Casey Anthony: Tony Pipitone salutes citizen-investigators - Hal

Casey Anthony: Tony Pipitone salutes citizen-investigators
posted by halboedeker on November, 21 2012 12:00 PM

WKMG-Channel 6 and Tony Pipitone have given people a lot to talk about this week.

That the topic is again Casey Anthony will either excite or annoy the populace.

A warning: Pipitone isn’t done. He will have more on his latest Anthony expose at 11 p.m. Wednesday and possibly at 6 p.m.

On Wednesday morning, Pipitone said he will highlight the blame issue between the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office.

The headline on the WKMG website sums up the major development in the story: “Cops, prosecutors botched Casey Anthony evidence.” Subhed: ”Computer search for ‘foolproof suffocation’ never found.”

You can see Pipitone’s detailed work at the station’s website. He acknowledges his debt to two “citizen-investigators,” Phoenix attorney Isabel Humphrey and Connecticut computer expert John Goetz. They had become acquainted through Websleuths, an amateur sleuthing web community, Pipitone said.

I heard from several readers who complained that they saw nothing new in Pipitone’s report. But most people aren’t that familiar with these details. Questions about prosecutors and the sheriff’s office have consequences in Orange County beyond the latest gossip about Casey.

A spokesman for defense attorney Jose Baez dismissed websleuths.com as an anti-Casey site and said Pipitone was relying on someone who had never testified or been admitted as an expert in the court of law.

Pipitone countered that the Baez camp was attacking people who had objectively gathered the information.

In his report, Pipitone cast doubt on several points that Baez made in his book, “Presumed Guilty.” Baez accuses George Anthony, Casey’s father, of making a search for foolproof suffocation on the family computer. But Pipitone details a timeline that shows George couldn’t have been home at that time.

Baez also pointed to George’s having an AOL Instant Messenger account as concrete proof that George had made the search.

“Jose said in his book that George was the only one who had an AIM account. And Casey didn’t,” Pipitone said. “That’s not true and Jose admits that in our interview and concedes he’s correcting subsequent versions of the book. So his concrete proof that it’s George because only George had an AIM account is false.”

Pipitone added that his reporting “pokes holes in Jose’s story that it was George. He concedes at least one of those holes, though he’s fighting hard on the other,” referring to the timeline.

Pipitone’s reporting was hardly old news. It had the competition scrambling to offer their own versions. WKMG’s heavy promotion of the report for sweeps month had tipped them off — a pitfall of the TV business.

But the competition could never duplicate Pipitone’s detail, because he started working on the story in July. He had the public’s help — a new and exciting development, thanks to the web — but he had to pull the story together himself. If you think that’s a small achievement, you should read his story.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2012/11/casey-anthony-tony-pipitone-salutes-citizen-investigators.html