Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony by Jeff Ashton Read Free Book Online

uniformed officers to follow behind in a marked patrol car in the event they needed to enter someone’s house or apartment. Their first stop was a building on North Hillside Drive. Casey pointed to a window on the second floor of the structure, which she identified as the apartment where Zenaida had lived in the early part of 2006. She said the units were all three stories and indicated that the window directly above Zenaida’s had belonged to the babysitter’s roommate.
    Moving on, Casey directed the officers to the Sawgrass apartment complex on South Conway. Casey didn’t see anyone she recognized, so they moved on to the Crossings at Conway, a townhouse community on South Conway Road near Michigan Avenue. It was there, Casey said, that Zanny’s mother, Gloria, owned a condo, and Zanny had lived with her mother there for a short time. She recalled dropping Caylee there several times between mid-2006 and early 2007.
    The detective drove slowly through the streets of the complex as Casey tried to find Gloria’s unit. She pointed out three as possibilities. The uniformed officer knocked on all three doors, but none of the tenants knew Zenaida or her mother. Casey apologized for not being able to remember the correct address, saying that she had gone there so often it had been as though she was on autopilot.
    Just before 6 A.M ., Melich dropped Casey back home.
    “I’ll call if I need anything,” he said as she climbed out of the unmarked vehicle. Before he pulled away, Melich was approached by George Anthony, who related concern that his daughter was holding back information. Both he and his wife were worried that something might have happened to Caylee. George mentioned the putrid smell in the Sunfire’s trunk. The detective acknowledged their distress and said he would be in touch.
    For the next several hours, Melich set out to confirm Casey’s story. He began at the Sawgrass complex, where he met with the manager, Amanda Macklin, and maintenance man, Dave Turner. Neither knew Zenaida, nor did they recognize the photograph of Caylee given to Melich by Cindy Anthony.
    Macklin stated that Apartment 210 had been vacant for 142 days, and then ran Zenaida’s name through their computer database. Sure enough, they got a hit: a Zenaida Gonzalez who had come to look at an apartment on April 17. She was never a tenant, but she had completed a guest card and left a cell phone number. One lie.
    Next, Melich looked into the apartment on North Hillside Drive. It had been the first apartment Casey visited with him, the location where she said Zanny had lived with a roommate in early 2006. Not only had no one named Zenaida Gonzalez lived there, but the complex itself was a seniors-only facility. Coincidentally, when the initial responding deputies had searched the Pontiac the night before, they’d found an address written on a piece of paper, an address that was right across the street from the seniors facility. It turned out that that address belonged to Casey’s ex-fiancé, Jesse Grund. So not only was there no way Zanny could have lived in the building, but there was another connection to the street that offered a possible hint of where the deception came from. Two lies.
    As Melich turned this over in his head, it didn’t add up. Every clue that Casey had given them was looking bogus. That alone was disturbing, but when combined with the fact that the police were trying to use Casey’s clues to find her daughter and kidnapper, it didn’t make any sense. The obvious conclusion was that wherever Caylee was, Casey clearly did not want her found. So either there had not been a kidnapping, or there was some other reason that Casey was hindering their progress. Was she afraid? If she was, she certainly didn’t act like it. Melich had seen people lie out of fear before, and they usually weren’t as calm about it as Casey had been. Another possibility was that this was just a continuation of the power struggle with her mom,