Well if they didn't enter the garage that night to check out the car they failed miserably.
Snipped from the 911 transcript:
CA "I just found her today, but I cant find my granddaughter.And she's just admitted to me that she's been trying to find her herself. Theres something wrong. I found my daughters car today, and it smells like theres been a dead body in the damn car".
So grandma is saying it smells like death, and they dont even check it out? They didnt need a search warrant to smell the car, for goodness sakes.They had already been invited into the house.
besides, lee said the smell was so overwhelming that it could even be smelt from outside the garage.
JMO
At the risk of being redundant, I think this has been covered many times on various threads. (
Please see my post #80 on this thread, page 4) YM, the child neglect officer had already been dispatched to the house to investigate a missing child before the "dead body" 911 call came in and the entire content of the final call may not have been relayed to him, as he was on his way, but simply recorded and added later to the entire incident report complaint. I am sure that the dispatcher was reassuring CA during that call that someone was indeed on the way to look for her missing granddaughter.
When LE arrived, we do not know if the garage door was opened or closed or what the Anthonys told them about the odor in the car. We have seen CA many times since the incident angrily tell the media "it was pizza" or that she had only included that "dead body" phrase because she was desperate to get LE to respond quickly. We also know that GA told the FBI and LE in his interview about the tow manager finding the bag and telling an anxious GA that it was probably only the garbage that smelled up the trunk. I think the tow manager did that out of compassion to ease a worried grandfather. GA, as an ex-LE officer said in his interviews he immediately knew that smell was human decomp and we know he immediately knew his daughter was not missing (she was texting her mom) but that he had not seen Caylee in a month and his daughter had been extremely evasive about her whereabouts. IMO he knew he was driving home part of a crime scene - whether he suspected it was Caylee's body or from some other nefarious thing his daughter had done, as she had been lying about it and her whereabouts, and did it on purpose.
If GA and CA downplayed the smell that evening and told LE it was from the trash bag, it certainly did not stop LE from retrieving the bag of garbage that very night from Johnson's to test it. They already knew the trunk had been compromised or contaminated by GA and CA admitting they had removed and even cleaned some items from the trunk. Perhaps they were more concerned with eliminating CA's claim that her granddaughter was missing, giving KC the benefit of the doubt by driving all over Orlando looking for the Imaginanny, before they started considering it a cover up or a potential homicide.
It is clear that LE added a homicide detective to the group that was interviewing KC the next day when she was at Universal (whether due to the fact they had the complete report of their own actions and the transcripts of all the 911 calls) and that was the day they impounded the car, after they realized that the car smell was most likely directly connected to the "disappearance" of Caylee a month earlier. If they already knew the car had been compromised, there really was no real hurry to impound it initially, particularly until they had first exhausted all means to find little Caylee alive.
CA and GA both snidely criticized LE for not impounding the car earlier (as they also made much of the fact that LE did not issue an Amber Alert - which was patently ridiculous as a child not reported missing for a month and with no license plate to include in a report pretty much eliminates that as a reasonable search tool).
If LE suspected that the car had already been tampered with, that CA and GA were downplaying the smell as "garbage" or "pizza" - they may have realized there was no real hurry in impounding the vehicle then until they had proof from the garbage bag at Johnson's that the horrible smell could not be food and that CA's later insistence she had "exaggerated" the smell to expedite LE was not true.
I think LE may have realized very early on that the Anthonys were not being completely truthful with them on various levels and they played everything by the book. If they were being told the smell was simply "garbage", they made sure that very night to gather the evidence to see if it was true.
While LE may have done a few things a little differently then knowing what they know now the only oversight I think they made that night (and very innocently) was judging just how mendacious every member of that family could be and were. I am really amazed at how easy it is for people to pick apart the actions of LE, who probably would have done many things differently, if they had known they were dealing with a family Olympic Gold Medal Liars, instead of concentrating on the real culprits here. LE always has to walk a delicate line when investigating, and not jeopardize getting evidence by showing their hand too soon. If I hear other trained LE professionals criticize the actions of OCSO that evening, I'll consider paying attention to their comments, but at this point I just have to ignore those of us amateurs out here who are Monday morning quarterbacking LE's actions that night after many of us have come to our conclusions after almost a year of access to Sunshine Law evidence and doc dumps to pore through and analyze.
- and I would really like to know what folks believe/theorize about this.
