Chapter 7 the new Casey Anthony story
Chapter 7 ©
Never Overlook the Obvious
Zanny the Narrator
At the top of my reporter’s files for this chapter was the transcript of a CNN interview with former sex crimes prosecutor and legal analyst, Sunny Hostin. She was interviewed on Anderson Cooper’s show. Sunny told Anderson that coverup and jealousy by the wives of parental sex abusers were common in her experience as a prosecutor. Many wives were jealous because their husbands were attracted to their daughters, and those wives often blamed their children. I asked myself, did Cindy fit that pattern?
************
Sunny had this to say to Anderson Cooper when discussing his feature on Dottie Sandusky, wife of Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State coach convicted for 45 counts of sexual abuse of young male athletes, including their stepson. Dottie denied her husband abused any of those children. Indeed, “denial” is a word heard often in the world that families with parent abusers live in.
Anderson Cooper: “Wow, well joining me now is CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, Sunny Hostin. I mean it is extraordinary to hear from this wife who is standing by her husband despite I mean these dozens of people who have come forward.”
Sunny Hostin: “It seems remarkable, but I can tell you having tried child sex crimes, I spent a lot of my career doing that. Denial is just a classic response. It’s terribly common. “
Anderson Cooper: “And the pedophiles that I’ve interviewed and spent time with are the most manipulative people I’ve ever met. And in many cases, some of them grab kids and some of them groom kids over time.”
Sunny Hostin: “Yeah. And I thought about that, and I think you’re right because I’ve interviewed pedophiles of course in my line of work, and they are master manipulators as most good criminals are. That’s why they’re able to re-offend. So certainly, that’s part of it. But I think part of it when you interview and speak to wives of pedophiles, part of it is, ‘Oh, my goodness, if I married this man, what is wrong with me?’ There is that self-blame. ‘I’m a failed mother or I’m a failed wife.’ And I think it’s more about that quite frankly than manipulation.”
Anderson Cooper: “It is hard to believe that a wife can live with somebody for 35 years and not have some sort of suspicion that something is going on.”
Sunny Hostin: “You know, I think in a case like this, and in many of the cases that I’ve tried, I don’t believe that they didn’t have somewhere in the depths of their soul some sort of worry and some sort of feeling this was happening.”
Anderson Cooper: “And again, the thing of showering with boys, and she’s saying, ‘Well, he was working out with the boys,’ I mean, that still doesn’t make any sense.”
Sunny Hostin: “It’s odd. And if you heard her interview with Jason Carroll which I thought remarkable was when she said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ She can’t bring herself to believe it. And I had people sitting in my office as mothers turning against their children saying their children were lying. And I’ve got to tell you, there were classic signs in this case of grooming.”
Anderson Cooper: “Right.”
Sunny Hostin: “This fascination with these boys; she must have known. She should have known. And I’ve got to tell you when I prosecuted cases, it was still a very unpopular position. I wanted to go after the mothers because these are witnesses to sexual abuse. They’re enablers. They’re putting these children in danger, and I think they’re partly responsible.”
Anderson Cooper: “All right. Sunny Hostin, I appreciate you being on. Thanks very much.”
Sunny favors the prosecution of wife-enablers of fathers who abuse their children because they hide ongoing crimes that occur in their homes. These wives’ silence empowers husband abusers. Sonny said these spouses typically are never suspected, investigated, or charged for covering up the sex crimes of their spouses.
My reporter asked if I saw a connection between Dottie Sandusky and Cindy Anthony. “Did Cindy want what most spouses of parent abusers want, to protect her husband-abuser, and keep the family together?” He said in his memo that emotional security for these spouses comes from protecting their husbands. The reporter suggested that Cindy and George were a team with a strategy to prevent George’s arrest for the crime of sex abuse.
He reminded me that the three-year murder investigation made Casey’s conviction seem a certainty starting with her arrest right up to her trial. Then after she was acquitted, the jury foreman said their #1 suspect was George. My reporter believed the evidence reveals that Cindy and George targeted Casey to be charged for Caylee’s homicide and to protect George.
I continued reviewing my reporter’s research. Some days I sympathized with the story Casey told her psychologists. She said George’s abuse started in the third grade and often involved putting a pillow over her face to silence her screams. But there were other days I became angry going through pictures of her partying just days after witnessing Caylee’s death. I told the reporter we need to hear more from the court psychologists.
