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Casey Anthony Case: Caylee Was Gone 31 Days Before Anyone Called (Part 1 of 3) · Both Things Are True Crime

• caylee pt1 edited: A house on Hope Spring Drive in East Orange County, Florida, a few miles from the airport, Tuesday, July fifteenth, two thousand and eight. A grandmother named Cindy Anthony has already called nine one one twice tonight and nobody has come, so she calls for a third time and she tells the dispatcher, Hey, I called earlier. And she says she just found out that her granddaughter has been taken. And she's telling her that her daughter finally admitted that the babysitter took the child about a month ago. And she gives the child's name, Kaylee. She says she's not seen her since early June. And then she says the sentence that is going to be played in the courtroom three years later, in my living room and in yours. It smells like there's been a dead body in the damn car. So Dispatcher, Dispatcher wants to speak to daughter, the daughter. And this 22-year-old comes in on the line and she's calm. And she says her daughter has been missing for 31 days. And she says she knows who has her. She spells out the nanny's name letter by letter. The dispatcher wants to know, girl, why you calling now and not 31 days ago? And of course, she does not have an answer. And I'm going to leave those two women on that phone, one of them frantic and one of them not. Because to understand the 31 days, you have to know the little girl and you have to know what Orlando was in the summer of 2008. Because I was in it. So let's talk about it. Kaylee Marie Anthony was born August 9th, 2005 in Orlando. And her mother, Casey, was 19. Her father has never been publicly identified, and I'm going to say that once and never speculate because this show does not guess at people. But she lived her whole life in her grandparents' house on Hope Spring Drive with her mother, her grandmother Cindy, a nurse, and her grandfather George, a police officer from Ohio. He's a former police officer. And her uncle Lee, he was like in and out, and she has a bedroom here at her grandparents' house. And there's an above-ground pool in the backyard with a ladder. And she was two years old in the summer of 2008. A few weeks short of three. Here's the thing about Kaylee Anthony that is so hard to explain to anyone who did not live in Central Florida in 2008. Her face was everywhere. Not everywhere the way a national story is. Everywhere. The way a missing child in your own county is everywhere. On the news at 6 and 11, on flyers and gas stations, on the side of a van in a parking lot, in the conversation at every table, talking about all the time at church, home, school. For about five months, there was no other story in Orlando. And this is a little part that is mine. I was like 13 or 14 that summer, and that fall, I was a student at Dr. Phillips High School on the other side of town. And I grew up watching this case before even YouTube had an option to watch it on there, right? And at some point that fall, I tried to figure out how could I sneak out of school and take the city bus across Orlando to go search for her. Now I did not and still don't know a single thing about the Anthony family other than what we all know. I just knew at that time that a two year old was missing from my city and that grown ups were walking through the woods looking for her and I just kinda wanted to be one of them. And that Is the Kaylee I grew up with. A face on the flyer and a reason to want to be useful. But that is the whole first part of this story. And it's the only part that is about her. Everything after this is about the 31 days. Nobody reported her missing. And then people who lied, searched, argued, and testified. She's the center of all three parts of this series. And the reason I'm telling you about the flyers and the bus is so that you know when this part ends with the medical examiner saying her name. You know what that name meant here. So Monday, June the 16th, 2008, George Anthony testifies that he watched his daughter leave the house that afternoon with Kaylee, and that is the last time anyone other than Casey Anthony is known to have seen her alive. And Casey told her mother she was taking Kaylee to the nanny. And then the next day, she said the three of them were headed to Tampa for work. What work, girl? And the nanny's name was Zanaida Fernandez Gonzalez, and in the family, she was Zanny. Nobody in the family, however, had ever met her. So then the next month is on surveillance cameras and in text messages and in the memories of a boyfriend named Tony Lazaro, and the Associated Press built the timeline out of them. June 18th, she borrows a shovel from a neighbor named Brian Burner and returns it about an hour later. June 19th, apartment hunting with Larazzo. June 20th, photograph for the nightclub called Fusion. June