Casey Anthony Case: Acquitted Mother Lives With Employer, Patrick McKenna

It has been just a few days since photographs of Casey Anthony holding a baby hit the internet, six years since the infamous Florida woman was acquitted of killing her 2-year-old daughter.

A lot has transpired since her not-guilty verdict stunned TV-watching audiences around the globe. Today, Anthony is living in Palm Beach County, Florida, at the home of her boss, noted private detective Patrick McKenna.

McKenna worked as a consultant on her trial and stood behind her story that she did not kill daughter Caylee Anthony and dump her in the woods in 2008.

“Yeah, she’s a liar,” McKenna told the Palm Beach Post back in 2011. “Yeah, she’s disturbed. She may be a very disturbed young woman, but she ain’t no murderer. She loved that baby. I think the jury saw that this kid didn’t commit first-degree murder.”

The jury did find Casey Anthony guilty of four charges stemming from lies she told to law enforcement after Caylee went missing. Jurors found that she lied about leaving the child with a babysitter, that she spoke to the toddler on the phone after the disappearance, and that she told co-workers at Universal Studios that her daughter was missing. The jury also found that Anthony lied about other details of her job at Universal.

Anthony was sentenced to four years in jail and $1,000 in fines for each count; she was credited with 1,043 days time served and released after serving 10 days. Anthony appealed the verdict after her release.

A judge later ordered Casey Anthony to repay Florida courts $217,000, the amount spent by officials on the case as a result of false statements she made to investigators. In 2013, an appeals court reduced the conviction to two counts.

But, who is Patrick McKenna?

Before working on the Casey Anthony case, McKenna was already known for his work on the murder trial of fallen football star O.J. Simpson, the criminal case billed by media as “The Trial of the Century.” His work on trials involving William Kennedy Smith and industrialist (not the actor) John Goodman also helped dub him the “celebrity investigator.”

WPB private-eye Patrick McKenna, who worked for OJ defense, says timeline doesn't allow burial of knife. @CBS12 pic.twitter.com/LVdrOECoLO

— Chuck Weber (@ChuckWeber12) March 5, 2016

But he did more than just poke around for defense lawyers in his prior cases. Sifting through thousands of documents and following up on just as many leads in the Simpson case alone, McKenna is the man who dug up the N-word-laden Mark Fuhrman tapes, which branded the cop a racist.

According to Fox 25 in Boston, McKenna was just another struggling private eye on July 15, 1994, when he got the call to work on the Simpson case. He has not disclosed the amount of his payday from the case but said big cases don’t always yield big dollars. Cost-heavy work will often result in little profit at the end of the day. In short, McKenna works hard for about $100,000 a year.

On the Casey Anthony case, little changed. McKenna chased down leads while Anthony’s reputation as a partying, murderous mother and pathological liar just kept swelling. These days, Anthony is his research assistant and tenant. There is no romantic involvement. McKenna, 67, has a girlfriend and remains friends with his ex-wife and mother of his two children.

Thirty-one-year-old Anthony’s love life remains something she hasn’t spoken about. What Casey has voiced are feelings toward those who still say she killed her daughter in cold blood.

“I understand the reasons people feel about me,” she told the Associated Press in March. “I understand why people have the opinions that they do… I don’t give a s— about what anyone thinks about me (and) I never will.”

[Featured Image by Getty Images]