Free Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony by Jeff Ashton

him?
C ASEY A NTHONY: Because . . .
K RISTINA C HESTER: You probably don’t want to tell me.
C ASEY A NTHONY: . . . he’s my boyfriend and I want to actually try to sit and talk to him because I didn’t get a chance to talk to him earlier because I got arrested on a fucking whim today. Because they’re blaming me for stuff that I never would do. That I didn’t do.
K RISTINA C HESTER: Okay. Well, I’m on nobody’s, I’m on your side.  You know that, right?
C ASEY A NTHONY: Oh, uh, sweetie, I know that. I just want to talk to Tony and get a little bit of . . .
K RISTINA C HESTER: But . . .
C ASEY A NTHONY: . . . of, of . . .
K RISTINA C HESTER: . . . Casey, you have to tell me if you know anything about Caylee.
C ASEY A NTHONY: Sweetheart, if I . . .
K RISTINA C HESTER: If anything happens to Caylee, Casey, I’ll die [crying]. You understand I’ll die if anything happens to . . .
C ASEY A NTHONY: Oh, well . . .
K RISTINA C HESTER: . . . that baby [continuing to cry]
C ASEY A NTHONY: Oh, my God. Calling you guys, a waste. A huge waste. Honey, I love you. You know I would not let anything happen to my daughter. If I knew where she was this wouldn’t be going on. 
    It was a striking series of phone calls. As each of her three conversations led her back to Caylee, all she did was try to get to Tony. Even as everyone worried about her daughter, she seemed more preoccupied with trying to sustain her fledgling relationship. Her sense of priorities was baffling, and in the end, this only added to the portrait of her as callous and uncaring about her missing daughter.
    A T THAT POINT THE CRITICAL focus of the investigation was on determining just how much of Casey’s story was a lie. The detectives’ hope was that if they could find a hint of truth somewhere, that hint might lead them to Caylee.
    Ever since Casey had named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, aka Zanny the Nanny, as the person she had last seen with Caylee, Detective Melich had been trying to locate her. While Casey’s wild-goose chase the previous day had yielded nothing of real substance, there was one promising lead on Zanny: the guest card with the name “Zenaida Gonzalez” and a phone number on it that Melich had been given by the manager at the Sawgrass Apartments. Melich had called the number and reached a woman going by the name of Zenaida who lived in Kissimmee, about thirty minutes south of Orlando. She said she was forty-two, had six children, and drove a car with New York license plates. She was friendly and cooperative. However, she denied knowing Casey or Caylee Anthony or having ever been employed as a babysitter.
    Zenaida agreed to give a sworn statement to an investigator, and on July 17, Missing Persons Investigator Awilda McBryde and Investigator Kari Roderick visited her at her home. She was shown photos of Casey and Caylee and denied knowing either. Likewise, Casey was unable to identify this Zenaida from a packet of photos shown to her.
    How and why Zenaida Gonzalez came into Casey’s crosshairs has never been determined. There was speculation that Casey somehow got hold of Zenaida’s guest card at the Sawgrass Apartments and from there came up with the fact that she was from New York by her license plate, or perhaps it was someone from her past and the real Zenaida was just a coincidence.
    While Melich still couldn’t be sure that Zanny was a complete fabrication, Casey’s story had gone from implausible to impossible. But as he’d learned at Universal Studios, he was dealing with a woman who was willing to follow her lies to the bitter end. If he was going to get her to admit the truth about Zanny, it would take more than he currently had.
    In the meantime, he tried to learn a bit more about the person they were dealing with. Casey had no criminal record, and prior to the 911 call two days earlier, she had apparently been an upstanding citizen. And yet there was something unsettling about how easy it had