Casey Anthony 4 days after seeing Caylee’s dead body
Before Caylee was “missing” Casey was telling friends about George’s abuse. Nathan Lezniewicz told the veteran detective, John Allen, what he heard about George before Caylee’s disappearance.
Sgt. John Allen: “Do you recall any conversation, either with Tony or with Casey … about anything inappropriate ….?”
Nathan Lezniewicz: “Uh, I will bring this up, if it doesn’t leave this room. It’s kind of some heavy…”
Sgt. John Allen: “Right.”
Nathan Lezniewicz: “…type of information. I do remember Tony expressing this at one point, and I asked him again about it the other day just to make sure that I understood him correctly. Casey at one point said to him some things about George abusing her.”
Sgt. John Allen: “Okay.”
Psychologist, Dr. William Weitz, like his colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, had a court order to evaluate the accused murderer. They both scheduled 10 hours of personal, one-on-one interviews with her. Dr. Weitz spent 100 hours in post-interview reviews and test result analysis. He was one of nine psychologists instructed by the court to evaluate Casey Anthony’s mental state. Dr. Weitz brought a huge tranche of notes and information to his appointment with the prosecutors when they called him to their office for his deposition. Dr. Weitz responded as prosecutors read his notes back to him.
Linda Drane-Burdick: “There is another starred … {referring to notes}”
Dr. William Weitz: “All of them {family} since childhood to her represented threats — mother, father, brother.”
Linda Drane-Burdick: “Okay, keep going.”
Prosecutor Jeff Ashton: “So when you wrote, ‘she feared father.’ It wasn’t that she feared for her {own} safety. It was that she feared for her daughter?”
Dr. William Weitz: “In other words, she had very divisive feelings vis-a-vis the issue you know of leaving Caylee with George alone in the house.”
I put a note in my diary after reading these files to remind me that Casey’s brother, Lee, left the house before George moved back as soon as he learned his parents were reconciling. Lee anticipated the tension and drama that occupied their home when George was around. Lee quickly found an apartment and moved in with his girlfriend, Mallory.
With Lee gone and George returning, the family was set up with a new core unit: Cindy, George, Casey, plus the disruptive member of the Anthony clan, the infant with unknown paternity, Caylee. The evidence files overflowed with fear and denial in this family’s home. The audience following the case in the media never heard about this in the reporting they followed. News consumers never considered the history of criminal abuse the psychologists described to prosecutors.
Within Hopespring Drive’s walls, Caylee’s presence threatened an already dysfunctional and fragile family structure that defined the Anthony home for a decade. After Caylee’s birth, there were thoughts about who was Caylee’s father. Was it George? But that was a strange idea to contemplate. No one was going to walk up to him and ask him if he took a DNA test to prove he wasn’t Caylee’s biological parent. That was ludicrous. It seemed unprovable. Unless law enforcement charged him with Caylee’s murder, there was nothing that could force him to provide a sample for such a DNA test. George declined a lie detector test to prove he was not hiding evidence. So did Cindy and Lee.
If George was not Caylee’s biological father, did that mean he never assaulted Casey? No! Did that mean he wasn’t fearful that his DNA could be biologically linked to Caylee? No! I said to the reporter, whether George’s biological DNA matched Caylee or not was irrelevant to whether he committed the murder being investigated. The DNA result was also meaningless for determining if he assaulted Casey at any time in her life.
My reporter agreed that if a DNA test excluded George, that did not make him innocent of involvement in Caylee’s homicide, or the other crimes his daughter accused him of before Caylee was born. The value of a positive test confirming George’s DNA connection with Caylee was only to determine if his alleged assault of Casey on one occasion nine months before Caylee was born resulted in Caylee’s birth. The absence of a positive DNA connection didn’t prove George innocent of Caylee’s homicide, or Casey’s claims of sexual assaults when she was a child. My reporter took me aside and said, by the way, he has evidence that George confessed to killing Caylee “accidentally.”
My reporter and I agreed that we needed to determine if Cindy and George reacted with unreasonable fear to Casey’s claim that George was Caylee’s biological father. If there was sexual abuse by a father against his eight-year-old daughter, and the wife was lying to hide that crime, then that would be consciousness of guilt evidence against both. Such a family would do anything to hide their history of criminal guilt.
My reporter shared with me the scene set he envisioned for George’s return. In the months leading up to his return home, the reporter said it was clear to George that things weren’t going to be the same again for him. Family secrets were bleeding from the wounds that began with Casey’s pregnancy. Cindy started what can only be described as a full-on pressure campaign against Casey and her baby to staunch the bleeding.
