Pathological: The Casey Anthony Story — The People Who Do Not Exist — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

0:00Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest of the other two. We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more. So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind. Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

0:40Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. Kissimmee, Florida, about 20 miles south of Orlando. Middle of July, 2028. It's 95 degrees and humid. A 37-year-old woman named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez lives here with her six children.

1:20She works and pays her rent herself. Until this week, no one outside her neighborhood had any reason to know her name. Then police find her name in the records at Sawgrass Apartments, the complex where Casey Anthony says her missing daughter's babysitter lives. Zenaida had been to the complex three months earlier looking for an apartment. She filled out a guest card and left her phone number. That is enough to send investigators to her home. Sheriff's deputies from Orange County knock on her door and ask if they can come in and look for a missing two-year-old girl. Zenaida is shocked, but she lets them in.

1:58She has nothing to do with the kidnapping, as she tells CBS, so she tells police to check the house. Talk to my kids, walk around, look inside, and that's exactly what they did. They went in, they looked around, and even check the bathroom, make sure she wasn't in there. The deputies are searching for Kaylee Marie Anthony, who has been missing for a month. The night before, Kaylee's mother, Casey, gave detectives the name of the babysitter whom she says has her daughter, Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez. Deputies go to Zenaida with the obvious question. Does she know Casey Anthony? Does she know Kaylee Anthony?

2:34Has she ever babysat for them? Zenaida shakes her head and says she's never met Casey Anthony, never seen her before, and never worked as a nanny, which pretty much ends the conversation. Investigators still have one more way to check. That afternoon in a parking lot at Universal Studios, Sergeant John Allen is going through pictures with Casey Anthony. He has run the name Zenaida Gonzalez through the state driver's license database and pulled the photos of every woman in Florida who matches the age range Casey has given them. Sergeant Allen asks Casey to find her nanny. She goes through the pictures, but none of them is the woman.

3:15So Alan draws her attention to the woman sheriff's deputies interviewed that morning. He shows Casey Zenaida's picture. Casey Anthony looks at a photograph and says, she's too old. Police rule Zenaida out. She has nothing to do with the missing little girl. But as records from the investigation drip out to the public, Zenaida's phone number is among them. And that creates a problem. I got phone calls from everywhere. And they started threatening me, calling me names. The calls keep coming. She says she loses her job and then her home. She took everything away from me. I lost my life. You know, I have no privacy.

3:55I didn't know anything else. I said to her, why would you do that to somebody? Why can you cause so much harm? Being cleared by the police does not put her life back together. She had done nothing except share a name with someone Casey Anthony invented. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential.

4:18Founded by four PhD 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 OS01, their proprietary peptide, which is the foundation of every product they make. The OS01 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.

5:01For a limited time, try OneSkin 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. It is the year 2006 when the invented Zenaida Gonzalez first appears in Casey Anthony's life. That is two years before Kaylee goes missing. Casey Anthony is 19. Her daughter Kaylee is a few months old, and she has just gotten engaged to a man named Jesse Grund. Jesse's family watches her three-month-old daughter Kaylee three days a week as a favor.

5:49His father, Richard Grund, is a Pentecostal minister. He remembers the overshare when Casey tells him she found a sitter. I found Zenaida Gonzalez, and she watches my friend Jeffrey Hopkins' son, Zachary. And Zachary and Kaylee play together. They love to be together, so this will work out great. Jeffrey Hopkins is real, but the story Casey built around him is not. He grew up in Orlando. He knows Casey's brother Lee from school. He and Casey know each other, but barely. When they passed each other in the hallways in high school, she always had a big smile for him. The Jeffrey Hopkins invented by Casey lives in Jacksonville.

6:30He's a widower with a little boy named Zach. And Zanny, the nanny, watches Zach and Kaylee together at Jeffrey's house while Casey is at work at Universal Studios or whenever she needs child care. Casey also says Jeff is romantically interested in her. Her family is supposed to meet Jeff and little Zach more than once. But they never do. Casey always has a reason why. She keeps using Jeff's name to explain where the nanny came from. She does so even after being fired from Universal Studios in April 2006. Casey keeps getting up and leaves the house for work. By the middle of 2006, Casey has a nanny no one has met, tied to a man she barely knows, while she keeps leaving home for a job she no longer has.

7:19She keeps it up for the next two years. But where is Kaylee going all these days, if not to the babysitters? Monday, June 16, 2008. Cindy Anthony leaves for work as a nurse before her granddaughter is awake. George gives Kaylee breakfast around 7.30 a.m. At lunchtime, George is on the recliner with the television on. At 12.50 p.m., Casey comes through the living room with her daughter. She tells her dad that she has a work meeting and that Kaylee will be staying over at the nanny's and that she has already cleared it with her mom. None of this is true, which George does not know. A commercial comes on TV and he checks his watch for the time.

