Erstellt am: 6. 7. 2011 - 17:43 Uhr
The Most Famous Little Dead Girl in the World
This has been one of the most difficult articles I have ever had to write. Aside from the horrific details of the story, I am confronted with the prospect of participating in the lurid sort of sensationalism that has tainted a society which, ultimately, could not protect the rights and the life of a two year-old girl.
In case you haven't been following the case which has been a dominant news headline and on-going feature story on news and talk shows in the United States since Caylee Anthony was reported missing in 2008, here are some key facts--note: FACTS.
After an Orlando, Florida grandmother named Cynthia Anthony (goes by the name Cindy) angrily confronted her then 22 year-old daughter Casey Anthony about the whereabouts of Casey's two year-old daughter Caylee Anthony, Casey admitted that the toddler had been missing for 31 days. Cindy called 911.
Casey explained she had left the girl with a nanny called Zenaida Gonzales who had mysteriously disappeared with her little girl. She went on to explain that she had not contacted authorities because she was leading her own investigation. She was doing her investigating whilst stealing money from her grandmother and best friend, stealing gas from her father, hanging out with her new boyfriend, getting a tattoo of the words 'Bella Vita' (Italian for 'Good Life') on her shoulder, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, going on shopping sprees, and participating in a 'Hot Body' competition at a local bar.
When police started to question Casey, she ensured the authorities that she had a job at Universal Studios in Orlando and in an effort to prove it, the police accompanied Casey as she managed to fib her way past security at Universal and lead the officers down a corridor to her 'office' but she stopped abruptly before she got to her 'office door' and admitted she was not employed at Universal Studios.
In the course of the past three years, while Casey was in jail and her lawyers planned her defense, the incredible string of lies just kept rolling out of her mouth. When her parents asked her why there was the distinct smell of human decomposition in the car that she was driving, Casey first said a pizza had been rotting in the trunk and then said two squirrels had climbed into the undercarriage of the car and died there. Her mother is a nurse; her father is an ex-cop. They are both aware of the unique and overwhelming stench of a dead human being which has been left in the trunk of a car in the Florida heat for more than two days. Watching and listening to footage of Casey being interrogated by police and footage of jailhouse visits as made by her parents Cindy and George Anthony and her older brother Lee Anthony, is a disconcerting experience. Not once does she ask about the investigation into the whereabouts of her daughter and any type of impassioned emotion she shows has to do with how sorry she feels for herself plus there's an angry sense of narcisstic entitlement when it comes to answering uncomfortable questions about the time leading up to Caylee's disappearance.
When Caylee's remains were discovered, parts of her were found wrapped in a blanket and her tiny skull had duct tape across the mouth and the nose. There was a heart-shaped sticker on the duct tape, the same sort of heart-shaped sticker to be found in the Anthony family home which is where the entire family lived, except for the 31 days in May/June 2008 when Casey was partying and her daughter, as was later established, was NOT with a nanny named Zenaida (she turned out to be yet another proven figment of Casey's imagination).
When computers and laptops were seized from the Anthony home during the investigation into the now suspected murder of Caylee, Google searches for 'chloroform', 'neck-breaking', and 'house-hold weapons' were found to have been made on the communal computer each member of the Anthony family used.
Casey was formally charged with murder and her trial the past few weeks has been followed by millions in the United States and across the world. The type of murder charges she had to face were punishable by death in the southern state of Florida. As if the prospect of a state-sanctioned killing of a pretty now 25 year-old woman wasn't titillating enough, the fact that her own brother Lee had been tested as the potential father of Caylee, made eyes even wider. The opening statement of Casey's lawyer during her murder trial was to then reach new heights of sensationalism. He offered the theory that Caylee had accidentally drown in the Anthony family pool, that her grandfather George had found her and with Casey together, had disposed of the body in a nearby swampy wooded area so that Casey would not be charged with child neglect. Taking it a step further,
Casey's lawyer Jose Baez then explained Casey's carefree ways post -'accidental drowning' with a sort of trauma coping mechanism Casey had developed since her own brother and her own father had sexually molested her as a child. Jose Baez actually said in court, "It all began when Casey was eight years old and her father came into her room and began to touch her inappropriately and it escalated ... She could be 14 years old, have [had] her father's penis in her mouth, and go to school and play with the other kids as if nothing [had] happened."
