Where Is Caylee Anthony?

(September 29, 2008)

What with all of the weighty globally-reaching stories happening right now � Sarah Palin, skyrocketing food prices, war in Iraq, and oh yeah, the utter collapse of the nation's economy -- one incredible news item has been relegated to the back pages. Nancy Grace, the Orlando Florida papers and the crime blogs are the only outlets still covering the story of missing Caylee Anthony.

If you haven�t been following this story, I�m here to help. I have been keeping up on it daily. As it unwinds layer by gruesome layer, it's proving to be the ugliest display of diabolical lying, subterfuge, misplaced entitlement and sociopathology since Tonya Harding, y'know, really wanted to win.

This all started on July 15th when Cindy and George Anthony received a registered letter from the city of Orlando citing that their daughter Casey's Pontiac Sunfire was impounded. The car, which is titled in their names, was towed two weeks prior on June 30th after being "abandoned" for three days at a check cashing place seven miles from their home. The grandparents went to retrieve the car.

They also tracked down their daughter Casey. It had been weeks since the Anthonys had been in contact with their daughter Casey or little granddaughter Caylee. It is still unclear these many weeks later where they thought Casey and the baby were � they mention that Casey first told them she was on a business trip in Tampa, then changed her story to say she had taken Caylee on "a mini vacation."

"Where is Caylee?" grandmother Cindy demanded of Casey, a question that Casey couldn't or wouldn't answer, a question Casey had been dodging for a month. So grandmother Cindy flipped out and called 911.

The July 15th Cindy Anthony 911 tapes (now released) reveal a distraught Cindy telling the operator that her 2-year old granddaughter had been missing for a month, that her daughter's car has just turned up in an impound lot. She said the car smelled like there had been a dead body decomposing in it. She is shaky and shrill, just like a grandmother would who has been missing her grandchild for a month. She asked police to arrest Casey for stealing the car and money. Three 911 calls in total. In one of them Cindy tells Casey in the background, "No I am not giving you another day, you have had a month!" On the third 911 call, Cindy gave the phone to Casey who confirmed that Caylee was missing. When asked by the incredulous 911 dispatcher why she did not contact police 31 days ago, Casey says she had launched her own investigation."I�ve been looking for her and have gone through other resources to try to find her, which was stupid." Other resources?

The police arrived at the Anthony home while Casey was still on with the dispatcher ("the officers are here" she is heard to say on the tape) and took her into custody. The next day, July 16th, 22 year old Casey Marie Anthony was charged with child neglect and providing false information to law enforcement.

Bond, half a million dollars.

The story she told Orange County investigators? It was weird, and just kept getting weirder. She claimed that she left Caylee with a babysitter on June 9th, and that Caylee wasn't at the babysitter's place when she went to pick her up. The tapes from these first interviews were released on September 12th. If you haven�t heard them yet, they�re online, and fairly unbelievable.

Casey's story was as detailed as it was fabricated. She supplied the babysitter's name, Zenaida Fernandez Gonzales. She gave an address where Zenaida lived. She spun a tale about how long she had known Zenaida (two years) and where she had met her (through a friend at her workplace, which was at Universal Studios where she worked as an Event Coordinator). She even provided names and numbers of workplace friends (first, middle and last names) who could vouch for her.

Just about every word of this was a lie. This young woman talks in circles, leading the police down insane rabbit holes, talking nonstop with incredible detail, yet saying NOTHING.

There was no Zenaida. The address Casey gave, the one where she claimed she dropped off Caylee every day on her way to work? An empty apartment that had stood vacant for five months. And what work? She had never been an event coordinator at Universal, the workplace friends were fictional. She didn�t have a job at ALL. She even lied about seeing Caylee last on June 9th. There is a photo now released showing Caylee and her grandfather on the 15th, Father�s Day.

The day she was arrested, Casey had a phone call with her mother. The July 16 jail call was also released by the Orange County Corrections Department. In it, Caylee's grandmother complained to her daughter about keeping mum about Caylee's whereabouts; Casey snapped that she didn't know where Caylee was, and she was none too happy about being turned in to authorities. "You're blaming me that you're sitting in the jail? Blame yourself for telling lies," Cindy Anthony said.

�All they care about is finding Caylee,� Casey whined. Read that again. It's just as horrifying the second time.