8:03What George does next, per his own account, is walk both of his girls out to the car. JoJo is what Kaylee calls her grandpa. George says he holds the car door open while Casey buckles Kaylee into the back seat, and he blows her a kiss, telling her that he loves her. He says, Jojo, we'll see you later. And Kaylee says, bye, Jojo. George leaves for his security job at about 2 o 'clock that afternoon. What happens over the next few hours has never been firmly established. That afternoon, someone on the Anthony family computer uses Firefox to search the phrase, foolproof suffocation. Firefox is the browser Casey primarily used.

8:49The search came from a password-protected user account on the computer. No one can establish who actually types the search. Casey's phone pings off of the towers near her parents' house for most of the afternoon. Then, a little after four, Casey Anthony makes a flurry of calls. Her mother, her father's office, her boyfriend, Tony Lazaro, Jesse Grund. About ten calls in 15 minutes, six of them within about four minutes, and almost no one picks up. At 4.18 p.m., in the middle of all that calling, her phone stops using the tower by the Anthony house and starts using a different one, suggesting she is on the move.

9:33The next time anyone sees her, three and a half hours have passed. At 7.45 p.m., Casey Anthony and Tony Lazaro are seen on a blockbuster video store security camera renting a movie. He has his arm around her. Kaylee is not with them. During the trial, Lazaro is asked how Casey seemed that night. How would you describe her demeanor? The way she was every day. Which was? Happy. Happy to see me. Having a grand old time. On this date, at any time that you saw her that night, did she ever cry? No. Did she ever act scared? Nope. Tony Lazaro shares an apartment on Sutton Place with two other guys, Clint House and Cameron Campana.

10:28They are DJs who throw parties on Friday nights. Casey starts coming around that spring, and three weeks in, she brings her daughter. Kaylee's welcomed and loved there, as Clint later tells Investigation Discovery. Kaylee was just the cutest two-year-old little girl that you could possibly imagine. The first time she came in, she came walking through the front door wearing some big sunglasses, and she just looked up at us, and she was like, what's up, dudes? Kaylee was extremely intelligent for a two-year-old. She knew how to count up to ten in English and in Spanish. She knew her colors, she knew her shapes.

11:10Kaylee comes over three times a week, sometimes more. Then, the week of June 16, 2008, she stops. Clint tells Investigation Discovery they asked Casey about Kaylee. The middle of June, it just came Casey coming over. Whenever we asked Casey where Kaylee was, she either said she was with the nanny or with the parents. But there was nothing that stood out that made me think that something may have happened. Tony's other roommate, Cameron Campana, notices something that summer he will later think was strange. Every time Casey's phone rings, she steps outside to take the call, never in the apartment.

11:52He watches her through the window, pacing around in the grass. He has no idea who she's talking to. Many of those calls are from her mother, asking where Kaylee is. Casey always has an answer, and it is never to bring Kaylee to see her grandmother. Friday, June 20th, four days since her father watched her drive away. Casey has told Cindy that she and Kaylee are in Tampa at the Busch Gardens theme park for a work-related conference. She says she's with Zannie and Zannie's friend Juliette Lewis, and Juliet's little girl, Annabelle. They are supposed to be home already. Now the conference has run an extra day.

12:33That night, Casey is photographed at Fusion Ultra Lounge in Longwood, just north of Orlando. She's wearing a short blue dress and tall black boots, and she is out on the dance floor. Cindy keeps calling. The excuses keep changing. Monday, June 23rd. It's been a week since George said goodbye to Kaylee in the backseat. Casey promises to be home. Instead, she calls to say the nanny has been in a car accident and is in Tampa General Hospital with a concussion and that she and the other girls and the kids are staying there until Zanny's family arrives. Friday, June 27th, Casey is supposed to come back.

13:16Instead, she is allegedly now in Jacksonville, seeing whether she and her dear friend Jeff Hopkins have a future, and her car has developed problems as well. She claims Jeff does not want her driving be 141 miles to Orlando in it, so he has put it in the shop. That same Friday, the white Pontiac Sunfire, registered to Casey's parents, runs out of gas on East Colonial Drive in Orlando. Casey, who is not in Jacksonville, pulls the car into the lot of a payday loan store called Amscott, parks it next to a dumpster, and leaves. She tells Tony her father will come and get it. She does not tell her father about it.

