the past.”
Although Casey said she never saw Caylee's body in the family swimming pool, she believes Caylee drowned because she saw her father holding Caylee's body.
“I took her from him and collapsed on the porch. He was yelling at me . . . your fault, couldn’t believe you did this... you’re a bad mother.”
Casey told doctors that her father said, "I'll take care of it," and then took Caylee's body away.
Casey told doctors that she never saw Caylee again.
"I was hoping she was somewhere, that she was still okay. It was devastating when they found her. I felt as if my body was going to explode."
[Source]
"I’m a mother of 10: oldest son 39, youngest daughter 13. I have seen the best of the best exposed to be child molesters. I’ve seen the acting. When a seasoned cop wants to kill himself, he takes a gun and holds it pointed upward under his chin at a 45 degree angle towards his neck, and he pulls the trigger. He does not tell people where he is and take some extra blood pressure medicine with a six-pack of beer. You don’t think cop dad George knew that Casey was not really working for two years? He used her frail and crazy mental state to his advantage. I have been a court advocate for molested children. I’ve looked in the eyes of molesters and heard and seen and smelled that stink of manipulation and how they use everyone for their cover, how people protect them. George tells people Casey did it (did what?) and it was an accident before the body was found. So what exactly did George know and when? How does he know now that it was murder and not an accident as he stated in court? So he knew Caylee was dead before her body was found but it was an accident, and now he claims Casey murdered her daughter. Murdered how, why is it murder? He is not even asking us to believe that it was an accident. This man is the worst of all in my mind, and just a feeling that he well might have molested Caylee and killed her and faked her drowning to make Casey think it was all her fault, and he kept Casey quiet so the body would have time to decompose." - Dianne Burnett, June 30, 2011
Between 2:20 and 2:50 p.m. on June 16, 2008, Casey found out something happened to Caylee:
- Casey's mother, Cindy, testified that she found the pool ladder attached to the pool and the gate open when she returned home from work the evening of June 16th, adding that she called George to ask about it since she took out the ladder from the pool on the previous day after swimming there with Caylee. The defense showed the jury a picture of Caylee appearing to open a sliding-glass door at her home. Cindy says Caylee was capable of opening the sliding door to the back yard and the pool.
- Cindy testified that on June 16th she left for work a few minutes before 7:00 a.m. while everyone in the home was still asleep.
- Casey told The Associated Press in March 2017: "What I remember is my mom coming in before she went to work and saying goodby to us. And then waking up several hours later, hour, two hours later and not knowing where she was.” In his August 2009 deposition, Casey's father, George said he made breakfast for Caylee around 7:30, before Casey came out of the bedroom she shared with Caylee.
- Shortly before 8, Casey began using the computer. She had activity on her MySpace account and did random searches for things related to the "shot girls" she was managing (7:52), and she chatted on AOL instant messaging (7:56). In particular, Casey chatted on AIM with a friend known as WitePlayboi. "So what r u up 2," WitePlayboi asked at 8:01. "Not a whole lot. Checking up on all the MySpace/Facebook hoopla," Casey replied 30 seconds later.
- At 8:46 a.m., Casey sends a text to her boyfriend, Tony. There isn't anymore cell phone activity or any computer activity until 11:27 a.m. and later. Presumably, Casey was eating breakfast and spending her morning with Caylee.
- At 11:27, the browser logged a photo (showing the inside of a lounge where Casey's boyfriend held weekly nightclub events) accessed through Facebook, then a visit to the Photobucket photo sharing site. Eighteen seconds after the photo was accessed in Facebook, it was uploaded to Casey's Photobucket account.
- Casey probably was talking to her boyfriend, Tony, on Facebook while she was on the computer because she receives a Facebook text from him at 11:43. This would only occur if she was logged out of Facebook at that time.
- At 11:47, Tony calls her and they have a 19-minute conversation.
- Casey and Caylee presumably eat lunch after 12:07 p.m., when Casey's phone call ends with Tony, and then Caylee presumably goes down for a nap. Around age 2, children often take a short nap in the morning, a longer nap in the afternoon, and then sleep most of the night; by age 3, the morning nap has likely disappeared, and the toddler will take only an afternoon nap and maintain a long stretch of sleep at night.
- At 12:55, Casey and Tony exchange texts. George says Casey and Caylee left at 12:50. Either George had Casey's phone AND was pretending to be her online OR he is lying. Casey's cell phone records indicate she was at or near the house that entire day, until she headed toward Lazzaro's apartment at 4:11 (view pings). Casey's computer activity also proves she did not leave the home before 4 p.m.
- At 1 p.m., Tony calls Casey and they have a 14-minute conversation.
- At 1:26, Casey exchanges text messages with another friend, Jesse Grund.
- At 1:39, Casey's password-protected computer account activates the browser, revealing activity associated with her AIM account and MySpace and Facebook. Firefox brower activity uncovered in 2012 shows that the last browser activity is at 1:42. The spreadsheet sent to Prosecutor Burdick included 17 vague entries from the Internet Explorer browser history on June 16, 2008, and failed to list 1,247 entries recorded on the Mozilla Firefox browser that day (including the search for “foolproof suffocation.”)
- At 1:44, Casey calls her friend Amy Huizenga and talks for about 35 minutes. Amy describes this as a normal conversation. The normal conversations at that time were that Cindy was leaving the house to Casey (and Caylee) and Amy was going to move in. Casey was probably in front of the computer the whole time she was talking with Amy because Casey reopens the browser at 2:10 pm even though she was still on the phone with Amy (view report). She hung up with Amy at 2:20.
- There doesn't appear to be any electronic activity between 2:21 and 2:49.
- George says he left for work at 2:30. However, George testifed that on June 24th Casey stopped by the house around the time he got home and started to get ready for work, which was about 2:30: "I got home about 2:25, 2:30, started to get ready for work." So if George's routine was to start to get ready for work around 2:30, then he wouldn't also be leaving at 2:30 to go to work.
- At 2:49, 28 minutes after Casey's conversation with Amy ends, and while Casey's cell phone is pinging a tower nearest the home, the Anthony family's desktop computer is activated by someone using Casey's password-protected account.
- At 2:51, someone does a search for "foolproof suffication" (sic), clicking on several pro-suicide websites. Five seconds later, the user clicks on an article that criticizes pro-suicide websites that include advice on "foolproof" ways to die (suicide ideation in reaction to losing her daughter). George left to dispose of the body and go to work, and Casey went online to consider suicide. It shows her state of mind on the actual afternoon her child had died. The browsing session that included the"fool-proof suffocation" logs its last activity, involving MySpace, at 2:52 and 55 seconds, the exact time that Jesse Grund calls, meaning that Casey switches from online searching to answering the call from Jesse.
- At 2:52:53, Casey receives a phone call from Jesse Grund. Grund describes the conversation as abnormal. "It was not normal, if that’s a correct choice of words. Uh, [the conversation was about] the fact that her mom was no longer moving out anymore. Casey now had to find a place to live. Uhm, uh, she couldn’t stay at home." (The call ended at 3:04:06 – the exact second the cell records show a call from George to Casey's cell.)
- Between 3 and 4 p.m., there is very little computer and cell phone activity.
- A little after 3 p.m., George arrives at work (this assumption was based on work schedules and George Anthony's unverified testimony, not time-stamped cards).
- At 3:02 George used his cell to call his house landline, indicating he was not home at the time.
- At 3:04 George called Casey, supposedly from work. According to the defense, the 26-second call from her father took place as soon as he got to work to tell her, "I took care of everything," meaning he disposed of the body and warned her not to tell her mother about Caylee's death. However, other accounting of events indicates that Casey ignored his call (the call lasted only 26 seconds).
- At 3:36, Casey tries to call Tony but he doesn't answer. From about 3 to 4 p.m., she received three Facebook text messages, but replied to none except the one sent by Tony. She tried to call him but he did not answer.
- Between 4:10 and 4:14, Casey tries to contact her mother a total of six times by calling her cell and work phone. Her cell phone was pinging a different tower, therefore she was no longer in the vicinity of her home, so she probably left home when she started calling her mother at 4:10 (she left a message at 4:14). In Baez's book, he says that after George left for work, Casey paced and cried and freaked out for about an hour before deciding she needed her mother and desperately called her.
- Beginning at 4:11, Casey's cell phone shows her leaving the Anthony residence and driving to Tony's apartment while exchanging text messages with him (4:18-4:19). Caylee is not with her. She tried to call Tony and another person up until 4:25. Considering that there were no more calls/texts between Casey and Tony after 4:20, she probably was at his apartment by 4:25. This was validated by the fact that her phone was pinging the cell tower in the vicinity of his apartment.
- Between 5 p.m. and shortly before 8 p.m., Casey was probably at her boyfriend’s apartment, as indicated by the cell phone pings. She tried calling a few people but no one answered.
- 7:54, Casey and Tony are seen entering and walking around casually at a Blockbuster video store. Caylee is not with them. They went back to Tony's apartment and watched the movies with his roommates.
"To smell her hair, to smell her sweet sweat from when she came in from outside... I miss that kiss on the check, that special hug... It's so great to get a hug from someone, but to get a hug from a small child, that gives me energy like you couldn't imagine (1 minute mark in video above)."
George Anthony Talks About Caylee PART 2 (Dedicated to CMAnthony)
By Dr. Keith Ablow
This column was going to be a simple “I told you so” piece. Having read the coverage of the recently-released depositions of psychiatrist Jeffrey Danziger, M.D. and psychologist William Weitz, Ph.D. regarding their official psychiatric evaluations of Casey Anthony, I was planning to remind everyone that in my book “Inside the Mind of Casey Anthony,” I had arrived at the same theory that Dr. Danziger alludes to: A girl who is sexually abused from age 8 can respond to very traumatic events, including even her daughter’s death, by burying her pain, getting a tattoo and going out to dance. Danziger put it this way, “Her demeanor, the best way to say it, is she was calm, cooperative and pleasant as if we were discussing someone who had a parking ticket . . . . It was very puzzling. I’ve never seen anything to this degree...”
“This is someone who is sitting in jail,” Danziger said. “Her child is missing, presumed dead. She’s . . . being accused by the whole world in the disappearance of her child. You would expect that that would provoke some measure of distress, whether someone genuinely did it, whether someone was falsely accused, I mean, it doesn’t matter.”
Yet, in Casey Anthony’s case, she not only was able to remain calm and collected, she also showed no attempt to deceive Danziger on the sophisticated psychological tests he administered—the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
- She also did not qualify for any psychiatric diagnosis.
- She did not qualify for antisocial (sociopathic) personality disorder.
- She did not qualify for narcissistic personality disorder.
- She did not qualify for borderline personality disorder.
- She didn’t even come close.
So let me get this over with, then move on: I told you so. I told you that the real story of Casey Anthony is that of a girl who buries her inner self so deeply (including unspeakably, unthinkably intense feelings of pain and humiliation and rage) that she is, for all intents and purposes, absent from her own existence. Gone. A ghost. A stranger to us, and even to herself. I called her condition “Identity Suppression Syndrome”—a term I coined. And I stand by that assessment, 100 percent.
But there is much more to say. Because the material in Danziger and Weitz’s depositions rings so true for a victim of horrific sexual abuse that it is stunning. It gave me the shivers.
I won’t state here whether George Anthony is a pedophile and child rapist, but I challenge any other mental health professional with any experience treating victims of trauma to review the depositions Danziger and Weitz rendered and come away asserting that Casey Anthony’s words ring untrue or seem fabricated.
Danziger stated that the scenes of sexual abuse Casey Anthony related to him as occurring at the hands of her father George Anthony were “disgusting, demeaning, intercourse, and everything.”
Casey Anthony told him the abuse started when she was 8 and tapered off when she turned 11. After that, it was an occasional rape, with the last one occurring when she was 18. “I tried to fight back when I older,” Casey Anthony told him. “I’m not a big person.”
“I’m not a big person.” She sounds almost apologetic. She sounds powerless. And that’s the way victims of sexual abuse sound.
But there’s more. “My first real sex was at age 16,” she said. Asked by Jeffrey Ashton what she meant by that, Danziger stated, “Well, as opposed to anything that was intrafamilial.” Meaning, with her father.
I have listened to victims of sexual abuse by family members for over 15 years. And that is the language of a victim. Pure, and simple, and heartbreaking. Word-for-word. “My first real sex.” Where on earth would Casey Anthony have learned to flawlessly mimic the lexicon of a victim of child rape?
“What would you do the next day [after being raped by your father]?” Danziger asked her.
“Well, I’d go to school. I made . . . “A”s. I had friends. I won awards. I was a popular girl.”
Still think Casey Anthony sounds like a sociopath? She doesn’t test anything like one. And I am here to tell you, she doesn’t come across as one in the Danziger or Weitz depositions, whatsoever.
“How do you handle the unspeakable,” she told Danziger. “By putting it in a little box, hiding it deep, pretending all is well. Doing that since age 8, since elementary school, I became exceedingly perfect.”
If Casey Anthony was
Mystery solved.
Does she hate her father? On this, too, Casey Anthony sounds like she is delivering the raw, honest truth from her gut:
“I hate the fact that I don’t hate him for everything that’s done, everything that happened. I hate the fact that I still love him, little girl wishing my dad could be my dad. I can’t figure out why I don’t hate him.”Is she full of crap? Really? Or is she describing precisely what I told you she was suffering with: Identity Suppression Syndrome—an inability to summon any true feelings from behind the dark, desperate walls of her trauma, lest they fracture her psychologically into a million tiny pieces?
The rest is almost unreadable, so stark is Casey’s telling of the story, so seemingly unadorned. Decide for yourself if she is Meryl Streep and Charles Manson rolled into one, or if she is a garden variety victim of child rape lost in terrifying shadows of her former self.
She told Danziger that she slept with Caylee to keep the little girl away from her father, George Anthony. She locked the door “to protect her the way she hadn’t been protected.” She told him—again, in credible language—that being exposed to repeated rape without being protected by her mother is why she doesn’t tend to ally with other women.
Then one early morning, when she forgot to lock the door, she says, as quoted in the deposition, George Anthony woke her up. He had Caylee Anthony soaked and dead in his arms.
“I took her from him and collapsed on the porch. He was yelling at me . . . your fault, couldn’t believe you did this . . . . He left the house...saying, ‘Daddy is going to take care of it.’”
Daddy.
This is the same daddy, by the way, who watched his daughter give birth, from the foot of the bed, staring at her naked.
This is the same daddy who found his daughter’s abandoned car, thought it smelled like a corpse, then headed off to work at a movie theater to make about twenty bucks an hour as a security guard.
This is the same daddy who threw his own father through a plate glass window when the old man wouldn’t turn over control of his car dealership.
This is the same daddy who boldly told law enforcement officials that his most treasured memory of his daughter’s ultrasound was when the obstetrician pointed out his granddaughter’s vagina and called it a hamburger.
This is the same daddy whom sources told me stole a girl’s panties from her house during high school and needed to finish up in another school system.
This is the same daddy who neglected to ask his daughter who the father of her unborn child might be—when his daughter finally realized she was pregnant at seven months.
This is the same daddy whose ex-wife says he was mostly interested in being a cop because he got to hide behind a uniform.
This is the same daddy who reportedly wanted to be a character at Disneyworld, hugging kids.
Then Casey Anthony told Dr. Danziger this: “I think he held her underwater, maybe he was doing something to her and tried to cover it up . . . . I don’t think it’s an accident and I didn’t do it.”
She implied George Anthony’s suicide attempt after Caylee’s body was found was his way out of the grief or guilt.
Do you feel nothing but hatred now for Casey Anthony? Do you think she is lying? Do you think that she is as gifted as Sir Lawrence Olivier and as smart as Bernie Madoff, this high school dropout, club-hopping, unemployed girl from Orlando?
Prosecutor Jeffrey Ashton listened to all this and, like a back-of-the-class law student, went right off the cliff prosecuting a ghost. Any jury that could have read these depositions and convicted Casey Anthony would have been a travesty of justice.
Actually, you know what? Forget that whole I told you so thing. I really don’t care. I’m sick to my stomach writing this.
I’m sick at heart about the way this whole case proceeded under Jeffrey Ashton, who is now running for State Attorney in Florida, trying to parlay his ill-gotten fame into holding public office.
Casey Anthony is in hiding now because it is a concrete metaphor for her having hidden from the truth her whole life. And her videos are just pathetic evidence of how completely detached from reality she remains, after being cleaved from it in her family of origin.
She’s no Al Capone. She’s a lost soul. She grew up on Hopespring Drive in Orlando, where there was no hope.
If Casey Anthony was telling the truth, she should sue George Anthony civily for killing her daughter. But, then, again, she still loves him. And even if she were to sue him, and even if she were to win that case, he’d only be able to give her the money he got from selling pictures of his dead granddaughter.
Or maybe he’d surrender the intellectual property he secured from trade-marking the name Caylee Anthony after the little girl was found in a trash bag.
But maybe all those assets are gone, if he’s had a recurrence of his gambling problem [which some sources say was really a porn problem] or if he turned any of the money over to River Cruz, the woman who accused him of shacking up with her when he was supposed to be out searching for his missing, beloved granddaughter.
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. He is the author of "Inside the Mind of Casey Anthony" (St. Martin's Press 2011). Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com. His team of Life Coaches can be reached at lifecoach@keithablow.com.
"The two areas most interesting aspects of the case to me were the psychology and the digital forensics. A few of the psychologists who interviewed her said that murder would be out of character for her. She wasn't a psychopath and even though she had narcissistic qualities, she wasn't a narcissist. I think the days after her child's death is a display of her not wanting to deal with the loss to the point of it not even happening; but she dug a hole from which there was no escape. The digital forensics were important to figuring out what happened because Casey was a social person - always on Facebook, AIM and the like. It's a shame the investigators botched this so badly. The phone calls, pings, and hard drive usage suggest that Casey was on the computer, or otherwise digitally occupied, when whatever happened to her child took place. Brewing chloroform seemed implausible and the duct tape had issues. Anyways, my thoughts on the prosecution's case are outlined on a blog I put together many years ago: https://statevcasey.wordpress.com." [truthtron, April 2017, reddit]
From George Anthony's Depositon, August 5, 2009:
Casey's computer usage and cell phone activity are proof that she was home until 4:11 p.m. on June 16th, 2008. George lied about Casey and Caylee leaving at 12:50 p.m. This lie proves he killed Caylee and disposed of her body. Therefore, George lied in his deposition about Casey and Caylee leaving at 12:50 p.m. on June 16th and that being the last time he saw Caylee alive.
Q. Did you at that initial stage have any conversations with Casey about the plans of the day [June 16, 2008], what was going on that day?
A. We just talked about work. She knew that I was going to be going to work that day, that afternoon. That was just in the normal conversation of days. That was nothing specifically at all; no.
Q. Did she indicate what she was doing that day?
A. Just going to work. Had a work meeting and she was going to work.
Q. Did she give you any other details about what this work meeting might be or what it was about or
A. No. Just that she and Caylee were going to be leaving and they were going to be leaving probably, you know, in a few hours. And I said: Okay. And that's about it.
Q. Anything else out of the ordinary happen the rest of that morning?
A. No. Definitely not.
Q. I know you relayed a number of times you were watching a show on the Food Network, the last thing you did before
A. As a matter of fact, I remember that specifically at that time. It was about ten minutes to 1:00 that day on the 16th of June. I was watching one of my favorite shows on TV, and it's called Drive-Up Diners and Dives. And to say I'm sort of hooked on it, I guess I am. I was watching it and I remember Casey and Caylee, you know, leaving and the last time I saw Caylee.
