Casey Anthony Trial: Timeline of Key Events in the Murder Trial of the Florida Mother
A timeline of key events from the beginning of the case to present.
July 6, 2011 — -- Casey Anthony was found not guilty Tuesday, July 5, of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee Anthony.. The jury declined to convict her of either first degree murder or manslaughter.
Instead, the jurors found Casey Anthony guilty on four counts of providing false information to law enforcement, which are misdemeanors.
After a trial of a month and a half, the seven men and five women of the Florida Ninth Judicial Circuit Court jury took less than 11 hours to reach a verdict in a case that had grasped national attention in the more than three years since Caylee Anthony's June 2008 disappearance.
Below is a timeline of key events in the case:
June 15, 2008: Casey claims to have seen Caylee for the last time. She said she dropped the little girl off at a babysitter's home and when she returned to pick her up, neither Casey nor the babysitter were there.
June 30, 2008: Casey Anthony's car towed. The family car Casey Anthony had been using was found abandoned in front of an Orlando, Fla., cash advance business and towed away. When the towing company called Casey's parents, Cindy and George Anthony, they became concerned. Casey reportedly had told her mother that she was going on a "mini-vacation" to Jacksonville, Fla. Cindy Anthony later discovered that her daughter had been staying with a boyfriend.
July 15, 2008: Caylee Anthony reported missing. Cindy Anthony called 911 and said, "I found out my granddaughter has been taken, she has been missing for a month." Casey Anthony allegedly told her family and police that she had not seen her daughter for 31 days and had launched her own investigation. In one of three calls placed to 911, Cindy Anthony said, "I found my daughter's car today and it smelled like there's been a dead body in the damn car." Cindy Anthony later retracted that statement, and the Anthony family rallied around Casey.
July 16, 2008: Casey Anthony arrested. Casey told police that she left Caylee at the apartment of a babysitter named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez, and that both were missing when she returned. Police found, among other discrepancies with her story, that the apartment had been vacant for more than 140 days. Casey was arrested and charged with child neglect.
July 22, 2008: 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. Bail was set at $500,000.
July 22, 2008: Casey Anthony called "person of interest." Officials said Casey Anthony is a person of interest in her daughter's disappearance and they were treating the case as a potential homicide.
July 24, 2008: Grandmother reports sighting of missing Caylee. Cindy Anthony told reporters that Caylee was spotted in Georgia, but police could not verify that claim.
Aug. 9, 2008: Caylee's third birthday. Birthday came and went with no sign of the missing child.
Aug. 17, 2008: Bounty hunter offers bond. The arrival of a Californian named Leonard Padilla added to the intrigue. A veteran bounty hunter with his own reality-TV show, Padilla claimed he'd been contacted by Casey Anthony and would post her bond.
Aug. 21, 2008: Casey Anthony out of jail again. Casey Anthony was released from jail after Padilla posted her bond.
Aug. 30, 2008: Casey Anthony returned to jail. Casey Anthony taken into custody on new charges, including petty theft.
Sept. 1, 2008: Police said they believe Caylee Anthony is not alive. 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."
Sept. 5, 2008: Casey Anthony released from jail.
Caylee Anthony Timeline of Key Events
Sept. 25, 2008: Babysitter files lawsuit. Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, the woman Casey Anthony reportedly named as a suspect in the case, filed a defamation lawsuit against Casey.
Sept. 29, 2008: Casey Anthony returned to jail. 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.
Oct. 2, 2008: Casey Anthony named a suspect in her daughter's disappearance.
Oct. 14, 2008: Casey Anthony charged with first-degree murder. Casey was also charged with aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter and providing false information to law enforcement.
Oct. 24, 2008: Police report evidence of body decomposition and chloroform in Casey Anthony's car.
Dec. 5, 2008: Jail releases Casey Anthony's visitation videos.
Dec. 11, 2008: Skull found near Anthony home. Skeletal remains of a young child were found a half-mile from the Anthony's home.
Dec. 12, 2008: Police "somewhat confident" it's Caylee. Police spokesman Carlos Padilla told ABC News police are "somewhat confident" the remains belong to Caylee Anthony.
Dec. 16, 2008: Defense team is not allowed access to the crime scene during an emergency hearing. For the second time, Judge Stan Strickland denied a motion by Casey Anthony's defense attorney to gain access to the area where the bones of a child were found.
Dec. 19, 2008: Caylee Anthony confirmed dead. Police announced that the results of DNA testing confirm that the remains found belong to the little girl.
Jan. 13, 2009: Tipster denies involvement in case. Roy Kronk, the utility worker who found Caylee Anthony's remains, dismissed suggestions that he was somehow involved in the toddler's disappearance.
Jan. 23, 2009: George Anthony leaves suicide note. Police discovered the grandfather of Caylee Anthony despondent and possibly under the influence of medication and alcohol in a Daytona Beach, Fla., hotel, his attorney told ABC News. Police also discovered a five-page suicide note that Anthony had apparently penned in the hotel.
