Files untangle Fla. mom’ tales

Associated Press

Casey Anthony tried to give her missing 3-year-old daughter up for adoption before she was born, but her mother wouldn’t let her, according to legal documents that paint the 22-year-old Florida woman as a perplexed, scheming and unbalanced person who repeatedly defended obvious lies in police reports.

The 400 pages released by prosecutors this week leave little hope that Caylee Marie Anthony will be found safe. Anthony says her daughter has been missing since June 9, but she didn’t report it until more than a month later. She faces charges of child neglect, obstruction and making false statements.

The documents include a poem Anthony wrote July 7, eight days before she reported her daughter missing: “What is given, Can be taken away. Everyone lies. Everyone dies.”

Prosecutors have called her a person of interest in what is appearing to be a murder case. She was freed last week on $500,000 bail and is on home confinement awaiting trial. Despite searches using divers and cadaver dogs, police have been unable to locate the Orlando girl.

The documents show a pregnant Casey Anthony, who gave birth to Caylee when she was 19, considered offering the child for adoption.

Kiomare Torres Cruz, Casey Anthony’s friend from middle school through high school, said she once offered to take and care for Caylee because doctors told her she couldn’t have kids of her own. But Cruz said Cindy Anthony wouldn’t have it.

“I said ... ‘I’m strongly considering adopting the baby from you.’ [Casey Anthony] said, ‘That’s a good idea,’” Cruz said in a police transcript. “But then she called me back saying that her mom pretty much has told her that no, she needs to keep the baby and that she’s not giving it up for adoption. Even though she really did not want to have the baby.”

Caylee’s father died in a car crash a year after she was born and he never knew his daughter, Anthony’s family has said.

“I have spent every day since Monday, June 9, 2008, looking for my daughter,” Casey Anthony wrote in a sworn affidavit signed July 16, the day of her arrest. “I have lied and stolen from friends and family to do whatever I could by any means to find my daughter. I avoided calling the police or even notifying my family out of fear. I have been, and still am, afraid of what has or may happen to Caylee.”

Anthony told police repeatedly that she left the child with her baby sitter of roughly two years, then couldn’t find them when she returned from work at an Orlando theme park. However, no one had lived at that address in months, Anthony had no job and no woman by the baby sitter’s alleged name ever knew the mother and daughter, detectives say.

The documents detail at length the mistrust Anthony’s friends and family — particularly her mother, a recent fixture on TV talk shows — seemed to have of the woman. The family had lived in Trumbull County, Ohio.

Cindy Anthony first wanted her daughter arrested for allegedly disappearing with money and a family car for a month during which Caylee’s whereabouts are now uncertain.

She told a 911 dispatcher that the car, which had been towed after being abandoned at a check-cashing business, smelled like someone had died in it. A man at the tow yard told detectives the same thing.