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SARASOTA - The man accused of abducting, raping and strangling Carlie Brucia told his mother, brother and a friend he was high on drugs during the crime and that the 11-year-old girl's death was an accident.
Prosecutors played the taped conversations from jail for jurors Tuesday as they wrapped up their case against Joseph Smith. His defense attorney was to present arguments today before the case goes to the jury.
Carlie's disappearance received worldwide attention after a carwash security camera caught images of the apparent abduction.
The edited conversations were taped over the telephone or during jailhouse meetings in the weeks after Carlie's Feb. 1, 2004, disappearance.
The phone calls were recorded at the Manatee County Jail in February and March 2004. The prosecution provided testimony that Smith knew his calls were being recorded.
During a Feb. 9 call, Smith's mother, Patricia Davis, told her son, "Oh, Joe, the best thing is to try and think of it as an accident."
Smith replied, "It was an accident. You don't think I would do that."
He asked his mother to explain to his ex-wife that it was an accident. "She knows I'm not an animal, right?" he said.
In another conversation, Joseph Smith told his brother, John, that he felt "good" after making a confession and an act of contrition to a priest.
"I confessed to everything, murder, all types of stuff," Smith said.
In another talk with a friend, Sharon "Dusty" Johnson, Smith said he was on cocaine and heroin. "I wasn't myself," he said. "This is what this (expletive) did to me."
In a jailhouse meeting with the suspect, his brother, John Smith, suggested that they communicate using a code, according to another taped conversation. An FBI code breaker testified for prosecutors Tuesday that Joseph Smith told his brother in a letter encrypted in code that he had dumped Carlie's clothes and backpack in four trash bins and had dragged her body to where it was found at a church property more than four days after she disappeared.
The letter ended with Joseph Smith telling his brother to destroy the correspondence after deciphering it and "shut up," said Dan Olson, the FBI code breaker.
Smith, a 39-year-old former auto mechanic and father of three daughters, is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and capital sexual battery. If convicted, he may face the death penalty.
His defense attorney, Adam Tebrugge, on Tuesday challenged the reliability of an FBI lab that linked his client through DNA tests to a semen stain found on Carlie's shirt.
Tebrugge used a May 2004 report faulting the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for employing methods that were "vulnerable" to mistakes as the framework of his cross-examination of FBI examiner Jennifer Luttman, who testified the previous day that the semen stain matched DNA in an oral swab taken from Smith.
"Methods have been put into place to prevent this from happening again," Luttman said.
The Bradenton Herald contributed to this report.