Pathological: The Casey Anthony Story — Every Door Was Open — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

Tuesday, July 5, 2011, Orlando, Florida. The line outside the Orange County courthouse begins forming in the middle of the night. For six weeks, people have been showing up at 3, 4, sometimes 1 in the morning. Hundreds of people a day from around the world fighting for a seat in one room they have seen on TV for weeks. All of them are here to watch, in person, the trial of a mother accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter. I've been watching. I tape every episode. Our family is at Disney World, but this was more exciting for me. 25 floors up is the courtroom of Judge Belvin Perry Jr. He grew up in Orlando, where his father had been one of the city's first black police officers. The jury in the Casey Anthony case has been out deliberating since yesterday afternoon, in all between 10 and 11 hours of deliberation so far. Judge Perry steps through. A door into the courtroom takes his seat and reads a note. The bailiff hands him, and he calls the courtroom to order. Let the record reflect that the defendant is present along with counsel for the defendant. It has been brought to my attention that the jury has reached a verdict. To those in the gallery, please do not express any signs of approval or disapproval upon the reading of the verdict. Let's return the jury. The jury files in. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Judge Perry. Have you reached a verdict? Yes, sir. Would you hand the verdict form to the court deputy, please? The foreperson hands the verdict form to a deputy, and the deputy carries it up to the bench. Judge Perry opens it and reads it, then he reads it again. He explains why later to NBC. I just wanted to be sure I was reading what I was reading. Will the defendant rise along with counsel? Madam clerk, you may publish the verdicts. Jenny stands up. Defense attorney Jose Baez is holding her hand. At the state's table, prosecutor Jeff Ashton has a habit when a verdict comes in. He watches the clerk's eyes. Guilty sits at the top of the page. Not guilty sits at the bottom. He watches her eyes go all the way down the page. The clerk starts to read. She stumbles. The circuit court for the Ninth Judicial Circuit. And then she gets her voice back. State of Florida. State of Florida versus Casey Marie Anthony. As to the charge of first-degree murder, verdict as to count one, we, the jury, find the defendant not guilty, so say we all. Baez squeezes Casey's hand for the rest of the verdict. Aggravated child abuse. Not guilty. He squeezes harder. Aggravated manslaughter of a child. Not guilty. Jose Baez squeezes her hand so hard that he thinks he may have broken it. By the second. Guilty. Jeff Ashton can see where this is headed. If they would not convict Casey of child abuse, they were not going to convict her of anything serious. He mouths a word without saying it out loud. Wow. He wants to shake his head, but he doesn't. By his own rule, you don't show a jury what you think of its verdict. He had put off his retirement to try this case. After the third not guilty, Jeff starts thinking about retirement again. Twenty-five floors below, the crowd on the street hears the verdict. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Oh, my God. And gasps. That's impossible. Casey Anthony does, too. Then she starts to cry. Casey's parents, George and Cindy, are sitting in the gallery in the back row. Neither of them makes a sound. Then the clerk reaches the remaining charges. After three acquittals, she says a different word. Guilty. Casey's parents, George and Cindy, are sitting in the back row. jury and starts with juror number one. Jury number one. Were these your true and correct verdicts? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Twelve times. Yes. Bias puts his hand on the side of Casey's head. We did it, kiddo, he says. Thank you, she says in response, and she hugs him. Judge Perry then calls Casey and her lawyers to the bench. Casey walks up, and Judge Perry reads the verdicts back to her. Casey Marie Anthony, the jury of your peers, having found you not guilty as to the charge contained in count one of the indictment, murder in the first degree, at this time, I will adjudge you to be not guilty. Almost three years after two-year-old Kaylee Marie Anthony was reported missing, and after the little girl was found dead in the woods near her home, her mother stands convicted of four misdemeanors based on lying. Then we'll set sentence in Thursday at 9 a.m. in this courtroom. Judge Perry thanks the jury and sends them home. He maintains a cool exterior. As he later tells NBC, the decision rattled him. What did you think when you opened the envelope and read that verdict? Surprise. Shock. Disbelief. For 15 years, people have argued about how that jury could have voted not guilty. A few of the jurors told us immediately, but nobody wanted to listen. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. Founded by four Ph.D. longevity scientists, One Skin is different. They focus on the actual cause of aging and not just the surface signs of it. After years of research, they developed OS-01, their proprietary peptide, which is the foundation of every product they make. The OS-01 face moisturizer has become a favorite of so many people who say their skin feels firmer and looks healthier. The fact that it is backed by real peer-reviewed clinical science rather than just marketing trends is a huge selling point. These peptides are all the rage. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, One Skin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try One Skin with 15% off using code MEGAN at oneskin.co slash MEGAN. That's 15% off oneskin.co with code MEGAN. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them, support our show, and tell them that we sent you, and using our name will also ensure you get your 15% off. In April 2011, before the trial, of Casey Anthony begins, a pseudo-trial kicks off. CBS News hires Richard Gabriel, a trial consultant working for Anthony's defense team, to see how the evidence might play in the courtroom. Gabriel assembles a mock jury of 12 Orlando adults and presents the evidence from both sides for four and a half hours. Then he asks them to vote, guilty or not guilty. On first-degree murder, nine mock jurors stand up. They would. acquit. They all say they believe Kaylee died accidentally, but cannot agree on how. Gabriel offers a different charge. Who would convict her on involuntary manslaughter? Nearly the entire mock jury stands. Judge Perry has observed Casey Anthony from the bench for six weeks. He later tells NBC that whenever the jury left the courtroom, he noticed a shift in Casey's demeanor. There were two sides. There was the side that was before the jury where she betrayed the role of a mother who had lost a child, someone who was wrongfully accused, and then you could notice the change and transformation in her when the jury went out. She was very commanding. She took charge of different things, and you could see sometime her scolding her attorneys. Did you think she was manipulative? Very manipulative. The judge also tells NBC his own opinion of the state's case and why he believes they did not convince the jury. Yes, there was sufficient evidence to sustain a verdict of murder in the first degree in this case. I thought they had proved a great case, but you've got to realize this was a circumstantial evidence case, and all the defense had to do was create that reasonable doubt, and that's what they did. On July 6, 2011, the day after the verdict is read, juror number three, speaks to ABC. Her name is Jennifer Ford, and she is a 32-year-old nursing student. She is the first juror to speak to the press after the trial. ABC's Terry Moran presses her on how Casey behaved during the 31 days her daughter was missing. Here is Ford's response. It looks very bad. The behavior is very bad, but bad behavior is not enough to prove a crime. Well, if you consider the whole family, they didn't really live in reality. They wanted everything to be happy and everyone to be fine. Even when she, in the jail video, she came up smiling, and she looked happy. She's in jail. Do you think that's how she really feels? I'm guessing not. As to the cause of death, Ford does not believe that Kaylee drowned in the family. family pool, though she does find it more plausible than the state's chloroform theory. You think that this might have been an accident, that she might have drowned in the pool? You believe the defense on that? I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's a lot easier to get to that conclusion. I can walk from here to there and make it happen. But the chloroform, I'm all over the place. I have no idea. I'm in a maze. I don't know where I'm at. I can't get from beginning to end, A to B, to see what even happened. I can't make it work. Moran then asks Ford's opinion on George Anthony, one of the state's most important witnesses and the first called to testify. What did you make of George Anthony's testimony? He did not. He did not help the state's case. Why? Because he was clearly dishonest. He was dishonest? Yes. He was evasive, number one. His story seemed to change depending on, like they said, initially he was on the defense's side, so he would, you know, fight with Mr. Ashton, not get him to give straight answers. But then he switched to the prosecution side, and now he won't give the defense straight answers. It was clear to me that he was just being difficult. He didn't want to answer questions. Ford later tells CNN that during deliberations, the jury took a vote on the manslaughter charge and that she voted to convict. Here she is after the verdict with Gary Tuchman of CNN. You're telling me, though, that the original vote for the aggravated manslaughter was six to six? Correct. And which side of the six were you on? The manslaughter. So originally you thought that she was guilty of manslaughter, or could be guilty of manslaughter? Could be, and I wanted to investigate it further to see if it fit based on the evidence that we were given. So what convinced you and the five others to switch your votes and vote for not guilty of manslaughter? I think everyone will tell you the same thing. It's just lack