twenty-third, she and Lozaro take gas cans from her father's shed because her car's empty. And then June 24th, she and George argue about the gas cans. She storms out and she says Kaylee's with the babysitter. So I gave you those dates flat without adjectives because the state gave them to the jury as facts. And the defense gave them to the same jury as a young woman in denial, and I'm not about to pick for you. And those are the 31 days: a nightclub, a shovel, a boyfriend, a shed. And a story about a nanny. But what was not happening in those 31 days? Somebody calling the police, not Casey, not a parent, who were, to be fair, were told that their granddaughter was with a nanny, then in Tampa, then with Nanny again, but not the boyfriend, not the family saw Casey, but they did not see Kaylee. And every time someone asked, there was a reason. So late June 2008, there is a white 1998. Pontiac's on fire. It's in the parking lot of an Am Scott check caching store in Orlando. It's been there for about four days. And on the 27th, a supervisor reports it is abandoned. And this car gets towed to a record yard where it sits from July from June 30th to July 15th. And there's a man named Simon Birch. He's the yard manager. He has 30 years in towing, two in waste management. He testifies that on the fourth day, the car in his yard, he noticed this odor coming from it. And under oath, He said that in his opinion and experience, the smell of decomposition is unique compared to rotten food or rotten garbage. And that was that smell. While the car sits in the yard, its owner, Miss Casey Anthony, is on camera. June 30th, JCP and Target. JC Pennies in Target. July the 1st, JC Pennies again. She must love her some JC Pennies. July the 10th, Target. July 12th, when Dixie. July 15th, Blockbuster, Bank of America, and Wendixie. Now, none of this is a crime, but all of it is on a clock. The state will later lay out over the clock of a missing child. So July 15, 2008, the Toyard sends a notice. This is when George and Cindy Anthony know that there's a car to go get. So they go get the car. And George testified that when he got there, the smell hit him and that he knew what it was because he had been a sheriff's deputy in Ohio before he was a grandfather in Florida, and Birch. Simon Birch, the yard manager, smelled it with him. And so they open the trunk together and they find a bag of trash. So George drives the car home. And that evening, after the family finally reached Casey and brought her behind back to the house, they have questions that had gone on for a month, and they finally get an answer. And the answer is a nanny nobody has met. And so then that is when Cindy Anthony picks up the phone and we are now back to where we started. July 15, 2008, evening, Hope Spring Drive. Three 911 calls from one house in a little over an hour. These were played for the jury, and Cindy Anthony sat on the witness stand and listened to herself. So the first call is about the car. Sydney, she wants to know where she can bring her daughter to turn in her for taking the car. So the dispatcher wants know, has the daughter had permission to use the car? Well, she did. But the call is something else, and that's what it's about. And everyone on it, they all know that that call is about something else. So the second call happens, and then the verbiage is said that I have a possible missing child. I have a three-year-old that's been missing for a month, and she just wants the deputy to come to the house, and she is still asking for her daughter to be arrested for the car. And the third call is the one from the top of the episode. She's called twice, nobody has come. Her daughter has just admitted the babysitter took Kaylee. And it smells like there's been a dead body in the damn car. And you can hear a call out to George in the background. So then Casey, 31 days. The nanny spelled out Z-E-N-A-I-D-A. A year and a half, almost two working for the family, but no one's ever seen her but Casey. She sounds like an imaginary nanny to me. But a phone call that very day also she had, but this number was no longer in service. And this is the number that Casey said. Hey, this is how I thought talked to my daughter for about a minute. And she also says, Casey, that she's been searching through other resources and she just thought this was a mistake. And when they want to know why, girl, you ain't called 31 days ago, she gives no reason to dispatch and write down. So three years later on cross-examination, Cindy says that she couldn't say why she set the dead body line. She said it just came out without thought. And she wanted the police to just come quickly. That she meant it figuratively. And listen, I believe that she believed that when she said it in 2011. But I also believe the dispatcher did not take it figuratively, which is why the deputies were at that house that night. And why the next