How long caylee anthony missing

July 22, New revelations at bond hearing. In a bond hearing for Casey Anthony, detectives revealed that they had found strands of hair that looked like Caylee's in the trunk of the Anthony family car, and that cadaver dogs had smelled human decomposition in the trunk.

July 22, Casey Anthony called "person of interest. July 24, Grandmother reports sighting of missing Caylee. Cindy Anthony told reporters that Caylee was spotted in Georgia, but police could not verify that claim. Birthday came and went with no sign of the missing child. The arrival of a Californian named Leonard Padilla added to the intrigue.

A veteran bounty hunter with his own reality show, Padilla claimed he'd been contacted by Casey Anthony and would post her bond. Casey Anthony was released from jail after Padilla posted her bond.

Casey Anthony taken into custody on new charges , including petty theft. The Orange County Sheriff's Office issued a statement saying that based on evidence that wasn't yet public and FBI tests, it believed "there is a strong probability that Caylee [Anthony] is deceased.

Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, the woman Casey Anthony reportedly named as a suspect in the case, filed a defamation lawsuit against Casey. Casey Anthony was arrested again and returned to jail on multiple charges including child neglect, lying to investigators, petty theft and use of a forged check, but wasn't charged in conjunction with her daughter's disappearance.

That pool of jurors began shrinking as the judge allowed many to go home for financial and family reasons—the jury could have been sequestered for months, preventing jurors from working or taking care of family. At this step in a prolonged and controversial case, the selection of the jury is a historical moment, but is not the only aspect of the trial that made history in the field of criminal investigation. The judge ruled that evidence regarding decomposition should be admissible—the first time evidence of this nature will ever appear before a Florida court.

Tests were later done of the air in the trunk by experts from the University of Tennessee, the university that hosts the body farm, to show that a decomposing body had been in the car. For a full timeline of the case, go here. For the jury selection process, go here. Twelve are required for the trial, plus several alternates, and after a number of potential jurors were let go for reasons such as financial hardship or personal reasons the attorneys believed may bias their decisions, the number of alternates were lower than originally planned.

Nevertheless, Judge Perry planned to begin opening arguments the week of May 23rd in Orlando. The trial was expected to last up to eight weeks, with the jury sequestered throughout that time.

While the prosecution stated, as expected, that only Casey Anthony could have killed her daughter Caylee, the defense had another theory. They alleged that this habit was formed in her childhood because her father sexually abused her. However, these witnesses also admitted under cross-examination that when she was seen with her daughter she did not appear to be a bad mother or to mistreat Caylee.

He described the disappearance of some gas cans from his shed, which he later confronted his daughter about. She retrieved them from the trunk of her car and returned them. This occurred about a week after Caylee was last seen, but allegedly before anyone in the family knew she was missing. Before the gas cans were taken, George Anthony had left duct tape on one of them, and according to him, the returned cans had no duct tape.

It had been found abandoned in a parking lot and towed two weeks earlier. The decomposition of a human body is a very unique and recognizable smell to anyone with experience with it, and the manager testified that he has had that experience.

George Anthony also claims familiarity with the stench through his time as a detective. Judge Belvin Perry questioned the probative nature of these messages, and suggested they would be excessively prejudicial, so the prosecution withdrew their attempted introduction of them. For the full story of this testimony, go here. It was Cindy who finally reported Caylee missing a month after she last saw her, and her testimony focused on that month. The explanations involved a nanny named Zanny who was taking care of Caylee while Anthony attended work meetings, as well as a car accident during an outing in Tampa.

Another explanation was that they were staying in a hotel with a wealthy suitor. Hopkins said he knew Anthony from school, but had no children and had not introduced Anthony to a nanny for Caylee, as she had claimed. June During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Casey used chloroform on her daughter and suffocated her by putting duct tape over the little girl's mouth and nose. They also alleged that Casey put her daughter's body in her car trunk before disposing of it.

June Forensics expert Arpad Vass testified on June 6 that the only plausible explanation for the odor in Casey's car trunk would be the presence of a decomposing human body. Pictured here is an evidence photo of trash found in the trunk. June During his testimony, Casey's father, George Anthony, denied the defense's claims that he sexually abused his daughter and that he was involved in his granddaughter's death. June Casey's mother, Cindy, also took the stand.