of hard evidence. She makes a similar point on the evidence when speaking to ABC. There wasn't enough evidence. I don't think anyone in America could tell us exactly how she died. If you put even just the 12 jurors in one room with a piece of paper, write down how Kaylee died, nobody knows. We'd all be guessing. How can you punish someone for something if you don't know what they did? In the ABC interview, Moran pushes back on Ford, saying the tape on Kaylee's body, wrapped in a plastic bag, hidden in the woods, would suggest murder to most people. Here's how Ford responds. In our country, unfortunately, we have to prove it. You can't just be like, yeah, that really looks bad. Smells bad, looks bad. I get that. But it's someone else's life, and if I'm wrong and I kill someone else, I can't live with that. Judge Perry would later say that a few more minutes of instruction to the jury could have changed this verdict entirely, but that it was not his place to volunteer it. Listen to how he explains it to Court TV in 2020. The judge's job is to give the standard jury instruction. It's the prosecution or the defense to request a special instruction. Would a special jury instruction indicating that proving how she died was not an element of the crime to be proven, I think that may have made a tremendous difference. I had already prepared that instruction. I figured it would come from the state, but they never asked. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton will later say he felt the state did show. The jury how Kaylee died with the forensics and the duct tape testimony, but that the jury failed to connect the dots. As the public demanded to know how the state lost this case, some suspected that they overcharged it with first degree murder and that seeking the death penalty may have pushed hesitant jurors away from a guilty verdict. Juror Jennifer Ford speaks to this exact point after the verdict. Here she is with George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Do you think if the prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty, it might have affected how you deliberated about this case? Absolutely. I think it was even mentioned a few times. If they charged her with other things, we probably could have convicted or got a guilty sentence, but not for death, not for first degree. There's not enough to substantiate that. That's a very serious charge. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton disputes the overcharge idea in his book, Imperfect Justice. Written after the trial was complete. Ashton points out that the jury could have acquitted Casey on first degree murder and still convicted her on either second degree murder or on manslaughter. They did not. The night of the verdict, a SWAT team shuttles the defense to a restaurant across the street from the courthouse. They order champagne. A photographer snaps a picture of them through the window. Attorney Cheney Mason proposes a toast to the United States Constitution, and he flips off the cameras outside the restaurant. The defense team sits down to watch the media coverage of the case they've been arguing for the first time. The toast ends up on television. Here's Nancy Grace from Headline News that night. As the defense sits by and has their champagne toast after that not guilty verdict, somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight. Public interest in the case is at a fever pitch. Casey Anthony has been presumed guilty for months in the press. You could feel it in the air. The tabloids covered it breathlessly. Multiple people in the case's orbit sold stories to the National Enquirer, which just whet the collective American appetite for more. And that interest began long before the trial. Good evening. I'm Nancy Grace. I want to thank you for being with us tonight. The desperate search for the truth. Three-year-old Florida girl, Kaylee Anthony. I just want to slap her. As the story of Kaylee spread, George and Cindy Anthony called 911 multiple times in response to protesters gathered outside of their home. People shouted at the parents, held signs calling Casey a baby killer. At least one woman went through the Anthony's trash looking for some way to help investigators. TV news, covered the story of missing and then dead Kaylee Anthony almost every night. Nancy Grace rocketed to national stardom through her coverage of the case. She eventually threatened Bill O'Reilly for the number one evening spot. A month after the verdict, one of the men on that jury speaks anonymously to People magazine about the moment they took their final vote when the decision stopped being something they were debating and became the verdict. He says, quote, And then we sat there for a few minutes and were like, holy crap, we are letting her go free. Everyone was just stunned at what we were about to do. One of the women jurors asked me, are you okay with this? And I said, hell no. But what else can we do? We promised to follow the law. Ten years later, People magazine goes back to this juror and he is still wrestling with his decision. He says, quote, I think of the case at least once every single day. Every time I see her face