Read Online Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story by Jose Peter; Baez Golenbock - Free Book Online Page B

Lee, and I left the courtroom, the crush of press was absolute madness. It was then that Cindy, defending her daughter, threw out the theory of the moldy pizza smelling up the car. As bodies and cameras and tape recorders surrounded us, she said, “There was a pizza in the back of the car for three weeks. You know how hot it’s been, and that’s where the maggots came from and that’s where the smell came from.”
    Riveted by her every word, the flock of reporters pressed closer until we were being held hostage. I finally had no choice but to make a deal with them.
    “I’ll talk to you if you let the Anthonys go,” I said.
    They agreed, and after the Anthonys made their escape, I couldn’t express enough anger toward the injustice of the $500,000 bond for a third-degree felony.
    I knew at that moment we were going to appeal it. To this day I cannot understand how any court could have justified a $500,000 bond for a third-degree felony.
    I went back to the Orange County jail to speak to Casey about what the $500,000 bond meant for her. I explained to her that I was going to appeal the decision, that we were going to do everything in our power to raise the money to get her out, and that her parents had agreed to help in any way they could.
    During the bond hearing I began to wonder whether Casey had been telling me the truth after I heard some of the things that came out. As I was telling her about the unfairly large bond, Casey whispered to me conspiratorially, “I have something I have to tell you.”
    “What, Casey?”
    Because I had been concentrating on the witnesses at the bond hearing and not on her, she knew that I would be asking her about the cadaver dogs and about her lies, information that must have been terribly unsettling for her. She knew this conversation was coming, and so to head it off she said to me, “I have some things to tell you.”
    “What is it?”
    “After I came back from the hearing,” she said, “I was up in my cell, and one of the inmates came by, and she flashed the number 55 through the window where I could see her. She was looking at me, and I could read her lips. She was saying, “Timer 55.”
    “What does that mean?” I asked her.
    She said, “Caylee had had a play date with Annabelle, and they went to Jay Blanchard Park with Zenaida [Fernandez-Gonzalez] and her sister Samantha, and at one point Zenaida grabbed Annabelle and Caylee and started walking toward the car.” Casey told me that she watched as the children got into the car, and when she asked Zenaida, “What are you doing?” she said that Zenaida grabbed her by her shoulders and said, “Listen, I’m taking Caylee, because you don’t know what you have. You don’t know how lucky you are, and I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
    Casey told me that she and Zenaida struggled and that Zenaida got in her car with the children, and as she was driving away, she said, “I will contact you with further instructions.”
    Casey said that Zenaida contacted her and told her to change all her passwords to “timer55.” (When we looked at her computer records, the passwords to her Myspace and Facebook accounts were in fact “timer55.”)
    “Why?” I asked.
    “What ‘timer55’ means,” said Casey, “was that Zenaida was going to return Caylee in fifty-five days.” (If you count from June 16, the day Caylee disappeared, to August 9, Caylee’s birthday, it’s exactly fifty-five days.)
    She said that Zenaida would give her instructions to go to places around Orlando, and the way she would do it was through posting on Myspace or Facebook.
    “Zenaida could do this,” Casey said, “because she had the password, but Zenaida would post it and then delete it right away so there would be no trace of it.”
    She looked at me with great seriousness. What I wanted to say to her was, You are nuts. That’s hands-down the most ridiculous story I have ever heard. Listen, Casey, it’s hard to believe that Zenaida was able