reviewsnthoughts

As someone who has been around for over 40 years, I’ve seen many television news stories and read many news articles about man’s inhumanity to man.  Wars and other acts of repression, mostly - World War II, the Holocaust, the rise and fall of empires and political movements - but also of the “closer to home” tragedies - the troubled couples whose stormy relationships end in murder-suicide, say, or the battered spouse who, after years of being physically and emotionally abused, ends up killing his/her tormentor in order to survive.

While it is true that I can become emotionally overwrought when I see media reports of human suffering in the grand or small scale (Remember 9-11-2001?), I find it almost impossible to watch Nancy Grace on CNN’s Headline News as of late.

In case you’ve been living somewhere with no access to mass media or even the Internet, the former prosecutor/anti-crime crusader’s Prime Time show (airing at 8 PM Eastern, 7 PM Central) has been featuring the heartbreaking case of Caylee Marie Anthony, a “beautiful two-year-old Florida girl” which police in the Orlando area were “desperately seeking after her grandparents reported her missing.”

All summer long on Nancy Grace’s show, I’ve heard the Breaking News intros with startling developments - Caylee’s mother, Casey Anthony waiting a month before telling her parents a babysitter had taken her daughter….grandmother Cindy’s first call to 911 saying her car smelled like “something died inside”….the disgusting pictures of Casey partying in night clubs while volunteers searched for the angelic looking Caylee…the web of lies and deception Casey spun as it looked more and more as though Caylee was dead rather than missing.

A Mother’s Heart of Darkness

“What is given, Can be taken away. Everyone lies. Everyone dies.”
–Casey Anthony, in a poem

Now, of course, the situation is a bit clearer.  There was no kidnapping babysitter.  Caylee was not alive somewhere in California (as her grandparents had theorized) or in Mexico.  She was dead, tucked away in a garbage bag - her head wrapped up in duct tape - in a vacant lot 15 houses away from where she had last been seen alive at her grandparents’ home.

All of Casey Anthony’s actions - her lies about working at Universal Studios several years after she’d been fired, alleged web searches on how to make chloroform, her indifferent attitude about her daughter’s whereabouts - are proof enough to me that she, for selfish and self-centered reasons, killed her own daughter.  The question I ask - as well as everyone else who has followed the case - is what feelings reside within Casey Anthony’s inhuman heart of darkness?