Over the weekend, Lee emailed Melich the detailed description of Zanny and other details from the conversations he and his parents had had with Casey at the jail. Law enforcement, however, was convinced that Zenaida did not exist.
George and Cindy prepared for the second Caylee vigil on Sunday, July 27. They planned to hold one every Sunday night until Caylee came home. That afternoon, Richard Grund called George, leaving a message that offered help, and asked one question: Why aren’t you doing what ex-cops do?
George must have understood the meaning of that question, that a former law enforcement officer would first focus his suspicions on the person closest to the missing person—his daughter Casey. According to Richard, George called back right away and said, “Here’s my answer to your question as to why I’m not doing what you think I should be doing: because my wife doesn’t want me to.”
Despite the rain that day, more than two hundred people filled the front yard of the Anthony home. A minister delivered a short sermon. Everyone joined hands as he led the group in prayer. “Casey has gotten deceived and we are standing here to ask God to break that bondage off of her.”
Cindy led the group in a chant of “Bring Caylee home!” Outside of the prayer, no one spoke about Casey or her situation in jail. They were encouraged by the news that an anonymous corporation had put up a $225,000 reward for the safe return of Caylee.
Rozzie Franco of Fox News approached Cindy at the end of the service to discuss Detective Yuri Melich. “We asked him about a grid pattern from your home, and why they hadn’t done that and why they’re not searching actively. What do you think? What are your thoughts on that?”
“I don’t know,” Cindy said. “I mean, they had receipts that could have traced my daughter’s last actions for the last month. They didn’t want them. They didn’t even want to go through any of her personal things. It’s too late now, guys. I’ve already put her stuff away. So you know, I let it sit out in the bedroom for the last week, and no one’s wanted to come through any of the stuff that we took from the apartment . . .
“And I’m frustrated. I just want one of them from the sheriff’s department to call me and give me some respect, give my husband some respect, give us a little update. They were so good about coming here every day for the first three days, because they knew we were giving them everything they wanted, and I’ve given them everything they wanted. I open my home to them. I let them search my backyard without question. I let them take my computers without question . . .
“I feel like I am the one who’s being punished for trying to look for my granddaughter. And I can’t keep doing this day after day. I’ve been grabbed by the media. My son gets chased down on his way to see his sister this morning. . . . My son is a tough person, but he called me this morning, he said, ‘Mom, this is first time I felt like my life was in danger.’ ”
Cindy concluded the interview with some venting about the media: “. . . This has to stop. Quit harassing her friends, her friends trying to speak to the authorities. They won’t return their phone calls. But they don’t need to be on the media. They’ve already said Casey is a great mom, that she’s always taken good care of Caylee; she’s always been worried about Caylee, that she’s been around cigarette smoke or whatever. This Zenaida person I’ve known about for the last three years. Do they think that she’s been plotting to murder her child for three years now? Come on. Give me a break!”
Lee sat down for an interview with Orange County Detectives Eric Edwards and Michael Erickson that day. He provided the investigators with a handwritten list of receipts containing twenty-two dated entries in chronological order. “I want to make sure that we’re on the same page—that these receipts were very organized . . . I saw them that night,” Lee said, referring to July 15, “when they were being taken out of the bag.” He added that he’d created the list when he visited the attorney on July 28.
“It would have been very nice to have those receipts,” Detective Edwards said. “The attorney currently has them?”
“Yes, he does.”
“And you can’t remember when you took them and gave them to the attorney, but it was some time . . .”
“I want to say it had to be this . . . past Monday. Not yesterday, the week prior. It had to be around that time.”
“Like the twenty-first?” Edwards asked.
“Yeah. Within a day or two, one way or the other. And we had offered it up . . . first to the officers on that—at this point, we’re early morning into the sixteenth—we offered it to them at that time. We offered it to them again on the evening of the sixteenth and again on the evening of the seventeenth. I was present for every time when that was offered to them,” Lee avowed.
The detectives moved on to questions about Casey’s relationships with the men in her life. Lee said, “Ricardo and Casey had been seeing each other from February until the month . . . of April on kind of a full-time basis. They decided to break it off, see what they can do as friends. But they were still having, you know, a relationship . . . kind of on a semi-serious level up until Casey started hanging out with Tony—and actually even through the initial part of hanging out with Tony. So, it was in that time that she kind of transitioned . . . from Ricardo to Tony.”
“She kind of seems like she may swing from boyfriend to boyfriend to keep a comfort?”
“Sure. Absolutely,” Lee said.
“Is that . . . how you look back at her past and . . .”
“Absolutely. That’s very accurate. But also to make sure that we’re clear on this, Casey—unbeknownst to Jesse’s and my parents—Casey and Jesse still maintained a semi-regular relationship, and always have over the past few years. This includes, from what I’ve been able to find out, at least into May when she started to see Tony.”
Lee laughed. “She’s always maintained to my mother and father that Jesse is the one pursuing her, and she’s trying to get him out of . . . her life, while Jesse maintains that same thing to his parents. When, truth be told, even through phone records, you can see they equally reach out and facilitate the relationship between themselves. No one person is chasing the other more than the other.”
Edwards wanted to clear up a piece of confusing information with Lee: “Now we go to the eighth [of June]. I have highlighted that in red because your Mom originally thought, in her frantic state, that she hadn’t seen Caylee from the eighth on. But now that changes. We know that to be the fifteenth. And that’s just over stress. There’s no finger-pointing going on there.”
“Right.” Lee nodded.
“It’s just that she recalled originally that’s the first time. You believe, though, that may have influenced your sister picking the ninth as . . .”
“A hundred percent,” Lee interjected.
“. . . when the abduction occurs?” Edwards finished.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, which is a red flag as far as what her thought process may have been—in my mind, anyway. We cruise on through—we get to the fifteenth. You know from talking to Mom that they went and visited Granddad in Mount Dora?”
“Um hum.” Lee nodded.
“When they came back, you believe from talking to Mom, that your sister, Casey, was at the house and actually [uploaded] the video and the pictures onto MySpace?”
“Yes.”
“Or onto the home computer?”
“And MySpace, yes.”
“And MySpace? Okay. And that being the forensics stuff that we know of, the last time any digital recording or any photographs were taken or existed of your niece . . .”
“Exactly.”
“. . . Was on the fifteenth?” Edwards continued.
“Yes,” Lee affirmed.
Judge Strickland’s decision to permit audio and video recordings to be admitted into the record earlier that day was on Lee’s mind when he talked to his sister on the telephone. “Here’s an FYI for you, so you can conduct yourself accordingly,” Lee warned. “Everything is public record, including this phone call, including the visitation video, all that stuff is going to end up being released at some point.”
“I know it is,” Casey said.
“I had no knowledge of that whatsoever,” Lee complained.
“They told me about that yesterday.”
“They told me after we did that. There are obviously things I may have asked in a different way.”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
“I don’t want you, you know, to feel for any reason we are not on your side about anything, because we are, about everything. We are completely behind you . . .”
“I know.”
“. . . and being completely behind you, our entire focus, our entire days—every second of every day is consumed by what we can do to find Caylee.”
“Of course,” Casey acknowledged.
He then asked her if she had anything she could tell him that would help them find Caylee, but Casey said that nothing came to her mind.
“Do you think Caylee is okay, right now?” Lee asked.
“My gut feeling, as Mom asked me yesterday, and as the psychologist asked me this morning, that I met with through the court: In my gut, she’s still okay. And it still feels like she’s close to home.”