Anthony Defense Team Inspects Car; Renowned Expert Brought In

November 14, 2008

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Casey Anthony's defense team examined her car on Friday, and a well-known forensics expert participated in the inspection, Local 6 News reported...

A judge recently granted Anthony's attorney, Jose Baez, to have access to the vehicle... abandoned months ago at an Orange County Amscot. Scientists have concluded that the trunk contained signs of possible human decomposition and unusually high levels of chloroform.

Baez said he wanted an independent examination of the white Pontiac Sunfire and brought in Dr. Henry Lee, who has worked in several high-profile cases, including the O.J. Simpson murder trial, to assist in the inspection.

In 2003, a judge ruled that Lee either hid or accidentally destroyed key evidence in a murder trial. (Phil Spectors hung-jury trial)

Anthony's car has been stored at the Orange County Sheriff's Office since being recovered after Anthony's arrest in July. Anthony's mother, Cindy Anthony, said on a 911 call reporting Caylee missing that the car smelled like there had been a dead body in it. Detectives told Local 6 News on Friday that the car still reeks of death.

Cell Phone 'Dead Zones'

A Local 6 News report about Casey Anthony shows that "dead zones" on her cell phone may hurt the investigation into the case.

Local 6 News investigative reporter Tony Pipitone analyzed hundreds of text messages and phone calls placed and received by Anthony in the two weeks after Caylee disappeared and used a database program to determine how much time passed between each ping.

There were 24 times when three or more hours passed with Anthony's phone remaining silent, Pipitone reported.

"And when you account for sleep and periods where she appeared to stay in the same place, we are left with three gaps -- or dead zones -- that raise some questions," Pipitone said.

The first "dead zone" was June 17 from 5:23 p.m. to 8:23 p.m. Anthony's phone pinged a tower close to her boyfriend's apartment near the University of Central Florida and then twice pinged a tower near Blanchard Park before going silent.

The park was searched but nothing was found. In the time it took Anthony's phone to ping another tower -- three hours later -- she could have traveled as far away as Palm Bay or Ormond Beach and returned to Orange County.

June 17 was a day after Caylee was seen alive by her grandfather, George Anthony, who said his daughter and Caylee left his home at about 12:50 p.m. the day before.

Scientific evidence suggests that human remains that decomposed in the trunk of Anthony's car was there for up to 2½ days after death, Pipitone said. That would mean if Caylee died on June 16, investigators may want to focus more on June 18 into June 19, which contained two dead zones on her cell phone, he reported.

On June 18, Anthony's phone went silent at 6:57 p.m. and did not ping another tower until 8:32 a.m. June 19. In both cases, her phone pinged a tower near her boyfriend's apartment. Her whereabouts during that time is not known.

On June 19, Anthony's phone pinged near her boyfriend's apartment at 4:54 p.m., then her movements head south and east, according to cell phone pings, Pipitone said. "Heading east and hitting (a) cell tower on Lake Underhill Road ... but from here, her cell phone goes dead for three hours and 17 minutes. Where could she have gone in that time?" Pipitone said.

The last ping from the Lake Underhill tower was at 5:45 p.m., and the phone then went silent until a ping near her boyfriend's apartment. She then called her parents' home at 9:13 p.m., and there's no indication where Anthony was during the time frame.

"If this is the time Casey may have disposed of the body in her car trunk, there's no indication where Caylee may be either," Pipitone said.

CELL PHONE FORENSICS

Is this why Casey Anthony decided to get a new AT&T Blackjack just a couple of weeks before it was found that Caylee was missing? Was mommy-dearest trying to confuse any tracking of where she was? Now she could say anyone who found her two missing cell phones could throw off her actual location? She was curiously detailed in her jail-house phone call description to her brother on how she moved the sims card back and forth between old and new phones because the new one "wouldn't hold a charge".

Tuesday, January 23, 2007
by Maite Amorebieta, Dateline assistant producer

Welcome to the age of cell phone forensics.

More and more it seems cell phone evidence is being used in criminal trials. And in the Piper Rountree case, it was key.

Often, cell phone records are used in court to establish people's movements. How? Well, what most people forget, with all that these devices do these days, is that cell phones are really just two-way radios, albeit sophisticated ones.

Cell phones are constantly communicating with a network, sending pings to the nearest transmission tower, which allows your calls to be routed correctly.

Multiple antennas are tracking your phone's signal, since each tower only covers a few square miles. But, as you move, your call travels with you and is handed off to the base station receiving the strongest signal from your phone. The carrier keeps records of which towers the phone has contacted or pinged, and when.

Which means a cell phone's position over time can be tracked within a few hundred yards. In urban areas with many towers, a phone can be tracked almost to the block. And as most phones become equipped with GPS chips, they only need to be turned ON to pinpoint your location in real time!

Technology is so good that hand-offs are unnoticed. But, the price we pay is that our phone calls leave a trail. And the trail left by Piper Rountree's cell phone threatened to convict her.

On the day of Fred Jablin's murder, lead detective Coby Kelley got a warrant for Piper's cell phone records. Within hours, the police were able to place that phone in the Richmond area at the time of Fred's murder and then tracked it heading east on I-64 toward Norfolk airport.
Then, the phone stopped communicating.

But, once it was out of the dead zone, the phone records placed Piper's phone in Baltimore. Upon further investigation, police learned that a passenger with the last name of 'Rountree' was ticketed on a flight from Baltimore to Texas that very afternoon. However, the ticket happened to be in the name of Piper's sister-- Tina.

Piper would later say that her phone was used by several people, including Tina. About 14 hours before the murder, police say Piper called her 12 year old son, and told him that she was in Texas. This was at a time when her cell phone was pinging towers in Virginia.

Could Tina have actually been on the phone with Piper's son? While Piper says that people often confuse her voice for Tina's, the prosecution argued a son would know his own mother's voice.
The jurors we interviewed believed Piper spoke to her son that Friday night.

And to them, that phone call put Piper in Richmond that Friday, leading them to the ultimate conclusion that she was also lying in wait to shoot Fred Jablin in his Hearthglow Lane driveway early that Saturday morning before the sun came up.