Q. Were you outside the house when they actually left or were you inside?
A. I walked with Caylee and Casey out when they left to get in their car and go.
Q. All right. And did you -- did you assist Casey in, like, putting Caylee in the car seat, buckling her in, anything like that?
A. Just hold -- held the door open while she buckled Caylee in the back passenger rear side and, you know, just blew her a kiss, told her I loved her and, you know, "Jo-Jo" will see you later.
From Huffington Post and People Magazine, June 30, 2011:
George Anthony denied his affair with a volunteer Kyrstal Holloway during the time his granddaughter was still considered missing.
Krystal Holloway, aka, River Cruz, met George at one of the command center tents, where she went every day to help and “console” him. She said their friendship was intimate but George denied the affair. She testified that George told her Caylee’s death “was an accident that snowballed out of control,” but he denied saying that. On cross examination, the prosecution challenged her credibility, getting her to admit that she had originally denied having an affair with George, only to spill the details of their relationship to the National Enquirer for $4,000. But she stuck to her claim that George said: “I believe it was really an accident and it went wrong and she tried to cover it up.” This would suggest George knew Caylee was dead long before her remains were found. But was Holloway a believable witness? Her account of the affair seemed to have more than a hint of truth to it: George was depressed and she comforted him, as he did her when she told him she was ill with cancer.
“Did you have a romantic relationship with her?” Baez asked.
“No,” answered Anthony with a laugh. “I find that very funny.”
“How did you meet her?” asked Baez.
“She was someone who volunteered at our site,” answered Anthony, who was testifying for the fourth time. “I considered her a friend. She worked at our command center to help us find Caylee.”
Holloway told police that during an intimate moment, George Anthony confided that Caylee’s death was “an accident that snowballed out of control.”
“Did you say that to her?” asked Baez.
“No,” answered Anthony. “I didn’t confide with anyone during that time.”
During the testimony, several jurors swiveled their chairs towards George Anthony, watching him intently. Cindy Anthony shook her head in the gallery, while Casey Anthony stared on impassively.
Holloway claimed that in November 2008 — while investigators were still searching for Caylee’s remains — George Anthony came to her home and she told him she did not think his daughter was capable of harming his missing granddaughter.
It was then, Holloway said, that George Anthony confided in her.
“He was sitting on my couch, and I was sitting on the floor,” she explained. “He said it was an accident that snowballed out of control. I was in shock, and by the time I looked up, his eyes were filled with tears, and I didn’t ... ask him anything further.”
Holloway’s testimony goes toward the defense’s theory that Caylee died on June 16, 2008, when she drowned in her family’s swimming pool. The prosecution insists Casey Anthony used chloroform to render Caylee unconscious and then put duct tape over her nose and mouth, suffocating her.
Holloway also told the jury she had received several text messages from George Anthony, including one in which he wrote: “Just thinking about you. I need you in my life.”
George Anthony was questioned about his alleged relationship with Holloway. He admitted knowing her and said she had volunteered at the command center in October 2008 during the search for Caylee. He described her as “just another volunteer.”
George Anthony denied having a romantic relationship with Holloway. He did admit sending the text message but explained it was not intended to be flirtatious and was sent because at the time he needed all the volunteers in his life.
George Anthony also denied telling Holloway that Caylee’s death was an accident. Anthony testified that he “never did” say that.
From drlillianglass.com, June 28, 2011:
George Anthony Shows Multiple Signals of Deception As Jose Baez Questions Him
As soon as George was asked about his affair with River Cruz (also known as Krystal Holloway), his voice became shaky. Up until now we have always heard a strong voiced George Anthony who sounded confident. Now he sounded weak and tentative. When you hear a voice tone like that it usually means that the person is extremely nervous and emotional or that they are about to lie or they are lying about something.
We also initially see George taking a huge breath where we see his shoulders raise as he inhales and then forcefully exhales. He is oxygenating himself as he knows what is about to take place. He breathes a big breath as Jose asks when did you meet River Cruz. The big breath shows emotional reaction to River.
Here we see George bow his head in shame when he said he would consider River a friend. If you consider someone a friend your head should be up, not bowed down.
After he says this we see him purse his lips which means that he doesn't want to talk about it. When somone does this it usually means they don’t want to say anymore about the subject.
Jose then asks, “Was it your testimony that she was just another volunteer?,” he shakes his head no as he says “absolutely.” To me that indicates that she was not just another volunteer. She was more than a volunteer to him.
Jose asks him if he had a romantic relationship with River. He says that’s funny. But he is not laughing. His eyes look angry. There is a discrepancy between his eyes and mouth. When that occurs it means person is usually conflicted in terms of what they say and what is true. This leads me to believe he is not being truthful. Also a big giveaway is when he said no but shook his head yes in terms of having an intimate relationship.
When Jose asks George if he was intimate with River he gets a case of cotton mouth. That usually leans towards a signal of deception. So I would assume he did have an intimate affair with River.
Then he volunteers too much information when he is asked if he went to River's house. He says maybe two, and then corrects himself as to maybe three times. He volunteers too much information as he describes the condo and the gated community. In true Anthony form, he is justifying his wrong behavior. Why is a married man going over to a single woman’s home three times? There is no reason for that unless they are having an affair, in my view, or the person is working on a project with them.
He justifies going over to an attractive single woman's house because he said she told him she had a brain tumor and, being the nice guy he is, he went. When someone tells you they are a nice guy it is usually the opposite.
George also lied when he said River was not a good person. River is a very good person. While she may have had a shoplifting incident when she was young, she has been a model citizen raising two kids whom she loves and adores.
River contacted me directly after I wrote a blog stating she appeared honest about her affair with George. I spent a lot of time speaking with her over the phone and found her to be a lovely person.
Maybe George has her confused with her sister Skye, who did have a criminal record. But River is lovely and kind and sensitive and caring. That is why she volunteered to find Caylee in the first place. She said she gave George money because he was crying poor mouth and said he had no money for groceries. She gave him a few thousand dollars so he could eat. George, of course, denied this and showed multiple signals of deception.
River did not not come forth on her own. She came forth because the police came to her door after her name was found on George’s phone records multiple times.
As I said, I spent a lot of time talking to River, and she told me how George said “it was an accident that snowballed.” George denied this statement which River made to me a year ago.
George is the one who is not a good person, in my view, as he claimed River was not a good person. River shared with me how George used her sexually and dumped her after she engaged in an act with him that Jose Baez spoke about in his opening statement.
So when Jose said Casey had to go to school after having George’s penis in her mouth it didn’t surprise me as that is exactly what River told me over a year ago as to what George did to her. She stated that after George made her perform this act on him, he discarded her like a used dish rag, and she never heard from him again. And yes, I do have River’s permission and River’s blessings to discuss anything she and I discussed as I am not her therapist nor am I legally bound to her.
I think Jose needs to keep George on the stand for hours and grill him about alleged affairs, gambling, online porn services, his job history or lack of a job for so long [and what he did when he was home with Casey and Caylee until 2:50 p.m. on June 16, 2008].
We need to know everything about him so we can see how he is not the nice guy he portrays himself to be. We need to know why he wanted to kill himself and what was in his suicide note.
He said to Casey in the jailhouse tapes he wished he would have been a better father and grandfather. Let us find out what that means.
First Cindy, then Lee, and now it appears that George lied on the stand. No wonder Casey is the way she is. How could she not be a liar coming from a bunch of liars?
From drlillianglass.com, June 29, 2011:
George anthony sobbed on the stand while casey shows him disgust and detachment. When George was first questioned and asked if he had ever sexually abused his daughter, he dropped his head before answering, a sign of shame or guilt.
George Anthony knew that this would be one of the hardest days with his one-time lover River Cruz coming into court and with being interrogated on the stand about his alleged sexual abusive towards Casey. That is why he came dressed with a black jacket to shield himself from Baez’ verbal slings and arrows. He had never bothered to dress in a jacket before even when Caylee’s memorial took place.
Initially Casey shot daggers at him as you can see in the photo above. Later she looked at him as though he was a zoo animal with a curious objectivity.
George came across very defensive, which was a turn off to many in the jury. He also appeared petty. This is a man who calls the police because of missing gas cans but does not report a smell in the car. There is no excuse for someone in law enforcement.
Casey looks disgusted with her father in many instances with her tight jaw and down turned lips.
George showed a lot of arrogance and anger as he tried to spar with Jose Baez. He appeared somewhat condescending. In looking at that exchange, it made the jury see how arrogant and condescending he may have been towards Casey.
Casey looks at him with complete disdain as Baez brings up the topic of molesting Casey starting when she was 8. George turns red and purses his lips while Casey shakes her head No. Then Jose tells him how in Florida in is life in prison for molesting a child, indicating that he would never admit to it.
Casey looks hurt and upset as though he may very well have molested her. This was the only emotion she showed. She has only anger and disgust towards George.
George cried only for himself. He cried when he spoke of the suicide note. Some of his tears were fake, as we can see above, and some of his tears were real, where he sobbed.
Casey could careless. She cocks her head and looks on with an objective curiosity as though she was observing a zoo animal. Note his down turned mouth and furrowed forehead, the veins popping out. This is raw emotion on his part.
If Casey could not show a tinge of emotion and empathy towards her father's obvious breakdown, it shows how much she hates him. This indicates that she has shut the door on her father.
Did George feel guilty about the way he treated her? He said he did, verbally, in the jailhouse tapes. What did he feel guilty about in the suicide note? Was it that he molested her? Maybe, maybe not. Only the two of them will know for sure. Whatever the case, something happened to make Casey the way she is.
Casey Anthony: Mystery Solved (Excerpt)
By truthtron, statevcasey.wordpress.com
September 28, 2011
Casey Anthony and her child lived at her
parents’ home in Orlando. Her friends characterized her behavior and
personality to detectives (transcript, transcript, transcript, transcript):
"I’ll tell you exactly what I thought um…she was a very nice person, she is a nice person um …a lot of…she seemed to be very agreeable, like if you say something, whether or not she’s actually done, she’ll say she has, and a lot of stuff she’d say, I …think it was a little bit BS, but it was trivial things, so I never paid it too much mind. Um…besides that she was very nice, she was caring, she…like, I would, I got sick one time, even when we were, after we were dating, she came and cooked for me food, chicken soup and all this stuff, like. She was a very good person. She did care, and I got along with her great.
"Um…she’s been really happy, she’s just, and you, I mean…any of my friends that have hang out with her, she comes out [and] she’s [a] very, very social person. She’s been cooking for everybody in the house, cleaning up the place…
"She’s always been like the mother figure in the group, like, Hey, you shouldn’t be doing this, hey, you shouldn’t be doing that.
"She always had to have somebody around
her or somebody talking to her. And a lot of people get annoyed because
she talks so much."
She was described by her friends as primarily a homebody but went shopping, often with her child (transcript):
"She appeared to be more of a homebody. We liked to go shopping. That’s what we did. We went shopping.
"A lot of times Caylee would be with us.
She drank alcohol but was not a drug user (transcript, transcript, transcript):
"She was very adamantly against cigarettes and pot.
"Casey was always the type that would scold people if she went to a party and saw people with pot. She was like, 'Don’t be doing that s**t.'
"She never was really into [drugs]. Like I
said, whenever we went out she would rarely drink to get drunk. We’d go
out and she’d have a beer because she’d most of the time drive."
Her friends partied but she didn’t go out with them all the time because she had to take care of her child (transcript):
"I do go out. I do party. And most of the time [Casey] wasn’t there… because she had Caylee."
The times that Casey did go out, she lied and said that she had to “work” late. On those days, she dropped the child off with her mother, Cindy Anthony, at work according to co-workers (transcript, transcript):
"Yes, [Casey] did bring the child in, usually on Wednesday[s], when I worked late. She was dressed, usually in a hurry to say, 'Mom I got to go,' [and] drop the child off about 5.
"Ah, there’s been times that she was
supposedly, according to Cindy, going to work. So, she would drop Caylee
off here and Caylee would stay with Cindy for 30 minutes or whatever.
And then Caylee would leave with Cindy."
When Casey did this, Cindy would call later in the evening and tell Casey to come home, according to her friends (transcript):
"She went out with us maybe once a month. Whether it was a house party or we went downtown, maybe once a month.
"Her mom would call almost every single time we went out.
"Her mom would just call, 'Where are you?
When are you going to be home?' You know, 'I want to go to bed.' And she
wanted her home to take care of her own daughter."
Casey told her parents that she had a babysitter named Zanny (read “Zanny, the Nanny”). Sometimes when she would “work” late, she would stay over at the babysitter’s place with her child. The babysitter was actually her boyfriend at the time (transcript):
"She’ll come over and stay over probably
three or four times a week. Uh, most of the time with Caylee, um, very
rarely without her."
Despite all of this, however, Casey never found life with her child to be a burden (transcript):
"She always told me she wouldn’t change it for anything."
Her friend, Annie Downing, was asked by detectives to describe the relationship between Casey and her child (transcript):
"If anything, over protective. For, until
Caylee was two and a half, uh, nobody could hold her because she was so
tied to Casey. I mean I was around Casey five days a week for at least
an hour or so. I mean when we were good friends we, I mean we hung out
almost every single day. And she, like I said, I couldn’t even hold her.
I was around her like every single day. She knew my face. She knew who I
was. She was okay around me. But she wouldn’t, I mean, if Casey were to
go to the bathroom and not take Caylee, Caylee would scream."
Another friend, Melina Calabrese, described the relationship (transcript):
"She and Caylee were adorable. I mean,
they would call me on the phone and they would sing songs to me. She
was, for being, you know, a nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, uh, mother,
she, she, I, I just, I, I’m you know, I didn’t envy it, because,
obviously, I’m not a mother. But, I just, I, I almost hoped for it, you
know, because she was very good with Caylee. She gave Caylee almost
everything that a little girl could need or want. She was very good with
her when it, you know, when Caylee did get upset, randomly. Uh, you
know, Casey was very good with her. Just never raised her voice. Always,
you know, and I never once ever saw her touch her in a, in a, in a
negatory (sic) way. It, it’s, you know, and to this day I, I, I hope my
mother/daughter bond is going to be like that. And, it almost seemed
easy."
However, sometimes when Casey was at home, she would leave her child unattended (transcript):
"Uhm, I do believe that there are times where Casey would leave Caylee unattended to do things. Get on the computer, talk on the phone.
"Caylee would usually, she would hang out in the living room while Casey was in the computer room, or sometimes Casey would go outside to use the telephone and leave Caylee in the living room.
"Uhm, she also went outside and played with Caylee a lot, and
then she’d also be playing with the dogs. Uhm, she let Caylee play in
her playpen while she’d go do something."
Hot Body Contest
The pictures of Casey Anthony at the Fusian nightclub are now infamous. Casey’s boyfriend used to work at the nightclub and she accompanied him (transcript, transcript):
"Um…and I manage the nights and I usually DJ so, I mean, she would just come up there, you know, try to help out with whatever ’cause I have the shot girls and she tells the shot girls she wants to have some kind of help, so I would let her, you know, manage the shot girls.
"What happened is she had gone there
[Fusian] uhm, with Tony. Uhm, she didn’t work there. She was uh, Tony’s
girlfriend. Uhm, Tony and Clint had the promotion company in conjunction
with two other gentlemen. Uhm, they all ran Friday nights there. She
would just sit with Tony uhm, at the front door, you know, checking ID’s
or whatever, whatnot."
The emcee of the hot body contest told detectives what happened that night (transcript):
"Uhm, they were running short on girls that evening for the hot body contest. Someone had asked her, I’m not sure if it was Tony or one of the other promoters had asked her hey, would you do it?
"So she changed. At that point she had
like a skirt in her car or something. So she changed into that blue
outfit at that point. Based at the realization that hey, I’m about to
get on stage and do some dancing, she did proceed to pound some shots
and some drinks before she got up on stage…"
A friend who knew Casey well stated that there was something wrong with the pictures (transcript):
"I would look at those pictures and I just
didn’t feel like [that was] the Casey I knew. She was trying too hard
to be someone she was not. Those seem like she was trying too hard to,
you know, smile for this camera and do these poses. Something about
those pictures is just not sitting right with me."
Casey did a good job at hiding her emotions from the people who were around her, most of whom were new friends. But there were clues that something was amiss – besides the fact that a mother didn’t have her child for a month.
At some point during the “31 Days” before her boyfriend left for New York, she awoke in the middle of the night when she thought everyone was asleep, sat up in bed, turned on her laptop and cried to a video of her child (view video).
Nathan Lezniewicz, a roommate of Casey’s boyfriend, told detectives what happened (transcript):
"Tony said that she [Casey] had woken up before crying.
"Uhm, I guess it was, he had just told me
this maybe a couple weeks ago, that she had sat up one night [and] that
he had woken up. I guess maybe between the hours of three and five he
had woken up and she was sitting up in the bed next to him crying."
Tony, Casey’s boyfriend, recalled the event (transcript):
"One time, a couple times that I had her, she had nightmares and she had these sweats, but I can’t remember exactly what days those were.
"Uhm, I remember, I would say it wasn’t at night. It was in the morning. And she was already awake. And she was just on her laptop watching uh, this video and she was crying.
"The video where I guess it shows like Caylee with the gr…her [great-] grandfather, that was shown all over the news.
"She was uh, uh, sitting up in my bed and
like at, like at the end, like … Indian style or whatever. And then uh,
and she had the laptop in here, in her lap."
Many TV doctors clamored that Casey was a sociopath because of her behavior, but they were wrong according to psychologists who examined her in jail (transcript, transcript):
"Let’s be clear. Many of the mental health experts have been yelling psychopath, sociopath. However, in my mind specifically when it came to anti-social personality or sociopathy, there was a specific provision [in her character] that ruled out her being diagnosed with that disorder.
"I do not believe – based on all of my
interactions with her, as well as the psychological testing, I don’t
believe that she has any diagnosable mental illness… [like] a
psychiatric or a psychological disorder. She doesn’t have [borderline]
traits either."
Her behavior throughout the “31 Days” was immature and Casey eventually recognized that according to a psychologist (transcript):
"She can’t believe how immature and how
she behaved. And again, I emphasize that I am seeing a Casey who has
been in jail for close to three years when I start seeing her. So she,
herself, when she looks back in time, has a real hard time understanding
how she behaved the way she behaved."
Casey told him (article):
"I’m embarrassed when I look at my behavior now. I can understand why others think the way they do."
The “31 Days” were not devoid of any criminal activity by Casey. She stole hundreds of dollars from her friend, Amy, and wiped out her bank account. It was only a matter of time before Amy found out. Casey was on a collision course with her own fate one way or another.
The Kidnapping Story
Cindy Anthony found her daughter, Casey, on July 15, 2008, and brought her home. Casey’s brother, Lee Anthony, recalled the night (transcript):
"I met them outside in the driveway as they were pulling in. My, when my sister and my mother uh, get out of the vehicle, it’s very obvious to me that they had been at least yelling back and forth with each other. Uhm, my sister conveyed something to the extent of uh, “You know you won’t even listen to me and why do I even bother.' Uhm, my mother uhm, when I’m trying to ask her what’s going on she just says, 'Your sister knows where Caylee is and she won’t take her to me,' or, 'She won’t take me to her,' sorry. Uhm, and then she continues to say, 'I’m going to call the police and you need to talk to your sister.'
