Finding Caylee's Crime Scene At 3AM
-by Jeremy Gloff
-appeared on TheNewGay.net
-July 11th, 2011

Something drew me there. Part of it was morbid curiousity. Part of it was my fascination with criminal psychology. Part of it was my investment in the hype machine. America’s greatest soap opera this year didn’t cost a million dollars to cast...it cost the life of a little girl. Bombshell tonight.

How that little girl captured the heart of America. That little girl (and her family) are our neighbors. Cindy Anthony is one of my friend’s parents in a different body. I’ve seen George Anthony (in a different body) mowing his lawn with his shirt off. When the quintessential (troubled) family next door reveals itself to be a cauldron of dysfunction and murder we are all peeping through the blinds with our ear on the peephole. Myself included, guilty as charged.

I become teary-eyed when I think too hard about what happened to Caylee Anthony. I am aware it happens to children every day. I am aware there’s millions of people in need of this energy all over the world. And despite this my heart still aches for this one iconic deceased little girl. We will never know if she would grow up to be genius, a thief, a bride, a prostitute, or a mother herself. She will be forever imprinted on our minds as that untainted tiny little child. Had Casey Anthony been murdered at three...the country would have fallen in love with her too. But Casey Anthony lived long enough to let her daughter go missing for 31 day without reporting it. And so we hate her.

A couple years ago I retraced the footsteps of serial killer Aileen Wournos around Florida. Florida is often ridiculed for being a land of prune-faced retirees or redneck imbeciles. That’s not the Florida I live in. I float around in a nighttime full of moonlit swampy magic and terror. I spent one August searching out a country road in the middle of the state that supposedly smelled like meth labs. It did. There’s never a shortage of mysteries to chase and discover.

The thick humidity cloaks my skin and protects me from the frost-bitten chills of my past. Florida is the freak show I get to watch from the front row. I’m always in awe and intrigued. Caylee Anthony and her legacy is yet another strange and bizarre patch on this quilt. I knew an hour and a half from my bedroom candles were glowing in the middle of the night illuminating Winnie The Pooh and his friends. The same thick forest that housed death now housed hundreds of stuffed dolls and helium balloons. I had to go there.

And so at 3 am last night, after a performance, four of us went. The air was still and the trees were cautiously majestic against the sky. The first drive down that road only yielded traffic cones on the left and trees on the right. If you blinked you’d miss it all and end up at a dead end near an elementary school.

U-turn. Passing by the woods a second time I noticed a glow emanating from within the trees and brush. Squinting my eyes revealed a glowing mound of white fur and silver balloons. We parked. A police officer was omnipresent - friendly enough to let us slither into the woods after we assured him we harbored no ill intentions.

And there we stood. In this spot a beautiful child’s bones were once discarded in a laundry bag. The same very spot that was on the minds of millions of Americans. The plush mountain of grief and sentiment quietly rested in these 3:30 am Florida woods. The spirit of a dead child and the evil voodoo that took her lingered within the still tree branches. One other man was also there. He’d driven two hours. He had to be there too.

After we left the woods the glow remained and the moon continued to bounce off the inky branches. We drove by the Anthony’s house. It was one minute away and some change. Cindy and George Anthony may have been sleeping inside with terrible and troubled night terrors.

We drove back towards the heart of Orlando. All those streetlamps and still so much darkness.