Concordia adjunct professor and forensic entomologist Dr. Timothy Huntington tells over 50 attendees “what the bugs say” in Casey Anthony murder case
Photo credit: Josiah Seabaugh
By Hope Nelson
Adjunct professor Dr. Timothy Huntington talked insects and investigation when describing his role as a forensic entomologist in the “trial of the century” to more than 50 students, faculty and community members.
Huntington is a board-certified forensic entomologist, one of less than 20 in the United States. He specializes in the examination of insect evidence as a way to pin down the timeline of criminal activity, such as the murder of toddler Caylee Anthony in July 2008.
“Basically, I look at bugs on dead people for a living,” Huntington said. He added that, most of the time, his work focuses on narrowing down a “post-mortem interval,” or the time from death to the discovery of a body.
Senior Seanna Patterson, who attended the lecture, said that she finds forensic entomology fascinating.
“[Huntington’s] job is super cool, and I had no idea forensic entomology was a career until I met him,” she said. “The stories that flies and maggots can tell at a crime scene are so cool, and they show how God’s creation was designed so intentionally that science can use it to make conclusions about unknowns such as murder cases.”
Huntington began his presentation by taking attendees through a timeline of the Florida murder case, which began in mid-July 2008 when 2-year-old Caylee Anthony was reported missing by her grandmother. In 2011, Casey Anthony, Caylee’s mother, was convicted by a jury of four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to a law enforcement officer, two of which were overturned on appeal. She was found not guilty of first-degree murder charges in the case.
Huntington detailed how he was called to examine evidence for the defense in December 2008 but did not gain access to it until July 2010. Then, he traveled to Florida, where he worked with insect samples found in the trunk of Casey Anthony’s car as well as the site where her daughter Caylee’s body was discovered. He gave a brief overview of the insect evidence involved in the case and said that it didn’t point to the conclusion that most investigators assumed to be true.
“As a scientist, I just tell you what the bugs say,” he said, adding that the bugs indicated that there had never been a body in the trunk of Casey Anthony’s car, complicating the case.
Senior Joshua Burmeister said that he felt the amount of information he learned from Huntington took him from not knowing anything about the case to feeling that he could give a lecture on it himself.
“By the end of it, I was saying, ‘maybe I should become a forensic entomologist,’” he said, “which is a crazy thought, because I’m a month out from graduating with a degree in theology!”
In court, Huntington testified for more than seven hours on how the insect evidence he discovered pointed to the conclusion about the trunk of Anthony’s car. Hired as a witness for the defense, he experienced backlash from various sources.
“One of the things I should not have done is watched the news that night,” he said, before reading a few of the emails he received in the following weeks from disgruntled viewers of the televised trial.