"So Casey immediately went inside, sat in on her bed. And I stood in her doorway and was trying to being a mediator through, from my mother who is in the living room and my sister who was in her room, trying to mediate the situation to, frankly, not have the police being called on my sister because it didn’t make any sense to me why she’d want to go through that unnecessarily. Uhm, for what seemed to be a better part of thirty or forty-five minutes I tried my best to stall my mom and get through to my sister that as she maintained, 'I know where Caylee is. She’s with the nanny.' Uhm, Casey maintained that you know uhm, 'Caylee’s at the nanny’s house.' Uh, 'She’s sleeping. I don’t want to take her out of you know, what’s been normal for her lately. We can go get her in the morning.' Uhm, 'I don’t want to interrupt her.'
"So I was trying to facilitate other
options to my sister by saying, 'I will go. Tell me where I can go to,
to see Caylee myself. I’ll go for five minutes. I’ll do it your way.
I’ll go and just make sure that she’s okay.' I even offered to have my
roommate, a good friend of mine and a good friend of ours, go to verify
that she’s okay. And my sister maintained that you know, 'Mom won’t
allow it to happen.' While my mother continued in the background to say, 'That’s unacceptable. I want her here. I want her home. I, I don’t, I
don’t want just to see her. I want to hold her. I want her to be here.'
So I didn’t really force that issue very much longer."
At this point, Casey maintained that she knew where her child was. Lee and his mother believed the child was with the babysitter but Casey wouldn’t take them to see her. When their mother left the room, Casey started to open up to Lee and confess a few things:
"So every time my mother would go outside I’d try to ask something to my sister that maybe she wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in front of my mom. You know, asking what’s, you know, 'What’s going on? You know what’s the deal?' And she still maintained everything, but she would say, uhm, that’s when she opened up to me and said, uhm, uhm, 'Mom has uhm, thrown it in my face many times before that I’m an unfit mother and you know, maybe she’s right and maybe I am.' She offered up to me for the first time that uhm, my mother has referred, said to my sister that uhm, even though Caylee’s been the best thing and the best mistake that she was indeed a mistake. That she was Casey’s mistake.
"She did uh, when it was uhm, when I kept saying, 'Well I don’t get it. What’s in it for you? Why are you letting, you know, the police get involved with this? The, this seems, this doesn’t make any sense to me.' She’s like, 'Well maybe this should have been done a long time ago. I’ve stolen money from Mom. I’ve been a bad daughter.' Uhm, 'You know I’ve been,' she said, 'I’ve stolen money from you. You know I’ve untrustworthy, you know.' And she goes, 'And maybe I have been a, a, a, you know, a bad, a mother, a daughter and sister.' And she said, uhm, 'You know so this should have been done a long time ago.'"
Unfortunately, she was taking too long to come out with it, so Lee gave up and told his mother to call the cops:
"Because at that point when she continued
to maintain that, I had finally looked to my Mom kind of with an
approval and said, 'Fine, call the cops because I’m with you. I want her
to prove it. If she won’t allow us to go, even me, or my friend to go
just make sure that she’s okay and come back.' I was like, 'I want, I
want you to have her prove it too. Absolutely.' My Mom goes outside to
call the police. While she goes outside to call the police I go and sit
in the, in the living room. So at this point my, I feel like my brain’s
fried and because I’m going, I don’t know how else I could have had her
open up to me."
Lee went back to his sister’s room and approached the situation from a different angle. He roleplayed what would happen when the cops arrive:
"I was like, 'Let’s go through this right
now.' I said, 'Because I don’t understand what, what you’re going to do
here.' I said, 'The officer is going to say,' You know, good evening Ms.
Anthony. Uhm, where’s your daughter? 'That’s exactly what he’s going to
say. And what are you going to say?' And she says, 'She’s with the
nanny. She’s sleeping.' And then again, playing the role of the police
officer and the scenario, I say to my sister, Great Ms. Anthony. I’m so
happy to hear that. That’s going to be a relief for everybody. So hop
in the car. Your Mom’s going to follow. Let’s go get her. And when I
look at my sister for the response she’s, she’s got this look on her
face like… I’m going to have to tell them what’s going on, you know.
"That’s exactly what they were going to do because that’s what they did do when they came. Uhm, and when I, so I gave probably a good ten, fifteen seconds to respond until I gave her just kind of like a shrugged shoulders look of you know, what’s it going to be? What, what are you going to say?"
Lee gave Casey a “slap of reality” and she broke down:
"And then at that moment is when Casey
began to break down and cry and she said, 'Lee, do you want to know the
truth? I haven’t seen Caylee in thirty-one days.' And then she repeated
herself, 'I haven’t seen my daughter in thirty-one days.' And at this
point her hands are in her face. She sitting her hands are in her face
and she’s crying."
This was make-or-break time right here because Casey was actually telling the truth. Lee followed up with some questions:
"And I take, her repeating herself
actually gave me enough time to let that sink into me, and instead of
getting completely worked up, just get, try to start getting the facts
of, 'Where have you been? Where is the last time that you’ve seen her,'
and all these type of things. I was trying to whisper to her, because
for whatever reason she hadn’t opened up to my mother yet. And I felt
like she was only willing to open up to me at this point now that I’ve
gotten through to her. And I was trying to ask her who took her. You
know, 'When’s the last, when, when,' you know and all these questions."
That’s when the light bulb illuminated in Casey’s head. She found an exit strategy. She didn’t have to admit the truth, which seemingly was on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she made up a story:
"And and that’s when she goes, 'She was kidnapped.' And she wasn’t speaking in details. She was speaking in generalities.
"And as soon as that started happening my mother realized that I’m whispering to my sister, she gets, you know, smart to the situation and realizes my sister is saying something, and she busts into the room. And again, the door wasn’t shut or anything, but she comes into the room, sees that my sister was crying, and she said, and actually the first thing that she asked her, she says, 'What have you done? Why are you crying? What’s going on?'
"And I can tell you, she, she, her eyes
were watered. She had been crying. Now it’s not bawling mind you, she
had been crying. But when my mother came in and started, 'What’s going
on,' and when my sister said, 'I don’t know where, where Caylee is,'
again her voice escalates when my mom gets in the room almost
combatively. Uhm, my sister, when she explains that to my mom, 'I don’t
know where Caylee is,' and then my mother immediately goes, 'Who took
her? Who took her?' And, and, and then Casey goes, 'Uhm, the nanny did.
She was kidnapped Mom.' And then that’s when my mother kind of hit her
fist on the bed and said, 'We could have found her a month ago. Why did
you wait?' And at that point my sister is done crying. She’s, now
they’re fighting about you know, this stuff in the past instead of
trying to focus on the information that we need to get."
At this point, Casey began ironing out the finer points of her story. She would stick with it long after it was refuted.
In my opinion, it was a mistake to arrest Casey Anthony so early on in the investigation. The detectives were already set on arresting Casey before she took them to Universal Studios on July 16, as they told George (transcript):
"I think it was Yuri [Melich who called
me]. And he just says that they were coming to my house to take Casey in
for some more questioning. And I remember he was very specific. He
says, 'George, she might not be coming back home.'"
Had they not arrested her, she would have gone home and been forced to face her family and friends. They knew her better than the detectives so they would have interrogated her on a more personal level. In all likelihood, she would have broken down.
Instead, they put her in jail and cut communication. From that point on, she was in control of the show. She could regulate what she said and not have to face any interrogations. Essentially, her incarceration was a continuation of what she was doing for the 31 days prior: evading her
How Did Caylee Die?
That State said that Casey Anthony intentionally suffocated her child, but this would be inconsistent with the character evidence. Furthermore, a psychologist who examined Casey in jail corroborated the character evidence with his findings (transcript):
"[Murder] would have been out of character
for… what I’ve learned about Casey. It would be out of character for
what I’ve learned about her parenting, that she was not a negligent or
abusive parent. I don’t think anybody has ever suggested that. And it
also would have been out of character for – in comparing to her prior
history or lack of history of violence. So if there was a homicide, it would have been out of character for her."
Cindy Anthony revealed to Dr. Phil that, three weeks before the trial began, Casey's lawyer, Jose Baez, called her into his office and told her that Caylee drowned and that Casey panicked.
In response to George Anthony’s claim that he believed Caylee was drugged so Casey could party (read “The Anthonys vs. the Evidence”), Baez said, “Caylee died on a Monday afternoon… there are not very many parties on a Monday afternoon” (source).
The scenario starts the night of June 15, 2008. Cindy and Caylee were in the pool when Casey came home shortly before 7:30 p.m. (cell phone pings), as Cindy recalled (transcript):
"I just had taken Caylee for the day to see my dad. [I got home] I want to say somewhere around 4:00 whatever because – just because I remember I fed Caylee dinner when I got home and then we went swimming.
"We were in the pool when Casey came home.
She started to [get in the pool] and I told her it would be too cold
for her because we were just – the sun was starting to go down. We were
getting a little bit chilled, and I told her I was about ready to take
Caylee out."
The media reported that neighbors overheard a fight between Casey and her mother. Cindy denied that any “fight” took place. She does not strike me as a liar, but she tends to trivialize certain matters. Casey came home around 7:30 and started texting her boyfriend constantly between 7:36 and 11:04. Therefore, if there was a fight, it was over in a few minutes.
Jesse Grund, Casey's former fiance, interview with law enforcement, July 31, 2008:
JG: Is, there was two, there's two different types of what if scenarios that have gone through my head in regards to what could have happened to uhm, Caylee uhm, because I'll, I'll say this for the record. Uhm, I don't believe Caylee at any point in time would have ever hurt, or I don't believe Casey would have ever hurt Caylee on purpose and I, I, there's no way that I, I personally could ever foresee her doing that. Uhm, I do believe that there are times where Casey would leave Caylee unattended to do things. Get on the computer, talk on the phone. And at that point...
EE: And where would she be unattended? Where, in...
JG: Caylee, Caylee would usually, she would hang out in the living room while Casey was in the computer room, or sometimes Casey would go outside to use the telephone and leave Caylee in the living room. Uhm, she also went outside and played with Caylee a lot and then she'd also be playing with the dogs. Uhm, she let Caylee play in her playpen while she'd go do something. So, it, there, there were plenty of times where I could have foreseen, because we both know with children something quick can happen. I mean Caylee was somebody who you know like picking up rocks and putting them in her mouth, or, or you, dog food was another thing that she used to use. And Caylee at any point could have picked one of those things up, asphyxiated and died. It wouldn't take that long for a child that small to asphyxiate and die.
EE: So you're talking the timeframes that Casey would leave her alone from time are lengthy?
JG: I mean yeah (affirmative). I mean again, uhm...
EE: How about the pool?
JG: I, I never, I didn't know enough about Caylee and the pool. I knew that they like to, and I knew that Caylee loved the pool. But I never ever actually seen Caylee in the pool. Now I was under the understanding they had actually had to move the ladder because Caylee kept trying to get into the pool and things of that nature. Uhm, I believe at any point in time something possibly could have accidentally happened to Caylee. And if something accidentally happened to Caylee I literally believe that Casey would have an emotional breakdown: a mental breakdown to the point where I almost believe she would take Caylee and put her somewhere and then uh, tell herself a new story, a new reality of what happened to her.
EE: Because she's been living in a false reality for years?
JG: Correct. So I don't think it's that far out of the spectrum. I think, I think if something happened to Caylee, her one toe that she's had in reality for the last couple of years, her one foot would be gone and she would be completely in her own separate world. And I think uh, that's because Casey directly has some issues that mentally she's never gotten taken, taken care of. So I, I do believe something accidentally happen to Caylee, which I believe is a what if scenario that could have happened. Uhm, choke on a piece of dog food, eat a rock, Slip coming out of the pool together. Uhm, you know, just fall off of something that she's climbing too high. She's, Caylee was a rambunctious little kid. She liked to climb. She liked to run around. She liked to do things. You know what three year old doesn't.
EE: Now Casey actually kind of lives under mom's thumb. It seems like mom's very judgemental of her as far as her m..uh, parental uhm, capabilities. You think Casey would be more than afraid to say Mom, now look what happened? I, look at what I've done?
JG: I, I believe if there's a, there's the distinct possibility that Caylee, Casey, if she wouldn't tell mom if something like this happened. There, I don't, I don't think there's any way. I, I don't even think that she would have told anyone except herself. I don't even think, the only way I think if somebody would have known is if she reached out to somebody to help her. But I don't, Casey's been an independent, self-sufficient person, who thrives off the attention of others.
EE: Uh-hum (affirmative).
JG: But she likes to do things on her own.
EE: Do you think she would, do you think she would have the strength, the inner strength at that point in time to take the child and put the child somewhere without help?
JG: I think that she'd be able to take Caylee (inaudible).
EE: Because it seems like she has to fall on men or boyfriends to have that crutch for confidence. Faced with that situation, would she have to call upon one of those guys?
JG: I believe that she would reach out to somebody for help.
EE: Who would that be?
JG: It would not be me. Because if it was anything in regards...
EE: Well at that time in her life though. I mean...
JG: Uhm, the only person that it would have been with would be her current boyfriend, which would be Tony Lazaro. That's the only person I could think of that she would have personally reached out to. Because again, they weren't together for very long and she was already falling in love with him in her mind, well was falling in love with him. So, I believe Tony Lazaro would be the only one that she'd reach out to for help. She wouldn't reach out to me in regards to anything Caylee related, especially if Caylee got hurt or anything, because he knew what my, she would know what my reaction would be. She also knows that I, I tend to be an honest and righteous individual. I'm, I'm going to come right out and tell the correct people if something happened.
EE: Uhm, Yuri said that there was some discussion about uh, hypotheticals with the playhouse out back. What was that?
JG: Uhm, well what, what we were talking specifically about in regards to the playhouse was as soon as I heard Caylee was missing and found out the extended length of time. I believe if something specifically would have happened to Caylee the first place she would have put her is uh, next to the playhouse. That was the first place I thought of. Well I ...
EE: Why would that be?
JG: That, Caylee loved that playhouse. That was like her own little house. Uhm, she loved everything about it. She had her own little phone in there. She has her own kitchen set. I mean she, she absolutely and totally loved the playhouse. Every time I'd go outside to play with Caylee anytime I got the chance (making clapping sound), right to the playhouse every time. Uhm, she spent a lot of time out there with her grandparents and with Casey. I believe that Casey, if something would have happened to her that would have been the first place that she would have put Caylee if she wanted to place Casey's body somewhere if something actually did happen to her. That's the, the first place that I can think of that she would have put her.
EE: How about if she had to remove her from mom and dads house where do you think she would have found comfort to put her next?
JG: (Sighs) You know honestly I, I, I can't think of anywhere else. Uh, my experience with Caylee was the first eleven months she was alive and then that, that you know, two months October and November when I really got to see her. Uhm, other than that, I, I, it, it was always home related. Caylee was at home all the time uhm, unless she was with the nanny. Uhm, because she was always at home. She was a, a home child I guess would be the best choice of words. So I don't ever remember there being anywhere else that Casey would go with Caylee. The playhouse, the pool, inside, that's about all I can remember.
[...]
EE: What about mom? We talked about mom and Casey's relationship and you brought up something a while back. She, you guys were laying on the couch together back when you were engaged.
JG: Uh-hum (affirmative).
EE: And mom blurts out something that kind of puts you in an embarrassing way. Can you tell me about that again?
JG: Uhm, we were laying on the couch. Her and Casey started having an argument about something and I, I stuck up for Casey. And I said, "Do, please don't do this while I'm here. Don't talk to her like that. You know I love your daughter." And then she immediately just throws Casey under the bus. a proverbial turn, just lays her out there. "How do you want to be with somebody who's got no future? She didn't even go back to get her high school education. You know she's got a, she's got a job and a place where she doesn't really even make enough money to support Caylee. I'm doing, I'm the one supporting Caylee." And just basically just threw her out there. Totally...
EE: Make...
JG: ...just threw her out there.
EE: Makes her feel like a failure in your eyes?
JG: Absolutely.
EE: (Sighs.) And that was a pretty common theme, and that was just one that sticks out in your mind or...
JG: Well, what...
EE: ...more of an isolated incident?
JG: What ended up happening with Casey and her mother was for the first, I would say for the first five to six months that we were together the second time, she constantly would tell me she doesn't want to end up like her mother. She wants to be a different person. Uhm, uh, she wants to change. And then they'd still be (unintelligible) and then she, I started seeing things like on her My Space, "I can't wait to be just like my mother when I grow up. I want to be just like her. I love her so much." She'd confide things in her. And that's when our relationship, her and I's relationship started going downhill at that point.
EE: Maybe if you can't beat them join them.
JG: Well, right.
From CNN, March 24, 2011:
Two-year-old Caylee Anthony was not murdered by her mother as prosecutors maintain, but drowned in the family's pool in June 2008, Casey Anthony's defense attorney told jurors during opening statements.
Casey Anthony and her father, George Anthony, panicked upon finding the child, Jose Baez said. Anthony found her father cradling Caylee's body the morning of June 16, 2008, he said, and George Anthony yelled at his daughter, "Look what you've done. Your mother will never forgive you." He told her she would go to jail for child neglect, Baez said.
"This is a tragedy that snowballed out of control," Baez said. "This is not a murder case. This is not a manslaughter case ... this is a tragic accident that happened to some very disturbed people."
Baez dropped another bombshell when explaining Anthony's behavior in the month before Caylee was reported missing on July 15 -- partying and lying about the child's whereabouts. "Casey did what she's been doing all her life, or most of it: hiding her pain," he said, adding that Casey Anthony had been sexually abused by her father starting at age 8.
Anthony was taught from an early age to behave as if nothing was wrong, he said, describing an incident where she went to school and behaved normally at age 13 after performing oral sex on her father. George Anthony sat stone-faced in the gallery as Baez made the allegations; Anthony put her head on the shoulder of another defense attorney and sobbed.
However, in his testimony, George Anthony -- the trial's first witness -- denied ever sexually abusing his daughter. He also said he was not at his home when Caylee died. "If I'd have known something happened to Caylee, we wouldn't be here today," he said as Casey Anthony shook her head.
George Anthony said as a former police officer, he was trained in CPR and that he would have done everything possible to save his granddaughter's life if he had found her in the pool as Baez alleged.
Baez also alleged Casey Anthony was inappropriately touched by her brother, Lee, although "it didn't go as far" as it had with her father. It was bad enough, however, he said, that the FBI conducted a paternity test to see if Lee Anthony had fathered Caylee.
He told jurors the Anthony family "keeps its secrets quiet ... You're going to hear all kinds of bizarre family behavior."
Baez said the family was "religious" about removing the above-ground pool ladder so that Caylee, who loved to swim, had no access to it. He suggested that Caylee's grandmother, Cindy Anthony, had forgotten to put it up the night before Caylee drowned, as she and Caylee were just exiting the pool when Anthony arrived home.
The day after Caylee's death, June 17, Cindy Anthony told coworkers she believed someone had been swimming in her pool, as the gate was left open and the ladder was left in place, Baez said.
Baez attacked much of the state's forensic evidence, saying such evidence has never before been admitted into courts -- and a death-penalty trial should not be the test case, as much of it is "questionable."
Police zeroed in on Anthony from the beginning, he said. "This investigation was extremely thorough when it comes to focusing in on Casey, probably the most comprehensive investigation that you will ever come across, and in the history of the state of Florida. It was directed at one person and one person only. The problem with this investigation is, it reached a level of desperation."
During his two-hour opening statement, Baez also cast doubt on Roy Kronk, the meter reader who found Caylee's skeletal remains in December 2008, alleging that he found the remains in an unknown location months earlier and moved them to where they would be found by authorities in an attempt to cash in on the high-profile case. "He thought he had himself a lottery ticket," Baez said.
"You will not be able to trust a thing having to do with Mr. Kronk, because he had control of Caylee's remains, obviously, for several months," Baez said. "Where he found her we do not know. We may never know, because the police never investigated him."
