Author’s Book Introduction
Zanny the Nanny
Script for Audiobook
Thoughts from Zanny the nanny: “Little Caylee Anthony trusted her family. That made it easy for her killer. I lived with Caylee for two years. I was there when it happened. I am Zanny, her nanny. I know all of Casey’s secrets. Casey shared one horrible secret with me. She believed George was Caylee’s father. I grew frightened of George. Everyone was — except Caylee. Poor Caylee. She trusted her killer.”
Author’s Introduction
Know what isn’t being said and never overlook the obvious.
Where should I begin? A single mother in Orlando Florida lives on a street named Hopespring Drive. Casey Anthony becomes the center of a scandalous story that dominates the national news cycle for a decade. But Casey is not the real story.
Before her daughter Caylee is born, this single mother, announces to her family very privately that the baby’s DNA could belong to her father, George. Fear takes up residence inside Hopespring Drive. George and Cindy aren’t afraid of Caylee, her DNA frightens them. This new mom’s baby triggers a panic not only in George but Cindy as well. Before Casey was old enough to have a baby, crimes occurred in their Hopespring Drive home for a decade. It is not a coincidence that the theft of Cindy’s life sayings — $30,000 — and then divorce papers accompany George’s flight from Hopespring Drive and his family. National print and cable TV bring her story to the public using a well-worn template known as clickbait. The photogenic mom fits their model perfectly.
Two stories emerge about this family. and so there are two narrators. One is the media story that introduces everyone to the evil, hateful mother of Caylee — Casey Anthony. The media story makes her the most hated woman in America virtually overnight. But there is another story that was never published about how this family creates an alternative universe to hide its scandalous history. The family hides out in two universes, so they don’t have to face their fears that Caylee is George’s child.
Their two realities intersect around Caylee. The new mother quits a job she loves at Universal Studios in downtown Orlando and never works a day in her life again. She breaks off her engagement to a boy she loves and never marries. She doesn’t earn any income for years — by choice.
Weeks before Caylee’s third birthday, Cindy calls 911 and tells the police Caylee has “disappeared.” She neglects to tell the police she knows Caylee is dead — killed by someone in the family a month earlier. It could be Cindy herself, or her husband, George, or of course, it could be Casey.
The FBI and Orange County Sheriff’s investigators on the case believe everything Cindy tells them, and Casey becomes law enforcement’s top suspect in the disappearance and likely murder of Caylee. No one admits to law enforcement that Casey is not working. They make up a story that Caylee is watched by a caregiver named Zanny — Zanny the Nanny.
Zanny is a fiction that the family cultivates for years. Zanny is the greatest hoax in American criminal history as the media finds a growing audience by repeating the family’s lies so often that everyone comes to believe that Casey had a caregiver for Caylee for years, and her name was Zanny. The fake nanny and the parents’ statements about how Caylee went “missing” take root in the media narrative. Credit for this false narrative is due to what is called the Nancy Grace School of Journalism. It’s a business model for TV journalism. The nonexistent caregiver becomes an audience aggregator for press reporters just by mentioning Zanny the Nanny.
Scott Bolin FBI: “So, June 16th? (the day Caylee was killed).”
Cindy (Casey’s mother): “(On June 16th and 17th) Casey wasn’t home. They (Casey & Caylee) were going to crash at Zanny’s.”
Yuri Melich (lead detective): “Alright, did Cindy ever mention Zanny, before this year?”
Charles Crittenden (Cindy’s supervisor): “Yes absolutely. She (Cindy) talked about Zanny for a couple of years.”
Yuri Melich: “You’ve personally never seen Zanny, never?”
Debbie Bennett (Cindy’s colleague): “I only heard Zanny’s name out of Cindy’s lips, that ‘Caylee’s with Zanny. Who is watching her? ‘She’s with Zanny, always Zanny.”
Yuri Melich: “Do you know if Cindy ever said she had known Zanny or met Zanny?”
Debbie Bennett: “You know I can’t believe that Cindy didn’t know Zanny because of the way she always said Zanny’s name. I always assumed it was a friend of Casey’s and they all knew each other. I’m shocked to hear that they didn’t.”
