From the lies, to the shocking acquittal, to the strange behavior — and did we mention
the lies? — there is almost nothing normal about Casey Anthony's case. The trial captured
the nation's attention, launched numerous discussions and provided some truly crazy
findings. Here are the most bizarre things from the case.
Usually, when a child goes missing, their parents are quick to ask for help. In fact,
thanks to TV police procedurals, we're used to the trope of panicked parents being turned
away by officials who say they need to wait longer to file a missing persons report. This
is all to say that the Casey Anthony case was bizarre from its very first moments. Caylee
Anthony, who was just two years old, had been missing for 31 days before police were notified.
Caylee was last seen on June 16, 2008. On July 15, her grandmother, Cindy Anthony, reported
her missing after confronting her daughter, Casey, about the toddler's whereabouts.
After keeping her daughter's disappearance a secret for a month, Casey admitted to her
mother that Caylee was missing. Casey claimed that Caylee had been kidnapped and that she
had been searching for her daughter on her own instead of reporting the crime to the
police.
Not only was Casey Anthony's mother the one who first reported Caylee missing, but she
seemed immediately suspicious of her daughter's involvement in the incident. When Cindy called
911 to report that her granddaughter was missing, she also requested that police come arrest
Casey — but not for Caylee's disappearance. During her initial calls to 911 on July 15,
2008, Cindy told the operator -
"I have someone here who I need to be arrested in my home."
When asked who she needed arrested and for what reason, Cindy explained that it was her
daughter for, quote, "stealing an auto and stealing money."
In a subsequent 911 call later the same day, Cindy described a horrific odor coming from
the car that she likened to, quote, "a dead body" — a claim she later backtracked on
at Casey's trial. As Cindy explained on the call -
"My daughter has been missing for a month and I just found her today. But I can't find
my granddaughter. She just admitted to me that she's been trying to find her by herself."
"There is something wrong. I found my daughter's car today and it smells like there's been
a dead body in the damn car."
Per the Orlando Sentinel, Cindy later changed the story of the smell when she referred to
it as, quote, "a bag of pizza for like 12 days in the back of the car."
Early in the investigation, Casey Anthony insisted that Caylee was with her nanny, who
she identified as Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, aka "Zanny the nanny" and that the nanny had
kidnapped Caylee, according to ABC News. This was the story she apparently told her mother
on July 15, 2008, and she reiterated it to police, telling detectives on the case that
"Zanny" had kidnapped Caylee on June 9. Asked why she hadn't contacted authorities sooner,
Casey claimed -
"I think part of me was naive enough to think I could handle [Caylee's disappearance] myself,
which I obviously couldn't."
During the course of the investigation, police actually found a woman by the name of Zenaida
Gonzalez, but she insisted she had never met Casey or Caylee, leading detectives to conclude
that "Zanny the Nanny" was a fictional character made up by Casey.
In another intricate lie originally told to her mother, Casey claimed to have had a relationship
with a man named Jeff Hopkins, who she identified as the person who introduced her to Zanny
the nanny. The outlet also reported that, at trial, Cindy Anthony testified that she
had found a picture of a man on her daughter's cell phone identified as Hopkins and filed
under 'boyfriend.'
Casey had also apparently said that Jeff's mom, who she called Jules, had cancer and
had told her mother that Jeff and Jules would be coming to meet her family around Christmas,
only to abruptly cancel. Casey even used the fictional Jules as an alibi for the time of
Caylee's disappearance, claiming she and her then-missing daughter were in Jacksonville,
attending a "surprise wedding" for Jules.
Like Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, there really was a person named Jeff Hopkins in real life,
but, also like Gonzalez, the story Casey told about him was completely fabricated.
Making up her daughter's nanny-slash-alleged kidnapper wasn't the only lie Casey Anthony
told police — far from it. As ABC News pointed out in its rundown of her "Top Ten Lies,"
during the investigation, several whoppers told by Casey Anthony actually came to light,
including a years-long lie about her employment.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the employment lie is that it didn't seem to be specifically
invented in relation to Caylee's disappearance. For years, Casey had been telling her parents
that she worked at Universal Studios as an event planner. She maintained the lie, even
to police, early in the investigation. When detectives insisted that Casey take them to
her office, she went so far as to walk officers around a building on the Universal lot for
a while before she eventually gave up and admitted that she had been fired from her
job at Universal in 2006 but had pretended to continue working there ever since.
This stunning moment in the investigation was apparently something of a final straw
for the detectives, who then directly confronted Casey about her blatant lies, with one detective
warning her -
"If you continue down this path and continue lying, I can tell you that when this snowball
gets to the bottom of the hill, the only person that's going to get hurt then is you."
"What we're trying to do is prove your story, but everything we've done is disproven your
story, every single thing. Everything you've told us we've shown you have lied about it."
While a lot of the strangest details from the Casey Anthony case sprang from her lies
and the alleged attempted cover up following Caylee's disappearance, there were also strange
things about Caylee's death. One particularly disturbing claim involves the duct tape that
was on Caylee's skull when her remains were discovered. According to testimony from an
FBI forensics expert, the outline of a heart-shaped sticker was found on the duct tape. The outline
reportedly matched a sticker that was found near Caylee's body and was "similar to a roll
of heart-shaped stickers that police found in Casey Anthony's bedroom," according to
a report from ABC News.