Kronk's attorney, David Evans, denied the allegations in a statement. "To the extent that the defense is stating that Mr. Kronk somehow had possession of and had something to do with the disposition of the remains of Caylee Anthony, those statements are absolutely false," Evans said.
George Anthony's cross-examination by Baez was punctuated by objections from prosecutors, most of them sustained by Orange County Chief Judge Belvin Perry Jr.
Baez did elicit the information that George Anthony did not ask his daughter who had fathered her child until around the time Caylee was born.
Baez attempted to cast doubt on George Anthony's recall of what Caylee was wearing the day he last saw her, suggesting he would likely not have retained that detail as he didn't know it was the last time he would see her. George Anthony completed his testimony but could be recalled to the stand later.
After the court session, an attorney for George and Cindy Anthony issued a statement responding to Baez's claims made during his opening remarks.
"George and Cindy Anthony are shocked and appalled that the Defense would resort to lies about them in today's opening statement. Baez's idle speculation today certainly are not facts, The only result achieved by the Defense in this statement was to further hurt this grieving family, " Orlando attorney Mark Lippman said in the written statement.
"George Anthony maintains that he never had anything to do with the death of Caylee Marie Anthony including what happened to her remains after she allegedly drowned," Lippman added.
From Christian Science Monitor, June 29, 2011:
Was the odor in the car driven by Casey Anthony caused by decaying trash or the decomposing body of her daughter, Caylee? George Anthony disavowed an earlier statement that the smell was trash.
The father of a Florida woman accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter testified – in a reversal of an earlier statement – that the odor in his daughter’s car back in 2008 was the unmistakable stench of human decomposition.
In emotional and at-times angry testimony, George Anthony also denied that he sexually molested his daughter, and he lashed out at defense attorney Jose Baez, who has accused Mr. Anthony of participating in a coverup of his granddaughter Caylee’s death.
“You are trying to take this joy of my life away from me, and you can’t do that anymore,” Anthony told Mr. Baez.
At several points in his testimony, the father broke down, sobbing after he was asked about trying to take his own life in despair over Caylee’s death. As he cried on the witness stand, his daughter, Casey, sat stone-faced at the defense table, revealing no hint of emotion.
In his testimony about the car, Anthony disavowed an earlier sworn statement that the smell in the car was not human decomposition but the smell of trash left in the car trunk for several weeks.
“I could smell it three feet away on the passenger side,” Anthony told the jury. “Yes, human decomposition. Yes, I will say it. Human decomposition.”
The admission is a victory for prosecutors in the first-degree murder trial of Casey Anthony, who is accused of smothering her daughter and then hiding her body for several days in the trunk of her car. The skeletal remains were later recovered in December 2008 in a wooded area near the family home.
A key issue in the case is whether the strong odor in Ms. Anthony’s car in the weeks after Caylee’s disappearance in June 2008 was caused by decaying trash or Caylee’s decomposing body.
Baez sought to undercut the force of Mr. Anthony’s testimony by pointing out that at an earlier deposition, the father had told prosecutors it was the stench of trash, not human remains.
“The decomposition that I smelled on July 15, [2008], at Johnson’s towing smelled like human decomposition,” Anthony testified. He said he had direct experience with the stench of dead bodies from his past work as a police detective.
“I can close my eyes and smell that again,” he said. “How dare you tell me I said something different than what I did.”
When Baez pressed the issue of how he could make statements that tended to support his daughter’s case in 2009 and yet testify to something significantly different in 2011, Anthony delivered his second bombshell of the morning.
“I didn’t want to believe back then [in 2009] that my daughter would be capable of taking the life of her daughter,” he told the jury.
Assistant state attorney Jeff Ashton seized on the statement during cross-examination.
“On Aug. 5, 2009, [at the deposition], you still believed that your granddaughter was killed by someone and it happened not in the custody of your daughter,” Mr. Ashton asked.
“Yes,” Anthony said.
During the deposition, you were upset, Ashton told Anthony, because you were being called upon to give testimony against your daughter in the murder of your granddaughter?
“Correct,” Anthony answered.
“But today, you no longer believe that your granddaughter died in the custody of someone other than your daughter,” Ashton asked.
The question prompted an immediate objection from Baez. It was sustained by Chief Judge Belvin Perry.
Ashton then asked about a July 2008 statement that Mr. Anthony gave to investigators. “Did you ever tell police that you thought your daughter murdered your granddaughter?” he asked.
“I didn’t believe that at that time,” Anthony said. “No.”
The implication for the jury is that while Anthony did not believe it in 2008 and 2009, perhaps he believes it now.
As expected, Baez also questioned Anthony about whether he had ever sexually molested his daughter.
“I would never do anything like that with my daughter,” the father testified.
“You would never admit to molesting your child,” Baez asked.
“Sir, I would never do anything like that to my daughter,” he said. “I would never do anything to harm my daughter in that way.”
Earlier in the morning, Cindy Anthony, Casey Anthony’s mother, was asked if she was aware of an incident involving her son, Lee, going into Casey’s room at night.
“No,” she answered.
Baez had sought to call a former boyfriend of Casey Anthony to testify that she once told him that she’d been molested by her brother. During questioning outside the presence of the jury, Jesse Grund said Casey told him that her brother had entered her bedroom late one night while she was sleeping and groped her.
Prosecutors objected to the testimony, and it has not been heard by the jury.
Mr. Anthony broke down in tears on the stand at several points. One point came after Baez asked him if he attempted to commit suicide in January 2009.
He admitted that he went to a hotel, drank alcohol in combination with assorted medications, and then wrote a suicide note.
Such details are important to the defense case because defense lawyers are seeking to paint Mr. Anthony not only as a child molester, but also as someone who would help his daughter cover up Caylee’s death.
Mr. Anthony has denied any involvement in a coverup.
During cross-examination by Ashton, Anthony was asked why he tried to take his own life.
He said when Caylee’s remains were found, it “left a deep hurt inside.” He said it was “a breakdown inside me, and seeing what my wife and son went through.”
He added: “I just decided that it was time for me to get away from all this to spend time with Caylee.”
Ashton entered Anthony’s suicide note into evidence. Prosecutors say the contents of the note demonstrate that Mr. Anthony did not know how Caylee died and was not aware of the location of his granddaughter’s body until after it was discovered on Dec. 11.
From CNN, July 3, 2011:
Jose Baez blamed Casey Anthony's behavior on her dysfunctional family situation.
"Casey has issues," Baez said. "And these issues were there long before Caylee was ever born and long before June 16, 2008."
He said he was "not proud of the way Casey behaved. I don't think anybody here can justify her actions, but they do not constitute murder."
"These people are different," Baez said of the Anthony family. "This girl is different. And this is why she behaved in this way."
He dismissed the state's alleged motive -- that Casey Anthony was tired of being a parent and wanted to be an independent 22-year-old -- as "nonsense."
"She had no motive," he said of his client. "Casey treated Caylee well. She loved that child." No witnesses, he reminded jurors, ever testified that Casey Anthony was anything other than a loving mother.
Baez continued the defense's efforts to focus suspicion on George Anthony, saying he lied repeatedly on the stand, even testifying against his daughter. George Anthony "doesn't have an ounce of paternal instinct," he said.
"George cares about George. Not about his wife, not about his daughter, not about his family -- about himself."
Ashton, however, said, "There is absolutely no possibility, reasonable or otherwise, that George Anthony had anything to do with disposing of this body. He is a doting grandfather who loved that child literally more than life itself," referring to George Anthony's suicide attempt in January 2009 after Caylee's remains were found.
Baez said the suicide attempt came because George Anthony was nervous at the authorities nosing around him.
He also tried to cast suspicion on Roy Kronk, the former Orange County meter reader who found Caylee's remains, alleging he knew where the remains were for months.
Testimony regarding the vile odor emanating from Casey Anthony's trunk, Baez said, "does not shed any light on how Caylee died. Period." For all the witnesses that testified about the smell, other witnesses testified they noticed no smell in the car, he pointed out.
"We all know Casey acted inappropriately, and made some mistakes and bad decisions," Baez said, noting Casey Anthony should have called the police and not attempted to "block this out." And if she committed a crime in doing so, he said, the state can charge her for it. But, he said, prosecutors have "overcharged" the case "... just because it's entertainment."
He said authorities focused on Casey Anthony from the beginning and "put square pegs in round holes," in an attempt to make the evidence fit their theory, rather than keep an open mind.
Just before closing arguments began, Perry prohibited defense attorneys from bringing up allegations that Casey Anthony was allegedly sexually abused by her father or brother.
The defense had sought to explain Casey Anthony's behavior during the month before Caylee's disappearance was reported to police by suggesting she had been schooled from an early age to hide her feelings after her father began abusing her when she was 8. George Anthony denied abusing his daughter in testimony.
Baez said in his opening statements that Casey Anthony's brother, Lee Anthony, also abused her, but "it didn't go as far" as that with her father.
From Daily Mail, April 13, 2017:
- George Anthony called daughter Casey a liar.
- He was accused by defense attorney Jose Baez during her murder trial of sexually assaulting his daughter
- George told Casey: 'Look what you've done. Your mother will never forgive you. You'll go to jail for the rest of your life'
- George opened up on the first two episodes of 'Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery'
- George said of listening to Baez in court: 'You don't know how much I wanted to get up and just, do something to him'
- 'My daughter could come right in front of me right now and say, "Dad this is what really happened," and I wouldn't believe her,' said George
- Later in the Investigation Discovery special George read aloud the suicide note he wrote in 2009 after he tried to take his life by combining beer and pills
George Anthony appeared on the Investigation Discovery two-episode premiere of 'Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery,' and addressed his daughter's shocking defense in her murder trial.
Casey's lawyer Jose Baez said in his opening statement that George sexually molested his daughter and helped her hide the body of her dead daughter Caylee after she drowned in a pool.
A disgusted George denied both of those allegations, and said of Casey: 'My daughter could come right in front of me right now and say, "Dad this is what really happened," and I wouldn't believe her.'
He also broke down as he read the suicide note he wrote three weeks after Caylee's body was discovered near his home in Orlando, Florida.
In the special George is asked explicitly by the production team if he ever molested Casey.
'Definitely not. Definitely not would I do anything like that to my daughter,' said George.
He then grew enraged and began to clench his fist as he said: 'I sat in that courtroom that day, and to hear that opening statement from that attorney [Baez], you don't know how much I wanted to get up and just do something to him.'
In his opening statement in the case, Baez immediately went after George, saying that he began sexually abusing his daughter when she was just eight-years-old.
'She could have her father's penis in her mouth and go to school and play with the other kids like nothing was wrong,' claimed Baez.
He went on to claim that George was the one who found Caylee dead in a pool after the toddler drowned, and that he ran to Casey holding the body and screamed: 'Look what you've done. Your mother will never forgive you. You'll go to jail for the rest of your life.'
Baez then continued his attack on George when he was the first witness called to the stand after opening remarks, a last second move by the prosecution after learning that the defense would be making the defendant's father a target.
He did not ask George about the molestation or the discovery of Caylee's body, but rather made him recount a suicide attempt he made in early 2009.
George spoke about that difficult time during the special while fighting back tears.
'I could not function after Caylee was found. I could not function,' said George.
'I drove as far as Daytona Beach, Florida to the most rattiest hotel. I took about 70 pills, I drank as much beer as I could, because I ... I didn't know what anymore to do.'
He then read parts of the lengthy note aloud, saying: 'I want to hold her again, I miss her, I will always love us... I love you, Cynthia Marie - Caylee, here I come.'
From Newser.com, April 12, 2017:
A jury in 2011 acquitted Casey Anthony of murdering her 2-year-old daughter after her defense attorney made the case for an accidental drowning. Her father, George Anthony, says that story is "a bunch of crap."
It's one of several revelations he made in the final episode of Investigation Discovery's three-part documentary series on the case.
Things to know about Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery:
Anthony suggested his daughter drugged Caylee Anthony on June 16, 2008, possibly with Xanax she got through friends. He also suggested it wasn't the first time Casey may have done this, noting Caylee often slept for up to 13 hours at a time, USA Today. "I believe that Casey gave [Caylee] something," George Anthony said. "Caylee didn't wake up."
Note: It would be unusal for a toddler to sleep 13 hours a day. Toddlers need an average of 11 1/4 hours of uninterrupted sleep at night and 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours of sleep during the day. Children at the younger end of the age group take two naps, a morning and an afternoon nap, but by eighteen months most children consolidate their naps to one midday or afternoon nap.
When asked what the street name of Xanax is, George replied, "Zanny." Some sites are reading into the remark.
His wife, Cindy, tells Investigation Discovery she believes Caylee's death was indeed an accidental drowning and that Casey simply panicked. She says she's since forgiven Casey and still speaks to her occasionally, reports the Orlando Sentinel.
George, however, said he'll likely never speak to his daughter again, and adds, "Justice would be to have my daughter behind bars and have her suffer the way Caylee suffered."
How does the couple stay together with such diverging opinions? "I don't think I could find anybody else that would understand my day-to-day ups and downs and what we go through other than him," says Cindy, per USA Today.
(Casey Anthony has pointed the finger at her father.)
"George Anthony floated the possibility that his granddaughter was drugged. While we don’t know exactly how the child died, we know how she didn’t die according to the evidence. She didn’t die by traumatic injury and she didn’t die by poisoning. The remains were tested by a UF toxicologist and an FBI toxicologist. The UF toxicologist tested the bone, bone marrow and hair for volatiles, such a chloroform, as well as drugs, such as Xanax. The results were negative (report). The FBI toxicologist utilized more sensitive instruments to test the hair for drugs such as Xanax and the results were also negative (report)." - truthtron, September 18, 2011
"When George stated that he thought his granddaughter was sedated, Cindy retorted by pointing out what the evidence said. That tells me she’s been doing quite a bit of thinking. As she said, she won’t rest until she finds out what happened to Caylee – and Casey – on June 16, 2008. Given how many of her 'excuses' actually fit the evidence, I believe that she’s pieced together
Layout of the Anthony home on Hopespring Drive (shed highlighted)
A cadaver dog trained to detect human decompostion alerted in the southeast corner of the Anthony back yard (image above). Crime scene investigators dug, looking for evidence (the digging and moving of the dirt is why the second dog didn't alert on the area).
George temporarily buried Caylee's body, wrapped in plastic with duct tape, in the backyard. George, Cindy and Lee Anthony all testified that their pets had been buried in the back yard. Cindy called it a "tradition" to wrap them in blankets and a plastic bag, with duct tape to keep the plastic bags from opening.
In his opening statement, Jose Baez hammered home the importance of the Henkel brand duct tape found near Caylee's body by showing a brief video of its use at a command center during the search for Caylee. George was the co-star in the video. Baez segued into the burials of deceased family pets and alleged that duct tape was used in them. While Baez mentioned numerous deceased pets the Anthonys had buried over the years, neither George nor Cindy acknowledged a particular means for their disposal: they said they could only recall wrapping a dead pet in a blanket or towel, sometimes with a stuffed play toy, and placing the animal’s body in a plastic bag and sealing it with clear plastic packaging tape. They acknowledged that sometimes they buried their deceased pets in the back yard.
However, when Lee Anthony was questioned about the family pet Cinnamon, he recalled it being buried in a plastic bag sealed with duct tape. Lee showed his mother and father to be liars. Lee sat down next to Cindy after his testimony while George sat further down the bench from them. Cindy glared at Lee once he sat down (photo below) because she wasn’t too happy with her son busting her lies.
George is a former sheriff's deputy. He knew if he put Caylee's body in his vehicle there was a chance cadaver dogs would alert on it, so he temporarily buried Caylee's body in the backyard. George had an extra set of keys to Casey's car (it was a family vehicle), but he did not have access to the car because Casey had been living at her boyfriend's apartment since June 16th, the day Caylee died.
Casey ran out of gas on June 23, broke into her father's shed, stole his gas cans, and put the gas into her car. The next day, on June 24th, she stopped by the Anthony home to get clothes, etc. George said he arrived home about 2:25 or 2:30 p.m. and was getting ready for work when Casey stopped by.
On June 27th Casey again ran out of gas. She had help pushing her car into a parking lot and called her boyfriend to pick her up. A day or two later, when Casey went to retrieve the car from the parking lot, she found out it had been towed.
Amy Huizenga revealed in an interview with law enforcement on July 23, 2008 that Casey said George had borrowed Casey's car. This would have been between the time Casey first ran out of gas on June 23rd and the second time she ran out of gas on June 27th.
The only time George said he saw Casey was on June 24th, so this must have been the day he borrowed her car (according to computer activity, she was at the Anthony home for at least 30 minutes). This also would have been the day George removed Caylee's body from the temporary grave in the backyard, put it in Casey's trunk, and transported it less than 1/2 mile to Suburban Drive (the body was almost 20 feet from the edge of Suburban Drive and several feet lower than the road pavement; intermixed with Caylee's skeletal remains were two plastic garbage bags, a canvas laundry bag, multi-colored shorts, and a baby blanket with a Winnie the Pooh print; roots growing into the vertebrae and bags indicate the body was placed there months prior to being found).
Neither Casey's boyfriend nor her father smelled a bad odor coming from her car when they came close to the trunk on June 23rd and 24th.
However, in phone conversations on June 25 and 26th, Casey said to Amy: "I think maybe my dad ran something over with my car when he borrowed it and it smells like something died in my car." Casey complained to Amy for two days about "a terrible smell coming from her car and she couldn't figure out what it was." On the second day that she complained about the smell to Amy, she said it had gotten worse.
George must have borrowed the car on June 24th, the day Casey stopped by the Anthony home. He needed less than 10 minutes to drive to Surburban Drive, dump the body, and return home. The lab concluded that there may have been a body in the trunk for 0-3 days. The smell probably got worse over time because the decomposition chemicals in the stain volatized due to the summer heat and the odor was trapped in the car.
Casey noticed the smell on June 25th and again on June 26th, when it had gotten even worse than the day before.
She ran out of gas on June 27, leaving the car in a parking lot, from where it would be towed three days later, on June 30th. The car reeked when George Anthony picked it up from impound on July 15th. There was a bag of rotten garbage it the trunk; therefore, the smell at this point, 18 days later, also could have been from the trash bag, which, among other things, contained a pizza box filled with maggots.
Amy also told detectives during her July 23rd interview that her initial statement in her affidavit on July 16, 2008 would be the most accurate; however, there are no copies of her affidavit or any videos of the recording online (there had been copies of the affidavit online but they have since been removed).
Amy Huizenga Interview with Law Enforcement, 07/23/2008:
EE: 14th through the, well the week of the 15th to the 21st you say that she kind of fell off the face?
AH: Pretty much.
EE: You didn't really see her? Or didn't see her at all?
AH: No, I didn't...
EE: Was it all text messages or whatever maybe?
AH: I didn't see, I did not see her at all from when was it? The, probably the 10th until the 30th. Everything was all phone calls because she blew me off about Jacksonville and then, you know, I didn't see her.
EE: Well, that's, okay, before we got to the 30th then, starting about the 25th you remember...
AH: She talked with me....
EE: Tell me about the phone conversations.
AH: She had told me that there was this horrible smell in her car and she couldn't figure out what it was. And then like as the days progressed, it may have been more that two days. But I know it was at least more that one day that she talked to me [she talked about the smell in the car via phone calls, not text messages]. So it had to have been at least two days [of phone conversations] that she told me about this smell in her car. And she uhm, you know like the next day it was just so much worse. She was like I think maybe my dad ran something over with my car when he borrowed it and it, it smells like something died in my car. And uhm, but she had mentioned the engine as being the source of the smell.
