Jailhouse Conversations to be Released

July 29, 2008 — -- Casey Anthony, mother of missing Florida toddler Caylee Anthony, was in court today in an unsuccessful bid to get the court to restrict the public release of jailhouse conversations and visitation videos between her and her family.

Anthony is being held in an Orange County jail on $500,000 bond after police named her a "person of interest" in the mid-June disappearance of her daughter, Caylee Anthony, 2, which was not reported to police until July 15.

Judge Stan Strickland agreed with Eric Dunlap, attorney for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, that denying the release of the conversations, which are of public record, would be a violation of the First Amendment.

Such a restriction, Dunlap said, would also set a "pretty dangerous precedent" of stripping the Sheriff's Department's power over the release of information that could greatly affect their investigation into the missing little girl.

Anthony's attorney, Jose Baez, who filed the motion to stop release of the material Monday afternoon, said that the tapes could hurt his client's presumption of innocence and right to a fair trail and impede the search for the missing toddler.

"If this person is out there and sees this information is released," Baez said referring to a possible kidnapper, "they may abscond, take the child even further, or even worse."

Judge Strickland said the information must be released, saying Baez was attempting to restrict the public's source of information to just the Anthony family and himself and was asking everyone to "trust" them.

Two conversations between Casey Anthony and her brother Lee were released on Monday but revealed few clues other than Casey Anthony's expressing her "gut feeling" that Caylee is OK and "close to home."

Anthony is currently being held on charges including child neglect and obstructing an investigation, but her bond was set unusually high as prosecutors said the case was turning into "what is looking to be a homicide investigation."

Casey Anthony, a "Person of Interest"

Casey Anthony was arrested on July 16 after police learned that she had not reported her child missing until a month after the toddler vanished and Anthony was, according to police, misleading about both where she worked and where the child was.

She was named a "person of interest" by Officer Yuri Mellich of the missing persons unit of the Orange County, Fla., Sheriff's Office during a bond hearing last week based partly on "evidence of decomposition," including hairs the same length and color as Caylee's, that was found in the trunk of a car last driven by Anthony.

In a previously released 911 call from the child's grandmother that was made last week, Cindy Anthony, she claims that the car smelled "like there's been a dead body" in it.

Plus, a police dog trained to seek out the decomposition of human bodies also alerted its handler to the car trunk.

Cindy Anthony has since discounted the comments she made in the 911 call, claiming that the smell could easily have been garbage in the car.

Casey Anthony told authorities that Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, the toddler's babysitter, has the girl, but police have been unable to track down Fernandez-Gonzalez or even determine whether she exists.

Frustrating, Curious Investigation

Since their investigation was launched on July 15, some Orange County officers have expressed their frustration over following leads based on incomplete information, half-truths and many accidental -- and some deliberate -- lies.

In the original version of events, Caylee's mother reported her missing to police, saying she had dropped the child off at a babysitter's house on June 9. When she went to pick the child up, both the child and the babysitter had disappeared.

Casey's parents both corroborated the story until the bond hearing last Wednesday, when Cindy Anthony said that the last time she saw the child was not on June 9, but on June 15, and that she had just been confused.

When police questioned Casey Anthony about her daughter prior to her arrest, they say Anthony misled them multiple times.

When she took police to the apartment where she said Fernandez-Gonzalez lived, they found that no one had lived in the apartment for five months. Efforts to track down Fernandez-Gonzalez have proved fruitless.

"I am not disregarding that this person may or may not exist," Mellich said during his testimony. "But Casey Anthony's friends and family have never met this person."

Casey also claimed to have worked for Universal Studios, but admitted later that that was not true.

But what unsettles Orange County Deputy Sheriff Carlos Padilla more than Anthony's imprecise information is her overall attitude.

"She has shown no emotion," Padilla told ABCNews. "That's unusual. At the time of the interviews ... she didn't seem concerned and that made this case much stranger."

"She spoke to deputies like she was talking about baseball. How do you get through to someone like that?" he added.

But with a homicide trial possibly brewing on the horizon, and the results of DNA tests on the newfound hairs pending, the Anthony family has not given up hope.

"I don't sleep, so I don't know what day it is. It's all one day," Cindy Anthony said at a previous court appearance. "I am prepared to do anything I can to find Caylee."