A day: sublimely evil, ridiculously beautiful

The story was told in a small photograph of Casey Anthony on the bottom of the front page of The New York Times last week. Gone was the demure young defendant with hair pulled back in a ponytail. Suddenly, the day after her acquittal on charges of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, she was revealed, long hair slung seductively over one shoulder, a creepy smile on her face.

I didn’t think much about this story until the astounding acquittal. A mother fails to report a child’s disappearance for a month. The maternal grandmother and grandfather sound an alert, saying they haven’t seen their grandchild and that the trunk of their daughter’s car smells like a decomposing body. During the month her daughter was missing, Casey Anthony stepped out with friends, partying and hitting the local nightspots. Eventually the child’s remains were found in the woods, with duct tape across the skull.

In time, first-degree murder charges were brought against the 25-year-old mother.

During the years of legal preparation and the weeks of the trial, apparently everyone lied. The grandfather attempted suicide; during the trial, the grandmother helped neutralize potentially damning evidence against her daughter by explaining away the fact that someone in the house had looked up “chloroform” on the Internet. The prosecution suggested that Casey had drugged her daughter and then suffocated her with duct tape. Casey’s mother said under oath that she looked up chloroform out of concern that her dogs were getting weak from some chemical in the backyard.

Some of the jurors said they felt sickened by their own verdict. They said that the prosecution did not give them the evidence they needed for a conviction. In a few days, Casey Anthony will go free, free to live her life, and of course free to have more children.

We think about this and continue to write about it because mothers who go dancing when their children go “missing” threaten our sense of ourselves. We are all human, we are members of the same club, yet some of us are capable of extraordinarily sick behavior.