Where is Caylee Marie Anthony?

The story of this missing child in Florida has been national news for over a week, and the story gets bigger and weirder every day.

For anyone not familiar with the disappearance of this two-year-old (soon to be three), here’s some background.

Caylee Marie Anthony is the only daughter of Casey Anthony, who is in her early 20s. Caylee’s father was killed in an automobile accident a year ago. Caylee lived with her mother in her maternal grandparents’ (Cindy and George Anthony) home. Casey has one brother, Lee Anthony.

In June, Casey Anthony told her parents that she needed some time with her daughter, in order to bond. Her parents didn’t have any problem with that, since Casey had always been a good mother, so Casey took Caylee on an extended vacation to the Jacksonville area.

When Cindy would call to check on Caylee, Casey would always tell her that Caylee was fine, but couldn’t come to the phone. At various times she told her mother that Caylee was at the beach, or at Universal Studios, or at Disney. After a month of being repeatedly put off from seeing or speaking with her grandchild, Cindy Anthony demanded that Casey tell her where Caylee was. That’s when Casey told her mother that she hadn’t seen Caylee in a month, and that she had been kidnapped by the babysitter.

Cindy Anthony immediately called the police to report the baby missing. As if not reporting one’s child missing for over a month is not strange enough, it got even stranger.

Casey Anthony told the police that the last time she saw Caylee, she had dropped her off with the babysitter, identified as Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, at Gonzalez’s apartment. The police proceeded to the apartment, but were told that not only was there not anyone by that name living there, no one had lived in that particular apartment in over five months so clearly no one was living there at the time Casey claimed she dropped Caylee off with the babysitter. Eventually police located someone by that name, and questioned her about the disappearance, but she said she had never even met Casey or Caylee, and had never babysat the child. When police showed Casey a photo of the woman they interviewed, they were told that she is not the same person.

Casey also told police that she worked at Universal Studios, and even took them there, pretending the entire time that it was where she worked …. until they got to what she claimed was her office, at which time she admitted that she does not work there. She used to work there, it seems, but was fired two years ago.

Casey Anthony, however, still swears that her story is true, and that her little girl has been kidnapped by the babysitter. She swears that if police find the right Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, who she says could possibly be in New York or North Carolina, they will find her child.

Police, however, believe that she is lying to them, and that she may even have murdered her child. She was arrested and charged with child neglect, for not reporting the child missing, and obstruction of justice because she lied to them repeatedly. A judge has since set her bond at $500,000, and at that hearing noted that Casey wouldn’t know the truth if it hit her in the face.

The entire situation is extremely strange, I must say. It appears that Casey claims to have been doing her own investigation into the child’s disappearance, because she saw somewhere (a movie, perhaps?) that if police are called, the child gets harmed. Over the weekend, I read where it is said that she believed calling the police would result in harm not only to little Caylee, but to Casey’s entire family.

That makes me wonder if – assuming, arguendo, that her statement is true – this is drug-related. Most criminals will not kidnap a young child and threaten an entire family, but those in the drug world have been known to do things of that nature if they are owed money. However, Cindy Anthony insists that her daughter does not have a drug problem.

Cindy also reported to police that Casey had stolen their car, and run up $45,000 on one of Cindy’s credit cards without permission. Yes, you read that right. In one month, Casey Anthony spent 45K, but seemingly has nothing to show for it. Again, I must wonder if this child’s disappearance is somehow drug-related.

Then there are the various problems in pinpointing exactly when anyone else saw or spoke with the child. At first Cindy said she had not seen Caylee since June 9th. Then a video surfaced which shows Caylee visiting her great-grandfather at an assisted living facility on Father’s Day, which was June 15th. Casey’s boyfriend (perhaps ex-boyfriend now, I’m not sure) worked for the police in Orange County (I’m unsure in what capacity), and he says he heard Caylee in the background when he spoke to Casey by phone shortly before Caylee was reported missing. He remembers the specific day, because it was the same day he stopped working for the police.

