Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (61 page)

N
EXT WERE CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATORS
Robin Maynard and Elizabeth Fontaine to talk about the phantom heart-shaped sticker. Dr. Neal Haskell testified about the flies coming from the trunk. Haskell’s report may have overreached, but on the stand, he was fair. He was subdued and answered honestly. He talked about the single leg of the blowfly, and when I asked him on cross where all the bugs came from, he answered honestly—they came from the garbage in the bag.

The very last of the prosecution’s long list of testifiers as to Casey’s character—not to whether she killed anybody—was Bobby Williams, the tattoo artist who tattooed the words “La Bella Vita” on Casey.

The prosecutors wanted to end on an emotional bang; they wanted the jury to know that after Caylee had died, she had gone into town and had herself tattooed, which I suppose was to indicate to the jury that she was a person of bad morals.

During cross-examination I quickly pointed out that George and Cindy had also gotten tattoos to memorialize Caylee.

“If George and Cindy could do it,” I said, “why couldn’t Casey do it?”

And that was the end of their case, both literally and figuratively.

I
MUST SAY THAT OVERALL
the state did a very good job presenting the evidence that it had. The state didn’t have much, but they made the most of it. All in all it was organized and well presented. Burdick was the reason for that. She was in charge of the case and its organization as far as the evidence was concerned.

Granted, there were a number of times when the prosecutors really let the case drag on, but what they wanted to do was err on the side of overkill, rather than under-try their case.

Aside from the fact they didn’t have any evidence as to how, when, and where Caylee died, especially how she died, the prosecutors also engaged in the quintessential prosecutorial overkill—using the many Fockers, using that video superimposition, and really dragging out the case to the limit when they really had very little to back it up.

After the trial I heard from one of the alternate jurors, who I will not name, that he and another juror told themselves the same thing: At the end of the prosecution’s case, each said, “We were asking for more, expecting more. And we were shocked, at the end of their case, they didn’t have more.”

The alternate juror had this crazy phrase:

“It was like paying for a prostitute and not getting any,” he said. But this case was far from over. Because of the circumstances, I feared the jury would find Casey guilty if it could find a reason to. I had to keep the pressure on.

CHAPTER 29

MY TURN

T
O MAKE OUR CASE, we wanted to break it into themes. We thought it would be easier for the jury to follow. Also, the prosecution had argued its case in chronological order, and we figured the jury had already gotten an idea of what happened when.

Here are the five themes I intended to follow:

A: The forensics. This had to do with all the evidence concerning the chloroform, the carpet samples, the air in the trunk, the textile fibers, the lack of DNA evidence, the phantom heart-shaped sticker, bugs, and Dr. Arpad Vass’s experimental air tests that there was decomposition in the trunk of Casey’s car.

B: Caylee’s accidental drowning. There was evidence to back this up.

C: The botched crime scene on Suburban Drive. I looked forward to questioning Roy Kronk.

D: Casey’s sexual abuse at the hands of George Anthony. This would explain Casey’s strange behavior during the thirty days before her arrest and in jail.

E: The final topic concerned the possible police misconduct and George’s attempts to frame Casey in order to keep her from talking about the abuse. I couldn’t wait to examine Krystal Holloway, George’s mistress during this ordeal, to let the jury know what she had to say about the accident that snowballed “out of control.”

F
OR THE LONGEST TIME
, I wanted to start with the forensics, and I wanted to start that way because the state had ended that way. It was a significant part of their case, and my intention was to put so many holes into their case that it would reek of reasonable doubt.

I wanted to accomplish two things with the forensics. One, I intended to show just how much the forensics actually exonerated Casey, and two, I wanted to show the jury just how much forensic evidence the state was hiding from them. And because of their poor strategy of hiding the ball, it made this really easy.

During the state’s direct examination, whenever I tried to bring something up that Jeff Ashton would object to as being “outside the scope,” Judge Belvin Perry would sustain the objection—these were points most judges would have allowed me to make—but what that did for me was really open up the door to show the jury just how much the prosecution was hiding from them.