Since Casey was providing no useful information, the authorities and thousands of volunteers who had rallied to search for Caylee had nothing to go on. Since she had been missing so long, the search was a dual one -- missing child, and search for remains. Everyone hoped Caylee was still alive, but feared that she was dead, so they did everything possible. On July 18th, Orange County police and cadaver dogs searched the Anthony's yard based on a tip from a neighbor that a month earlier on June 18th, Casey rang the neighbor's bell and asked to borrow a shovel. Authorities searched a pond off Chickasaw Trail, about a mile from where Casey and Caylee had been living. The grandfather George reported finding, in Casey�s car trunk, some gas cans that had gone missing from his shed.

Up until this point (third week in July) the grandmother was hellbent on finding Caylee and demanding her daughter tell the truth. Cindy Anthony even apologized to police for having laundered some pants she had found in the smelly car, to get the dead body smell out of the pants. But on July 21, grandmother Cindy's tune suddenly changed. She started to tell the papers something ludicrous. She said, "Casey has been trying to tell the police in her own way what she can tell them and the only unfortunate thing is, you know, they want a clear picture." Yes, that IS unfortunate you psycho. What are you TALKING ABOUT. WHERE IS THE BABY? "There's no clear picture," she goes on. "Casey has her reasons why she just can't blurt out the whole story, so she's been honest with them for what she can be honest with."

She "has her reasons why she just can't blurt out the whole story." Have these people seen too many episodes of CSI? Something changed for the Anthonys. They clearly learned something on the 21st that they did not know on the 16th when they called 911 to have their daughter arrested. After July 21 those stolen gas cans were never again brought up by the grandfather, and the grandmother denied ever thinking (or saying) that the car smelled like decomposition. "Do me a favor," the grandmother said July 23. "Put a little piece of pizza in your car today and leave it in this heat and then come back to me in 19 days and tell me what it smells like." Unfortunately for this woman, there was an officer who had testified the prior day at Casey�s bond hearing who said that he not only smelled decomp, but saw hair and stains in the trunk. (Later the tow truck driver and impound lot manager would agree about the odor).

The evidence from the trunk was in the lab while police questioned the Anthonys, friends, colleagues and gathered hundreds of pages of depositions. Casey continued to prattle on and say nothing, meanwhile authorities continued to try to find out if there really was a babysitter, and whether or not Caylee�s biological father was in fact deceased as Casey had testified. (The family of the deceased student who she had identified as Caylee�s father had never heard of Casey, but that doesn't prove anything.) Thousands of volunteers, including a special group who searches on horseback, were combing the Orlando area looking for Caylee. The FBI got involved to investigate some tips that Caylee may have been spotted out of state. If she WAS kidnapped, after 31 days she could be anywhere in the world.

As of August 8th, which was Caylee�s third birthday, Casey Anthony remained jailed on $500,000 bond. So far the charges were child neglect, failing to report her daughter's disappearance and lying to police. She was not arrested for anything else�like killing Caylee�because so far all the evidence was circumstantial. Borrowing a shovel and partying with friends at nightclubs aren't crimes.

On August 16th the Anthonys hired a spokesperson. Some crime bloggers deemed this fishy, but Casey's laywer probably advised them to stop talking to the press because they, especially Cindy, were beginning to sound like total looneys. It was probably for the best in terms of protecting Casey, and for the worst in terms of finding Caylee.

The third week in August, this story took a weird hop. A well-known California bounty hunter entered the picture, gave righteous statements about Casey�s right to be home with her parents, and posted the $500,000 bond.

She got out of jail on August 21st.

Leonard Padilla is like Dog the Bounty Hunter, only he doesn�t have his own TV show. When he sprung her from jail, the Nancy Grace show might as well have BEEN �his� show. When asked why, Padilla told reporters that he thought he could get the truth out of her. �She�s obviously lied to law enforcement,� Padilla said. �I believe that in a week or two she�ll come up with some information about who she handed the baby off to, and what the underlying circumstances were.�

Padilla said that he felt that Caylee was still alive.

Eight days later on August 29th, Padilla revoked the bond.

What happened in those eight days?

For one thing, Padilla was wrong, Casey would not talk to him at all. He was no more successful than local law enforcement or the FBI in getting Casey to say where Caylee was, and you could tell from interviews that he was pissed about that.

Mostly, August 28th brought some lab results.