14:00Three days go by. Amscott decides the car has been abandoned and calls for a tow. Kaylee's car seat is still in the back. The following weekend, Casey tells her mom she, yet again, cannot come home. Good old Jeff Hopkins' mother, as it turns out, is remarrying, and there is a brunch on Sunday that she must attend. Cindy stops asking to see Kaylee and starts asking just to speak to her. But it is never the right time. Kaylee's napping. Kaylee's getting ready for bed. Wednesday, July 2nd, 16 days since anyone in the Anthony family has seen Kaylee. Casey goes to a tattoo parlor on South Orange Avenue in Orlando called Cast Iron Tattoo, where she's a regular and has two words put on her left shoulder blade.

14:52Bella Vita, Italian for beautiful life. Hours after the tattoo, Casey posts on her MySpace page writing, quote, On the worst of days, remember the words spoken. Trust no one, only yourself. With great power comes great consequences. What is given can be taken away. Everyone lies. Everyone dies. Life will never be easy. That night, Casey is out at a bar on the east side of Orlando called the Waterford Lake Alehouse. And as coincidence would have it, standing in that bar is the actual Jeff Hopkins. They recognize each other. They catch up. They trade phone numbers. Jeff has no idea this woman has spent weeks describing his imaginary life and her role in it to her mother.

15:45Cindy calls Casey seven times that night and again the next morning. She hears nothing back. On July 3rd, Casey finally picks up. She tells her mother Kaylee is at Universal Studios at an event for the Children of Employees. Casey would love to invite her, but it's only employees who are invited. Cindy shows up anyway and calls Casey from the Universal parking lot. Casey tells Cindy the plan has changed and that she and Kaylee are on their way to Jacksonville to see Jeff Hopkins and his son, Zach. That day, Cindy creates a post on MySpace. She titles it, My Kaylee is Missing. She writes, quote, She came into my life unexpectedly, just as she has left me.

16:31This precious little angel from above gave me strength and unconditional love. Now she is gone, and I don't know why. All I am guilty of is loving her and providing her a safe home. Jealousy has taken her away. Jealousy from the one person that should be thankful for all of the love and support given to her. The jury will only hear about Cindy's MySpace post. When she takes the stand to trial, the judge will bar Cindy from reading her daughter's posts aloud. They will not hear Casey's everyone lies, everyone dies post from the previous day. Later that night, on July 3rd, Casey's brother Lee hops from bar to bar in downtown Orlando looking for his sister on a quest to help find Kaylee.

17:19He's using Casey's friends' online posts to figure out where they are. Someone tips Casey off. Lee misses her by minutes. Tuesday, July 8th, Casey drives her friend Amy Huizenga and Amy's roommate to the airport for a trip to Puerto Rico. Amy leaves her checkbook in the car. Over the next week, Casey writes a number of checks on that account. She buys groceries, clothing, lingerie, cherries, orange juice, and a six-pack of beer, among various other things. but nothing for a toddler. As Casey shops, Kaylee is nowhere to be seen in any of the surveillance footage. Tuesday, July 15th, Amy flies home.

18:06That morning, Casey cashes one more of Amy's checks, $250 made out to herself. Then she drives Amy's car out to the airport to collect her, and on the way back she tells Amy that she spoke to Kaylee that morning. Amy does not yet know her friend has drained her bank account. That same day, George Anthony is at the post office picking up a certified letter from Johnson's Wrecker Service. George and Cindy drive out to the tow yard together. George gets within about three feet of the white Pontiac and stops. The stench is awful. It is also familiar. from his police days. He opens the driver's door.

18:50Kaylee's car seat is still in the back. George wants to call the police from the tow yard, but Cindy refuses. She wants to find her daughter first and give her a chance to explain what's going on. That night, going through what was left in the car, Cindy Anthony finds a phone number for a young woman named Amy. She has never met. Amy tells her where Casey is. Before the night is over, Cindy Anthony will call the police several times. It is now July 16th. Kaylee has not been seen in a month. Detectives start checking Casey's changing story piece by piece. Early that morning, Detective Yuri Melek takes a recorded statement from Casey Anthony and asks her to describe the woman who has her daughter.

19:37Is she Puerto Rican? Is she Dominican? Is she white? She's mixed. She's black and Puerto Rican. Is there any underlying cause to why Zanida would have taken your job? Nothing that... Does she ever make any statements to you about... Only how much she loves Kaylee and how great of a kid she is. The imaginary caregiver named Zannie is 25, 5 '7", 140 pounds, dark curly hair and brown eyes. She has two roommates and she babysits a second child in addition to Kaylee. And she has an address. Detective Malik goes there only to find the apartment that has been vacant since February. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts.

20:26And 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 forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of 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.

21:14So 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. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget.