Trying a case is a lot like playing a chess match. You always have to anticipate your opponent’s next move. They began to preclude me from going into areas that exonerated Casey during my cross-examination which forced us to do it in our case. We were more than willing and happy to do this, because we could parade in front of the jury witnesses that the state should have called but didn’t.

There’s a case called
Haliburton
, which says that during closing arguments you cannot argue that the state has failed to call a witness unless you call that witness yourself. For example, if we had not called Roy Kronk, we could not then argue that the state didn’t call him. And I knew come closing arguments, this was going to be especially important.

It would be fantastic to call as my first witnesses no one but FBI laboratory personnel to testify about all the evidence that
wasn’t
brought forth by the prosecution, and all the evidence that exonerated Casey.

And that’s precisely what we did.

This wasn’t an easy task to pull off because all these experts were busy and had tight schedules, but this was where my associate Michelle Medina was at her best. Michelle is extremely organized and personable, and managed to arrange for all these witnesses to be in court in the order we needed to put them on.

We started with Gerardo Bloise, because he was the one who collected a lot of the evidence and sent it to the FBI so they could examine it. At this point I wish to note that I found the FBI lab employees to be extremely professional. Paula Wolf, the FBI lab’s lawyer, was a straight shooter with the defense.

“Our personnel is going to testify to whatever the facts are,” she told me, “whether it helps one side or the other.”

I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

The FBI asked if we would go over with each person the testimony before they testified in court, and so every evening after court I would meet with the FBI lab personnel and go over their testimony with them.

We began with Heather Seubert, who was a senior DNA analyst with the FBI lab.

DNA is always a very difficult topic to explain to jurors without losing them, and I have to say that some of my best lawyering in this case was making the science simple. I spent a lot of time preparing for it and to date it is the work I am most proud of.

I found Seubert to be a great witness. She was very personable and very good at explaining DNA, and she helped us out on several fronts. She testified that there was no blood on the car seat, in the trunk of Casey’s car, or on the steering wheel; that there was no DNA on the duct tape; and that the duct tape was contaminated.

The state was arguing that there was human decomposition in the trunk of the car, but Heather testified that decompositional fluids should have DNA in them, yet there was none. She testified that she also tested for blood, semen, and saliva, and none of that was found.

The jury was able to reasonably conclude there was no body in the trunk.

She also testified about the foreign DNA found on the sticky side of the tape that excluded both Casey and Caylee.

That really hurt the prosecution’s case.

T
HE NEXT THING
I did was attack the phantom heart-shaped sticker. The prosecution’s theory was that Casey had taken one of Caylee’s heart-shaped stickers and placed it on the duct tape to show her how much she loved her.

Taking this ridiculous theory apart was easy.

I called Ronald Murdock, who was in charge of processing the crime scene, and he testified that the sticker was thirty feet from Caylee’s body.

After that we called Lorie Gottesman, and she testified that she inspected the duct tape and found no residue of any stickers.

Then we showed the jury that the stickers found in the house looked nothing like the one found at the scene thirty feet away.

The conclusion for the jury to make was that the state had in fact tried to trick it by giving it misleading information.

And what made it especially powerful was we were using the state’s own people to do it. These were not our experts. These were the prosecution’s witnesses, and the prosecution had to sit and watch us use their experts to put on our case.

Ashton, in particular, was getting all upset as his case disintegrated before his eyes. He was his usual self, making faces, carrying on, making objections, getting all angry as usual.

Slowly but surely we could see the agitated Ashton start to boil like a volcano ready to erupt at any moment.

The next day I called Dr. Tim Huntington, our entomologist, to the stand. Huntington did extremely well. He broke things down to their simplest forms for the jury to understand that based on the larval habits of flies, the ones in the trunk didn’t come from human decomposition, which the prosecution tried to claim, but rather from the trash—and for no other reason.

When asked whether the leg of the blowfly was evidence of decomposition, he testified, “It doesn’t mean anything.” He said if there had been a body in the trunk, there should have been thousands of flies, not just one leg.

He also testified that, in his opinion, the body had been moved from another location to where it was found; it wasn’t placed there originally.