Casey Anthony & the Impossibility Theorem

The verdict in the Casey Anthony murder trial ought to demonstrate for the public the viability of the mathematical Impossibility Theorem. A common way of explaining it is that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” It is impossible to be 100% certain of anything because there may be factors that are not obvious or not presently known. For example, let’s suppose you are in a room and need to create a list and description of everything in it. You do so by the normal white light spectrum that’s present. What if you change the light you’re seeing everything in to infrared or black light? Now the descriptions of everything will change. What if you magnify everything? Then maybe you can see otherwise microscopic objects or organisms.

I learned early on in my investigative career not to second-guess legal cases, especially criminal defense cases, when I cut my teeth on the Ginny Foat murder trial which took place in Metairie, Louisiana (the place where pirate Jean Lafitte is buried and that has the ignominy of having elected Nazi-KKK member David Duke to the legislature). If you listened to the media for the eleven months preceding the trial, they had Ginny, then-president of the California National Organization for Women (and now respected City Council member in Palm Springs), guilty as sin. However, because the defense team was scrupulous about not leaking our evidence to the press, when all was said and done, the jury came in not guilty on the first ballot after only 1 hour and 50 minutes of deliberations.

Ginny’s autobiography, Never Guilty, Never Free tells a lot about her life and trial, but it didn’t go into the details of the investigation conducted by myself, Gary Eldredge of New Orleans, and Carl Van Wagenen of New York. Nor did the press or other books written on the trial ever, to my knowledge, ever discuss the evidence that we couldn’t use so the jury and the public never heard about it.

The murder had taken place in 1965. The case went to trial in 1982. There was a letter written in the early 70’s which, when read by anybody of normal sensibilities, indicated that Ginny knew nothing about the 1965 murder until her abusive criminal husband told her he’d killed people before while trying to strangle her to death.

We couldn’t use the letter because there was no way to authenticate it. My investigation included two assignments in our desperate efforts to get it authenticated so that it could be admitted into evidence. First, I had to find the person to whom the letter had been written. Her first name was easy. Her surname should also have been easy, even though Ginny wasn’t sure of how to spell it. It was phonetically and ordinarily, either Sayre or Sayer. I spent literally months trying to find her. Finally, it turned out that her last name was a bizarre spelling that nobody would ever have guessed….and after all that, she didn’t want to get involved. Testifying to save somebody’s life was simply too inconvenient for her and we couldn’t subpoena her from California to Louisiana.

The other way we tried to authenticate the letter is that the paper it was written on was extremely rare. This is dating myself, but in the early years of public air travel, airlines used to give you gift packs including elegant airline stationary. In this case, the letter had been written on American Airlines stationary while Ginny was flying out of California to get away from her abusive husband who’d just tried to kill her.

Unfortunately, the records of American Airlines that would have shown its purchase of the stationary had been wiped out by a flood. I showed the letter to my friend Bernie Sapiro, who’d been President of District Council 2 of the Printing Specialties and Paper Products Union (now part of the Graphic Communications International Union and the Teamsters). Bernie took one look at the letter and told me that it was very rare paper: 25% cotton “Plover Bond.” There were only a few factories in the United States that made the paper, but unfortunately, none of them had their sales records going back far enough.

We couldn’t use the letter.

Another important piece of testimony we didn’t get to use was the testimony of John Carr, who’d saved Ginny’s life from her abusive husband. He was a neighbor who heard the commotion and rushed to her aid while John Sidote was strangling her. At the time of trial, John was horribly sick. I got him medication to control symptoms that would have prevented him from flying, got him and his wife on the airplane; unfortunately it arrived just after the jury verdict came in and obviously too late to testify.

To this day, I get asked by people whether or not Ginny was “really guilty.” She wasn’t. I say that with every grain of conviction I have, because I know about the evidence that wasn’t admissible, but nevertheless entirely truthful.

As Casey Anthony’s lawyers have pointed out, many attorneys and pundits have tried her case to death in the press. But what the public doesn’t know it doesn’t know and people should refrain from second guessing the jury unless they somehow have the ability to delve into the prosecution and defense files to ascertain what didn’t come out in court or the press. There is ALWAYS something that remains unseen after any trial.

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