While Caylee was in utero, the family alpha, Cindy, begins planning how to remove her from the family portrait by any means necessary. Caylee will not live to see her third birthday. Someone in the family kills her on June 16 early in the morning. The killer is not named Casey. That leaves two possibilities that were never considered by law enforcement or the news media: Cindy and George. When has there ever been a family like this?
The untold story was hiding in Cindy’s alternative universe within the walls of Hopespring Drive. Caylee was groomed to trust her killer. Her body was left in a field behind the Anthonys’ Orlando home. For six months the Anthonys looked out from their kitchen window onto that field in stone-cold indifference to the tragedy of what the police felt certain was murder. It’s more than a decade later now, and Caylee’s murder has become an unsolved cold case.
Who killed Caylee? Why would law enforcement target the wrong person? The Anthony family is two parents (Cindy and George), a daughter, Casey, and a granddaughter, Caylee. Somebody in that family killed Caylee and planned the same fate through the justice system for Casey. That leaves two possibilities — Cindy and George. This family lived in a parallel universe that was run by Alpha.
Caylee’s birth wasn’t planned. it was a surprise to Casey and her father, George — and Cindy was also surprised. The family’s alpha was not used to surprises. She reacted badly when she realized Caylee’s birth threatened to expose the long history of criminal secrets that accrued in her home during those years before Caylee’s birth.
My reporter began his up-close look at this family while working as an investigative journalist at Harvard on what the media first called the “trial of the century.” He was assigned to investigate and report these horrific crimes in Orlando by his editor Barry Sussman. Before moving to the Nieman Journalism Foundation at Harvard, Barry had a storied career with the Washington Post as supervising city editor. His job description was to greenlight horrible crime stories for the Post, but none were like this.
Barry left the Post after finishing his assignment as supervising editor over Woodward and Bernstein for the Watergate series. Keith and Barry were a great team and proud but not surprised when his reporting captured the most reader response in Nieman’s history. It remains a featured article on Harvard’s Media Watchdog website more than a decade after publication. My reporter is the journalist of record for this story.
In journalism, the press does a disservice to news consumers when it buries the lead. Here, the lead was buried in the Anthonys’ backyard. The lead story answers the question, “Who killed Caylee Anthony?” But the media frenzy can get consumed by its model to capture audience share from competitors. Clickbait and eyeballs rule media coverage, as they always do. My journalist of the record is old-school.
For all the nationwide scrutiny this case commanded, Nancy Grace, Court TV, and the morning cable TV journalists covering the trial lacked an essential curiosity to report an underlying narrative that was in plain sight. It takes an old-school reporter trained by Barry Sussman to apply critical thinking skills to his reporting. My reporter begins research from the case record exclusively with files and evidence presented in court. He and Barry recognized the beginnings of a historic story and they brought it to the public who were being short-changed by the media who only focus on Casey. My reporter told me his principles are “know what isn’t being said and never overlook the obvious.”
The case evidence files show readers that the Anthony family protected Caylee’s killer and knew from day one who among them should have been charged with murdering her. My reporter and Barry never imagined there was a fake story constructed around Cindy’s mythical-family member, Zanny. Cindy made lies the family’s reality. That is the underlying story of Caylee’s tragedy. The key player in that false reality is Zanny the nanny, but Zanny was given life by Cindy.
The media can occasionally adopt a groupthink reporting model as it competes for the audience that is most eager to want to hear the narrative it wants to believe.
Here, the family itself narrated a hoax that captivated a cadre of willing detectives, and that narrative was then picked up by a media model that can profit as much from fictional news narratives as reality. The Anthony family lived the greatest hoax in American criminal history. It is based on a fictional woman the family alpha calls Zanny. My reporter and I decided to convert Cindy’s fictional Zanny-caregiver into a factual Zanny-narrator for this book and its mission to bring clarity to consumers of news. Zanny the narrator shares with us the evidence that was never reported to law enforcement by the family. Zanny as the narrator starts now.
Chapter 1
An Open Mind
Note to Readers:
This introduces Zanny as the narrator
