How the Casey Anthony Murder Case Became the Social-Media Trial of the Century

Like many other popular attractions in Orlando, the Casey Anthony trial requires tickets. Hundreds of people show up each day to watch the murder case unfold. But only those who arrive well before 8 a.m. and wait in June swelter can get a pass allowing them into the soaring, chilly top-floor courtroom where Anthony is trying to avoid the death penalty.

Anthony is accused of murdering her 2-year-old, Caylee, in 2008. In December of that year, investigators found parts of the girl’s duct-taped corpse near Anthony’s parents’ home. Bugs and vegetation had colonized the remains, which had been dumped roughly six months earlier. The sheer horror at the act — and the idea that a mother committed it — catapulted the case from local live-at-5 sideshow to tabloid sensation (“Monster mom partying four days after tot died,” one recent report said) to national preoccupation. The case is being followed by millions on live-stream video feeds and constant cable-news reports. In the past few days, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald have become the latest major outlets to begin offering live streams of the case. CNN and NBC air so much coverage of the trial that the networks each decided to erect a two-story, air-conditioned structure in a lot across from the courthouse. The broadcast village around the court often grows to hundreds of media vehicles.

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And yet they are relative latecomers to what is the first major murder trial of the social-media age. The first public mention of the case appeared on MySpace on July 3, 2008, when Cindy Anthony, Casey’s mother, posted a distraught message saying her daughter had stolen “lots of money” and wasn’t allowing her to see her granddaughter. (A few days later, Cindy called 911 to report a “possible missing child.”)

Today, the latest and most reliable news of the trial comes from a Twitter account, NinthCircuitFL. That’s the feed managed by the 9th Judicial Circuit Court, which has some 400 reporter-blogger followers. (As the first court in the U.S. to use DNA evidence, in a 1987 rape case, it’s accustomed to being on the cutting edge.) The various Facebook pages honoring Caylee have amassed tens of thousands of friends, and Twitter accounts like CaseyJunky and OSCaseyAnthony (managed by the Orlando Sentinel) are adding followers at a rate of hundreds per day.

And yet virtually no one doubts that Anthony was involved in her child’s death. In fact, her lawyer admits that Anthony knew how her daughter’s body would be disposed of. Few legal experts watching the proceedings expect her to get off. So why has this case become the O.J. Simpson trial of the new decade?

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Casey Anthony is a tenacious liar. Her defense team isn’t disputing most of her deceptions, which began not long after Caylee went missing three years ago. When sheriff’s deputies first questioned Anthony, in July 2008, she said that because she worked at Universal Studios (a lie) she employed a nanny to care for Caylee (another lie). That nanny, she said — a woman named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez — had stolen her child. This was a fantastic lie, as no such person existed.

The case might have run its tabloid course relatively under the radar if the fraudulent story line hadn’t changed. But last month, when the murder trial against Anthony began, she and her attorney Jose Baez radically altered the script. They said Anthony had lied for so long in order to cover up a family tragedy: Caylee had accidentally drowned in her grandparents’ pool. Baez said Casey didn’t reveal the truth because she was scared of her father George Anthony — who, Baez alleged, had begun molesting Casey when she was 8.

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George Anthony, 59, a tanned, white-haired former cop who shows up with his wife most days at the trial, has denied the accusation. “When I heard that today,” he said in court, “it hurt really bad.” The prosecution has chipped away at the drowning theory by showing that Casey didn’t seem upset in the days following the supposed accident. A local tattoo artist, Bobby Williams, testified that on July 2, 2008, about two weeks after Caylee was last seen alive, Anthony entered the shop where he works and requested new ink. She was specific about what she wanted: the phrase “Bella Vita” (Italian for “beautiful life”). As he tattooed Casey, Williams said, she happily chatted on the phone.

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Details like that one have enraged the court of social-media opinion. The day after Williams testified, Facebook user Jennifer Heavey posted a typical message on a Caylee Anthony page called Sweet Angel: “think im gonna puke in my mouth over them trying to get an aquittal shes GAULITY GAULITY GAULITY [sic]!!! Justice for Caylee.”

Hundreds of more sober posts on various pages weigh whether Cindy Anthony is a victim of her daughter’s duplicity or a grandmother who didn’t do enough. Cindy has wept on the stand several times at the trial; each time, posts on various Anthony feeds and pages spike to hundreds per minute. After testifying on June 14, Cindy mouthed the words “I love you” to her daughter. When Casey looked away without responding, the digital fury was palpable. If it’s true that Facebook and Twitter provide forums for a rich abundance of perspectives, the Casey Anthony trial shows they can also be arenas for mass, lip-licking bloodlust.

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From a legal perspective, the case against Anthony is astonishingly weak. Before it rested its case June 15, the state could present only a ragbag of circumstantial bits of evidence against her. Her fingerprints weren’t found on the body or on the duct tape over Caylee’s mouth and nose. No eyewitnesses ever saw Casey hurt Caylee, and the defense is sure to call witnesses who will testify that mother and daughter were close.

The prosecution is relying mostly on evidence found in an Anthony family Pontiac Sunfire that Casey used to drive. Casey abandoned the car about two weeks before Caylee was reported missing. When George Anthony got the car back, he said the trunk carried an overpowering stench of decomposing flesh. He testified that he had smelled dead bodies when he was a cop and that the smell is something “you never forget.” A controversial new smell test developed by crime researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that the odor almost certainly came from a body, not from a bag of garbage (as Anthony’s attorney has said). The prosecution also has a single strand of hair from the trunk, but it cannot say for certain whether that hair belonged to Caylee or to another Anthony family member. Tests suggesting that the hair came from a decomposing body are not conclusive.

But even if the body was in the car, isn’t that consistent with Casey’s story, that she and her father panicked and disposed of the body after Caylee drowned in the pool?

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And about that tattoo: what if Bella Vita is a description not of the good life Casey believed she would have after her troublesome daughter was dead but of the “beautiful life” that had just been taken from her?

Wouldn’t Casey abandon her car after she had to use it to hide her daughter’s corpse? Wouldn’t she bury her daughter with the girl’s Winnie the Pooh blanket, all the better to comfort the little body? Wouldn’t she have to keep up appearances after the accident by going out with friends to bars? Wouldn’t she text her boyfriend, “I’m the dumbest person and the worst mother. I honestly hate myself”?

Well, maybe. You have to squint really hard to bring the defense case into focus. It could ultimately crumble because of the overreaching, virtually unprovable accusation that George molested Casey. In court, the prosecution played hours of tapes from 2008 visits by George and Cindy to see Casey in jail. During one visit, Casey told her father, “You’ve been a great dad and the best grandfather.” The defense could argue that she said those words because she was frightened of him and knew that police were taping the visit. But her many deceptions won’t incline jurors to give her the benefit of the doubt.

For the public, though, the endless variations of the truth coming from Courtroom 23 are fodder for constant posts and reposts, bitter condemnations and many!! exclamation!! points!!!! The Anthony family tale has so many crosscurrents that operate along such electrified moral axes that it’s hard to turn away. If you looked at O.J. Simpson in 1995 and saw a cold-blooded killer trying to get away with it, you could only scream at the television. But if you see murder in Casey Anthony’s big brown eyes during a live feed of her trial, you can tell all the world how delectable you will find her execution.

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