I have been debat­ing what to blog about recently. But last week, the Casey Anthony mur­der trial started and it imme­di­ately piqued my inter­est. Never before have I been as engrossed with the goings-on inside a court­room as I have been this case – not even with the O.J. Simp­son mur­der trial back in 1995.

The story is dis­turb­ing to say the least. A sin­gle mother, liv­ing at home with a seem­ingly lov­ing fam­ily, takes her daugh­ter and goes “miss­ing” for 31 days. In fact, she has been bounc­ing from the home of friend to friend, never call­ing her par­ents and let­ting them know where she is. Then, when she is finally con­fronted by an angry and wor­ried mother, she tells her mom, Cindy Anthony that her daugh­ter, Caylee, has been taken by the nanny and has been miss­ing the whole time.

The foren­sic sci­ence used in the inves­ti­ga­tion is very intrigu­ing. Nor­mally I would be bored to tears by the tes­ti­mony that has been given by the anthro­pol­o­gists, ana­lysts, and sci­en­tists that have taken the stand. But I find myself want­ing to hear more about all the tech­niques used in the investigations.

I have been thor­oughly impressed by the case the pros­e­cu­tion is build­ing. They basi­cally start in the begin­ning, and take the jury and audi­ence through the events from June 15/16, 2008 – when Caylee was last seen – to July 15, 2008 when Casey finally was found, con­fronted by her mother, and then inter­viewed by Orange County Sheriff’s Office investigators.

The case they build is this: In the 31-day span men­tioned above, Casey goes from friend’s house to friend’s house, par­ty­ing and hav­ing a good time. None of those who saw her dur­ing that time said she appeared dis­traught, wor­ried, or con­cerned about the where­abouts of her daugh­ter Caylee. They have all said she appeared “nor­mal”, even happy at times. When asked, “Where’s Caylee?” she always says, “She’s with the nanny.”

How­ever, the defense says that Casey was abused sex­u­ally by her dad and brother. It also pur­ports that Caylee drowned acci­den­tally in the pool, and George Anthony, Casey’s dad, helped her dis­pose of the body. I’m not buy­ing it, and unless the defense has an air­tight case they can prove (other than more lies by Casey), the jury won’t either.

The evi­dence pre­sented by the pros­e­cu­tion so far really hasn’t done any­thing in the way of estab­lish­ing a modus operandi (or “motive”) or a cause of death for Caylee. What it does do is estab­lish the case that Casey Anthony is a cold, cal­lous, unfeel­ing mon­ster that doesn’t care what has hap­pened to her daugh­ter. She con­tin­u­ously and patho­log­i­cally lies so much that it seems sec­ond nature to her. It also proves, via cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, that Casey was the last one to see Caylee alive and had some part to play in her death and dis­posal of her body. Caylee’s body wasn’t found until Decem­ber of 2008.

I truly believe, based on what I’ve seen so far, that this jury will have an easy time of con­vict­ing Casey of first-degree mur­der. It will be much harder to prove pre­med­i­ta­tion, so I don’t really fore­see the death penalty in this case.