EE: Okay.
AH: Uhm, and so then on the 27th I have a text message from her uh, saying that it was when she had, you know, the same day that she had run out of gas, when she was telling me about that. Uhm, that...
EE: So she told you she ran out of gas the 27th?
AH: On the 27th, yes. Uhm...
DR: On the 27th?
AH: ...and I have text messages that say that she ran out of gas. Uhm, she had run out of gas the week before. There's one that says, ran out of gas, you know, two Fridays in a row. How does that work?
DR: Uh-hum (affirmative).
Amy Huizenga Deposition, February 14, 2011
AH: Okay, yeah, the 27th [of June] is when confirmed -- like, when she said what it was [the smell]. But there was definately a day or two [before June 27th] that she had been like, dude, my car smells and I don't know what it is. Just like one of those -- I mean, I think everyone's had that time you're like, what is that smell? I don't understand. And she just said it smelled like, you know, something had died in her car and she had no clue what it was. I think it was -- she -- it was coming from the engine area is what she said. And then we she -- you know, finally it was -- she was letting me know [on June 27th] she had found what it was and that is was a squirrel that she figured her dad had run over when he was driving the car.
JB: Let me ask you this --
AH: Yes.
JB: -- do you have any other text messages about the smell or was is just that one text message?
AH: I don't know. You have the text messages.
JB: Do you recall any?
AH: I -- the actual naming of the squirrel, I think that was the only conversation we had about it [the squirrel as the source of the smell]. I do not know if talking about the smell was in text messages or in a voice conversation.
JB: Do you recall if you mentioned other text message or was this the only text message?
AH: Of the --
JB: Anything regarding the smell of the car?
AH: Like I said, I know we talked about it but I don't now if it was in a text message or in a voice conversation.
JB: Do you now if you spoke about it [the smell] before the 27th or after the 27th [when she figured the source of the smell was a squirrel that she figured her dad had run over when driving her car]?
AH: Before, because the 27th is when she said what it was [a squirrel], and there was at least a day, if not two days, that she told me about the smell [meaning she noticed the smell on June 25th and 26th].
JB: And the way you make -- the way you remember that is because she says there is something definately plastered to the side of --
AH: Yes.
JB: Okay, that's what makes you remember that is was before and not after?
AH: Well, her telling me that something was plastered was the confirmation of what we previously talked about, so we would have previously talked about it.
JB: Is there anything else that triggers your memory, other than the text message, that is was before that text message and not after?
AH: Well, just that I know that was the confirmation of what happened, and it would have had to happen before.
JB: I understand. My question is: Is there anything else that triggers your memory other than that text message?
AH: Not that triggers. I just know that it happened before [June 27th].
Casey's Text Messages to Amy:
June 24, 2008, Tuesday (Casey stopped by the house to pickup clothes around 2:30 p.m.; her computer usage while she was there indicates she was there for at least 30 minutes; George could have borrowed her car without her permission,-- he had his own set of keys -- and driven the two-mile round trip to Suburban Drive to dump the body; Casey knew he took the car but he wasn't aware of this)
02:12:22 PM (Casey Text Amy): Leaving work in a few. Ill call you on my way to the house
03:39:27 PM (Casey Text Amy): Dont buy the whole store!
03:40:45 PM (Casey Text Amy): Haha then do it :-)
June 25, 2008, Wednesday
09:08:26 PM (Casey Text Amy): Me too!
09:08:48 PM (Casey Text Amy): What time saturday?
June 26, 2008, Thursday (Casey mentions the smell in her car as being caused by a dead animal)
01:41:16 PM (Casey Text Amy): I need a freaking vacation
June 27, 2008, Friday (Casey abandons car out of gas at Amscot Financial parking lot)
11:34:47 AM (Casey Text Amy): There was definitely part of a dead animal plastered to the frame of my car
11:49:54 AM (Casey Text Amy): My car ran out of gas again
11:58:20 AM (Casey Text Amy): Two weeks in a row..on Friday..my stupid car runs out of gas. Wow.
11:24:18 PM (Casey Text Amy): No worries. Ill call you in the morning
June 28, 2008, Saturday
06/28/08 08:37:17 AM (Casey Text Amy): Call me after you get up and what not
From On The Record, August 5, 2008:
Casey's computer usage and cell phone activity are proof that she was home until 4:11 p.m. on June 16th, 2008. George lied about Casey and Caylee leaving at 12:50 p.m. He lied because he killed Caylee and disposed of her body.
VAN SUSTEREN: Let me talk about the timeline. We talk about finding Caylee, and the best way to do it is sort of explore it by looking at the timeline. June 13, there is video of her from a Father's Day event, right.
CINDY ANTHONY: No, it's June 15, Father's Day, which was mistaken early on because, you know, I never even thought about what day Father's Day was. I just -- I knew it was a Sunday in June I had taken that video, and I knew that was the last day that I physically saw her, even though I knew where she was sleeping the next morning. My husband actually saw Caylee and Casey leave on the 16th of June.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right. So the 15th is Sunday, Father's Day. Everything's normal, everything's fine. The next morning is the last day that either you or George saw her. Do you remember about what time of day it was?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Oh, specifically. I remember it was 10 minutes to 1:00 on Monday the 16th.
VAN SUSTEREN: So in the middle of the afternoon or early afternoon.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Yes, it was shortly after the lunchtime hour. I was watching a favorite show I like to watch on TV, a news...
CINDY ANTHONY: Before you go to work.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Yes, it's was a Food Channel thing I watched, so...
VAN SUSTEREN: And was it -- you were watching here in the living room.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Right, and I was sitting right here, almost in the same spot, just watching it, and saw my granddaughter and my daughter come out, you know, with their backpacks and...
CINDY ANTHONY: Like any other day.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Just like a normal thing type thing.
VAN SUSTEREN: Do you know where they were headed with the backpacks?
GEORGE ANTHONY: My daughter said that she was going to work, dropping her daughter off at the nanny's house, and that was it. I give them both hugs, kisses and saw them go out the door like a typical thing that they've -- that she's done.
VAN SUSTEREN: Nothing out of the ordinary?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Just smiles, hugs. Dad, we'll see you tomorrow because I might be working a little bit late, type deal. And that was it.
VAN SUSTEREN: Now, I know you won't reveal the details, but can you just tell me, has Casey told you what has happened to that child?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes. In her way. And I can't reveal that.
VAN SUSTEREN: But in her way -- so that, I mean -- I know, George, that it was at least reported that you came out the other day and said that Casey said that Caylee was close, which is, you know, rather vague. Is that -- is that the kind of information that, Cindy, you have, or do you have, like, specific information that satisfies you?
GEORGE ANTHONY: She just feels that Caylee's close, she's still safe.
CINDY ANTHONY: And I think you can interpret that in a couple of ways. Close meaning within the central Florida area, close meaning in the neighborhood -- I don't think that's what she means -- close to maybe coming home. There's a lot of different ways to interpret that. My interpretation is that she's, hopefully, in this area.
VAN SUSTEREN: I guess it's not so much the comment, but I'm wondering whether she was -- you know, that she spoke the same way to you in conveying the information, you know, which is sort of code or vague, or whether she was much more specific with you, so that you say to yourself, Cindy, I know what happened, and I understand now why it has transpired as it has.
CINDY ANTHONY: No, I think that is just a genuine (ph) statement. I don't think that was a code. I think that's her gut feeling. Again, she's maintained all along that she doesn't know the physical whereabouts where Caylee's at. She knows who has her, who's responsible for taking her, but she does not know the physical whereabouts.
And this is her mom's room. This is Casey's room.
VAN SUSTEREN: This is Casey's room. And you told me that Caylee oftentimes slept with her mother, right?
CINDY ANTHONY: Oh, she -- almost every -- every night, she slept in here, from the time she was born.
VAN SUSTEREN: This is how the room is pretty much...
CINDY ANTHONY: This is how the room is always.
VAN SUSTEREN: And this is...
CINDY ANTHONY: Except for Caylee's toys usually being on bed, a blanket, some stuffed animals, those kind of things.
VAN SUSTEREN: Who's the father? I mean, that's the other big mystery that we don't know.
CINDY ANTHONY: Caylee's never had a father. He was a friend of Casey's. He's never been in Caylee's life. He's not on her birth certificate. He was a friend of Casey's that lives out of state. By the time Caylee was born, he had already started another family, and he passed away earlier in the year. And again, his family never had knowledge of Caylee. And that was a mutual thing that Casey and he had agreed upon, that he was not going to be part of Caylee's life. This is her life. Excuse me.
VAN SUSTEREN: I've never seen so many stuffed animals in my life.
CINDY ANTHONY: There's more!
VAN SUSTEREN: There more?
(CROSSTALK)
VAN SUSTEREN: There are little monkeys -- little monkeys, rabbits, tigers.
CINDY ANTHONY: You can tell the animals have been sleeping on her bed because her pillows are off of the bed. Tinker and Tillie (INAUDIBLE) up here (INAUDIBLE) since Caylee's not here.
VAN SUSTEREN: And the baby picture? The baby picture?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes. That has a lot of Caylee's personality. That was in the hospital, what, two days after she was born. I mean, that's Caylee, expression like, You know what? You better -- you better behave, you know? She's just got her eye on you, so...
VAN SUSTEREN: And over here, the toys and all the books. What is this? Oh, her birth -- is this her first -- this is her very -- this is when she was born.
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes. I made that the first week, all those pictures within the first week of Caylee coming home. We had a baby shower. Caylee was born on a Monday night or Tuesday morning, and we had a baby shower for her on that Saturday. And this was a baby shower present that I put together for Casey, just within that week, with pictures Caylee's birth announcement.
VAN SUSTEREN: Continuing now with missing Caylee Anthony's grandparents, and for the first time, you will see the back yard that crime scene investigators dug up looking for evidence after Caylee vanished.
CINDY ANTHONY: I was told that the dog was inconsistent on a hit here and...
VAN SUSTEREN: Here being right here at the house?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes. And inconsistent where her sandbox was.
VAN SUSTEREN: Which is where?
CINDY ANTHONY: Where it's at now, roughly.
VAN SUSTEREN: Oh, is this the sandbox?
CINDY ANTHONY: That's the sandbox.
VAN SUSTEREN: That has a cover on it. OK.
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: So there was -- there was an inconsistent alert here.
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes, an inconsistent alert over in the corner of the house.
VAN SUSTEREN: Meaning over behind -- near the pool?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: Now, so they never had, as you understand it, an alert. They rather had an inconsistent one.
CINDY ANTHONY: They had an inconsistent alert, so that's why they explained to us why the brought the second cadaver dog in. The second dog did not alert in the same spots that they did.
VAN SUSTEREN: Did not?
CINDY ANTHONY: Did not.
VAN SUSTEREN: Did not. All right. Did...
CINDY ANTHONY: And there was nothing that they found that had any -- you know, that they came up with any evidence.
VAN SUSTEREN: Does Casey say she borrowed a shovel from a neighbor?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: And what did she say her purpose of borrowing a shovel...
CINDY ANTHONY: To look (ph) for the bamboo.
VAN SUSTEREN: So to remove the bamboo, which grows very...
CINDY ANTHONY: Rapidly.
VAN SUSTEREN: ... Aggressively.
CINDY ANTHONY: Right. It does. And if we don't keep track of it -- if I don't get rid of that today, I'll have other shoots coming into the rest of the yard.
VAN SUSTEREN: Do you not have a shovel that she could have used?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes, we do have a shovel she could have used. But if she was here and we weren't home -- George and I made a decision when we started locking the sheds this year because last year, Caylee wasn't able to do some of the things she can do this year. So we made a conscious effort to lock the sheds. We have three sheds.
VAN SUSTEREN: Are these the sheds were there was some report something was stolen from the sheds or broken into?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes, and we actually need to replace a lot of stuff out here. But yes, this is one of the sheds that we would normally keep locked and normally keep the shovels in, which we do keep the shovels in. This is his toolshed. The lawn mower, you know, weed-whacker, that type of thing, shovels, axes, hoes, anything you do gardening work is locked up in here, like that. I mean, it's a normal shed.
VAN SUSTEREN: Was something reported stolen from this, though?
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes, gas cans.
VAN SUSTEREN: When was that report made that gas cans were stolen?
CINDY ANTHONY: You'd have to ask George.
VAN SUSTEREN: Was that, though, before Caylee was -- had been reported missing or after, that the gas cans...
CINDY ANTHONY: That was before.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Absolutely.
VAN SUSTEREN: And gas cans were -- how many gas cans?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Two, the 2-and-a-half-gallon and one about a gallon- and-a-quarter, something like that.
VAN SUSTEREN: Now, you made the report on June 24, though. That's when you noticed it. Do you remember when you last were in there, so you have some sort of window of when that could have happened?
GEORGE ANTHONY: It could have been Sunday. I believe I was in there Sunday. I don't believe I was in there the day before that, like, on the 23rd. I'm almost positive it's a Sunday.
VAN SUSTEREN: So the Sunday the 23rd, you might have been in there?
CINDY ANTHONY: Well, Sunday would have been the 22nd.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right. So as best you can tell, it happened between the 22nd and the 24th. someone broke in there.
GEORGE ANTHONY: Uh-huh.
That's when I saw my daughter. I was getting ready to go to work, and the garage door goes open and my daughter comes in. This is about 2:25, 2:30 in the afternoon on the 24th. As she comes in the house, and I said, Hey, how're you doing? And she says, Fine, Dad. I says, Well, what's going on? And she says, Oh, I'm just stopping home for about 10 minutes, get some clothes. I go to go back to work. Where's Caylee? She's with Zanny. And I said, OK, when are you guys coming home? She says, Oh, we'll be back home maybe late tonight or the next day.
I said, OK. Have you been talking to Mom? Oh, yes, I talk to Mom every day. I said, I know, but did you talk to Mom today? She sort of hesitated for a moment and she says, Yes. And she says, Oh, by the way, it's a shame what happened in the shed. And I said...
CINDY ANTHONY: Yes, because (INAUDIBLE)
GEORGE ANTHONY: And I said, Really? She says, yes. I said, Interesting. And I just said, Hey, by the way, I said, I'm getting ready to rotate your mom's tires on her car. There's a little metal wedge that fits underneath your tires so your car doesn't rock back and forth. And I said, Well, I'd like to have it, so in case you're not here over the weekend, I'd like to be able to do it.
She was hesitant about letting me get in the car. And I said, Well, listen, I got an extra key. I'll just go get it. Well, she was adamant about -- about that.
VAN SUSTEREN: What, not letting you into the car?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Yes, didn't want me to get into the car to get the stuff out. Dad, I'll get it for you. Dad, I'll get it out. I said, It's no problem. I know where it's at. I'll get it, get it out and be done with it.
So as we're walking out through the garage, she's still telling me, Dad, I'll get it. Give me a minute, I'll get it. I said, Casey, I'm capable of reaching inside your car, and I got it. So -- and she opened up the trunk of the car...
CINDY ANTHONY: The gas cans were there.
GEORGE ANTHONY: (INAUDIBLE) The gas cans there. She's the one that took the gas cans.
From On The Record, August 12, 2008:
VAN SUSTEREN: Meanwhile, George Anthony was asked why he is so excited about a new traveling billboard that has a picture of his missing granddaughter on it.
GEORGE ANTHONY: That's the first chance I've had to have that because a lot of other people have been doing it for us. But you know, this is -- this is just something special for me to do.
QUESTION: I know you said that you had felt helpless that you haven't been able to find her. Like, what (INAUDIBLE) you're out and about. I mean, you're getting her face out there. How does that...
GEORGE ANTHONY: Well, maybe someone will finally connect, or maybe -- it's a lot. I think the connection that somebody's going to say, "God, this is the grandpa. He's really out there trying." Plus, they know that anyhow, and same way as my wife. It's just something that I got to do.
QUESTION: Who are you hoping sees this today?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Anyone. Anyone. Anyone that's out there. Hopefully, the person who has my granddaughter's going to say, "Oh, my gosh. I got to -- maybe they'll flag me down. Maybe I'll be driving around and she'll be right there."
QUESTION: Like, what's the plan today?
GEORGE ANTHONY: I don't have a specific plan. I'm just -- I'm going to drive anywhere that I can today and...
QUESTION: George...
GEORGE ANTHONY: ... If I have to drive out of state to find her, I'm going to do it, so...
QUESTION: The last thing that you saw Caylee...
GEORGE ANTHONY: I've got a full tank of gas and I'm ready to go.
QUESTION: The last thing that you saw Caylee wearing was her white sunglasses and her jeans skirt...
GEORGE ANTHONY: All that, guys, is part of the initial reports, so I don't want to go back and -- that's backing up again.
QUESTION: I was just wondering if -- did they find it?
GEORGE ANTHONY: Guys, that's something you're going to have to ask the sheriff's department. See, now you're going -- you're taking another step so please -- I don't want to go into that kind of step, OK? My granddaughter is still with us. I know it deep in my heart. My wife knows it. So don't be taking it in another area because, guys, we still have a lot of stuff to get out there and to get done.
QUESTION: What's your...
GEORGE ANTHONY: You know, and that's...
(CROSSTALK)
QUESTION: ... American people, or even in your community, that are going to see this sign, and they want to do some (INAUDIBLE)
GEORGE ANTHONY: Never, ever, ever give up. There's an organization we work with, and I can't say their name because I told them I wouldn't, but you can't give up. You can never give up on anything.
Sample Routine or Schedule for a 2 Year Old:
What was George doing all day while at home with them?! Nobody questioned George about what he was doing from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 16th. Why didn't anyone ask Casey when she woke up, when Caylee went down for a nap, what she and Caylee did before Caylee went down for a nap? She was not online or on her cell phone from breakfast through lunchtime. She must have been with Caylee, probably in the backyard, in her playhouse, Caylee's favorite place. And they could have been watching TV; they could have been learning new things. Casey's boyfriend said Caylee could count to 40 in Spanish, so Caylee spent time teaching her. They had dogs that they would play with in the backyard.
George said Caylee and Casey left at 12:50, but this is a lie. Caylee most likely had been napping since 12:30 p.m.
7:30 am | Wake Up
Even if my toddler wakes up a bit early, he stays in his crib until this time. This is breakfast time. Awesome tip: when you serve breakfast is when their metabolism signals them to wake up. If you feed them at 5:30 am they’ll wake then. I’m a stay-at-home-mom so I know this time won’t work for everyone. This clock might help if they are an early riser.
8:30 am | Free play
We do breakfast leisurely. We eat slow, put dishes away slow, and mosey away from the table slow. After that I let the kids free play for a bit to ease into the day. I try not to let this go on long enough they start fighting and going nuts, but I let them figure out what they’d like to do next whether it’s riding bikes, playing with the bunny, or just messing around with toys. You can find age appropriate bestselling toys here.
9:00 am | Independent play
Now, depending on the season, this time slot may change. Independent play is essentially letting your child play alone with their toys uninterrupted by you or siblings. I try to have this happen daily. If your kids don’t know how to play on their own, this will help you teach them how.
10:00 am | Outside play and snack
If we skip snack time, things go haywire. I am okay with letting the kids go hungry on occasion. However, without a proper fulfilling snack they may stand by your side begging for veggie sticks or grapes until you want to bang your head against the wall.