or hear her name, I get a pit in my stomach. I think about those pictures of the baby's remains that they showed us in court. I even remember the smell of the courtroom. My decision haunts me to this day. I think now if I were to do it all over again, I'd push harder to convict her of one of the lesser charges like aggravated manslaughter, at least that, or child abuse. I'd I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And I didn't stand up for what I believed in at the time. He says the jurors stayed in touch for a while. They had a group text. He says eventually even seeing one of their names light up on his phone made him feel sick. So he muted it. Two days after the verdict is read, Casey Anthony is back in Judge Perry's courtroom, this time getting sentenced for the four misdemeanor convictions. Judge Perry gives her one year in jail. And a thousand dollar fine on each count with credit for the three years she has already spent behind bars. He asks if Casey wants to say anything. Jose Baez answers for her. No, your honor. Casey says nothing at all in that courtroom. Ten days later, just after midnight on July 17th, 2011, she walks out of the Orange County jail a free woman. The case keeps moving without her. The next spring, Florida passes Caylee's law, making it a felony in certain circumstances to wait to report a missing child. Several other states follow with laws of their own. In January 2013, an appeals court cuts Casey's four convictions down to two. The court says the four lies she told came during two police interviews and that prosecutors cannot turn every false statement inside those interviews into separate crimes. By then, Casey Anthony is already free. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, address, even your signature. It's all sitting in a database anyone can access. A cyber scammer can pull your records, use AI to fraud your records. AI can clone your voice, forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property. your property. Then they can borrow against your equity or even sell your property long before you realize anything is even wrong. But let me tell you about Home Title Lock. They monitor your property's title 24-7, alert you of any changes, and if you are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to $1 million restoring your title. So when's the last time you checked your title records? You can do it today. Use my promo code MEGAN at HomeTitleLock.com to get a free title history report plus a free trial of million-dollar triple lock protection so you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's HomeTitleLock.com, promo code MEGAN, or use the link in the description. There is one piece of evidence those 12 jurors never got to consider. We told you about it earlier in this series in episode two. State investigators. Found it after the verdict had been handed down. The defense had found it much earlier. It comes from the Anthony's home computer. What emerges after the verdict is just how serious a for the prosecution. In July 2012, Jose Baez reveals the find in his book, explaining the defense was waiting for the prosecution to drop this bombshell. It never did. It never found the search. On June 16, 2008, the last day Kaylee was seen alive, someone using the family computer opened the internet browser Firefox. That was the browser Casey Anthony primarily used. At about 2.51 that afternoon, someone typed a query into the search bar. Full proof suffocation. Suffocation was misspelled. The next page opened was about suicide. It discussed methods that included poison and putting a plastic bag over one's head. Then, a minute later, the same browser session records activity on MySpace. Casey used MySpace. George did not. The Orange County Sheriff's Office later admits its computer examiner had missed the Firefox browser history. The original investigators had pulled just 17 entries from Internet Explorer. More than 1,200 Firefox entries from that same browser. That's a lot of entries. The full proof suffocation search was one of them. The jury never heard it. And according to prosecutor Jeff Ashton, neither did the prosecutors trying to convict Casey Anthony. When Ashton learned about it after the trial, he said it was a shame they hadn't had it because it would have put the defense claim of an accidental death in serious question. Defense attorney Jose Baez knew that it was a shame they hadn't had it because it would have put the defense claim of an accidental death in serious question. : : A phone record showing his cell phone calling home 11 minutes after the suffocation search. Casey's own phone, meanwhile, remains in the vicinity of the home until later that afternoon. And the Firefox browser activity immediately after the search goes to MySpace, a site associated with Casey. None of that proves who typed the words, but it doesn't take much to get there. And it is evidence the jury never received. 