About the smell in the car: lab tests on air samples confirmed, without a doubt, that a decomposing human body had been inside the trunk. Not old pizza like Cindy Anthony said, not road kill like Casey told her brother Lee, not squirrels crawled into the engine as Casey had told her friend Amy Huizenga.

About the hair and stains in the trunk viewed by the officer who testified at Casey�s bond hearing: DNA tests came back with results, but it was very much unclear what those results proved, if anything. At least two crime blogs said the tests proved �Caylee Anthony Is Dead.� But in the August 28th press conference with Captain Angelo Nieves of the Orange County Sheriff�s Department, he never once said definitive words about the DNA tests proving Caylee's fate. Several sources reported that tests came back positive for chloroform, but most hesitated to venture a guess as to its role in Caylee�s disappearance. Mere presence of chloroform, while weird, doesn't automatically prove Caylee's death.

Casey went back to jail on August 29th, the day after the lab results came back. But there was still no arrest for murder. She was arrested for fraud, having stolen her friend�s checkbook and forged checks.

Casey got out of jail again on September 19th. There was no outcry, this happened while the nation was busy with Sarah Palin and the economy. Nancy Grace, the Orlando papers and the crime blogs stuck with the Caylee Anthony case, and on September 23rd when authorities released nearly 600 pages of interviews, the Internet went wild.

The best timeline plus all of those 600 pages are posted on David Lohr�s site. Also made public are hundreds of text messages to and from Casey Anthony during the 31 days she was supposedly �investigating� Caylee�s disappearance on her own, other telltale texts from before the baby went missing, one racy IM conversation between Casey and sheriff�s deputy Anthony Rusciano. He was later fired for lying about having an affair with Casey Anthony.

Other things revealed in the document dump are how the grandparents struggled in June to get Casey to let them see Caylee. How Casey fabricated a convoluted saga about a trip to Tampa that landed the babysitter in the hospital (no such records exist). At one point Casey spun a tale to her friend Amy that her father had a stroke (he didn�t). George Anthony at one point hopped in his car and raced after Casey when he grew �sick of her evasiveness.� At one point, Casey told Cindy that she and Caylee were in Jacksonville visiting a boyfriend and weren't sure if they'd be returning to Orlando at all. On a different day, when Lee Anthony asked his sister Casey why she would not produce Caylee, Casey said "maybe I'm a spiteful bitch."

The depositions (I haven't even made it all the way through all of it) are stunning, but the text messages Casey sent to her friends - these are the real kickers. Two weeks after Caylee goes missing, on June 25 she texts �You and the girls should try to come out to Fusion this week. There's a hot body contest. First prize: $50 and a bottle. It's the all-white party. Give me a shout!� Does it not sound almost like ��now that I don�t have to worry about watching my kid anymore!�

Crazy things just keep happening. A woman whose name happens to be Zenaida Gonzales (one of approximately 400 women with that name in the Florida area!) is suing Casey Anthony for accusing her, when in truth police have cleared Ms. Gonzales and the woman has never even met the Anthonys. The Orlando Sentinal reports that �Since news of the missing girl broke, the Kissimmee woman has been threatened, Morgan said, and people nationwide consider her a suspect in the case.� It is true that the "comments" section of numerous crime blogs urge another look at Zenaida.

At this juncture, the end of September, the Orlando community has had it with the lying, sniveling Casey Anthony and her big bag of shit. There are protesters camped out on the lawn of the Anthony home in Orlando and things are getting violent. The grandparents continue to berate the media and the police for not understanding. Casey is still free, she is not cooperating with police, she is showing no remorse or even concern that her baby has now been gone for three months.

What HAPPENED?

Did she sell her and then expect the family not to notice? The girl does not seem to think things through to the next level -- in one interview tape the police are questioning her while at Universal, where Casey had led them "to her work." But she didn't even work there...what was going through her mind as she led police through the building to her office that doesn't exist?

Did she take care of her babysitting problem by chloroforming Caylee and leaving her in the car trunk on all those nights out at dance club Fusion, and accidentally overdose her? This is what I think -- they say that chloroform is the kind of fume that will occupy a whole space, replacing the oxygen. The car trunk could have become deadly if the baby was laying in it, unconscious, with a soaked chloroform rag.

Or did she chloroform Caylee deliberately and bury her with that borrowed shovel?

If Caylee Anthony shows up alive at this point, everyone will be in shock. I guess we�ll wait to see what October brings.