I love sending them all outside. We have a designated fenced play area, but if it’s summer we’re by the pool all morning or in the front yard with the hose and the dirt. There is usually a lot less fighting outside and the squeals seem less… grating. (Here are 7 things to do when it gets too noisy)
10:45 am | Indoor activity
I don’t do an indoor activity every day. And, the days I do, “activity” is loose over here. This can mean building together, reading a book, or even doing chores. There will be a time during the day when you need to do something structured or – at least – led by you. This is character building, helps teach them to obey instructions, and means they aren’t trying to find something to get into or throw in the toilet.
11:15 am | Free play
I let my son (who is currently 2) find something he likes to do and either let him at it or join in if I’m able. On the days when my mother’s helper (2 mornings a week) is here, she will often play with him. This might be Spot It or it might be trucks in the dirt.
12:00 pm | Lunch
I aim for lunches that are filling enough to last through a good long nap. I don’t do short order cooking, but I try to offer quite a few filling options on their plate so even if they don’t eat it all (and since I don’t engage in meal time battles) they are still fairly full.
After lunch, I have them put their dishes in the sink or dishwasher (ahem, if I’ve emptied it from the night before) then we mosey down the hall to get ready for naps. Naptime can be a struggle if your child isn’t “Buying In.” Here is how you can get your child to buy into their routine.
12:30 pm | Wind down to nap
This doesn’t always pan out as I hope, but all in all I try to utilize this calm down method or have someone else (if they’re around) read to some of the kids so I can get the others to their rooms. Here are some wind down routines for bedtime and many apply to nap time as well.
1:00 pm | Nap
It doesn’t always happen at exactly 1, but 1 is the goal. This means by around this time all the kids are in their rooms with lights out to nap or, those who are old enough they don’t need a nap every day, have a few quiet activities they can play independently. My 5-year-old may only nap once a week, and my 4-year-old only 4 days a week or so.
4:00 pm | Wake up and snack
The time at which everyone wakes up varies. If my older kids aren’t napping they can come out of their rooms after a couple of hours and do something quiet. Or they often go into each other’s rooms to play quietly. Often all the nappers will sleep until 5:00 pm if I let them! I’ve found waking up cranky is remedied by a quick snack (not too filling or sweet).
4:30 pm | Free play, TV, or calm activity
If the weather is good the kids may play outside. If we are currently watching TV each day for a bit (I go through seasons where we do no TV all week except movie night for this particular reason) they may watch TV. I like when the kids offer to help with dinner, but I can’t have all the kids underfoot so rotating which child can help avoids this and allows you one on one time.
5:30 pm | Dinner
We aim for eating between 5 and 5:30 pm. This is early, I know, but means we aren’t in a manic panic to do the wind down routine and the kids still get to bed at a reasonable hour. Reasonable being between 7 and 7:30 pm most nights. This works for our family.
6:00 pm | Bath and bedtime routine
If we haven’t swam that day then it’s usually bath time, books, pajamas, and calm play before bed. That said, kids will be kids and calm can turn to chaos quickly. My husband and I conquer and divide so each child can have a few minutes alone with each parent before bed. These wind down routines are key for babies, and I normally get baby duty. A mommy privilege!
7:15 pm | Bed
Sometimes this is a bit earlier or later, but around this time most kids are in bed. My 2-year-old may often stay up and talk to himself (or sing God Bless America) in his crib if he’s had a late nap, but we’re okay with that. He doesn’t cry or fuss so it’s less stimulating and more relaxing (not to mention consistent) for him to be in bed at similar times.
The Key to a Good Routine
This may be so simple it goes without saying… but the key to a good routine is keeping the routine. It can be hard to remember what all you want to do with an energetic two year old running around, but once you get the hang of it, routine will be second nature. Here are some ways you can learn to keep your routine without the hassle.
Casey Anthony's Timeline for June 16, 2008:
From Casey Anthony's Cupid.com Profile, May 20, 2008:
On August 12, 2008 at approximately 0900 hours, Detective Yuri Melich requested the date and time of when the following photograph was posted to the website Cupid.com. The EXIF data for the image suggests that the Polaroid camera date and time was set to March 20, 2008 at 07:06:48.
According to Cupid.com in Poughkeepsie, New York, Casey Anthony's Cupid.com member profile was created on May 20, 2008 at 12:59 pm EDT. The last log on date was May 27, 2008.
"case035"
I am a 22 year old female seeking a male. I am about 10 km from you.
"i'm a genuine girl."
About me....
i'm a single mom, and my daughter is the love of my life. br/sports and music are two of my greatest passions. gotta' love them OSU Buckeyes, Cleveland Browns, Indians, and the Orlando Magic. i like to keep things simple, and enjoy every moment of life.
I'm looking for...
someone to share my time with, really, it's that simple.
The most important thing in my life is...
my daughter, my family, and my friends. i cherish the people i share my life with, and strive to show them that each and every day.
I spend my free time...
i try to spend as much time as possible with my daughter. it is nice to get away for a few hours, and grab a drink at an Ale House, or Fridays. i'll play the occasional game of pool, or darts. my family and my friends make everything worth wild.
How I spent my last vacation...
my last vacation was to Myrtle Beach, SC, in 2005. this trip was the first time i had ever flown, and I can honestly say, that it was an experience.
My favorite dish or recipe...
i love all types of food, with the exception of seafood. i'm allergic to most types of shellfish, but that has yet to stop me from at least trying something different. pastas, potatoes, and fruits are some of my favorite things.
My motto...
live for the future, forget the past.
What my best friend would say about me...
he/she would say that i am extremely outspoken. they would tell you that i'm a "mom" to everyone. i have been since i was a little kid. it has always been in my blood. he/she would also say that i have the coolest daughter in the entire world. Why? because it's true!
My most prominent memory...
hand down, the moment i found out that i was going to be a mom. it was completely unexpected, and i'll have to admit, i was horrified. in that moment, i knew that my life was going to change, and that i was going to become the happiest i have ever been. not once have i ever questioned that, nor have i doubted the wonderful feeling it is to be a parent.
On my coffee table you will find...
a couple of my daughter's books, the tv remote, and a plastic wrapper from a freezer pop.
Last Saturday night I...
enjoyed a nice night out with a couple old friends. needless to say, i got my butt kicked at pool, but redeemed myself with a game of darts.
If I could be on any reality TV show, I would be on...
"i would love to go on Survivor."
the premise of the game is impeccable: outwit, outplay, outlast. unfortunately, i wouldn't be able to be my "typical" self, because my mouth would probably get me in trouble. i would try my hardest to stay under the radar, and develop strong bonds with a multitude of players. it's a big social game, but there is a lot of physicality that plays into as well that's when being a smaller girl would work to my advantage.
From Hysterymystery at subreddit Unresolved Mysteries, November 25, 2016:
- Casey Anthony Revisited: Proof that George Anthony is lying?, a post that discusses the disputed timeline on the day Caylee died.
- Casey Anthony: What happened on Suburban Drive?
- Casey Anthony: The Chloroform Evidence
- Casey Anthony: The gas cans
- Casey Anthony: The smell in the trunk, part 1
- Casey Anthony: The smell in the trunk, part 2
- Casey Anthony: Trunk Science
- Casey Anthony: George's lies
- Casey Anthony: Family Dysfunction, Part 1
- Casey Anthony: Family Dysfunction, Part 2
- Casey Anthony: The mystery of the shorts
- Casey Anthony: Molestation Allegations
- Casey Anthony: The duct tape, part 1
- Casey Anthony: The duct tape, part 2
- Casey Anthony: Party Animal
- Casey Anthony: Establishing Motive
- Casey Anthony: The timeline evidence
- Casey Anthony: What do we do with George Anthony?
- The post about gas can fight where I may have led you down a blind alley, and the post where I discuss the discrepancies in the phone records relating to the gas can fight.
The reason I focused so heavily on the exculpatory evidence for Casey and the inculpatory evidence for George is that when I started writing this series, I went into it with the idea that most of my audience would be Americans who were not only familiar with the case, but had lived through the media onslaught and had been fed a steady diet of misinformation about it. The American perspective was so skewed by the media bias that no one could perceive of a situation where Casey could be acquitted. They were in disbelief when jurors called Casey a good mother. They were in disbelief that jurors couldn’t see how partying was the obvious motive. And they were really in disbelief when jurors said they were suspicious of George. So yes, it may seem that my series is extremely skewed in one direction, but that’s only because I assumed you already knew the other story and wanted to correct the misconceptions about the case.
I’m also a big courtroom junkie so giving a breakdown of what happened at the trial was really important to me. That’s what I like to write about. I wanted to explain why the jurors voted the way they did and, in my opinion, George played the single biggest role in the not guilty verdict. Yes, they were swayed by the positive character testimony about Casey, but every single juror who spoke about the case—even jurors who didn’t have any sympathy for Casey—pinpointed George as a major factor in their deliberations. If George's involvement wasn't a question, I don't believe she would have been acquitted.
The first juror to give an interview was alternate juror Russell Huekler. Huekler made headlines when he made the controversial statement that the prosecution failed to explain why this otherwise “good mother” would decide to kill her child. He opined that it was probably an accident “…something with George Anthony. He was definitely hiding something, for all the different times that he was on the stand. Something happened and he knew about it. We don’t know how she died, but it comes down to it was probably an accident that the family did not know how to cope with it and so instead tried to hide it.”
Juror Jennifer Ford was the next to give interviews. Now, Jennifer wasn’t as sure it was an accident as Huekler was. She said she could follow the logic of the defense’s accident theory more than the state’s theory of murder, but she did initially vote guilty on the manslaughter charge. She didn’t have any strong opinion on what happened to Caylee, but she did believe George was involved in some way: “He did not help the state’s case…he was clearly dishonest…He didn’t want to answer questions and if it didn’t help the prosecution’s case he was going to try to just “I don’t recall.” She later added: “I don’t know if he had anything to do with it, but I think he was there. Him and Casey have something…like the jail videos: her mom has all the questions and George sits there, pats his wife’s back and then he’s like “Do you have anything else you want to tell me? He’s not like “What’s going on???” You know, he’s always like a step back, hands are clean, not too close.”
The jury foreman said that George’s involvement was definitely among the “round robin topics” that they discussed in deliberation, noting that George had a “very selective memory.” Certain events, like the day Caylee died, he had an almost eidetic memory. But at other times, such as the gas can testimony, he became extremely difficult and claimed not to remember things. The foreman also had no idea how Caylee died, but noted that the verdict reflected that he couldn’t rule George out as being the caregiver for Caylee at the time she died: “Who was looking out for her that day? George, Cindy, and Casey all took a hand in raising Caylee. We know that Cindy went to work and then the gray area comes in.”
Even juror #2, who was probably the least sympathetic to Casey and was the last person to concede to a not guilty verdict on the aggravated manslaughter charge, didn’t believe anything George Anthony said on the stand. He wanted to vote for a guilty verdict on the manslaughter charge because Casey failed to take action, regardless of who harmed the child: "The six that voted guilty [on the manslaughter charge] said it didn't matter at what point in time she came home and found out her daughter was missing, she had to report it in some way, shape or form, and that's where the negligence came in." But even with that, he couldn’t conclude that it was Casey who actually harmed the child: "You couldn't say who did it. To me, that's why it was aggravated manslaughter of a child."
After studying the case for so long, it’s frustrating for me to read commentary on the case where people say that the jurors believed she was guilty of murder but couldn’t convict because of some legal technicality. Or worse, that they didn’t understand that circumstantial evidence is real evidence. When you look at the juror interviews, that’s clearly not the case. For one thing, they clearly didn’t believe there was enough evidence to say that it was a homicide because several of them said outright it was probably an accident. Secondly, even if it was a murder, they couldn’t rule George out as a suspect. Those are solid grounds for an acquittal.
Why did they feel so strongly about George?
The jurors really didn’t get any real backstory on George and they were mainly going by how belligerent he was acting on the stand. I talked about this in a number of posts (most of them actually), but his behavior really was striking: he tried really hard to get Casey convicted and he was clearly dishonest. The most notable example of testimonial weirdness was when they questioned him on the gas cans. The prosecution was attempting to connect duct tape found with the remains to a piece of duct tape found covering the spout of a gas can at the Anthony family home, evidently placed there by George. It really should have been a nothing moment—there’s no reasonable argument that anyone outside of the family was involved in Caylee’s death, but George was weirdly averse to admitting that he put the duct tape on the gas can. Instead of testifying honestly, he wouldn’t give straight answers, he pretended that he couldn’t understand simple questions. When confronted, he would insist that he couldn’t remember which gas can they were talking about when there was only one gas can with duct tape on it.
There were also several logical inconsistencies in his story. For example, he testified about how sure he was that Casey’s car smelled like human decomposition when he picked it up from the tow yard, even sparring with Baez over how Casey’s car didn’t have “garbage”, but only had non-smelly “trash” in the trunk, so it had to be human decomposition. But then, after smelling this awful smell, he proceeded to take no action that any logical person would in that situation. The jury foreman commented: “You know, here it is, you haven’t seen two members of your family in a very long time. You make the comment that it smells—there’s a smell of decomp. And you being a law enforcement officer, you would think that is something you might think could have been one of the two, you know—causing that smell of decomp. But then he goes and gets in the car and drives away…you know him not calling Casey at that point in time to see if she’s all right or what’s going on here—it raises a lot of questions. It really does.” George went on to work his entire shift without mentioning it to Cindy or raising the alarm in any way.
George also seemed to have big inconsistencies in how clearly he could remember events. He could tell you the complete outfits everyone was wearing when Casey and Caylee supposedly left on June 16th and what clothing Casey was wearing on June 24th when they had the gas can fight. But he couldn’t tell police a single specific thing that he and Caylee did in the morning on the 16th. He gave examples of things he had done with her in the past, but his memory of that specific morning is a blur. The latter, of course, is normal. I couldn’t tell you what I did on a random morning 30 days ago. But then when it comes to Casey and Caylee leaving, all the sudden he knows every detail—right down to the color of their socks. And then of course there’s the discrepancy in his court testimony. When he’s testifying for the prosecution, his memory is very clear. But when the defense asks him to recall events, his memory fails him. The jurors found this very suspicious.
Lies, lies, and more lies
George’s behavior on the stand was very strange, but we at home have the benefit of seeing all the further inconsistencies that didn’t make it into the trial. As I talked about earlier in the series, every story George told police about what happened that month has some question associated with it. Taken individually, it’s easy to say maybe there’s some other explanation. Maybe he forgot. Maybe he’s remembering a different day. And certainly, there are plenty of other people who got details wrong in their interviews, but with everyone else, it was minor things that could easily be cleared up. Maybe they got the date wrong, but the events could be corroborated. Or they got small details wrong, but the majority of what they remember is correct. But when you put George’s stories all together, it paints a very clear picture: George is fabricating events. Every time he is asked to describe some event, he acts like he has a photographic memory—describing minute details and verbatim conversations. But then when the police start trying to corroborate these events, it all falls apart.
When police were questioning George on why he failed to take any action to investigate Casey’s strange departure (after she moved out, he only called her once), he made up a story to try to prove he actually was investigating. He claimed Casey came to the house to borrow Cindy’s vehicle and he was so worried about Caylee that he got in his car and chased her down the freeway. Cindy tried to stop him, saying “George you’re not a detective anymore!”, but he was so worried he followed her until he lost her. When police tried to pin down the date it turns out it never happened—Cindy doesn’t remember this event and the phone and EZpass records prove it never happened. But instead of backing off when the evidence started crumbling, George doubled down on the story. Just like Casey does in her own police interviews when she’s confronted with her lies, George just keeps going. He insisted it happened despite evidence to the contrary.
Consider the gas can fight on June 24th. The events he’s describing at least somewhat coincide with a time frame that Casey actually was at the house. But what he’s describing doesn’t match up with the electronic records. He claims she was only at the house for like 10 minutes: she arrived at the house, went to the bedroom to gather some clothes for work, then from the bedroom, followed George out to the driveway where they had the fight over the gas cans and she immediately drove away. The electronic records show Casey was there at about the time he said she was (although probably more like 30 mins), but she spent almost the entire time playing on the computer and talking on the phone. I’m sure there actually were some tense words between them about the broken shed and stolen gas cans, but why does he remember something so different from what actually happened? And why did he file a police report as if a stranger broke into the shed when all evidence points to Casey doing it? Even more suspicious is that sometimes he claims to remember seeing in the trunk during their argument and sometimes he doesn’t. Maybe that seems like a small detail, but by trial, the prosecution was attempting to use this testimony to argue that Casey had a body in the trunk and was trying to hide it from George. He testified for them that he couldn’t see in the trunk and was too far away to smell it. But when Baez cross examined him, he brought up an earlier police interview where George gave police a full list of items he saw in Casey’s trunk that day, including specifically how the gas cans were positioned (inside blue storage bins, if you’re wondering). If this memory is accurate, it’s impossible for there to be a body in the trunk, but yet he helped the prosecution argue that there was. So which memory is the correct one?
And then there’s the testimony about the day Caylee died. This goes back to where the whole series started. I posted the first essay in the series in April 2015 and in hindsight, I probably should have explained the scenario better than I did. What happened is this: Caylee Anthony died sometime on June 16th under mysterious circumstances. When the prosecution presented their case at trial, they acted like we really didn’t know anything concrete about Casey’s movements that day. They presented very little in the way of electronic information, only citing that Casey’s cell phone pings stayed near the Anthony house until a little after 4 p.m. What they did present was testimony by George Anthony who gave a detailed account of Casey leaving the house with Caylee at 12:50 p.m. He knew everything that everyone said, everything everyone was wearing, what show was on TV, and specifically that it was on a commercial break. The prosecution hitched their timeline to George’s testimony to argue that Casey murdered Caylee sometime between 12:50 (when she left the house) and 4:11 p.m. (when she departed for Tony’s apartment). Caylee wasn’t with her when she arrived at Tony’s apartment, so the 4:11 cap is probably accurate.
The jurors actually didn’t buy George’s testimony at all. Because of all the other courtroom behavior that they really didn’t think they could trust his timeline. The jurors couldn’t say who Caylee’s caregiver was when she died and that was a major factor in the acquittal.
Then in August 2013, two years after Casey was acquitted, Jose Baez published a book about the case that contained a bombshell: the prosecution neglected to enter Casey’s computer searches for June 16th into evidence. Most of it was random crap, but one search stood out. At 2:51 pm. that day, Casey searched for “foolproof suffocation”.
So basically, everyone’s minds were collectively blown by this. How on earth could the state miss something so crucial? The excuse they gave was equally baffling. They claimed they didn’t know Casey used firefox; they only looked at the Internet Explorer searches and that's how they missed it. And this is where I came in. I had just finished watching the testimony about the chloroform searches and they definitely told the jury that not only were these searches done on firefox, but also that Casey was the only one in her household who used firefox. Somehow they managed to forget that Casey used firefox for one day and one day only. And then it hit me: the suffocation search doesn’t fit with the timeline. Casey’s not supposed to be at the house at 2:51.
Not only does this search prove that Casey was at the house after the time George claims she left, but the rest of the searches done on firefox that day prove that Casey never left at all. This entire time frame that Casey is supposed to be out murdering her daughter, she’s actually sitting at home—with George—playing on the computer.
And it’s not like he just got the time wrong: George left before Casey did, so he can't have a memory of Casey leaving. He’s remembering events that didn’t happen at all that day. He has this extremely detailed story—right down to the color of everyone’s socks—and it’s a complete fabrication. Why is he claiming to be home alone when he was actually with Casey and Caylee?