11 years later, Casey Anthony sits down for the Peacock series, "Where the Truth Lies." The filmmakers put that search directly to her. : It wasn't me. I can tell you that everyone had each other's passwords because it was a family computer. But I didn't make those searches. : Casey says George still could have made the search before leaving for work. Then the interviewer puts the 302 call to her. George's cell phone calling the house. : Casey's answer is that without his cell phone records, nobody can say where his phone was when that call was made. But there's another problem. That explanation only really works with the story Jose Baez gave the jury. : Kaylee accidentally drowned. George found her. He panicked and covered it up. And George, consumed by guilt, was searching for a way to kill himself. : Kaylee no longer tells that story. The same documentary asks her directly whether Kaylee could have drowned accidentally in the family pool. : No, she had no way of getting in the pool. : So years after the acquittal, Casey denies making the suffocation search. And she rejects the accidental drowning story that Baez later used to explain why George might have made the search. The very theory the jury found more plausible than that Casey suffocated. Kaylee. : So Casey Anthony says Kaylee did not drown. That still does not put Casey Anthony's hands on that keyboard, but it leaves a fact that never reached the jury. : On the afternoon Kaylee disappeared, someone on the Anthony family computer searched foolproof suffocation. The browser Casey normally used was active, and her MySpace activity followed. Kaylee. : George's cell phone remained near the house. Her conversation with her friend Amy ends 31 minutes before the search. And 11 minutes after it, George's cell phone is calling the house. : And the jury that decided whether she murdered her daughter never knew any of it. : For 11 years, Casey Anthony says almost nothing in public. Then, in her November 2022 sit-down on Peacock, she explains how she has lived. : I didn't receive any help or assistance from my biological family. I was given a little bit of money from my defense team. : Pat McKenna was lead investigator during my case. I've been working for Pat McKenna as his research assistant for ten and a half years. : And for the first time, she corroborates her defense attorney's most explosive accusations from more than a decade ago, which both her father and brother deny. : When I was eight years old. : My father started to come into my room at night. : I was physically hurt. Scared because I was physically hurt, and I can't tell Mommy what happened. She'll get mad at me. That's what I was told. : With my father, the abuse one day just stopped, just before my 12th birthday. My brother started coming in shortly after I turned 12. : And it stopped around the time I turned 15. It wasn't the same thing that happened with my father. My brother never raped me. No. No, absolutely not. But it was close enough. Close enough where there was a pattern. : In 2011, Jose Baez stood in front of that jury and told them exactly what happened, with a mourning and a place and dialogue in it. Kaylee drowned in the family pool on June 16th. : Casey came around the corner of the house and found her father holding the wet body of her daughter and told her it was all her fault. It was the story Baez put before the jury. : Eleven years later, the woman it was told for describes that mourning herself. She claims she woke up in her bed and Kaylee was out of her room. She says she went looking for Kaylee throughout the house when suddenly George appeared holding Kaylee. : I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. : I can see him standing there with her in his arms and hand her to me and telling me that it's my fault. : In that account, she does not mention the pool. She does not explain why her daughter is wet. She says George took Kaylee away and told, : In that account, she does not mention the pool. She says George took Kaylee away and told, you In his book, he concedes the rest. He never learned how the child got from that house to those woods. Casey explains why she behaved the way she did while her daughter was missing. She said it was part of putting on a happy face, something ingrained in her for her entire life, to protect the image of a perfect family, even in denial, like her pregnancy. I completely replicated my father's behavior during those 31 days. I watched him lie, manipulate, take money from people. I did all of those things. Casey Anthony said she was looking for her missing daughter. We don't know if that's true, but we do know this. Casey got a tattoo. You covered up your tattoo. Elavita, that was my fuck you to my family. I spent my entire life protecting our perfect, beautiful little family. That was a subconscious. That was a conscious way for me to speak out against all of it. Eight weeks after the trial ends, George and Cindy sit down together with Dr. Phil. He plays the verdict back for them. We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty, so say we all. Dated at Orlando, Orange County, Florida, on this 5th day of July, 2011, signed for person. They hear the same verdict, but George hears Casey walking free, and Cindy hears her daughter coming home. First one came through, they found her not guilty of first-degree murder. I remember I started to shake. I got this deepness