21:52Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. Later that afternoon, detectives bring Casey to Universal Studios. They have visited every address she gave them, and they follow her around the park on a brisk walk to a non-existent office where Casey finally admits, this has been a wild goose chase. She does not work there. Soon after, Casey Anthony is under arrest. That same day, sheriff's deputies knock on the door of boyfriend Tony's apartment on Sutton Place.

22:34Tony is there, and so is his roommate, Clint House. Clint describes the shock of that moment to investigation discovery in 2017. It was very nerve-wracking to have, you know, 20 Orlando PD inside of your home asking you about the disappearance of a missing child. Tony was just absolutely surprised. He had no idea where Kaylee was. He was just as shocked as the rest of us. Hours later, Casey calls home from the Orange County Jail. She has seen her mother on television talking about the case. The jailhouse recording is later played aloud in court with Cindy in the witness box. Casey? Mom. Hey, sweetie.

23:20Well, I just saw your nice little cameo on TV. Which one? What do you mean, which one? Which one? I did four different ones, and I don't know. I haven't seen them all. I've only seen one or two so far. You don't know what my involvement is in stuff? Casey. Mom. What? No. I don't know what your involvement is, sweetheart. You're not telling me where she's at. Because I don't fucking know where she's at. Are you kidding me? Casey, don't waste your call. No. I'm in holler at me. Waste my call sitting in, oh, the jail. in where her bunks are? Whose fault is you sitting in the jail? You're blaming me that you're sitting in the jail?

24:01Blame yourself for telling lies. You mean it's not your fault? What do you mean it's not your fault, sweetheart? If you'd have told them the truth and not lied about everything, they wouldn't... Do me a favor. Just tell me what Tony's number is. I don't want to talk to you right now. Forget it. Cindy wants to find out whether Casey is really hiding Kaylee somewhere to punish Cindy. She's not the only one who thinks so, and it would mean the little girl is alive. Casey can receive visitors at the Orange County Jail. They can sit in separate rooms, look at each other over a video feed, and speak over a wired telephone.

24:34Everything Casey and her guests say is being recorded. Some of it will be released to the press and broadcast nationwide. Lee, George, and Cindy come to see Casey nine days after she's arrested. Lee goes first, and George and Cindy speak to Casey together. What's that t-shirt? I didn't get a chance to ask him, you know, other things. Kaylee's picture's on the back. Is it? Can Dad show me the shirt? Turn around so she can see. It's the Never Lose Hope Foundation. Do you see it? I can see part of it, yeah. Have you seen me? And then it has the information on how to contact. Okay. Casey, you don't realize that the whole United States is looking for Kaylee?

25:20I know that, Mom. Her cover's going to be on People magazine in a few days. Okay. Everybody is looking for her. Oh, good. Everybody is looking for her. Are we going to be able to find her, do you think? I hope we can, Mom. Cindy goes on to ask Casey about pictures of Zannie's apartment, anything they can find that would help find Kaylee. This is more than a week after police found the real Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez and quickly realized she was not involved. On tape, Cindy presses her daughter and then gives her an out. I know the pictures with Kaylee in Zannie's apartment. Is Zannie's apartment the ones with the drums?

26:08She had a drum set, yes. The one in the picture?

26:16I think there are even other pictures. I told Lee to look through everything. Okay, is that Zanny's apartment? Because I know whose apartment it is. Is it Zanny's apartment? That exact apartment, no, that was Ricardo's apartment. It was set up a lot like Zanny's apartment. Okay. Do we have any pictures of Zanny's apartment? Alina, I already talked about this. I don't know what could be. They do not find any because Kaylee has never been to Zanny the nanny's apartment. it does not exist. On October 14, 2008, three months after Kaylee was last seen, a grand jury sits for two hours of testimony and two hours of deliberation.

27:01George Anthony is one of six witnesses to speak. The grand jury indicts Casey Anthony for first-degree murder, plus aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and four counts of lying to law enforcement. No one is arguing that Kaylee is still alive. No one has found her body either. That is exactly why on the 3rd of December, the state decides not to seek the death penalty in the case against Casey Anthony. Florida law requires aggravating factors beyond the murder itself to put the death penalty on the table. Without a body or a reasonable assessment of how Kaylee died, the state did not have a strong argument for it.

27:43That's according to one of the prosecutors on this case, Jeff Ashton, who will later write about the experience at length. The one aggravating factor his team has in hand is that Kaylee was, quote, a child in the care of a caregiver when she was killed. While this is horrific, it does not typically push a crime into death penalty territory, not on its own. On December 11th, 2008, eight days after the state attorney's decision on the death penalty in Orlando, a meter reader named Roy Cronk steps into a swamp. He is working in the suburb where Cindy and George live. He notices a black plastic bag.