This is the question that started the whole thing for me. I believe that the prosecution, knowing how much of a liability George was to their case, willfully hid this evidence from the jury. What are the chances they conveniently forgot that Casey used firefox when analyzing the records for just that one day? How do you explain to jurors that George’s lies aren’t relevant? How can the jurors be sure that George himself didn’t do the search? Even without this evidence, the jurors were sure that George was involved. What are the chances that the jurors wouldn’t see this as further proof that George was there? A lot of people think this evidence was an ace in the hole for the prosecution, but I think it’s clear that the truth is much more complex than that.
So what on earth do we do with George?
If this was any other case, I would conclude, based on this evidence, that George was involved. Here we have this guy who was with the decedent during a critical time period and lied to police about that fact. All these suspicious things are happening around him: Casey moved out. They haven’t seen Caylee. And George not only isn’t investigating what on earth is going on, but he cut off contact with Casey almost completely that month. He doesn’t even contact Casey when things start to look really dire—his daughter’s car has been abandoned, and according to him, it smells like death. Then when police question him on why he isn’t more concerned about Caylee’s disappearance, he makes up a story to try to convince police he actually was. George’s behavior is extremely suspicious.
But this isn’t just any case. And I think there are other explanations for his behavior that have nothing to do with guilt. I think George, like Casey, is a compulsive liar. I honestly think that George would lie to the police regardless of whether he had anything to hide. Like Casey, he was also what I like to call a pathological people pleaser. He and Casey have a self worth that revolves entirely around the approval of those around them. If you remember, Jesse Grund described Casey as a chameleon who morphs to match whoever she’s hanging around at the time. I see those same qualities in George. There are so many examples of George tailoring his story to suit whoever he was with at the time. As I talked about in the family dysfunction posts (1 and 2 ), you can never get a read on his genuine thoughts or opinions because it changes according to who he’s with. When he’s with the police, he’s super pro-prosecution, then he does media interviews where he acts like Zanny is real and the child was actually kidnapped (even claiming at one point that they had the kidnappers under surveillance). He flew all over the country with Cindy to look for Caylee and Zanny. Then he’d go back to the police station and talk about how guilty Casey was. George is doing the same chameleon act that Casey does. He just wants people to like him and approve of him. And this is especially true of his relationship with Cindy.
I think when people look at this case, they spend way too much time trying to apply normal human logic to the actions of the people in this family. The problem is this family isn’t normal. It’s not normal to pretend that Casey wasn’t lying about having a job and a nanny when it’s clear that she was, but that’s what made sense to George Anthony. For whatever reason, Cindy needed George to do that and she made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t allowed to do otherwise. When he tried to catch Casey in her lies, he was the one who got in trouble. He told police that, although he suspected she wasn’t working, he didn’t pursue it because he “had his marriage to worry about”. So when we’re looking at George’s actions during that month, it actually sort of makes sense that he wouldn’t try to investigate where Casey was. He’d done it before and it didn’t end well. I still think he was exaggerating or outright lying when he testified about how sure he was about the smell of human decomp in Casey’s car, but you can definitely see how someone who has this family dynamic and is that scared of his wife’s reaction would hesitate to take action.
So we know that this is a guy who lies a lot, we know there is this bizarre family dynamic where he’s not allowed to acknowledge Casey’s lies, and we know he perceives his marriage to be on eggshells. The normal logic simply doesn’t apply. What we can say about the case is that George is not your average father who would never hide an accidental death. That’s one I hear over and over: why would a former cop hide an accidental death? Because he’s not your average former cop. He is a compulsive liar and is terrified that his wife will leave him. His history of bizarre behavior doesn’t prove that he had any involvement, but it certainly proves he’s capable of making strange decisions that wouldn’t make sense to anyone outside of the Anthony family. If Caylee died in some household accident and the death was hidden, I honestly don’t think anyone really thought it through. I think they acted on instinct: “We need to make this go away so Cindy won’t hate me.” They did it for the same reason everyone pretended into her 8th month that Casey wasn’t pregnant, and for the same reason that they pretended Casey had a job and a nanny, and for the same reason they pretended Caylee was still alive after they’d already buried her.
One strange anecdote that supports this dynamic: when George was married to his first wife 30+ years ago (who also told investigators that he was a compulsive liar), he evidently filed for divorce from her and neglected to tell her. They were still living together at the time and she only found out when she read about it in the newspaper. We saw this same dynamic with Casey and Amy. Casey couldn’t tell Amy she didn’t want to live with her, so she went through this crazy charade. George also, at one point, pretended to have a job and pretended to go to work. Clearly George and Casey are terrified of being the bearer of bad news.
So if the lying isn’t relevant, how do we know?
I suppose we may never truly know whether George was there, but I think a look at the timeline gives us some clues. We know that George’s testimony about Casey and Caylee leaving the home at 12:50 was false. Computer and phone records show Casey at the home until after 4 pm that day. I think we can be reasonably sure that George was at work for his shift that started at 3 pm that day. I haven’t personally viewed the work records, but it was presented in court and the defense didn’t dispute it. George told police that he left the house at 2:30 pm that day to go to work. Personally, I think he left later than that but without his cell phone pings, I can’t prove it [in his depostion in Casey's case, he said it was a 10-minute drive to work]. According to his deposition in the Zenaida Gonzalez lawsuit, he was working at Orlando Utilities commission on Pershing Drive that day. According to google maps, it’s 3.6 miles from the home and takes approximately 9 minutes to get there. Again, I can’t prove it, but that’s awfully early to leave, especially for someone who burns through jobs as quickly as George. He just doesn’t strike me as the go-getter type. I suspect he left closer to 2:45.
When we look at the timeline I outlined in the timeline post, the suspicious gap in the computer records starts while George is still home. Casey gets off the phone with Amy Huizenga at 2:21. Even as careless as Casey was about watching Caylee, I suspect she probably got up to check on her within the first two minutes. Even if she didn’t get up immediately, I would think within 10 minutes—when George claims he left—that she would have noticed Caylee was missing. So this puts George there when I believe Caylee was likely discovered missing. If he left at 2:45 like I suspect he did, he’s there for almost the entire critical gap when I believe the body was discovered.
Then, when he gets to work, he immediately calls Casey and although she and George have a terrible relationship she ends her call from Jesse to take George’s call. Perhaps she switched over because she perceived that call to be important? I mean, coincidences happen, but there are only two phone calls between the two of them during this entire 30 day period and one of them just happens to be during this critical time frame. I’m unable to find any information on whether police ever asked George what they talked about during that phone call, but the defense claims that George disposed of the remains and the phone call was basically to tell Casey that he “took care of it” and warn her not to tell her mother.
Now, of course, you could always argue that Casey waited until George walked out the door and decided to murder Caylee during the 1.5ish hours that she was home by herself after he left for work. I think we can be pretty sure that George was probably gone by the time she did the “foolproof suffocation” search at 2:51. So there was a period when Casey was by herself.
But I think the evidence points more to this scenario:
After Casey hangs up with Amy, she goes to check on Caylee but can’t find her. George and Casey do a search throughout the house. Eventually one of them ends up searching the lawn, going through the side gate which they leave open, and finds her in the swimming pool. If both of them are there, I see George as the one taking the lead. I just can’t see George trusting Casey to take care of it. George is intensely concerned about his marriage. He has tried for 30 years to prevent his wife from being upset about anything, and Casey has just ruined his life with her carelessness. Cindy will never forgive them for letting Caylee drown, so without thinking, he wants to make it go away. He screams at Casey that her mother would never forgive her, wraps her remains the same way he wrapped their pets for burial, and then disposes of them in the first wooded area he came to on the way to work. There was no logic—just fear that his wife would leave him. I’m sure if he had thought rationally about the scenario he would’ve called 911, but it happened so fast that he acted out of instinct. He just wanted the death to go away, so he hid it and pretended it didn’t happen. The computer search and phone call with Jesse Grund at 10 till 3 demonstrate that Casey was trying to figure out what she was going to do next. The flurry of phone calls that happened a little after 4 demonstrate that Casey eventually decided to reach out for help.
I think the phone records back up some involvement as well. While I don’t necessarily think him not investigating Casey’s departure was a great piece of evidence, Baez pointed out that the phone calls to Casey dropped off dramatically on the day Caylee died. In March of that year, there were a total of 13 calls between George and Casey. During that last 30 days, there were only 2, so George definitely seems to be distancing himself from Casey as much as she was from him. As I said before, George called Casey during this suspicious time frame at 3:04—right around the time of Caylee’s death. Then after she moved out, there’s only one call. He called Casey on July 8th, about a week before Casey’s arrest. Something I’ve wondered was whether that phone call had something to do with Casey’s car. The car was towed on June 30th and had been at the tow lot for two weeks at the point when Cindy found the notice on their door, which set in motion the series of events leading to Casey’s arrest.
The notice placed on their door was dated the 11th. They noticed it over the weekend on the 12th or 13th. They picked up the letter on the 15th, followed by the car.
Simon Birch, the tow lot manager, testified that their official policy was to send out a letter on the third business day, which should have been sent Wednesday the 2nd or 3rd and arrived possibly as early as the 5th. According to my research, if a certified letter isn’t picked up within 5-7 days, a second notice will be sent to the residence, which would could put the second notice there by the 11th.
The prosecution argued that the mail was backed up by the 4th of July weekend and that the first notice didn’t arrive until the 11th, but the defense argued that, given the timeline, this could have been the second notice about the letter. Did George get the first notice and discard it without telling Cindy? I’m not an expert on certified mail, but that does seem like an awfully long time to receive the first notice.
Could George have called Casey after getting the first notice in the mail? Could they have discussed the car in their phone call on the 8th? A couple of other pieces of evidence support the claim that George knew about the car. First, George knew to bring gas with him when he picked up the car. Now, in and of itself, it’s not much. I mean, she stole gas just a couple weeks prior, so clearly she didn’t have gas money. But Simon Birch, in recalling his conversation with George, claims that during their discussion of how long the car had been at the lot, George told him the car had been at the Amscot parking lot for three days before it was towed (June 27th - June 30th)—information that Birch himself didn’t even know. George denied making this statement and claimed he didn’t know that information at the time. How did George know that? Did Casey tell George that she ran out of gas on the 27th?
P1 of 2 - George & Cindy Anthony - Larry King Interview Just Before Remains Found
P2 of 2 - George & Cindy Anthony - Larry King Interview Just Before Remains Found
From Orlando Sentinel, July 2, 2012:
The Orlando Sentinel reports that Dr. Phil got Cindy and George Anthony, the parents of Casey Anthony and the grandparents of Caylee Anthony, to appear on his eponymous television show last September. Were they paid? The Sentinel doesn’t say so, but it reports on a People magazine article that says that Dr. Phil McGraw did pay $600,000 to Caylee’s Fund. Was it a quid pro quo or did McGraw simply happen to feel motivated to contribute to the charity at around the same time that the elder Anthonys appeared on his show?
As of last month, the charity was dissolved, with $100,000 left in its coffers that was distributed to three other charities according to the grandparents’ attorney, Mark Lippman. People believes that the McGraw payment went to support Casey Anthony who, as everyone knows, was acquitted of her daughter’s murder.
Actually, papers [PDF] dissolving the entity known as Caylee’s Fund Foundation were filed with the Florida Secretary of State in May, signed by Lippman the attorney as its registered agent, based on a vote of the “members” of the corporation on May 22, 2012. The articles of incorporation for the fund, filed on July 19, 2011, establishing it as a “Florida not-for-profit” corporation are a little thin – just one page. The articles say the fund is “exclusively for charitable purposes that qualifies (sic) under IRC ss. 501(c)(3), including advocating for grandparents rights with regard to grandchildren and assisting grandparents of missing, neglected, or exploited grandchildren.”
If Casey Anthony received any money from the fund, it would violate Article VII in the amended articles of incorporation, filed August 2011, which disallowed any of the earnings of the fund to go “to its directors, officers, or other private persons, except that the Corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services rendered …”
Let’s set the timeline:
- Caylee’s Fund is created as a Florida not-for-profit July 2011.
- The interview with George and Cindy Anthony is shown on Dr. Phil’s TV show in three parts, beginning on September 13, 2011, followed by Part 2 on September 14 and Part 3 on September 19.
- The trustees of Caylee’s Fund then vote to dissolve the entity in May 2012, meaning that the charity was alive less than a calendar year.
- Presumably, if People magazine is correct, McGraw made a payment of $600,000 to the fund during the Fund’s brief 10-month lifespan. On the show, McGraw said that the Anthonys were not being paid for their appearance.
- The website for Caylee’s Fund is down.
The Casey Anthony trial created a subculture that need not be revived here. But the brief and all too vague history of Caylee’s Fund as well as the other Caylee foundation creates an impression of a none too salutary charitable endeavor.
QUESTIONS
1. If Dr Phil donated $600,00...What happened to $500,00 of Foundation funds in less than 1 years time?
2. Did they attempt to amend or change State Laws regarding Grandparents Rights?
3. Which three other Foundations received/split the remaining $100,000?
Did they used the funds for compensation to the directors?
Mark Lippman was the incorporator of Caylee'sFund. So I guess that's how they will rationalize it. He's also the only listed officer and listed as Manager.
Have the Anthonys done any little thing in their granddaughter's memory? Anything? And "earning" money on this child's back doesn't count! Wonder what they were doing in the Bahamas? Offshore banking?
By all rights, they should have taken $100,000 and given it to Texas Equasearch, seeing how it was Cindy that called them.
According to http://www.sunbiz.org, searching under the name Caylee, the result produced was CAYLEE'SFUND FOUNDATION, INC (not a typo: there is no space between the "s" and the "f"). This fund was established on 7/19/11. On 7/25/11, an amendment was filed, http://www.sunbiz.org/pdf/10391789.pdf, describing about how the funds should be handled. It's a four page document.
[–]Hysterymystery[S] wrote at Reddit
ReplyDeleteFor the sake of conversation, I'll add my own theory: Caylee drowned in the pool while Casey was on the phone with Amy Huizenga, the body was discovered by George and Casey soon after that call ended and George disposed of the body on his way to work.
Evidence for that theory:
We know the pool ladder was up that day because Cindy discovered it, was very concerned, and told her coworkers about it. She later frantically called Yuri Melich to tell him about this while he was questioning Casey. He ignored the tip and never followed up.
Caylee had previously tried to run into the pool at Tony's apartment and Casey saved her
Her behavior as well as the way the body was disposed (19 feet from the road, just a few blocks from the house) all point to the death being unplanned. I could plan a better murder in 5 minutes than she supposedly did in 3 months.
There appears to be a very distinct change in her behavior at a specific point in the day. A gap in the electronic information that is sandwiched between normal and abnormal behavior. This points to something unexpected happening in that gap.
The frantic calls to Cindy. It's the type of thing you'd do after an accident...not so much after you've committed murder.
A premeditated murder is inconsistent with what her friends testified at trial. Everyone testified that she was a great mother who was overprotective. No one testified that she ever saw Caylee as a burden and in fact, there were instances where people would want Casey to spend more time with them and she would tell them Caylee comes first.
The secondary theory of a drugging that ended in death is also inconsistent. The time of day would be bizarre for that type of thing. Why would she sedate her child in the afternoon on a Monday, particularly when she had no plans to go party that night. Also, this theory is inconsistent with her friends testimony about her social habits. Caylee was almost always with them when she would spend time with friends. Casey rarely went out partying with her friends without Caylee and when she did, she drank light and left early to get home to Caylee. Also, George described her as being awake that day...she certainly wasn't sedated in his retelling, nor was she on any other day he could recall.
George is lying about the timeline that day. He claims Casey and Caylee left at 12:50. This doesn't protect Casey in any way, it only protects him by putting distance between himself and Casey. Of course, you might argue that he found out at a later date, but another issue to consider:
George stopped calling his daughter that day. Aside from the call at 3:04, he appears to be avoiding Casey completely that month. The previous month, they spoke about every other day, so this is a big change. On the other hand, Casey and her mother spoke frequently. He certainly wouldn't avoid Casey in anticipation of finding out about the death.
George never asked Dominic Casey what on earth he was doing searching Suburban drive while he was working for George. Especially after the body was actually found there. You'd think that would be a pretty darn important question to ask! How on earth did you know to search the exact spot where the body was found and have a description of the location that is very close to how Roy Kronk described the location. I sure would've asked him how he knew this information. George never questioned it.
CONTINUED...
So now obviously, this leads to the question of why did they hide the death instead of calling police? There are a few possibilities:
ReplyDeleteEither George was molesting Caylee or believed that Caylee was his child and wanted to cover it up. This was what the defense argued at trial, but personally, I lean away from this theory. I believe Jose put this in the trial for other reasons. Obviously this would explain a lot about the family's behavior (like why they hid her pregnancy), but I think the family is simply weird. People always want a reason why people act weird when often there is no reason for it at all. Maybe there was some sexual abuse, but I'm not sure it was related to the death. However, it's a theory so I thought I'd throw it out there.
There was some neglect involved and they were afraid of being charged in the death. This is definitely a possibility. People always say there's no way they would cover up an unintentional drowning, but I'm not sure that's the case. We really have no idea how they would've perceived the situation and people really can get charged with these types of deaths. Just the other day there was a ferret mauling where the parents were in the home, but not in close enough proximity that they could hear the child and they were criminally charged. The computer and phone records place Casey on the computer and not watching her child for most of the day. It really is plausible that they thought she would be charged with the death.
Another possibility is that they just had a weird reaction to the death. This was posted recently on reddit about abnormal reactions to death and denial. People really do sometimes pretend that nothing ever happened as a defense mechanism. Particularly when you consider the history of this family. Their 19 year old daughter gets pregnant and they just pretend it didn't happen. It wasn't like they lied to people and hid it, no, she walked around with this huge belly and they just flat out denied it was happening. Even when people confronted them about it, they would deny it. There was dysfunction beyond belief happening with this family.
They panicked over how Cindy would react. Both George and Casey seem to have some fears of how Cindy will react to things And a lot of the lies seem to revolve around Cindy. I suspect George was worried that Cindy would leave him for not watching Caylee more carefully and Casey thought her mother would never forgive her. Both made statements regarding those fears after the death. I suspect it was a combination of these factors that led them to hide the death.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/32r6bw/casey_anthony_revisited_proof_that_george_is_lying/
[–]Hysterymystery[S] wrote at Reddit:
ReplyDeleteSorry, I didn't realize how ambiguous that is. From the testimony of her friends, in terms of going out partying with friends to bars and that kind of thing, she rarely went. When she did go out with them in that context, without Caylee, her mom was blowing up her phone saying "when are you coming home to take care of Caylee". She almost always left early and drank very little during these times. This is consistent across the testimony. In fact, the prosecution switched tactics during the trial and began eliciting testimony about how infrequently she went out and how often she was turning people down. Basically, they were trying to prove that Casey had a motive to commit murder because Caylee was holding her back. Unfortunately (for the prosecution) it had the opposite impact on the jury. They saw a responsible parent who put other things on hold so she could care for her child.
In terms of being with boyfriends and friends, she often spent time at their homes with Caylee. Ricardo Morales testified that Caylee and Casey spent something like 5 nights a week at his apartment when they were dating. Basically, if Casey was with her friends, Caylee was almost always with her.
In terms of incriminating searches...we have two searches that were pinpointed by the prosecution: the chloroform search and the foolproof suffocation search.
The chloroform search, I'm stating categorically that it has nothing to do with anything. The explanation put forth by the defense was that Morales posted a pic on myspace of a woman being drugged that said "win her over with chloroform". Immediately after that, Casey googled chloroform followed shortly thereafter by self defense. If your boyfriend posts a picture of a woman being attacked and drugged with chloroform, and immediately afterward you look up chloroform and then self defense, it seems logical that you were thinking "what is that and how can I protect myself" as opposed to "How can I murder someone with this product". The jurors did not buy the chloroform evidence and it really fell apart at trial. There's no evidence she ever bought chloroform and there's no evidence she ever thought about chloroform after that day. When you consider what her friends said about Caylee and Casey, I'm just not sure when she would've ever had the opportunity or need to use chloroform. She wasn't partying and Caylee was accounted for.