The reporter concluded Cindy’s strategy was to delegitimize Caylee as a member of her family and find a reason to remove her from the home through a change of custody. Having Caylee around George was like holding a mirror up to the history of their family and hanging it on their front door. He said Cindy’s reaction was not about denial of pregnancy, it came from a private and very personal anger for reasons only the wife of an abuser could explain. Jealousy and self-protection come to mind.
He wondered how early in Casey’s childhood was Cindy aware of George’s sexual intimacy with her. If Cindy believed George’s assaults continued from third grade up to nine months before Caylee’s birth, then that would be a reason she wanted to be rid of the baby. Cindy’s anxiety over Caylee found an outlet to channel anger and perhaps jealousy. When her feelings couldn’t be contained, she morphed into violence against Casey for bringing her into Cindy’s world. “How dare she?” was my reporter’s thought. In Cindy’s world, Caylee was already collateral damage.
As I thought about it, it was hard for me to not believe Cindy’s attitude and anger were anything but borderline threats against Caylee. When I considered how this reaction to Caylee affected Casey, there were some days I felt sympathetic to the idea that she was trying to make a long-delayed transformation from a very immature teen daughter to a young woman who was unexpectedly blessed to be a mother herself.
I could see an abuse victim’s need to protect family secrets being questioned as Casey lived the experience of being a mother. Could she transform herself from victim to survivor? That was very much an open question.
George’s dating, gambling, stealing, and abuse were surfacing in conversations among Casey’s friends. The whispers filtered back to Cindy from outside the walls of Hopespring Drive.
Ryan Paisley was one of Casey’s best friends and a frequent visitor to the home. Ryan was called to the Orange County Sheriff’s office for an interview. During his debriefing, he was asked if he observed stress in Casey’s family relationships.
Detective Yuri Melich: “Okay. What about her father? Any problems there or is it a typical….”
Ryan Paisley: “…Well (sighs), I guess there’s a little bit of animosity between the two of them {Cindy and George} because I guess he had had some issues uh, earlier on, you know, putting him in a bad spot as far as credit goes. He took off for a couple of months.”
Detective Yuri Melich: “Hmm.”
Ryan Paisley: “And, you know, and then he came back. Uh, Cindy had found out that he was talking to another woman online and so there were some issues there that she had some sort of, you know, you know, some valid reasons…”
Detective Yuri Melich: “And you said dad left for a couple of months? Is that because of the cheating or something else?”
Ryan Paisley: “Uh, yeah (affirmative).”
I asked my reporter to show me the comments he found from a nationally prominent jury consultant who provided his professional analysis of the evidence for CBS television as the start date for the trial approached. Richard Gabriel put together a focus group that aired on CBS. He was able to evaluate the public’s perceptions of the family and provide insight into the selection process for the jury pool that her jurors would ultimately be drawn from. Gabriel published a book with his professional assessment of what he learned from that experience. He became familiar with Casey’s home environment while visiting their home before the trial. [1]
He wrote a scene recalling his impressions after he was left alone in the Anthony residence shortly before Casey was charged with murder. He stood in her room and let the vibes from it sweep over him. Gabriel was touched by how close and confined everything in the house seemed.
Richard Gabriel: “There is a sense that Casey emotionally stopped developing sometime in adolescence. What strikes you as you look around are the dozens upon dozens of individual and montage photographs of Caylee spread over all available surfaces. These photographs were there from before the time Caylee went missing. This room starkly contrasts with the rest of the furnishings of the small home with its black lacquer Japanese furniture and running bamboo in the yard. One is struck by how close and compressed the house is, how near the pool is to the living room, and how the home is close to the site where Caylee’s remains were found.”
After reading Gabriel’s account I thought it was striking how often people around Casey and Caylee or who were part of their world, described the kind of warm, empathetic relationship Casey seemed to exude for her daughter. I was struck that Gabriel experienced it from being in their bedroom.
Richard Gabriel rose to the top of his profession as a jury consultant by cultivating his skills for evaluating how environments and circumstances influence behavior. His insight evoked impressions of a dark history in the Anthony home, and he was compelled to share his thoughts publicly.
Richard Gabriel: “Secrets can also run deep in families. There is a hidden code — things that are done that should not be done. Things that are said that should not be said. And things that are never spoken of because they are too painful; too laden with shame and guilt to be uttered.”