morning, two of them put her little behind Casey Anthony up in the police car and drove her to Universal Studios. So Wednesday, July the 16th, Orange County Sheriff Detective Yuri Melick and his colleagues, they have a story they need to check. So Casey saying, hey, the nanny's a Nida Fernandez Gonzalez. She lives in the apartment complex off of Conway Road. This is where I dropped Kaylee off. And Casey also, she says she works at Universal Studios. And she said, this is where I met the nanny through a co-worker named Jeff Hopkins, whose child the nanny also watched. Because, entry level people at Universal can afford nannies all the time. You know what I'm saying? They're just so cheap like that. But the apartment first, right? So Casey volunteers to show them the way. The unit she points at, hmm, it's been vacant for more than 140 days, ma'am. Nobody by that name has actually ever even lived in the complex. Now there is a real woman named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, and she does live in the Orlando area. But this woman has never met Casey, nor Kaylee. And she's going to sue Casey for even saying her name. So universal. Melick, he goes ahead and checks, right? So we find out that Jeff Hopkins did work there in 2001, 2002. How Jeff don't have no kids. And we find out that Casey did work not for Universal directly, but as a subcontractor until 2006. I believe she was one of those people who has like the safari type of like brown shirts and like brown shorts, and she takes the overpriced pictures of you at Universal. I believe that is the subcontractor she worked for. but the nanny. Has never worked at Universal at all. And so two other detectives, they bring Casey to the employee entrance. And the Universal Assistant Manager of Lost Prevention, Leonardo, he's already confirmed this girl's not an employee with us. But he escorts her in anyway, because we are looking for a dang child. So Casey, her weird behind, she walks in there like she just belongs there. And she points to a building and she's like, that's my office. She starts to lead them in, go down the hallway. Then she halfway down, she stops. She turns around. I think her lies ran out of space in her head. And she just like, I don't work here. So Melik needs to talk to this lady, okay? So they go ahead and they find a conference room. How accommodating you universal, right? So they find a conference room and Malik records for about an hour. And for the first half, the detectives they are pushing. Melik is like, girl, everything you have told me is a lie. we are here because we got here. How? And she does say because I lied. Melick later testifies how persuasive Casey had been. And that until the hallway, he couldn't have even imagined the whole thing was a ruse. This is an experienced detective, y'all. He wasn't even able to detect this woman was a liar in the beginning. And I just want to sit on that for a second because I think it's the only honest description of what that whole 31 days of this looks like from the inside. A trained detective walking a woman to an office that does not exist and believing her into the moment she stops walking. And so here's a little bit of the law, okay? Florida statutes, chapter 837, section point five five. Quick format lesson once. Florida numbers is closed by chapter and section with a decimal between them. So eight thirty-seven is the chapter on perjury and false statements, and point five is the section. So from here on, I'll just say the number. But eight thirty-seven point five five, it says that whoever knowingly and willfully Gives false information to a law enforcement officer who is conducting a miss in person investigation with intent to mislead or impede, commits a first degree misdemeanor, up to a year each. It's not perjury. Nobody's under oath, but it's a separate, smaller crime that Florida wrote down for exactly this situation. A person who wants to send the search in the wrong direction on purpose. So she's arrested that day, as she should be, in the charges of child neglect, giving false information to law enforcement and obstruction. Now, the neglect charge is 827.03, and it's gonna be dropped in October for a reason that tells you everything about what the case is headed. Because neglect assumes the child is alive. And every one of the four false information counts she's eventually convicted of is all from this scenario, the universal scenario that she worked at Universal the lie, that Zenida was the nanny, the lie that she told co two co-workers that. Kaylee was missing, that she spoke to Kaylee on the phone after she disappeared. So four lies, one day, one hallway. And in July 2011, a jury of 12 people from Penillas County is going to acquit her of everything else in this case and convict her of those. Two of the floor are going to actually be thrown out in 2013 because they came from the two same