The Case Of Casey Anthony

In 2008, the United States of America, and indeed the Western World, was enthralled by a case that played out in the second half of the year. It involved a woman named Casey Anthony, and her two-year-old daughter Caylee.

Caylee was reported missing by her grandmother Cindy on the 15th of July 2008. When she called the police, Cindy Anthony alleged that she hadn’t seen Caylee for 31 days, and that when she had recently been around Casey’s car, it had a strong smell of human decomposition. Casey allegedly told her mother, and later detectives, a number of lies about Caylee’s whereabouts. In October of 2008, with no body to be found and a very confusing pool of evidence, Casey Anthony was charged with first-degree murder. She pleaded not guilty.

Then, in December of 2008, Caylee’s skeletal remains were found with a blanket inside a garbage bag in the woods not far from the Anthony family home. Although the coroner did rule the case as a homicide, the official cause of death was not known, as was listed as ‘death by undetermined means’.

What followed was a sensational trial that Time called the ‘social media trial of the century’ that saw Casey Anthony eventually declared not guilty by a jury of per peers, with no other perpetrator yet to be found.

What We Know

What we know about the disappearance, and murder, of Caylee Anthony begins on June 16th of 2008. It was on this date that Casey Anthony, who was then living with her parents Cindy and George, moved out of the property. She took Caylee with her. Caylee’s grandparents would never see her alive again. During the month that followed, Cindy Anthony regularly rang Casey, and asked to see Caylee. She was always rebuffed with excuses that Casey was working, or Caylee was away in the care of a nanny.

Then on July 13 2008, Cindy and George received a letter that informed them that Casey’s car (registered to their address) was in a tow yard. When George went to pick the car up a few days later, both he (a retired police officer) and the yard attendant, noted that the car had a strong smell of human decomposition around the trunk. A rotting back of garbage was all that was later found inside. He told Cindy, who called the police and reported Caylee missing. In her phone call to the police she said: “There is something wrong. I found my daughter’s car today and it smells like there’s been a dead body in the damn car.”

It was July 15.

That same day, following a call from the police, Casey too confirmed that Caylee had been missing for 31 days.

Casey’s Lies

The truth became one of the hardest things for authorities to pin down in the case against Casey Anthony, because she blended fiction and fact without thought. This began from the moment she was contacted by the police on July 15, 2008. She confirmed to them that Caylee had been missing for 31 days, and claimed that she had been kidnapped by her nanny. She stated that she was too scared to seek the help of police in the matter.

However, the police were later looking over her signed statement there were somethings that didn’t quite add up. Firstly, the nanny from Casey’s statement, a woman of Mexican heritage that she had identified as Zenaida “Zanny” Fernandez-Gonzalez had never been seen by any of Casey’s family or friends. In reality, there was no nanny. Secondly, Casey stated that her place of employment was Universal Studios in Florida. However, when police went with Casey to Universal Studios on July 16 and asked her to show them her office, she wandered around the lot for some time before admitting that she hadn’t worked there for years.

At this point, Casey was arrested by police and charged the next day for giving false statements to law enforcement, child neglect, and the obstruction of a criminal investigation.

The judge denied her bail, and stated that Casey had shown “woeful disregard for the welfare of her child”. This was a statement that would be echoed throughout the case.

Confusion At All Levels

There was a lot of confusion in the case of Casey Anthony, but it was not just of her doing.

On three consecutive days (August 11 – 13, 2008), Roy Kronk, who was a local meter reader, called police about a strange object he had seen in the wooded areas close to the Anthony property. Following his third call, offers met him at the scene and did a quick search, but found nothing. Kronk called again on December 11, after which a more thorough search was undertaken and the remains of a child were found in a trash bag. Just over a week later, the medical examiner confirmed that the remains found were Caylee Anthony.

This confusion made its way into the courtroom as well. Some four hundred pieces of evidence were presented at the trial, which didn’t begin until May of 2011. The prosecution had stated as early as April of 2009 that they were seeking the death penalty in the case.

As soon as the trial began, it was clear that the defence had a solid plan to support Casey’s ‘not guilty’ plea. Her lawyer, Jose Baez, didn’t waste any time telling the jury exactly what had actually happened.

His version, and we have to assume Casey’s version, is that on June 16, 2008, Caylee drowned in the pool at her grandparent’s house. Her body was discovered by George Anthony, who convinced Casey that should be be imprisoned for Caylee’s death, and then covered it up. This, Baez claimed, explains why Casey’s behaviour didn’t change during the time that Caylee was missing. According to the defence, the reason that Casey was so successful in pretending nothing was wrong, was that she was sexual abused by her own father from the age of eight.

Baez also sowed seeds of discord in the jury by questioning whether Kronk hadn’t moved the bones from somewhere else, and noting that the police department had made errors in the case in their desire to feed the media a headline story. He admitted that Casey had lied about the nanny, but noted that protecting the reputation of the abuser was a common behaviour in abuse victims. One of his main arguments against the prosecution’s case was that their forensic evidence was weak, and not enough to prove conclusively that Casey was the one behind her daughter’s death.

The prosecution were obviously looking at the case from an entirely different angle. Essentially, they claimed that Casey had used chloroform to knock Caylee out, before suffocating her by putting duct tape over her nose and mouth. They identified her as a party girl, and suggested that she killed her daughter to free herself from parental responsibility. They had the evidence to prove it, although much of it was forensic, and there were some issues with the science behind the methods. Despite this, they remained strong to their party line: Who would make an accident look like a murder?

The trial lasted for six weeks, and the jury went into deliberation on July 4, 2011.

The very next day, the found Casey Anthony not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and aggravated child abuse.

However, they did find her guilty of providing false information to law enforcement. With time served, Casey was released on July 17, 2011.

Reasonable Doubt

Following the trial, a number of the members of the jury came forward and stated that, although they in no way believed that Casey Anthony was entirely innocent in the death of her daughter, there simply wasn’t enough concrete evidence provided by the prosecution. A consistent bungling of forensic evidence by police and other law enforcement, and perhaps even the slightest feeling that the story Casey’s lawyer told was plausible, meant that in this case, reasonable doubt was the key word.

Who Killed Caylee?

We might never know for sure who killed little Caylee Anthony, or how she came to be dumped in the woods, perhaps by the people who were supposed to love and care for her.

What we can say is that although the depravity of Casey Anthony, and the careless way she responded to the charges against her, may have indeed been caused by her own upbringing, her little girl certainly didn’t deserve to suffer for it.