feeling in my heart. I'm like, okay. But she's going to actually be in jail for a while to pay for Kaylee's death. And the second count comes back not guilty, and the third does too. Oh, my gosh, my daughter's going to walk out of here, and I'm never going to know about Kaylee. I felt she needs to have something. To be held accountable for. If that meant being in jail, that meant being in jail. Dr. Phil asks George whether, sitting there in that courtroom, he had wanted to hear a guilty on one of the first three counts. I did. I didn't want to see my daughter put to death. But I wanted her to be held responsible for my granddaughter. I did, and I still do. Then Dr. Phil turns to Cindy. What was your reaction? You wanted to hear. I was praying for all three not guilty, and I was elated. When all three of them came not guilty. Would she be welcome in your home? Not while I was there, no. That verdict broke more than people's faith in the justice system. George and Cindy's marriage cracked, too, though they never divorce. In 2018, they sat with A&E. There was different things that I got the blame for. But you know what? I didn't take $20 from your wallet. I didn't take this. I didn't take that. What about Casey going into Kaylee's savings account that I had started with her and taking money out? But George, Casey learned by example, and I. Wow, you're really. No, but I'm telling you, there was QLive for me for several years, and that's where our daughter got it. Years later, George agrees to take a televised polygraph. Whatever you make of polygraphs, one question stops him cold. Did you knowingly conceal Kaylee's whereabouts? No. I mean, I didn't know where she was at. Okay, so you're struggling with that one a little bit. Tell me why. Maybe it's because I was so close to her house that she was found. Right. I just was visualizing the woods at the mall. I'm sorry. The former FBI examiner giving the exam says George passes the polygraph test, that he is being truthful, including on the questions about whether he had concealed Kaylee's whereabouts. The woods at the end of Suburban Drive. begin just a few steps off the road. You step off the street and the ground falls away under the trees, tall pines overhead. Beneath them, thick palmetto tangled with vines and underbrush. When the rain comes, the low ground fills with dark water and turns the area into a swamp. The house where Kaylee lived is only a quarter mile away. People drive past these woods every day. They go to work, they come home, they get on with their lives. And for nearly six months, Kaylee was in there. Five months after Casey is acquitted in December 2011, a PBS photographer goes back to Suburban Drive to take pictures. By then, the woods have become a memorial to Kaylee, a shrine of kids' things built up over the years. Stuffed animals in the muck, stuffed animals propped against trees, hundreds of them. Balloons caught in the tree branches, notes tied to trees, notes written on the trees, notes written on the toys. There's a lot of Winnie the Pooh. Kaylee loved Winnie the Pooh. The blanket found with her remains had Pooh Bear on it, with Piglet riding on his shoulders. Some of these stuffed animals have been sitting in the woods for years, longer than Kaylee had been alive. The photographer sees a lifelike child's doll lying face down in the leaves. A group called "With Love Ministries" has been tending the Kaylee Memorial. That winter of 2011, they finally start clearing it out. It takes months. Anything that can still be used goes to shelters for women and children. The moldy toys, the ruined notes, everything the weather has gotten to, that goes in the trash. By the time they are done, there are more than 100 large trash bags full. After that, they ask people to stop bringing stuffed animals. If you want to leave something, bring flowers instead. One thing keeps coming back. In 2011, a man named Wally Goodnow drives up from Sarasota with a wooden cross and plants it near the place where Kaylee had been found. Someone takes it, so he builds another. That one disappears, too. So Wally makes a third cross. Someone takes that one, too. Five years later, on what would have been Kaylee's 11th birthday, Wally and his wife, Janine, come back with a fourth cross. This time, they put it 30 feet off the road and sink it deep into the ground. Wally says he keeps doing this, bringing the crosses, because he does not want people to forget the little girl who died there. "So many children go missing every day," he says. Then the fourth cross disappears, too. Wally keeps coming back. Twelve jurors said the state did not prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt. They were never told the state did not need to prove a cause of death. They never heard about the foolproof suffocation search. Jennifer Ford said it the morning after the verdict. "Not guilty is not exoneration." "Not guilty" doesn't mean innocent. Eighteen years later, we are left with a verdict with which few agree. And a mother who faced no condemnation from a jury, but was sentenced to a life of it from the public all around her. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.