I’ve been both blessed and cursed by my friendship with Muzikman (insert rocker emoticon here). I’ve been blessed by the fact that he has sent me complete copies of discovery releases, often containing materials not uploaded by the media. I’ve been cursed by the fact that the additional detail occupies a lot more of my time than it probably has any right to do so.
With that preamble, I’m ashamed to say I’ve spent some time off and on over the past year looking at the contents of Casey’s Photobucket account – all 12,000 images, 351 MB worth. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not it has any bearing on this case.
According to the Photobucket image time stamps, Casey began uploading images on April 3, 2007 (incidentally, this is right around the time that Casey ended her engagement with Jesse). That day she posted 994 images, the very first being the icon shown on the right.
She did not upload every day, and could go many, many weeks between uploads. But when she did upload images, she would do so hundreds at a time in rapid succession – say one every two seconds. This tells me Casey would harvest images from the web over a period of days or weeks, organize them on her computer, and then upload them en-masse to her Photobucket account. And Casey definitely organized the images before they were uploaded, as the images were often grouped into themes such as “whores” or “rainbows” or “farts”.
As for her themes, there were a number of them. Major themes were tatoos, sex, partying, whores, bitches, House (the TV show), boyfriends and lost love. Minor themes were usually some variant of the major themes, such as flirtatiousness being a sub-theme of sex or whore, depending on the specific image.
The media certainly played up the fact that she uploaded lots of “disturbing” skull and heart images, focusing on the uploads that took place in June and July, 2008. However, from what I can see she was uploading images like that from the day she first got on Photobucket. The image on the right is one of a dozen or so uploaded that first morning. Also, I see images like that all over myspace and other sites frequented by young adults these days. It seems part of their current culture. I truly have not been convinced the images have any link to the murder or premeditation. I believe Casey simply thought they were cool.
Casey, however, uploaded far, far more than images of skulls and hearts – or party pictures. She liked to upload what I will simply call “cute sayings.” Nearly all of them fall into two categories. One category is made up of wistful and often cliche-filled views on love, boyfriends, and broken hearts. The other category is humor – often sophomoric humor. Very often this has a high vulgar content.
Some examples of the first category (think sugary and sappy):
You do make me happy
Love is like a glass door. Sometimes you don’t see it, and it smacks you right in the face.
Please don’t pretend you care, then crush my feelings into little bite-sized pieces for you to eat up with a side order of my dignity covered in self-respect sauce.
Examples of the second category (think Family Guy and South Park):
Don’t hate me because I am beautiful, hate me because I have huge boobs
If you’re happy and you know it, Drop your pants
When life hands you a lemon, say ‘oh yeah, I like lemons. What else ya got?’
Love like a movie star, Party like a rock star, Fuck like a porn star
I’m not a gynecologist but I’ll take a look
No matter what was going on in her life, Casey continued to upload quotes and sayings that fit within those two categories. That is, until May, 2008. Beginning in May, it seems she basically stopped uploading written messages of personal philosophy and stuck with graphics and photos. The two images below were the last ones posted, at the beginning of May:
Later, one image of that ilk was uploaded on the 24th, and another four on June 26, but that was essentially it:
That is not to say she stopped collecting them – which I will get to in a moment.
Casey’s Photobucket behavior change in May was not her first. I also noticed a significant change in her January 4, 2008 uploads. Mixed in with the typical shallow / superficial / sophomoric one-liners are a bunch of quotes and sayings (some quite lengthy) focusing on “getting the most out of life”. For example:
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints. To handle yourself, use your head, to handle others, use your heart. Anger is only one letter short of danger. If someone betrays you once, it is his fault; if he betrays you twice, it is your fault. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. He who loses money, loses much; he who loses a friend, loses more; he who loses faith, loses all. Beautiful young people are acts of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. Learn from the mistakes of others, you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. Friends, you and me…you brought another friend…and then there were three…we started our group…our circle of friends…and like that circle…there is no beginning or end…yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.
I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
Fall in love or fall in hate. Get inspired or be depressed. Ace a test or flunk a class. Make babies or make art. Speak the truth or lie and cheat. Dance on tables or sit in the corner. Life is divine chaos. Embrace it. Forgive yourself. Breathe. And enjoy the ride…
I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again.
Here’s to life. Hanging out, making out, sneaking out, passing out. Whatever happens, happens. No regrets.
Now, up to that point in time Casey’s uploads said very little about “life”, and the quotes she chose to upload were never this long unless, of course, they oozed sarcasm and included the word “f*ck”. So seeing them sprinkled in with the typical dreck caught my attention. I began to wonder … did Casey make a new year’s resolution around taking control of her life?
There were a couple of other quotes uploaded that day that sounded vaguely familiar:
Every story has an end, but in life every end is just a new beginning.
Live for today
Those quotes reminded me of:
Every day is a brand new beginning
Carpe Diem – Seize the day
Which of course were written in the infamous diary that the prosecution may or may not have possession of (at least Brad Conway put the offer on the table on live TV with Larry King). The question that popped into my mind: does the ” ’03 ” written on that page refer to “2003″, or does it refer to “page 3″, or perhaps “January 3″? January 3 seems somewhat plausible.
But it gets better.
The history files for the laptop computer released by OCSO in September 2008 only went back to July 6, and they recorded mostly file accesses on the laptop hard drive rather than internet surfing activity. That seemingly does us no good because we cannot see where Casey was surfing, and neither do we have a copy of the hard drive to see what she was looking at. Here is an example of what I mean:
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/bobby/Desktop/artwork/music-notes-circle.jpg
However, Casey – creature of habit that she is – was downloading images off the internet to be uploaded at a later time to Photobucket, and the act of saving a file on the hard drive was recorded in this history. By taking the file name of the image and searching for it in Google, one might be able to see what it was she had downloaded. Now, if she saved a file with the name “1.jpg” from the internet, that does not do us a lot of good. There are millions of images with that name. Finding the right “1.jpg” without having the laptop in our hands is impossible.
But what about an image with the name music-notes-circle.jpg? Think maybe we can narrow that one down pretty quickly? Of course we can. And using that approach, we can determine that there were some images downloaded to Casey’s laptop in July, 2008 (but never uploaded to Photobucket) that offer the following philosophy (all saved on July 10):
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
Now the above could have been about Tony and her feelings regarding him possibly moving to New York after he finished up with school.
There was a rant I ran across that could have been penned by Casey herself (saved July 14):
There were, of course, a couple graphics of interest ( saved July 13 and July 10, respectively):
And one final quote (one of the very last items she saved to the laptop, on July 14):
The above seemed to echo the sentiment in “page two” of the diary:
I have no regrets, just a bit worried. I just want for everything to work out okay. I completely trust my own judgement & know that I made the right decision. I just hope that the end justifies the means. I just want to know what the future will hold for me. I guess I will soon see. This is the happiest that I have been in a very long time. I hope that my happiness will continue to grow. -I’ve made new friends that I really like. I’ve surrounded myself with good people. -I am finally happy, let’s just hope that it doesn’t change.
So I am left wondering: did Casey decide at the beginning of 2008 that, come hell or high water, from that moment forward the world would be focused on Casey?
Related posts:
- Rainfall Analysis for Conditions on September 1st, 2008
- 2 years ago: Caylee’s last full day
- Wind Analysis for September 3, 2008
- Rainfall Analysis for Conditions on August 11, 2008
- Timeline and Forensics Files updated 11/21/09
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