Cindy Anthony, whose daughter Casey was acquitted in 2011 of murdering 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, says she has “never been the same” since the trial that tore her family apart and made them household names.
Cindy appeared on “Crime Scene Confidential” Tuesday night and was reunited with a crime scene investigator who helped find Caylee Anthony’s body, People reported. Cindy, getting emotional, told the host that she knew the crime scene investigators “didn’t want to leave until you found every single [bone].”
“It means a lot,” she added.
Cindy was interviewed by Alina Burroughs, who was one of the crime scene investigators on the case.
“I didn’t know how Cindy was going to react to me,” Burroughs told People. “I mean, I was a prosecution witness, so she could’ve seen me as someone who wanted to lock her daughter up. But she was very gracious. And I think in some ways, the interview gave her some closure.”
Cindy said the interview that she and her daughter Casey didn’t speak for many years after the trial, but have recently started speaking again sporadically.
“It’s hard for her to speak out about this case,” Burroughs told People. “She really went through hell and back, and she’s never been the same.”
It was Cindy Anthony who called the police to report her granddaughter Caylee missing, after the 2-year-old hadn’t been seen for 31 days and her mother, Casey, kept giving different reasons for the whereabouts of her daughter. When Cindy called 9-1-1, she said her daughter’s car smelled “like someone died,” but later said at trial she meant it as a “figure of speech.”
Caylee’s remains were eventually located in the woods behind the Anthony home, and Casey was charged with first-degree murder and lesser charges, including allegations she lied to police about a non-existent nanny and the whereabouts of Caylee. Casey was ultimately acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges, but found guilty on four counts of lying to police.
Though Casey was found not guilty of killing her daughter, last year, a juror in the trial said the case “haunts me to this day,” People reported in May 2021.
“I think of the case at least once, every single day,” the juror told the outlet. “It was such a strange summer. I knew that there was public interest in the case, but it wasn’t until after I was sequestered that I realized that the whole world was watching.”
Now, however, the juror told People that he focuses more on Caylee Anthony.
“Every time I see her face or hear her name, I get a pit in my stomach,” he told the outlet. “It all comes flooding back. I think about those pictures of the baby’s remains that they showed us in court. I remember Casey. I even remember the smell of the courtroom.”
Ten years earlier, after the trial, this same juror had told People that “Generally, none of us liked Casey Anthony at all.”
“She seems like a horrible person,” he added, “But the prosecutors did not give us enough evidence to convict. They gave us a lot of stuff that makes us think that she probably did something wrong, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.”
He also told the outlet that the acquittal bothered jurors at the time.
“And then we sat there for a few minutes and were like, ‘Holy crap, we are letting her go free,'” he said in 2011. “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.'”