April 13, 2009: Prosecutors announced they plan to seek the death penalty for Casey Anthony. In a reversal, prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against Casey Anthony. In December, the state's attorney's office filed court papers indicating that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty in connection with the first-degree murder case.
June 16, 2009: One-year anniversary of the last time George and Cindy Anthony say they saw their granddaughter.One year after Caylee Anthony's disappearance, George and Cindy Anthony's lawyer, Brad Conway, said the couple does not know the truth about what happened to Caylee, but he knows of no theory in which the Anthony's daughter and Caylee's mother, Casey Anthony, is above suspicion. He also said Casey Anthony would likely take the stand in her own defense at the trial, which could be at least a year away.
June 19, 2009: Caylee Anthony's autopsy report released.
Dec. 18, 2009: Judge rules Casey Anthony can face the death penalty. Judge Stan Strickland denied the defense's motion to eliminate the death penalty, saying it would best be left up to a jury whether Casey should face death if she is convicted.
Caylee Anthony Timeline of Key Events
April 6, 2010: Casey Anthony jailhouse letters and inmate police interviews released. An inmate told police Casey said in jail that she used to "knock out" Caylee, perhaps with some kind of sedative, so she could go out at night. The inmate also claimed Casey knew details about her daughter's remains before police said they were made public.
April 19, 2010: Judge Stan Strickland steps down. In a scathing written decision, Judge Stan Strickland -- who had presided over the Anthony case since it began -- removed himself amid controversy over his positive comments towards a blogger who was covering the case. "At its core, defense counsel's motion accuses the undersigned [Strickland] of being a 'self-aggrandizing media hound.' Indeed. The irony is rich," he wrote. "Motion granted."
June 15: 2010: George and Cindy Anthony mark the second anniversary of the day their granddaughter's disappearance. In an exclusive interview with "Good Morning America," George Anthony said he doesn't think about the trial's eventual outcome and is just living day-to-day. In a few months, the ordeal will have lasted longer than Caylee's short life.
July 15: 2010: On second anniversary of the night Caylee was finally reported missing, Casey, Lee, George and Cindy Anthony all appear in court for an emotional evidentiary hearing. After dramatic testimony by Cindy Anthony, who recounted the panicked night she learned Caylee had been missing for a month, a Florida judge ruled the 911 call Cindy made immediately afterward -- in which she discussed the "dead body" smell in the car Casey Anthony had driven -- would be allowed in Casey's murder trial.
Sept. 14, 2010: Casey Anthony expands her legal defense team to six attorneys.
Jan. 3, 2011: The judge ruled that witnesses who had a romantic relationship with Anthony would be allowed, but said questioning would not veer into extremely intimate details of the relationship.
May 9, 2011: The trial begins with jury selection. The process of seating a jury took 11 days.
May 25: Casey Anthony's lawyer, Jose Baez, opened her defense with the claim that Caylee accidentally drowned in the family's swimming pool on June 16, 2008, and that Casey's father, George, helped her cover it up. The defense team also alleged that she was sexually abused by her father and brother and hid her daughter's death like she hid the secret of her alleged sexual abuse.
Caylee Anthony Timeline of Key Events
June 23: Cindy Anthony claims she, and not Casey, was the one who searched the terms "chloroform" and "neck breaking" on the family's home computer. Those searches were a key piece of prosecutors' circumstantial case because they say that Casey Anthony used chloroform to subdue her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, and then suffocated her with duct tape over her nose and mouth.
June 29: George Anthony deals a blow to his daughter's defense by saying she was the last one to see Caylee alive. He also offered details about his 2009 suicide attempt, which he made just weeks after Caylee's remains were discovered. He said he did it because he was despondent that he had "failed" Caylee.
July 1: The prosecution presented evidence that questioned the truthfulness of Cindy Anthony's claim that she made the incriminating computer searches. They presented records indicating that Cindy Anthony was at work during the time she claimed to have searched for chloroform from home. Computer records revealed that someone using Cindy Anthony's username was logged on to her computer at the hospital where she worked for nearly nine hours on March 17, 2008, and March 21, 2008, the days computer searches for chloroform were done by someone in the Anthony family home.
July 3: Closing arguments begin. Defense attorney Jose Baez and prosecutor Jeff Ashton were both admonished and threatened with expulsion by the judge. The harsh scolding came about after Baez interrupted his summation and yelled to jurors that Ashton was a "laughing guy," as Ashton barely hid a smile behind his hand.
July 5: Casey Anthony is found not guilty of murdering her 2-year-old daughter Caylee. After a trial of a month and a half, the Florida Ninth Judicial Circuit Court jury takes less than 11 hours to reach a verdict in the case. The seven men, five women jury declines to convict Anthony of either first degree murder or manslaughter but does convict her of four counts of providing false information to law enforcement, which are misdemeanors. Anthony could get up to a year behind bars on each count when she is sentenced Thursday, July 7.