Forensics experts weren't able to prove that the sticker had been on the duct tape, but
combined with the roll of stickers found in Casey's bedroom, prosecutors said it suggested
a possible connection between Casey and the crime. It would also have gone a long way
toward proving the prosecution's theory of the case, which was that Casey had killed
Caylee by placing the duct tape over her child’s nose and mouth to suffocate her.
At trial, Casey's legal team, led by Jose Baez, mounted a defense that included several
shocking claims. First, the core of the defense's story was that Caylee Anthony had not been
killed at all, but had accidentally drowned in the Anthony family pool. Casey's lawyers
also argued that it had actually been her father, George Anthony, who allegedly aided
in the, quote, "disposal" of his granddaughter's body to cover up the death.
Baez also alleged that Casey's behavior after Caylee's death was a coping mechanism developed
after years of abuse at the hands of her father, saying -
"Casey did what she's been doing all her life, or most of it, hiding her pain. She went back
to that deep, dark place called denial to pretend as if nothing was wrong."
George Anthony vehemently denied all of the claims made by the defense during an emotional
day of testimony in court.
"Sir I never would do anything like that to my daughter."
"My question is you would never admit to it would you sir?"
In October 2011, just three months after she was found not guilty of her two-year-old daughter
Caylee's murder, Casey Anthony was in the news for legal issues again, this time tied
to a civil suit from Zenaida Gonzalez, who sued Casey for defamation and sought compensatory
and punitive damages for the damage to her reputation. As Zenaida told WKMG's Click Orlando
in 2008 -
"It has been horrible. I haven't been able to get a job and haven't been able to do much
of anything because everybody is judging me by my name."
Casey's appearance during her deposition made headlines. CBS News reported that she appeared
on camera, quote, "disguised in sunglasses and a baseball cap" and gave few answers during
the 45-minute deposition, invoking her 5th-amendment rights in response to most of his questions.
After her surprising acquittal, Casey Anthony disappeared from the public eye. In 2012,
however, it came out that Casey had been given sanctuary by a church pastor near Port St.
Lucie. That January, the Daily Beast reported that Casey was staying at Cross Church in
Palm City, where lead Pastor Steve Camp was giving her refuge. The news sent shockwaves
through the community and, when local media reported the church's address, residents took
to the streets with signs that read "Hide your Kids" in protest of Casey taking up residence
in the area. Casey supporters also descended on the area to counter the protestors.
Michael Wedgwood, a resident of the area, was quoted in WFTV's coverage, saying he had
seen Casey leaving the property with a police escort just three hours after the Daily Beast
report was published. Wedgwood also said rumors were going around about the counseling Anthony
was reportedly receiving from the church, as well as her alleged involvement in church
programs, and that local parents were outraged to learn that one of the programs she was
rumored to be involved in was next to an elementary school.
Five years after Casey Anthony's criminal trial, her name was in the news again following
allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of her lead attorney, Jose Baez. In 2016,
affidavits that Dominic Casey, a private investigator who had worked with Casey Anthony's defense
team, were made public. The documents included allegations that Baez had admitted to him
that his client had confessed to Caylee's murder, as well as allegations that Baez and
Anthony had a sexual relationship and that she had paid for her defense with sexual favors.
Baez strongly denied the alleged claims, writing in a statement to People -
"I unequivocally and categorically deny exchanging sex for my legal services with Ms. Anthony.
I further unequivocally and categorically deny having any sexual relationship with Ms.
Anthony whatsoever."
In 2017, the Associated Press reported that Anthony was in South Florida, working for
private investigator Patrick McKenna, with whom she also lived with at the time, doing,
quote, "online social media searches and other investigative work." McKenna is a veteran
investigator who served as the lead for not only Anthony's defense team, but also that
of OJ Simpson in his murder trial. In her rare interview with the AP, Anthony made it
clear that she was passionate about her investigative work, saying -
"I love the fact that I have a unique perspective and I get a chance to do for other people
what so many others have done for me."
Anthony also shared with the AP her goal of obtaining a private investigator's license
and working in criminal defense. Just three years later, she appeared to take a big step
toward that goal. According to the Associated Press, Anthony started her own PI firm, an
LLC called Case Research & Consulting Services in 2020.
Casey Anthony's defense team levied a number of shocking allegations against her father,
George Anthony, during her trial. The father and daughter's relationship was reportedly
nonexistent following Casey's acquittal. Their estrangement went on for years, but in 2018,
George was injured in a car accident that People described as "near-fatal."
In a 2019 interview with Dr. Oz, George revealed that Casey had reached out to see how he was
after his accident and that he finally felt ready to reconcile with her, saying -
"I would just like to tell her I'm sorry. You know that I forgive her. I forgive her
and that's hard for me to say, but you know what, I need to be forgiven by her, my son
and other family members or friends that I care so much about. Forgive me for what I've
done. To all of our lives."
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp
National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat
services.