Needless to say, in all this confusion, the police consider Casey a person of interest, and many people believe she may have killed her daughter and made up all the lies to cover up what she had done. It wouldn’t be the first time a mother had done that, after all.

Why do they think she may have murdered her child? She abandoned her car in a parking lot, and when it was found, it had a stain, dirt, and what appeared to be Caylee’s hair in the trunk. It also had the stench of human decomposition, according to Cindy Anthony who found the car. Cindy Anthony is a nurse, and her husband used to be a homicide investigator, so it’s safe to say they both know that particular smell. A cadaver dog alerted to the trunk of the car, as well as to a spot in the Anthony’s backyard. Cindy says she believes the dog alerted to a maggot-infested piece of pizza which had been left in the car. The police brought in another cadaver dog, just to be sure, and that dog alerted to the same exact places.

Either way, cadaver dogs don’t alert to pizza, rotten or not. They don’t even alert to dead animals. They focus in on two scents which are specific to decomposing human bodies, which is excreted due to the breakdown of proteins, and nothing else; and trained cadaver dogs can find those scents even when they are in an area where a human could not smell it at all. For example, if one took a piece of clothing off a human cadaver, put it in a plastic container and covered the container in plastic wrap, the dog can still smell it despite all the attempts to cover it up.

Since it seems the Anthony family did not also have maggot-infested pizza in their backyard, the alert by the cadaver dog in that area can’t be explained away quite so easily even by the most well-meaning person. The same alerts from two different cadaver dogs cannot be ignored, no matter how much everyone wants to see Caylee found safe and sound.

It is also notable that police found a stain, dirt, and what appeared to be Caylee’s hair in her mother’s automobile trunk. It will be hard to positively identify the hair, however, since Caylee’s father is deceased. Mitochondrial DNA passes from the mother, so they will need to extract nuclear DNA from the hair instead. Also, they must be absolutely sure that the hair they use for comparison is Caylee’s, which is difficult if not impossible when they are getting the hair sample from anywhere except her body. After all, even if the hair comes from her hairbrush, there is no guarantee that no one else has ever used that brush, or that someone else’s hair didn’t simply fall onto the brush and then was impacted as the brush was used.

However, I have to wonder, did someone kill Caylee, possibly bury her in the Anthony’s backyard then remove her body and bury it somewhere else? That would explain the dirt, the stain, the hair, and the stench of human decomposition. However, that is just conjecture, since as far as I know, there is not any proof that Caylee is dead.

It is also notable that the Anthonys reported that two five-gallon containers of gas were stolen from their shed, during the time when Caylee was missing, and that Casey regularly stole gas from her family. Casey had also borrowed a shovel from a neighbor, after the last time Casey says she saw Caylee and when she was the only person at the Anthony home; the Anthony family said the shovel was probably to dig up bamboo shoots in the yard, which hurt Caylee’s feet.

But whenever you’ve got a shovel, two cans of gasoline, a smell of decomposition, dirt and hair in the trunk, and a missing child …. well, you can’t help but wonder whether those things are as innocent as Casey wants others to believe.

Today there was to be a court hearing on whether the recordings from the jail should be released to the press, and the judge denied the motion; apparently videos of a visit at the jail will be released today. In the meantime, here is one of the conversations released so far. What I find interesting is that the mother seems far more concerned about herself and her boyfriend, than her missing daughter. Her callousness is really quite striking. Here is the audio recording;

What do you think? Did a mysterious babysitter take Caylee? Was Caylee given away, or sold? Or has Casey harmed her daughter, and made up this bizarre story to cover for what she did? If Casey harmed Caylee, what was her motive for doing so? I’d love to hear what others think, and I will update the blog as more information becomes available.

Readers can find a complete list of this blog’s coverage of the Caylee Anthony case by clicking here.

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