The suffocation search is somewhat more problematic. Certainly you could argue that it was premeditation, but I think it's equally possible that it was suicide ideation. Considering that she began acting strange all at once as opposed to googling murder methods over several months, I lean toward it being suicide ideation in reaction to the death of her child. That coupled with the testimony about her character and her parenting, it seems out of character for her to want her child dead when there was literally nothing that pointed to her feeling that way or acting like she was burdened. It really did seem to come out of nowhere.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/32r6bw/casey_anthony_revisited_proof_that_george_is_lying/
[–]Hysterymystery[S] wrote at Reddit
ReplyDeleteThere were some pics of her dancing, partying it up, etc, however, in terms of "partying" it really was just the one night at Fusion. Nancy Grace emptied her photobucket account and put every photo she'd taken from the last 3-4 years and made it look a little different than it really was. The night at fusion does look bad. She's doing a hot body contest and drinking some, but her friends testified that she had been managing part of his business for some time, this event had been planned well in advance, and it really was more of a work event than a night of partying. It wasn't like Casey said "Hey guys, let's get wasted tonight!" She was helping him manage his business. And the hot body contest they made so much about...the only reason Casey did it was because they didn't have enough girls and so they asked their girlfriends to fill in so they didn't have to cancel it.
I don't want to come across like a cheerleader for Casey. She really did spend 30 days pretending nothing ever happened. She did go out and pretend that nothing was wrong, but the majority of that month was spent doing very mundane things. It wasn't a wild month of jello shots and orgies like Nancy would have us believe. She spent one night at a night club, tagged along when people did things like go to the mall, and she got a tattoo. So obviously it is not how you'd expect a normal person to act, but not exactly a celebration either. On the other hand, there were instances where she was obviously not doing well. Of course the prosecution didn't leak that to the media because it didn't help their case, but it happened nonetheless. For example, one night, Tony woke up to find Casey sitting in the dark watching Caylee videos and bawling her eyes out. She played it off like it was nothing, but he thought it was strange enough he told his friends. Another friend said it was like Casey was trying hard to act like she was happy.
So in terms of behavior during that month...you could go either way. You could argue that she was acting normal and doing things with her friends, so that proves she wasn't sad about the death and therefore committed murder. Or you could argue that this is just consistent with her past behavior of denial and that she was just basically pretending it didn't happen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/32r6bw/casey_anthony_revisited_proof_that_george_is_lying/
[–]lemonriot wrote at reddit
ReplyDeleteJust want to throw this out there, since y'all are discussing her behavior during that first month... I am in no way defending or making excuses for any members of the Anthony family, but I am going to share my experience. Several years ago there was a sudden death of an infant in my home. Everyone was flipping out, no one knew what was happening. While screaming/weeping incoherently on the phone to the police I, for whatever reason, put the baby in the bouncer & placed him under a table (therapist said he believed it was to protect the baby & the rest of the family, since it appears my actions were triggered by another family member attempting cpr though it was clearly too late for that). Everyone in my family was so devastated & confused. During my questioning I couldn't even remember what had just happened a few moments before. We were kept by police for hours & hours, locked in our backyard, with no shade or food or water, in the desert. Even though we were all heartbroken & dazed, as soon as we were released we all took off to find a/c, water, & distraction- no one could be in the house where this horrific incident had just taken place. I actually went to the mall. Best friend even bought me a few things, so one could go as far to say that I was "shopping." I definitely started drinking heavily in the month that followed. It is an incredibly traumatic situation, & people in shock do strange, inexplicable things. You really cannot say you know how you'd react, unless you've been in that kind of situation (I sincerely hope no one ever, ever has to experience it).
[–]Hysterymystery[S] wrote at reddit
ReplyDeleteCertainly you can go that way, but you also have to consider all of the testimony about Casey's behavior as well.
There's ample proof that denial is a normal behavior pattern for her as well as the rest of her family. The way her family dealt with not only the pregnancy, but other stressful life events makes this behavior a pretty normal behavior pattern for her. What would be abnormal for Casey is to shed her normal defense mechanisms and deal with tragedy in a normal way. In light of her past behavior, this behavior was way less meaningful.
There's also extensive testimony about her parenting and her character. And this was not from witnesses picked by the defense, all of the positive character evidence came from prosecution witnesses. Every last one of them testified that Casey was a loving mother who cared deeply about her child and willingly gave up her social life to care for her. Even right before the child died, she was doing flash cards and buying child safety items. If you watch that block of testimony from Casey's friends, it went overwhelmingly in Casey's favor. Casey was at no point in time acting like she wanted Caylee out of her life.
Certainly you're welcome to your opinion, I just think the evidence points away from homicide and points to an accidental death. :-)
Also, the chloroform is really not something that anyone should consider. You can certainly think about the suffocation search and the night at Fusion as being part of the case, but if someone in your family died today, I can guarantee you've googled things that would look funny. I've googled chloroform as well as a million other bizarre things that I read about on reddit and I'm certainly not planning on killing anyone. The idea that chloroform was used is really pretty out there. The jury did not buy it at all. When have you ever heard about chloroform being used in a crime outside of a sherlock holmes novel? There are just so many other pharmaceuticals that are easier to use and easier to come by. Chloroform is not an easy thing to buy or make. It wasn't part of a larger search pattern where she looked up different sedatives. There is a plausible explantion for it. There was never any evidence that she ever bought it or made it. And she didn't google it or any other sedatives after that day. It really does appear to be unrelated. The idea that Casey did this massive science experiment to make chloroform when no one noticed and then cleaned up so well that it was undetected...I just don't see it.
[–]Hysterymystery[S] wrote at reddit
ReplyDeleteThanks. Yeah, Casey isn't perfect, but people don't seem to understand that the media isn't giving them an objective look at things and the jury saw something very different. Casey was lazy and apparently didn't want to work, so she took money from her mom's wallet and then lied about it. She was also a compulsive liar. (although, I'm not sure that's a moral issue as much as psychiatric one. She certainly wasn't doing it maliciously for the most part, it was mostly to make her life look better than it was)
But she also had good qualities and the jurors heard ample evidence of that. Everyone testified about how well she treated them, how she went out of her way for them. It was funny listening to Tony and his roomates talk about her living with them that month. She cooked, she cleaned, she did their laundry. She tried to patch things up between the guys when they got in fights. She scolded them for drinking too much or smoking weed. By the end of it, you'd think she was Snow White! And across the board people testified about how well she cared for her daughter.
The funny thing is, the prosecution elicited all that testimony...apparently without any thought to how the jury would perceive it. For every incriminating thing, there were like five positive things. After the prosecution spent days on end presenting testimony about how great she was, it became really hard for the jury to see her committing murder. But of course when you listen to the media recount the trial and they just ignore all that and play up the incriminating bits--out of context and disproportional to the impact they had when they came out at trial.
Totally agree with you on the clothes. It was a little weird. They did the same thing with Jodi Arias. Tried to make her look like a librarian.
[–]molinafan
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post! I've enjoyed reading the different theories. My question is if caylees death was an accident, what would be the point of the duct tape over her mouth?
[–]Hysterymystery[S]
Thanks! It wasn't over her mouth. That was just the prosecution's theory of where it used to be. Part of it was several feet away, part of it was lying flat on the ground next to her skull. The jurors were not sure where it originally was and at least one said they believed it was used to hold the bag shut the way George buried all their pets in garbage bags sealed with duct tape.
[–]writeonred
I don't believe Caylee accidentally drowned. As a police officer, George was CPR and emergency-response certified. Rather than stage a kidnapping with a convoluted cover story, it is much more likely he would have called 911 and administered CPR if he had found Caylee unresponsive. Childhood drownings are not uncommon, especially in Florida, and George would have known that it was unlikely for charges to be filed against either him or Casey. There was no reason to mislead to the police if Caylee's death was truly a tragic accident.
[–]writeonred
ReplyDeleteWhy would George decide to hide an accidental death? That doesn't make sense to me. Unless you believe that he deliberately killed Caylee, which is a perspective I can understand (although I may not agree). George is not a great man, and he significantly contributed to a horrifically dysfunctional family dynamic, but he seems more stable than his daughter was at the time. Do I think he was a good father/grandfather/husband? No. Not at all. And maybe he was physically and sexually abusive toward his children -- I don't believe so, but I have no idea. I wasn't there. Given George's career in law enforcement (and again, he didn't do a great job at fulfilling that role), I think he would have known there were no "tracks" to hide. If Caylee's death was an accidental drowning, there was nothing to cover up. Accidental drownings are not uncommon. And he would have known that parents and caregivers are rarely charged, even with neglect, in those cases.
[–]Hysterymystery[S]
I think people are overestimating how normal and stable George is. According to Baez, George insisted that Casey not tell her mother about the death and made some comments about how him and Cindy would get a divorce if she knew. When you look at past behavior, a lot of lies from both Casey and George seem to revolve around Cindy.
As in, they're lying because they're scared of how Cindy will react. The defense always insisted that George knew Casey wasn't working and I think that is backed up by the fact that Casey stayed at the house all day. Certainly if she was trying to pretend she had a day job, she wouldn't hang out with George at the house during those hours. Various other scenarios came out at trial that indicated George knew she wasn't working. On the other hand, she's telling Cindy she's working. The way he handled himself during the investigation is another thing that points to him being afraid of Cindy (or being afraid she'd leave him). He's on Casey's side when Cindy's around, but then giving them incriminating evidence when she's not. If he was supposed to be watching Caylee and she drowned on his watch, he may have perceived that as something she'd never forgive him over. I mean, think about your own family. Just the other day, my husband was supposed to be watching the kids and when I got home, he wasn't watching them. They had gone to the neighbors house and he had no idea where they were. I was livid. When you watch kids that young, you're supposed to know where they are at all times. I can't even imagine the rift that would've developed if my kids had died instead of being found safely down the street. In terms of accidental drowning, that's how OJ Simpson's first marriage ended. The child drowned when his wife was supposed to be watching her. He blamed her, he never forgave her, and he divorced her shortly after that.
[–]Hysterymystery[S]
ReplyDeleteSorry bout that. The second thing is, I think people are trying to apply too much logic to the family's actions. It's clear these people are weird. Who denies a pregnancy is happening for 9 months? Not hides it, flat out denies it's happening? It's clear their ability to deal with stress normally is impaired. And realistically, I don't think he was thinking at all. I certainly would not be making logical decisions in that situation. He may have just been thinking "how can I make this situation go away". I'm sure in the hours and the days after that he wished he'd just called police, but I think it was just a moment of panic where he made an irrational decision. We also have the words of his mistress: she testified that he told her it was an accident that snowballed out of control.
Or maybe it was an accident that happened while he was high. Certainly that's always possible.
To me, the number of odd things George did and said during that time frame make me feel like he had to be there:
He lied about or misrepresented what happened that day in a manner that put him further away from Caylee during a suspicious period in the afternoon. This doesn't protect Casey in any way that I can discern, but it sure puts him in a better spot.
He stopped calling his daughter that day. If he didn't know about Caylee's death until later, why would we see that change starting so early?
He didn't ask questions like Cindy did in any of the recordings made, not on the 911 tape, not in the jailhouse visits. Now maybe he just has a different personality than Cindy, but the jurors pinpointed that as odd and so did I.
Dominic Casey got info from someone about where the body was and had a detailed (correct) description of what the scene looked like (as in, it perfectly matched what Kronk said about the scene). When he did his search he was on the phone with someone getting info. When asked, he hemmed and hawed and told a couple of different stories about it before finally saying he had a psychic tip...he had inside info, that's the only explanation. Now, obviously he used to work for Baez for a short time so it's possible he got it then, but after Baez fired him, he went and worked for George. I feel like if he got the info from Casey he probably wouldn't have waited to go look for the body and he wouldn't be on the phone getting this description, but it's still possible he got it from Casey. But even if he got the info from Casey, George never once asked him where he got his information. He never once questioned him on the search or whether Casey gave him this info. If I had someone working for me and suddenly they know where the body is when no one else in the world does, I would sure question them on it!
[–]Hysterymystery[S]
ReplyDeleteYou should read Cheney Mason's book on the case. Or not, depending on the stomach you have for this kind of thing. It doesn't go into the details of the case as much as it does the prosecution's relentless misconduct in trying to get a conviction. They threatened numerous witnesses to get them to not testify for the defense. They presented fabricated evidence to the jury (and got caught, thankfully). After they found the body, they arranged for her to watch the media spectacle on a horrendous tabloid show while they video taped her reaction. She's sitting there hyperventilating and they're just calculating how much this video will fetch in royalties. They created a situation where she can't have even a modicum of personal safety all in the name of media coverage. They had no interest in justice, it was all about how it would impact their careers. I'm not saying the defense was perfect, but they were tasked with one thing: advocating zealously for their client, which is what they did. The prosecution has a duty too: justice. And they failed tremendously.
If you are upset by the prosecution (or anyone) using a child's death for their own personal gain the book will infuriate you. The things the prosecution did were abhorrent. I knew a lot of this stuff just watching the trial, but I learned a lot more about the misconduct after reading it though.
If you want to read a book about the case, in terms of quality, I think Baez had the best book and gave the clearest picture of the case. Now, not everything he says is true. I think there's proof that he's doing a little creative rewriting of history too (as I noted above), but over all it's a good book and gives you a good picture of the case and why it was an acquittal. Jeff Ashton also wrote a book and if you plan to read several on the case, it's certainly on the list, but Ashton is off in lala land. He honestly has no idea why he lost the case. The way he writes about the trial, it makes me wonder if he was even there. Mason's book mainly focuses on the misconduct of the prosecution. He's angry and that anger comes across in the writing. Writing quality isn't quite as high as Baez's book and he made bizarre choices like including motions, in full, in the book. There was one that was like 30 pages long! Can't you just paraphrase it? It won't give you as much info on the case, it's mostly just about the misconduct by the prosecution and the judge in the case.
If you're just going to read one, I'd suggest Presumed Guilty, which is Baez's book. I really enjoyed it.
[–]Awsaim 1 point 1 year ago
ReplyDeleteSorry to necro this post after a couple months, but I recall Caylee having a ♡ sticker over the duct tape on her mouth. Police later found a ♡ sticker sheet with stickers on the sheet being used, which leads me to believe Casey did actually kill her, accident or not.
[–]Hysterymystery[S]
Not exactly. An evidence tech testified that she thought she saw something in the outline of a heart (perhaps adhesive residue), so she went to get a second person, who couldn't see the heart. She herself couldn't find it again after that. They did additional tests to find the residue and they all failed to find anything. So basically, we have the testimony of one person who spotted something once and failed to find it again when she looked. Not very convincing. And yes they did find stickers in her home, but that's not really surprising. I have heart shaped stickers at my house as do most of the houses in my neighborhood.
Also, the duct tape...it wasn't over her mouth. The prosecutors argued that it was once there, but that's now how it was found. Half of it was several feet away and the rest was laying flat on the ground next to the skull.
But I do think it was a big prosecution mistake arguing that a heart shaped sticker was ever involved. The heart is a loving symbol and a loving act. I'd have a hard time seeing someone committing first degree murder and then putting a heart shaped sticker on the remains. An accident though? That fits much better. But realistically, there's no solid evidence a heart shaped sticker was ever at play here.
Cindy was hypercritical of Casey, including her parenting skills, to the point of emotional abuse. She had been demeaning and belittling toward Casey prior to Caylee's death and also afterward. Perhaps she was subconsciously blaming Casey for the sexual abuse she suffered from her father. Cindy had to have been suspicious but in denial that George had been sexually abusing their child. George used this to his advantage, convincing Casey to hide the death from her mother, saying her mother would never forgive her for it. He had convinced and threatened Casey since the age of 8 to kept secrets from her mother.
ReplyDeleteGeorge unitentionally killed Cayle while performing a sexual act on her that presumably caused her to suffocate or choke to death. There would have been physical evidence of the sexual assault so he had to cover it up by putting the ladder back on the pool, dipping Caylee in the pool, and presenting her wet body to Casey, telling her she was to blame for Caylee's "accidental drowning."
Speculation on what happenend: Caylee was napping but George went into the room where she was sleeping and began to sexually assault her while Casey was working in the computer room. He may have accidentally suffocated or choked her (Jose Baez specified that George would force his penis into Casey's mouth when she was younger). He couldn't call 911 because there would have been physical evidence of the sexual abuse and cause of death. He needed sufficient time to pass before her body was discovered so that her body would decompose enough that pathologists would not be able to determine when and how she died. Caylee's body quickly would decompose outside in a swampy area and in the summer heat of Florida.
George Anthony covered up his crime of pedophila, which resulted in the unintentional death of his granddaughter, by framing his daughter. As a former sheriff's deputy, he was protected by the system: cops and prosecutors ignored evidence pointing to his guilt.
The body would have shown extensive trauma.
She may have been choked or strangled into submission.
Her mouth and nose may have been held tightly to stifle her screams, thereby causing asphyxia.
She may have died from shock or trauma, which is not uncommon in young children and older persons.
Offenders may attempt to mislead investigators by staging the crime scene to make it appear to be something other than a sex crime.
I recall and ID channel murder case (can't remember which show) where the murderer placed duct tape over the nose and mouth AFTER the victim was killed to prevent fluids from seeping out. Being in law enforcement, George Anthony would know this.
ReplyDelete"Under normal conditions, the intestinal bacteria in a corpse produce large amounts of foul-smelling gas that flows into the blood vessels and tissues. It is this gas that bloats the body, turns the skin from green to purple to black, makes the tongue and eyes protrude, and often pushes the intestines out through the vagina and rectum. The gas also causes large amounts of foul-smelling bloodstained fluid to exude from the nose, mouth, and other body orifices.
"By seven days after death, most of the body is discolored and giant blood-tinged blisters begin to appear. The skin loosens and any pressure causes the top layer to come off in large sheets (skin slip). As the internal organs and the fatty tissues decay, they produce large quantities of foul-smelling gas. By the second week after death, the abdomen, scrotum, breasts, and tongue swell; the eyes bulge out. A bloody fluid seeps out of the mouth and nose. After three to four weeks, the hair, nails, and teeth loosen and the grossly swollen internal organs begin to rupture and eventually liquefy.
"In the early nineteenth century, the American and British poor often prepared their own dead for burial in a process called "laying-out," "streeking," or rendering the "last offices." Women normally washed the corpse, plugged its orifices..."
http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Rigor-Mortis-and-Other-Postmortem-Changes.html
They had the option of convicting her of 2nd-degree murder and they didn't do it. Jurors who've talked about the case after trial have said they discussed the possibility of convicting on a lesser charge but felt that the evidence just wasn't strong enough, even for the lesser charges. The 2 big issues were:
ReplyDeleteThey felt that the prosecution couldn't adequately disprove the defense theory that Caylee had died in a pool accident that got covered up.
George and Cindy both came off as dishonest and sketchy during the trial. To the jury, it seemed just as likely that they might've murdered Caylee.
And nobody has said this, but I think the prosecution's decision to make chloroform such a big part of their theory was a huge mistake. Because I just cannot imagine high-school dropout Casey Anthony sitting down and manufacturing chloroform herself. That just did not happen. She didn't even have the equipment to manufacture chloroform, anyway. The whole chloroform thing made the prosecution's theory look ridiculous, because it was ridiculous.