ORLANDO, Fla (Reuters) – An expert on insects said on Friday at the Casey Anthony murder trial that he saw no evidence of a decomposing body in photos taken of her car trunk, an opinion at odds with testimony by a state witness.
Testifying for the defense, Timothy Huntington, an expert on insects and decomposing bodies, said if a body had decayed in the car's trunk, there should have been many insects present and there would have been a very noticeable stain.
The state's insect expert, Neal Haskell, had testified earlier that he found only one "blowfly" leg in the garbage bag found in Casey's trunk. Blowflies colonize dead and decomposing bodies at a very early stage, Huntington said.
A body decomposing in the trunk of a car, especially in the heat, would attract thousands of blowflies, Huntington said.
Prosecutors said Casey, 25, stored the body of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee in the car trunk after killing her on June 16, 2008. Caylee was reported missing on July 15, 2008, after her grandmother found Casey's car in an impound lot reeking of the odor of death.
Caylee's remains were located in woods a 10-minute walk from the Anthony family's home on December 11, 2008, after a nationwide search.
Huntington did not examine Casey's trunk in person until two years after Caylee's death. By then, the trunk had been emptied and the liner removed. He based his opinion on photos, something he said was common practice in his specialty. The jury was shown one of those photos on Friday afternoon.
To back his conclusions, he also showed the jury photos of his experiments in Nebraska in which he put recently killed pigs into car trunks to study the resulting insect colonization and the decomposition process.
Prosecutors asked if a body wrapped in a plastic bag would be protected from blowfly infestation.
Huntington said it depended on how well the bag is sealed. "If flies can smell decomposition in a plastic bag, they can get into it."
In a day of increasingly confrontational interactions between the state and the defense, prosecutor Jeff Ashton objected when the discussion turned to stains, saying that Huntington was an entomologist who should only be testifying about insects, not the stain left by a decomposing body.
Huntington said he had examined hundreds of decomposing human bodies during the course of his studies, and in his forensic duties with law enforcement.
The type of stain typically found when a body decomposes on carpet, he said, is black, greasy and thick -- a stain that in his experience could not be cleaned, even professionally.
At times Ashton's voice rose, and he often interrupted as the witness attempted to answer a question. Judge Belvin Perry reminded counsel that he was not hard of hearing, and even shushed Ashton at one outburst.
Huntington said the stain he saw in photographs of the trunk liner of Casey's car was not consistent with decomposition fluid stains.
"If that was a decomposition stain, it had to have been professionally cleaned. Decomposition stains don't go away easily," he said.
In fact, he said, the cars he used for his experiments were junk cars because they could never be cleaned or used again after he allowed the pig bodies to decompose in the trunks.
As for Casey's car, Huntington said, "There is nothing I can see that would indicate a decomposing body was in the trunk."
SPECTATORS SCUFFLE FOR A SPOT
A scuffle outside the courthouse early on Friday prompted court officials to change the procedure for obtaining tickets for the trial's public seating. The trial has garnered national media attention, including radio and television talk shows.
As spectators jostled before dawn for the sought-after passes, a couple of people tried to cut in line and a fight and shouting match ensued. There were no arrests, but four people were warned about trespassing, authorities said.
Effective immediately, court officials instructed trial observers to line up at 4 p.m. each weekday for tickets to the next day's court session.
Also outside the courthouse, a newly added defense witness held a press conference on Friday to insist that he does not know the Anthony family and has no idea why he was listed as a witness.
The defense team filed documents in court this week saying Vasco Thompson's phone number appeared on phone records of George Anthony, Casey's father, four times on July 14, 2008.
But Thompson's attorney Matt Morgan said his client, a convicted kidnapper, has never met the Anthonys and has no involvement with the case.
(Editing by Colleen Jenkins Greg McCune and Peter Bohan)
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