True Crime Database

Caylee Anthony

When a child is killed and receives a huge amount of media coverage, the public tends to react very strongly. After all, children are a beacon of hope, the future and the symbol of pure innocence – how evil would someone have to be to want to hurt a child? The case of Caylee Anthony was the pinnacle of this trend, especially with the perpetrator widely believed to be Caylee's own mother, Casey Anthony. Times magazine labelled the subsequent trial "the social media trial of the century". The case has left a shocking taste in the mouths of the US population anyway, with a verdict just as shocking as OJ Simpson's trial.

Caylee Anthony was the only daughter of Casey Anthony. Casey Anthony was considered to be fun and personable, very sociable among her peers. However, Casey started having a track record of lying, even just unnecessary white lies, which continued onwards into her adult life. One huge instance of this was when Cindy and George, Casey's parents, turned up at her graduation to find out that Casey had not been attending class and she was short of enough credits to be able to graduate. Casey had in fact led them on to believe that she was graduating with the rest of her classmates.

Casey also became pregnant at age 19 – to this day, no one knows who the father is, but she lied about being pregnant for months and told people she was just putting on weight and maintaining that she was a virgin. Her parents had always suspected it, and it wasn't until a long way into the pregnancy that Casey revealed the truth. Casey consistently named several men, former lovers, as the father, yet constantly changed her mind about who she thought she was.

On August 9th 2005, Caylee Anthony was born. As a young mother with no job or money of her own to put behind her, Casey decided to raise Caylee in the home of Cindy and George, who remained a very active part of Caylee's life. Casey seemed to be very hesitant about being a mother and wanted to give Caylee up for adoption, but was discouraged by Cindy. Casey had also lied to her fiance, Jesse Grund, saying that she was Caylee's father. However, the timing of Caylee's conception made it incredibly unlikely and a DNA test proved that she was not his child. The engagement was called off and Casey was left to raise her daughter as a single mother.

Cindy and George doted on Caylee, and tried to be as supportive as they could for Casey. However, Casey would often put her wants over Caylee's needs. On June 16th 2008, following an argument regarding over the way Casey was raising her daughter, Casey left with Caylee to go and stay at a friends house in Orlando. Cindy and George did not see the two of them for 31 days. Cindy made continuous phone calls to Casey, however, she consistently had an excuse as to why Caylee could not come to the phone. Usually, Casey would say that she was away on business, or that Caylee was with her nanny, a woman called Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, Zanny for short. In the meantime, Casey was photographed as partying, getting drunk and engaging in all sorts of wild behaviour. She even got a tattoo reading "bella vita", meaning beautiful life in Italian.

On July 13th, George and Cindy received a certified letter from the post office stating that Casey's car was in a tow yard and needed to be picked up. When George went to the tow yard two days later, he was hit with a foul odour; his initial thought was that there was a dead body in the car. The boot contained a plastic bag, but there was no body. Concerned, Cindy drove to Casey's friend who she was staying with. When Cindy asked where Caylee was, Casey finally confessed to not knowing where Caylee was and had been missing for 31 days and had never reported it. Cindy ended up reporting her granddaughter's disappearance.

Casey's initially told police that she believed that Caylee had been taken by Zanny the nanny and sent police on a wild goose chase looking for her. There was a woman called Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez living in Florida, but she was not a nanny and had no connection to Casey or Caylee. Casey was forced to reveal that she made the nanny up completely. Police were desperate to look for leads or some sort of idea where Caylee could be. They decided to search Casey's place of work, Universal Studios, and led police around the theme park until she suddenly revealed she had been fired there and had not worked there for a long time. Casey was arrested as a suspect in her daughter's disappearance, child neglect, giving false statements to law enforcement and obstruction of a criminal investigation.