This brand new theory didn't exactly mesh with Casey telling her Dad that he was the best father in the world while he visited her in jail. It also doesn't really mesh with the fact that Casey's mother had, on a jailhouse visit, told Casey how sick it was that people were thinking Caylee drown in their pool (this was before Caylee's remains had been found) and Casey responded with, "Surprise, surprise."
Cindy Anthony, faced with the prospect of having her daughter join her granddaughter in death, dropped a bit of a bombshell during Casey's trial too. She declared she had made Google searches for the word 'chloroform'. Her aim was to take the premeditated part of the murder charges out of the equation and therefore have the murder charges result in life-long imprisonment as opposed to the death penalty. This was after Casey's defense team attempted to throw George Anthony under the bus and after both Cindy and George Anthony visibly cooled towards their daughter whose facial and body language conveyed boredom, anger, frustration, and the occasional forced tear during the course of the trial.
Well, true tears of relief did flow down Casey's cheeks yesterday. After deliberating for 11 hours, a jury of her peers came back with a not guilty verdict on all murder charges and child neglect charges but did find her guilty on the charges pertaining to the lies she told the police. She will be sentenced tomorrow on those charges but could very well walk free if the judge decides the three years she has already been detained is enough punishment.
I'd like to now take my reporter's hat off and tell you what I think--not what has been proven as FACT.
Casey Anthony's lawyer managed to take a mountain of solid evidence against his client and reduce it to a heap of trivial words by lodging a preposterous load of doubt into the courtroom. Reasonable doubt is what a jury in the United States needs to be convinced beyond of . There was nothing reasonable about the slanderous ethics of Casey's lawyer in my book but for 12 people, made up of defendant Casey's peers, the evidence they heard in court resulted in an uninamious decision that there was not enough evidence to, not only, convict Casey of murder but also not of manslaughter, and not of child neglect.
Casey was convicted of purposely misleading the authorities responsible for the safe return of her daughter during the time when it was believed that Caylee was alive.
No matter what the outcome of tomorrow's sentencing for this conviction, Casey Anthony, the jury at her trial, her family, her friends, her neighbours, and her lawyers are free to pursue any type of deal they'd like to with regards to the case. Convicted murderers are not allowed to profit from their crimes but Casey has been deemed innocent of the murder of Caylee so the inevitable barrage of books, made-for-TV-movies, interviews, and magazine cover-stories is bound to make somebody a tidy sum of blood-money.
There certainly is a huge market for stories involving either a dead child, incest, sex abuse, family dysfunction, sociopathy, buxom babes gone bad, questions of paternity, vindictive motives, the smell of decomposition, or anything that results in an ultimate death penalty---and the Caylee Anthony Murder Trial HAS THEM ALL!
There is speculation that the state prosecution team should have not sought the death penalty and taken the sensationalism-factor down a notch to ensure a guilty of murder verdict.
I don't know about that. All I know is that a palpable cloud of desensitization has travelled from Florida to me and it has steadily gotten scarier as I've followed the Anthony case these past three years. There is the chill that Casey has permanently left in the hearts of grown-ups around the world who wouldn't dream of not raising the alarm if the children left in their care had gone missing for 31 MINUTES, never mind 31 days. There is the blood-thirsty snarling of broadcasting wolves whose shocking diatribe on the subject of a dead little girl is so lacking in respect as to be truly obscene ( Nancy Grace I'm looking at you). There are the punters, viciously vying for prime position in an arena that's dripping with sordid depravity. And let's not forget, there is a perverse inclination of self-preservation, of self-glorification through means of verbal trickery with absolutely no regard for the protection of the law. The varying degrees of arrogance and insolence provided by the featured players of this murder trial have affected me so that I have questioned more than just the justice system in America. While no one has been held responsible for Caylee Anthony's death, she has forced me to consider the intricate web of responsibility all adults have if we hope to raise generations respectful of humanity.
EPA