interviews. But I'll talk about that fight in part three. For now, we're talking about the crime. And the hallway is the crime. But July and August 2008. Orlando is looking for a two-year-old. Okay, the sheriff's office, volunteers in the woods, flyers and gas stations, satellite trucks in Hope Spring Drive, and crowds eventually. Child, a very, very angry crowd. Child, I was 14. I was trying to figure out the city bus. Okay, I was trying to figure out the route. Which bus will connect this bus to get to this place to get to them? Okay, it was a little too far away. It wasn't my budget, but the whole city. Was doing this version of the same thing. And so then July 17th, a cadaver dog alerts on the car. And then July 24th, the sheriff's office releases the 911 calls, and that dead body line goes national. I remember that. August the 9th is Kaylee's third birthday. Then August 27th, an air sample from the trunk is reported as consistent with human remains. And then August 28th, DNA from the trunk is reported to indicate she is dead. And now Every one of those is a scientific claim about a car. And every one of those is going to be fought over in part two. But in part one, they are the dates on which a city literally stopped believing the nanny story. And then on August 11th, 2008, a meter reader, his name is Roy Kronk. He calls the sheriff's office. He's been reading meters near the Anthony's house and he found something off Suburban Drive in the trees, about a half a mile from the house. Something white that looked to him like a skull near a gray bag, and he's routed to a tip line, nobody calls him back. August the twelfth, he calls again. August thirteenth, he calls again, and this time two officers do meet him. One of them, they walk into the brush, he looks briefly, sees nothing, and he leaves. Then Kronk goes back to work. And I'm gonna say this plainly, and I'm not gonna editorialize it because the record does it for me. But on the three days in August, when a meter reader told the Orange County Sheriff's Office he had seen a skull a half a mile from the Anthony home. Listen, me being a little fourteen year old, I'm trying to figure out how to get across town to figure out how to go look for Kaylee Anthony. Because everybody was looking. One man found her. And he couldn't get the people who needed to walk into the brush. Go walk to the brush and look. Now Roy does not go back to this area for four months. So we'll talk about him again once we once we get to December. But first we're gonna get to July twenty twenty second. 2022, my gosh, July 22, 2008. There's a bond hearing that happens, and the charges are felony neglect, count, and misdemeanors. And the judge sets the bail at $500,000, citing what he calls a woeful disregard for the welfare of her child. And that number is the system saying out loud, basically, what is not allowed yet to charge. So, Casey, on another inmate's recommendation. Hires a lawyer from jail. Now, this man is a Kissimmee defense attorney almost nobody in Orlando has ever heard of. And his name is Jose Baez. Now in part one, he's a name. In part three, it's the whole story. So July 29th to September the second, prosecutors they put a limited immunity offer on the table. Listen, girl, tell us where Kaylee is, and what you say will not be used against you. This is the type of immunity that it protects the words, not the person. And it expires on September the second if you don't give us no answer. Of course, it expired. So then August 21st, a California Bell Bondsman named Leonard Padilla and his nephew Tony, they post the $500,000 bond themselves, saying that they hope to help find Kaylee. So she goes home to Hope Spring Drive with an ankle monitor. And there's a crowd gathering outside that house and child, they ain't friendly. They ain't happy to see you, girl. Then August 29th, she's arrested again, this time on check charges. and you can actually listen to the friend who she stole a check from. There's an interview on YouTube that I thought was very interesting to listen to because it describes a lot about Casey's character and honestly just the kind of person she is, which is not a good person, in my opinion. that's just my opinion. so she gets arrested for the check charges, and this is for a forged check. Fraudulent use of someone's else's identification. It was her friend and petty theft. And then August the 30th, the Padillas revoked the bond. And then September the 5th, her parents end up posting it instead with a promissory note. And Casey's back home again. And then September 15th, Casey turns herself in on the check charges and is out the next day on 1253. Now I do want to mark what the check charges are because they they do come into more of a play later. and I think they're very Easy to lose in the noise, but during the 31 days, the state said that she wrote those checks on a friend's account. And