Here, she's seen reacting to a photo of Caylee on a monitor during her testimony on June 14, , day 18 of the trial. June Judge Belvin Perry looks at evidence as it's presented during the trial. June Jennifer Welch, a crime scene investigator with the Orange County Sheriff's Office, shows letters from Caylee's T-shirt that were entered into evidence.

June Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton holds crime scene evidence during a cross-examination of entomologist Dr. Tim Huntington. The country's interest in every update on the case was voracious; by the time it concluded, it had yielded record ratings for some networks. June 30, By the end of June , both the prosecution and the defense had rested their cases.

Casey Anthony never testified. July 5, : The trial's jury deliberated for 10 hours and 40 minutes before reaching a verdict. Casey was found not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter of a child. She was found guilty of four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to law enforcement. July 5, Casey Anthony's defense team surrounded her in a group hug after the thenyear-old was acquitted.

July The not-guilty charge divided many people who followed the case. July Others, such as Tim Allen, right, and David Antolic, held signs of a different tone in front of a jail in Orlando on July 16, , the day before Anthony was released.

July 17, Casey was sentenced to four years in jail with credit for time served. Aftermath: Seven years after being acquitted of the death of her daughter, Casey Anthony, pictured here with her attorney Cheney Mason in , resides in West Palm Beach, Florida. In , Anthony told the Associated Press she's still not "certain Ultimately, the jury acquitted the young mother of the most serious charges against her.

Now 32 years old, Anthony is living not-quite-out-of-sight in her home state of Florida; just last year, she gave a widely covered interview with the Associated Press.

But the Casey Anthony case involved many other players. Ten years later, we spoke to some of those who were involved, to get their thoughts on how it played out and their perspective on why it struck such a chord with the public. Here's what they had to say:. These statements have been edited for length and clarity. The Judge: 'What really happened? I thought the state had proved its case. I thought, while they may have had some flaws in their case, that there was a high probability that Casey would be found guilty of some form of homicide, and that did not occur.

A number of jurors said the reason that they came back with "not guilty" was because the state could not prove how Caylee died. The defense threw out a lot of theories.

They threw out that she drowned. They tried to build on the inference that the gate was open, and that the ladder was down and that she was known to go out of the door and go up to the pool because she liked water.

I mean, there was no evidence that that happened. Those were inferences. But they were logical inferences that they were permitted based upon those slim factors to argue Justice is always served in a case where the facts are litigated before a jury, the jury looks at the law through their lens and they render a decision.

People may not agree with that decision, but when a case goes through the process that we have all agreed to live by, then justice is served. Here we are, 10 years away from her death, and people still think about it. And there's one question that is on everyone's mind: What really happened? The reports note that a hair strand discovered in the trunk is "microscopically similar" to those found on Caylee's brush and showed "characteristics of apparent decomposition. The bones are found in a bag in a wooded area less than a half-mile from the Anthonys' home by utility worker Ray Kronk.

It is later revealed that Kronk had sought to convince police to search the area back in the summer. The Orange County chief medical examiner reports that the bones showed no evidence of trauma and that Caylee's death is being ruled a "homicide of undetermined means. George is reported to be "despondent and possibly under the influence of medication and alcohol" when he is located at a hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida, along with a five-page suicide note.

April 13, Prosecutors announce their intention to pursue the death penalty. Although earlier court papers indicated that the death penalty would not be in play, the new notice of intent cites "sufficient aggravating circumstances" to justify its imposition. The trial begins with the prosecution's opening salvo of Casey being a party girl with no use for a young daughter, as evidenced by the month spent shopping and drinking during Caylee's absence.

Those remarks are soon eclipsed by Baez's stunning opening statement which asserts that Caylee drowned in the family swimming pool and that George sought to cover up the accidental death. The lead defense lawyer also alleges that George had molested Casey, thereby igniting her habit of lying to cover up the pain and that Kronk, the utility worker, had found Caylee's body and planted it in the woods. Taking the stand as the first witness, George denies that he ever molested his daughter or knew anything about Caylee's drowning.

Simon Birch, the manager of the towing company that impounded Casey's car in June , testifies that he had encountered multiple vehicles with dead bodies during his three decades in the business and that the smell from Casey's car was consistent with those past experiences.

Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory explains how the "shockingly high" amount of chloroform — a chemical released by decomposition, as well as one that can be used to knock someone unconscious — detected in the car trunk led to his conclusion that a dead body was indeed present.