'Neck Breaking' Searched on Computer of Missing Girl's Mom
By Mark Wangrin
Associated Press
Thursday, November 27, 2008
ORLANDO, Nov. 26 -- Someone performed Internet searches for "neck breaking" and "household weapons" on the home computer of a Florida mother charged with killing her missing 3-year-old daughter, according to court documents released Wednesday.
The Orange County State Attorney's Office released almost 800 pages of discovery documents in the case of 22-year-old Casey Anthony, who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other charges in the June disappearance of her daughter, Caylee.
In mid-March, someone used the Anthonys' home laptop to search Google and Wikipedia for peroxide, shovels, acetone, alcohol and chloroform. Traces of chloroform, which is used to induce unconsciousness and is a component of human decomposition, were found in the trunk of Anthony's car during forensic testing, the documents say.
Caylee has not been seen since June, but she wasn't reported missing until a month later. The child's grandmother first called authorities in July to say that she hadn't seen Caylee for a month and that her daughter's car smelled like death.
Anthony told authorities she had left her daughter with a babysitter in June and the two were gone when she returned from work. Documents traced the unsuccessful efforts of investigators to find the woman.
Anthony says she spent the next few weeks trying to find her daughter and didn't call authorities because she was scared. Investigators say they have poked several holes in her story.
Other information depicted in the documents includes:
· Text messages in which Anthony writes, "I am the dumbest person and the worst mother. Honestly hate myself," and calls Caylee a "little snothead."
· In an instant-message exchange with a boyfriend who calls Caylee an obscene name for wanting more lunch, Anthony responds, "Ha. Ha." She follows with "I'm pretty vicious."
In a later exchange, Anthony writes, "You know what you're getting into with me, and I'm sorry, Caylee has to come first."
· E-mails from Rick Pleasa, brother of Anthony's mother, Cindy, in which he calls her support of Anthony "ignorant and intolerable" and suggests she get psychiatric help.
"I would believe in the tooth fairy or ET or Santa before I trusted and believed in Casey," he also wrote.
· Interviews with more than a dozen friends and relatives of Anthony who said they never met the babysitter who was supposedly staying with the child.
Todd Black, a spokesman for Anthony's attorney Jose Baez, said the standard procedure for defense attorneys is to review discovery documents for a few days before commenting.
Later Wednesday, Circuit Judge Stan Strickland denied a prosecutor's request for a wide-ranging gag order. Strickland ruled the state did not prove that national TV appearances by Baez and other comments in the media would sufficiently prejudice the jury pool.
"Even with a gag order the publicity and media attention would continue unabated," Strickland wrote in his opinion.
Strickland said lawyers on both sides are bound to a Florida Bar statute prohibiting comments that are false or would otherwise taint the jury pool.
The gag order would have affected not only prosecutors and defense attorneys, but also Orange County sheriff's investigators and Anthony's parents.
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