Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story Read Online Free

Caylee had very distinctive features and that even if someone had cut her hair, people would recognize her dark hazel eyes. “They’re brown and green. She has a birthmark on her left shoulder.”
    “What kind of birthmark?”
    “It’s just like a small line. It almost looks like a small little beauty mark.”
    “Anything else?”
    “I just want my daughter back.”
    Melich then had her raise her right hand and swear that everything she had told him was the truth.
    After taking down her statement, Melich said, “Okay, take me to where you showed the police officers.” They went back to the same apartment complex. Then he asked, “Do you know any other places where Zenaida lived before she lived here?”
    “I know where her mother Gloria used to live,” she said, and she took Melich to another apartment complex, which turned out to be a home for the elderly.
    Melich checked. The people at the home had never heard of Gloria Gonzalez. Later police would discover that the complex was across the street from one of Casey’s former boyfriends, Ricardo Morales. And the Sawgrass Apartments, where Zenaida supposedly lived, was the home of Dante, the boyfriend of her best friend, Annie Downing.
    After driving Casey around until three in the morning, Melich drove her back to her home.
    “Okay,” he said, “we’ll talk tomorrow. We’re going to keep investigating.”
    Before Melich left, George pulled him aside.
    “My daughter has been lying to you,” he said. “Something’s very suspicious. I don’t think she’s being truthful. You need to look into this a little bit more.”
    “Don’t worry,” said Melich. “We will.”
    George then told him about finding the car at the impound lot and again mentioned the smell in Casey’s car.
    The car was in the garage of the Anthony home with the trunk open. As the police were coming in and out of the house that night, they entered through the garage. Any of them could have smelled that car, and not one said a word about it. Even though George had told him, “The car smells of death,” the detective was either grossly incompetent or believed the smell from the car came from the trash that had been in the car, as apparently did all the police on the scene. In Melich’s five-page, detail-rich initial report, not a word was said about any smell in the car. If the car smelled uniquely of human decomposition, none of the officers noticed it. As I will show later, decomposition is decomposition and no one can uniquely detect human decomposition.
    Melich drove back to his precinct and met with Sergeant John Allen around seven in the morning. During breakfast Melich briefed Allen about the case.
    As they discussed it, the new strategy was to see how far Casey would go with her lies.
    Casey had told the police she didn’t have Zenaida’s cell phone number because she had left the cell phone in her office at Universal Studios.
    “The number of everyone who knows about Caylee being missing is on that SIM card on the cell phone in the office,” said Casey.
    “Let’s go to Universal and get it,” said Melich. “We’ll get your cell phone out of your office, and you can get the numbers.”
    She quickly changed her story.
    “My phone was stolen,” she said. “I reported it to loss prevention, and they’re looking for it.”
    Melich, sensing another lie, decided to drive over to Universal Studios and see what Casey’s coworkers could tell him about this strange tale-spinning woman whose child was missing.
    It was July 16, 2008, and in speaking with Universal’s head of security, Leonard Tutura, Melich learned that Casey was fired from her job at Universal Studios on April 24, 2006, after not showing up for work one day. Melich asked about Casey’s coworkers, including Hopkins and Lewis. When Melich checked, he found that Hopkins had once worked at Universal but was fired in 2002, so he couldn’t have known about Caylee’s disappearance during the thirty days when she