Letter from Los Angeles

Editor’s Note: Mark J. Phillips and his daughter Aryn Z. Phillips have shared here numerous stories of celebrated trials of the twentieth century, adapted from their book “Trials of the Century.”

Here is Part I of a tale of a trial from the twenty-first.

Mark is a shareholder at the law offices of Lewitt Hackman in Encino, California.  Aryn is a Professor of Public Health at the University of Illinois.

In 1906, when the editors of the New York dailies confidently pronounced the murder of New York architect and socialite Stanford White by Pittsburgh railway millionaire Harry Thaw as the “crime of the century,” there were ninety-four years left in the century.

Over the years since, little has changed in the appetite of the American public for sensation, and the willingness of the media to provide it. But an explosive increase in technology, literacy, and leisure over that period has resulted in a vastly greater capability to provide the information at a level of saturation that few early-twentieth century editors could have predicted.

When the call came in to 911 in Orlando, Florida, on July 15, 2008, that a two-year-old was missing, the toddler was but one of 800,000 children to be reported missing in America that year. What made the call unusual was the content of the report. The caller to the emergency line was the child’s grandmother, who told the operator that her car, her daughter, and her granddaughter had disappeared a month before, that the daughter had now returned without the infant, and that the car had just been reclaimed from impound smelling like a dead body had been stored in the trunk. She asked that someone come to the home and arrest her daughter, Casey Anthony.

In the coming months, the following headline appeared on the website of HLTV, an affiliate of CNN: “Casey Anthony: Trial of the Century.” Appearing more than a hundred years after the media furor following the murder of Stanford White that fateful evening in 1906, it is a stark reminder that the framers of the news neither feel the need to acknowledge the past, nor a responsibility to consider the future. For a reporter, only today exists. Enthralling and repulsive by turns as the Anthony trial was, if there is a single thing to be gleaned from an examination of the twentieth century, it is that the coming decades of the twenty-first century will provide innumerable trials of equal drama. Yet the Anthony trial is illustrative of how dramatic has been the change in the delivery of news over that century.

No one had seen two-year-old Caylee in more than a month, not since June 15, 2008, Father’s Day, when Casey Anthony had taken her daughter and left the house. Over the next thirty days, Casey visited with friends, telling various stories about where her daughter was. Caylee is at the beach she would say, or at Sea World; always with a nanny.

Freed of child care, Casey went dancing, and got “Bella Vida” (“beautiful life”) tattooed on her shoulder while chatting happily on her cell phone. She went shopping at various stores, purchasing nothing suitable for a toddler, and paid with checks that she stole from a vacationing friend. She steadfastly refused to allow her parents, Cindy and George Anthony, to see Caylee. She was too busy with work, she told them. Having trouble reaching her daughter, Cindy opened a MySpace account on July 6th to communicate with Casey, and the next day her daughter responded “What is given can be taken away. Everyone lies. Everyone dies.”

On July 15th, after receiving notice by certified mail, Cindy and George retrieved Casey’s missing car from impound, an unmistakable stench coming from the trunk. Cindy finally located her daughter and the call to 911 followed.

When police arrived there was no body in the trunk. What they found instead was Casey Anthony, an unapologetic twenty-two-year-old party girl and compulsive liar. Little Caylee was alive, Casey told the officers, but she now claimed that her daughter had been kidnapped by the nanny, to whom she gave the unusual name of Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez. Zanny the nanny. Police escorted Casey to the apartment where she said the nanny lived, but there was no response to their knock. They interviewed the building manager, who told them that no one had lived in that apartment for some six months.

Police asked Casey if she had told anyone about the kidnapping, and she said that she had talked about it at her job at Orlando Universal Studios. She gave them the names of coworkers and supervisors. Did she have their phone numbers? Not on her, but she had the numbers in her cell phone. Did she have that with her? No, she had left it at work.

Taken by the investigating officers to Universal, Casey led them on a random tour before she stopped suddenly, put her hands in her back pockets, and turned to face them with a shy grin. “Okay,” she confessed, “I don’t really work here.” It turns out that she been fired more than two years before, but had kept up the pretense of a job for her friends and family, and to explain her long hours away. The coworkers and supervisors? All invented.

Her fabricated world collapsing, and unable to produce Caylee, Casey was arrested and charged with child neglect and lying to investigators.

The arrest of Casey Anthony on July 16th became instant news. By July 18th, a reporter from People magazine was camped in the lobby of Casey’s newly retained attorney, Jose Baez, and “20/20,” “Dateline,” and “The Early Show” had all called. Fox News sent former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, a central figure in the O.J. Simpson trial, to take Baez to lunch. What had started as an odd local story in the Orlando newspapers quickly caught the attention of the nation, fascinated by a missing child and revolted by a mother who couldn’t be troubled for more than a month to report the alleged kidnapping of her two-year-old daughter. Caught up in the human drama, Cindy and George Anthony appeared to be concerned grandparents, heartbroken over their missing grandchild. On July 25th, they started a website for the missing Caylee, and on August 1st appeared on “Larry King Live.”

Charged with only a third-degree felony but suspected of foul play, bond for Casey was set at $500,000. Casey’s parents had neither the money nor the desire to post bail. Following her arrest, the always frosty relationship between Casey and her parents deteriorated. She refused numerous requests to visit by her parents or her brother, Lee. As a result, Casey languished in jail until August 31st, when Leonard Padilla, a former ex-con and media-savvy California bounty hunter feeding on the rising celebrity of the case, arranged to post her bail. Released, she was confined to her parents’ home, while outside increasingly violent protests continued day after day. Signs read “You killed Caylee” and “I hope you die.” The Anthonys turned the hose on them. On September 18th, rock-throwing protesters attempted to drag George Anthony into the street.

Rearrested, released, arrested yet again and eventually charged with a capital crime on October 15th, the case against Casey rested on evidence no stronger than her lack of character until December 11th, when the scattered bones of a small child were reported by a utility meter reader in a wooded area only a quarter of a mile from the Anthony home. The remains were identified a week later as those of little Caylee. The meter reader, Ray Kronk, told “Good Morning America” that he had notified authorities of the dumped body numerous times as early as the previous August, but that the investigating sheriffs had ignored his tips because the area was muddy and snake-infested.

Coming in August: The Trial