those are the charges she eventually pleads to in January 2010. And she does this separately from everything else. And they're pretty small. But when you really think about it, they're also the only part of the 31 days she actually ever admitted in a courtroom. So then August, not August, October the 14th, 2008, in Orange County. Grand jury indicts Casey Anthony on seven counts: first degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of child, four counts of providing false information to law enforcement and the hallway at Universal. And now in Florida, a capital charge can only come from a grand jury. Basically, in secret of a whole bunch of a room of citizens, and they hear only the state side and they decide whether there is actual probable cause. And so in this grand jury, George Anthony actually testified before them. And also there's no body. But on October 14th, 2008, the state of Florida indicts a mother for murdering a child it cannot find on a car, a smell, a dog, an air sample, and 31 days of lies. She is arrested that afternoon and held without bond. So about October 22nd, the state they dropped the neglect charge because again, neglect presumes a living child. And the state just told the grand jury. There's not one. So that same day, George and Cindy are on today's show, and they're saying, Hey, no, no, no. Kaylee is alive. And on October twenty seventh, Casey is arraigned, and she pleads not guilty to all seven counts. And then we get to November twenty sixth and court documents released to the public. They describe the internet searches on a computer in the Anthony home, including the words neck breaking and household weapons and those searches and the word chloroform. They're the center of part two. But in part one, they are a headline. In a city that has already decided. So on December the 5th, we're still in 2008, the state attorney's office they announced that they're not seeking a death penalty. But then six days later, a meter reader goes back into the woods, and on April 13th, the state reverses that decision. Part two will talk about the reversal. Part one is going to talk about December the 11th. So December the eleventh, two thousand eight, this is a Thursday. Roy Krunk is working his route near the Anthony house for the first time since August. And he testified that he had not gone back to that spot in the four months between. That day, however, he walked into the trees off Suburban Drive, about half a mile from Hope Spring Drive, to relieve himself. And that's when he sees the gray bag. Still there. He sees something round, and later he testifies that he put a stick through the eye socket and pivoted it. But that he never fully picked it up, and that an earlier statement of his that the skull rolled out of his bag was a mistake. And he called the sheriff's office, and this time somebody really did come. And what the deputies found in the words the record used and no others, the skeletal remains of a small child in a laundry bag with a blanket in the woods, less than half a mile from the house where she lived. Juck tape on hair. Attached to the skull and over the next four days, more bones, some no larger than a pebble, and they were recovered from the brush around the first spot. That's all I'm gonna say right now about what was in the woods. The duct tape, where it was, what it means. That's gonna be the entire States case in part three. And I don't wanna argue about it in a scene about the meter reader. So I'm just gonna wait. But I I I will say one thing about Ro Roy Kronk. The defense has to put on defense. So he got the defense. He got some stuff put on him. The defense, we're gonna talk about part three. They're gonna spend a lot of time on Roy. now Roy was never charged with anything. He was accused in a courtroom, but it was by lawyers whose job is to create doubt. but he was accused of having moved those remains by the lawyers only, and that's an accusation. It's never a finding, never a charge, never anything a court agreed to. So on this show. He is a county meter reader who called three times in August. He was ignored. And he walked into the woods in December and was not. That's the record. And honestly, in both directions, the record is all he gets, okay? So this is where I talk. All right. This is where I have a little bit to say of my own personal opinion. I've waited my whole adult life to make something about this case, to be honest with you. And now that I'm here, I just really want to be careful. So let me say what I actually think in the order I think it. First, I don't know what happened to Kaylee Anthony. Nobody does. Except possibly one person. And a jury of twelve people who sat through six weeks of it said they couldn't be sure either. I've watched that trial four times. I grew up in the city. I have an opinion about the 31 days, and I'm gonna give them to you in part three after you