Casey Anthony’s trialgets underway today with jury selection, nearly three years after her toddler daughter, Caylee, disappeared.
The trial was moved to a secret location and the judge did not reveal the site of the trial until early this morning. Jury selection will occur in Clearwater, Fla., instead of Anthony’s hometown of Orlando in an effort to find an unbiased jury of 12 members and eight alternate jurors.
Caylee disappeared in the summer of 2008. The child had been missing for a month before Anthony told anyone and when she did, it was her mother who called 911.
“I can’t find my granddaughter. There’s something wrong. I found my daughter’s car today and it smelled like there’s been a dead body in the damn car,” said Cindy Anthony in the July 2008 call to police.
During a five-month search in 2008 for Caylee, Casey Anthony told investigators she had left Caylee in the hands of a babysitter, a woman who now is suing Casey for defamation. Anthony lied to investigators about her job. She said that she worked at Universal Studios, even taking investigators to the theme park. Anthony had no steady job. She occasionally worked at a nightclub selling shots to partiers.
Caylee’s body was found December 11, 2008 in a wooded area a 15-minute walk from the Anthony home. The body was too decomposed for medical examiners to determine a cause of death. Anthony was charged with murder in October 2008 and could face the death penalty.
Instead of searching for her daughter, photos showed Anthony partying during the first month of her daughter’s disappearance.
“It’s going to be very tough for this mother to explain why she was doing and saying the things that she was in the days and weeks after her daughter disappeared,” ABC News’ legal analyst Dan Abrams said.
Anthony has been criticized for not only partying in the months after her daughter’s disappearance, but for showing little emotion and even laughing in jailhouse conversations with family and friends.