Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Death of Caylee Anthony: Murder or Accident? (Part I)

On October 14, 2008, Casey Anthony was indicted by a grand jury on charges of first degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and four counts of providing false information to police. She was later arrested. Judge John Jordan ordered that she be held without bond. On October 21, 2008, the charges of child neglect were dropped against Casey, according to the State Attorney's Office because "[as] the evidence proved that the child was deceased, the State sought an indictment on the legally appropriate charges." On October 28, Anthony was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On April 13, 2009, prosecutors announced that they planned to seek the death penalty in the case.

Trial

Evidence

Four hundred pieces of evidence were presented. A strand of hair was recovered from the trunk of Casey's car which was microscopically similar to hair taken from Caylee's hairbrush. The strand showed "root-banding," in which hair roots form a dark band after death, which was consistent with hair from a dead body.

Kronk, who discoverered the remains, repeated the same basic story that he had told police. On Friday, October 24, 2008, a forensic report by Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory judged that results from an air sampling procedure (called LIBS) performed in the trunk of Casey Anthony's car showed chemical compounds "consistent with a decompositional event" based on the presence of five key chemical compounds out of over 400 possible chemical compounds that Vass' research group considers typical of decomposition. Investigators stated that the trunk smelled strongly of human decomposition, but human decomposition was not specified on the laboratory scale. The process has not been affirmed by a Daubert Test in the courts. Vass' group also stated there was chloroform in the car trunk.

In October 2009, officials released 700 pages of documents related to the Anthony investigation, including records of Google searches of the terms "neck breaking" and "how to make chloroform" on a computer accessible to Casey, presented by the prosecutors as evidence of a crime.

According to detectives, crime-scene evidence included residue of a heart-shaped sticker found on duct tape over the mouth of Caylee's skull. However, the laboratory was not able to capture a heart-shape photographically after some duct tape was subjected to dye testing. A blanket found at the crime scene matched Caylee's bedding at her grandparents' home.

Among photos entered into evidence was one from the computer of Ricardo Morales, an ex-boyfriend of Casey Anthony, depicting a poster with the caption "Win her over with Chloroform".

Witness John Dennis Bradley's software, developed for computer investigations, was used by the prosecution to indicate that Casey had conducted extensive computer searches on the word "chloroform" 84 times, and to suggest that Anthony had planned to commit murder. He later discovered that a flaw in the software misread the forensic data and that the word "chloroform" had been searched for only one time and the website in question offered information on the use of chloroform in the 19th century.

Attorneys and jury

The lead prosecutor in the case was Assistant State Attorney Linda Drane Burdick. Assistant State Attorneys Frank George and Jeff Ashton completed the prosecution team. Lead counsel for the defense was Jose Baez, a Florida criminal defense attorney. Attorneys J. Cheney Mason, Dorothy Clay Sims, and Ann Finnell served as co-counsel. During the trial, attorney Mark Lippman represented George and Cindy Anthony.

Jury selection began on May 9, 2011, at the Pinellas County Criminal Justice Center in Clearwater, Florida, because the case had been so widely reported in the Orlando area. Jurors were brought from Pinellas County to Orlando. Jury selection took longer than expected and ended on May 20, 2011, with twelve jurors and five alternates being sworn in. The panel consisted of nine women and eight men. The trial took six weeks, during which time the jury was sequestered to avoid influence from information available outside the courtroom.