heard the defense. But because this that is a deal that this show kind of makes with you, alright? But I just feel like I want you to hear both sides before you hear me. Now, second, and this is the one I can say now, okay? Them 31 days are not a mystery. It then they're not the white airhead, okay? I don't have to figure out what flavor it is, okay? They're not a mystery. They are the one part of this case that is not in dispute by anyone, including the defense. A two year old was gone for a month and her mama went to a nightclub, popped her butt, and borrowed a shovel, and wrote checks on a friend's account and told her parents about a nanny. Who didn't even exist and walked two detectives to an office that didn't even exist either. And the defense's answer to that in 2011 was roughly, well, guys, this is what a damaged young woman in denial looks like. Maybe. Listen, I've known people in denial. I've been a person in denial. I am not gonna tell you that I don't recognize some of this as that. But I'm gonna tell you that my recognition is not evidence, which is why a jury and not me even decides these things. And third, I was 14, y'all. And I want to take a bus across the town for a child I had never met. And sometimes I think about that version of me a lot when I think about this case a little bit, not to make it about me. But the 14-year-old me, she wanted justice, okay? And I don't think she had an idea what that word meant, all right? But I almost feel like the woman doing this episode, she knows that justice is a process with rules. And begrudgingly, I understand that the rules protected Casey Anthony, and that the rules are the only reason that they would protect me. And I'm not gonna pretend that those two people agree, okay? But I'm gonna let them both talk across three parts, and you can decide which one you are. And I have come to think that that is the most important statue, I think, in this whole story. Not because of what it punishes, but because of what it names. It literally names the thing everyone in Orlando actually saw with their own eyes in the summer of 2000. Listen, we did not see what happened to Kaylee, but we saw a mother lie about where she was for a month to everyone while we looked. And I think the law had, in a word for that, exactly that. And the jury used it. And I think there's something almost unbearable in just how precise that is. So Friday, December 19, 2008, Dr. Jan, this is the chief medical examiner for Orange and Osula counties. And a lot of the city knew them from a television store. So they stand in front of the cameras, right? And they let us know that the remains found off of Suburban Drive have been identified by DNA, and they are unfortunately Kaylee Marie Anthony. And the remains are completely skeletonized. A large portion of the skeleton was recovered. The bones, they showed no sign of trauma before death, and the toxicology was pending, and the manner of death was homicide based on the examination and on the circumstances. And the cause of death, the words she said would go on the certificate, and that she did not expect any new evidence and change was homicide by undetermined. And I think that phrase is almost the hinge of this entire series because it's a homicide with no cause. A killing the examiner is certain happened, but Cannot say how. And every scientific fight in part two, the chloroform, the air sample, the duct tape, the computer is the state trying to fill in that word undetermined. And every move the defense makes in part three is built on the fact that it never did. And Sheriff Kevin Berry said that the case it left open a wound in the community that he didn't expect to close until after a trial. And listen, he was very right about the wound. But boy was he wrong about the trial. So Kaylee Marie Anthony, she was a two-year-old who lived in her grandparents' house in East Orlando, who had a bedroom and a pool ladder and the third birthday that passed while a city searched for her, and whose face was on every screen and gas station wall. I saw the fall I turned fourteen. And Kaylee Marie Anthony is a child whose death has no cause. Caused on her death certificate, and whose mother was acquitted of killing her, and about whom the only thing a court ever established is that she was lied about for 31 days. And I'm not gonna ask you to make those agree because the state of Florida could not with everything it had. But we are gonna be saying my mama's name, okay? Because Kaylee Marie Anthony is so beautiful. Part two is the two and a half years between this press conference and a jury. It is a judge. Who steps down because of a blogger, a death penalty that comes back, a word called chloroform, and a number called forty eighty-four, and the hearings where Florida decided what science a jury would be allowed to hear. And it's also where Jose Baez stops being a name. And that is next.