Detectives Overlooked Google Search In Casey Anthony Case

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP/CBSMiami) — The Florida sheriff's office responsible for the investigation of Caylee Anthony's death confirmed Sunday that it overlooked online evidence.

The Orange County Sheriff's Office said that it failed to notice a computer search for suffocation methods made from the little girl's home on the day she was last seen alive.

Sheriff's Capt. Angelo Nieves said the office's computer investigator missed a June 16, 2008, Google search for "fool-proof" suffocation methods.  It's not known who performed the search. An Orlando television station reported it was done on a browser primarily used by the 2-year-old's mother, Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of the girl's murder in 2011.

Anthony's attorneys argued during trial that Anthony helped her father, George Anthony, cover up the girl's drowning in the family pool.

Sheriff's investigators reportedly pulled 17 vague entries only from the computer's Internet Explorer browser, not the Mozilla Firefox browser commonly used by Casey Anthony. More than 1,200 Firefox entries, including the suffocation search, were overlooked.

Whoever conducted the Google search looked for the term "fool-proof suffication," misspelling "suffocation," and then clicked on an article about suicide that discussed taking poison and putting a bag over one's head.

The browser then recorded activity on the social networking site MySpace, which was used by Casey Anthony but not her father.

A computer expert for Anthony's defense team found the search before the trial. Her lead attorney, Jose Baez, first mentioned the search in his book about the case but suggested it was George Anthony who conducted the search after Caylee drowned because he wanted to kill himself.

Not knowing about the computer search, prosecutors had argued Caylee was poisoned with chloroform and then suffocated by duct tape placed over her mouth and nose. The girl's body was found six months after she disappeared in a field near the family home and was too decomposed for an exact cause of death to be determined.

Many jurors apparently went into hiding amid public outrage over the verdict and refused to comment, but two have said prosecutors couldn't conclusively prove how Caylee died.

Prosecutors Linda Drane Burdick and Jeff Ashton didn't respond to emails from The Associated Press on Sunday.

"It's just a shame we didn't have it. This certainly would have put the accidental death claim in serious question," Ashton told an Orlando television station.

Baez didn't respond to phone or email messages Sunday from The Associated Press but told an Orlando television station that he expected prosecutors to bring up the search at trial.

"When they didn't, we were kind of shocked," Baez, who no longer represents Anthony, told the station. Her attorney, Cheney Mason, who was also on the trial team, didn't return an email message from AP Sunday, and his office answering service refused to take a phone message.

The sheriff's office didn't consult the FBI or Florida Department of Law Enforcement for help searching the computer in the Anthony case, a mistake investigators have learned from, Nieves said.

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