Casey Anthony

According to George Anthony, Casey Anthony’s father, Casey left the home where she, her father, mother, and Caylee all lived on June 16th 2008, and did not return for 31 days, taking her daughter with her. Cindy, Casey’s mother asked repeatedly during that month to see Caylee, but Casey deflected each time, claiming she was busy with work, or that Caylee was with a nannyby the name of Zenaida "Zanny" Fernandez-Gonzalez. On July 13 2008, Cindy and George Anthony were notified that Casey’s car was in a tow yard. When Mr Anthony picked up the car both he and the tow yard employee noted a significant odor coming from the trunk. Both would state that they believed the odor to be the result of a decomposing body. The trunk would be shown to contain

On October 14, 2008, a grand jury indicted Casey Anthony on charges of first degree murder, child abuse and aggravated manslaughter of a child, as well as four counts of providing false information to police. She was later arrested. The Judge, John Jordan ordered that she be held without bond. The charges of child neglect were dropped against Casey, and on October 28, Anthony was arraigned and pled not guilty to all charges. Prosecutors announced that they planned to seek the death penalty in

Trial
Four hundred pieces of evidence would be displayed in court, with several articles of evidence being key to the prosecution 's case. A strand of hair was recovered from the trunk of Casey 's car which was similar to hair taken from Caylee Anthony 's hair brush. This strand showed "root-banding," which was consistent with hair from a dead body. On Friday, October 24, 2008, a forensic report by Dr. Vass of the oak ridge national laboratory stated that results from an air sampling procedure (known as LIBS) performed in the trunk of Anthony 's car showed chemical components "consistent with a decompositional event" based on the presence of five key chemical compounds out of over 400 possible chemical compounds that Dr. Vass ' research group considers typical of decomposition. Dr. Vass ' group also stated there was chloroform in the car trunk (Schneider). 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 Anthony, presented by the prosecutors as evidence of a crime. According to investigators detectives, evidence included the residue of a heart-shaped sticker found on duct tape over the mouth of Caylee 's skull. However, the laboratory was not able to record a heart-shape photographically after the duct tape was subjected to dye testing. A blanket found at the crime scene was found to match Caylee 's bedding at