SAN DIEGO — The Danielle van Dam murder trial opened Tuesday with a prosecutor asking jurors to focus solely on the 7-year-old victim and her alleged killer while the defense urged the panel to scrutinize the sex lives and substance use of her parents and their friends.

"This trial will be about two people... about David Westerfield and what he did to Danielle van Dam," said prosecutor Jeff Dusek as a projector flashed a school photo of the gap-toothed second-grader alongside a mugshot of Westerfield, her 50-year-old neighbor.

In a steady, systematic way, the prosecution laid out its case, including hair, blood and fingerprint evidence linking Westerfield to the crime. The prosecutor's meticulous, almost genteel opening statement was followed by rapid-fire, animated address in which defense lawyer Steven Feldman largely ignored the physical evidence.

Danielle van Dam

Instead, he portrayed Danielle's parents, Brenda and Damon, as oversexed suburbanites more concerned about their next swinger's rendezvous and marijuana hit than the safety of their children.

"Brenda is putting the moves on people, meaning she's behaving in a sexually aggressive manner," Feldman said, raising his eyebrows at jurors as he described a bar outing with girlfriends the night Danielle vanished. "Brenda was trying to bring company home to Damon."

He charged that the couple was intimate with a circle of people and added, "interesting as to who they allow in their door."

Westerfield, a divorced design engineer with two grown children, faces the death penalty if convicted of Danielle's kidnapping and murder. His body shook slightly, as he has in previous hearings, while he listened to testimony Tuesday. Dressed in a charcoal jacket and narrow maroon patterned tie, he chatted with his lawyers during trial breaks and at one point flashed a smile and nodded at two women in the small court gallery.

The van Dams, like all witnesses in the trial, are precluded from being in the courtroom. Family friends were in attendance, however, and shook their heads and scoffed as Feldman attacked the couple. Judge William Mudd, responding to defense complaints, told van Dam supporters not to wear buttons showing Danielle's picture in court, nor to distribute them in the hall where jurors might pass.

Prosecutor Jeff Dusek

"The public must certainly understand what form of intimidation that is and I'm not going to tolerate it," said Mudd. The judge was dealing with intimidation of his own in the high-profile trial. After giving jurors his chambers telephone number from the bench — standard procedure for Mudd — his office was deluged with calls from people the judge described as "every weirdo, wacko and dime store comedian in this country."

"We're not in San Diego anymore," he quipped to jurors.

From the start, the case has garnered national media coverage. Danielle was stolen the night of Feb. 1 from a canopy bed in her suburban bedroom as her parents and two brothers apparently slept undisturbed. Three weeks later, her body was found in a trash-strewn lot.

Her corpse was too badly decomposed to determine how she died or whether she was raped, but prosecutors theorize she was sexually assaulted and then suffocated — a manner of death that would leave no obvious sign.

Investigators focused on Westerfield because he left for a trip the morning Danielle was discovered missing. Police found her fingerprints and hair in the recreational vehicle he took on the trip, child pornography on his home computer and a spot of her blood on his jacket.

Prosecutor Dusek revealed additional evidence against Westerfield Tuesday. Among the previously unknown evidence Dusek cited:

* Fibers found in Westerfield's recreational vehicle match the carpet in Danielle's bedroom and a towel from the rural spot where he body was discovered.

* Westerfield frequented a casino near the dump site and was familiar with that area.

* Two days after Danielle disappeared, a time when Westerfield claims he was traveling alone, a witness who heard him talking to someone inside his RV.

* A bent screen and binoculars in Westerfield's house suggest he might have spied on Danielle playing in her backyard.

Defense lawyer Feldman shrugged off the prosecution's case as entirely circumstantial. Only someone familiar with the van Dam house would know how to navigate in the middle of the night, not Westerfield who barely knew the family, he said. He suggested Danielle van Dam's hair might have gotten in his home and on his property when she and her mother sold him Girl Scout cookies a few days before her disappearance. He also said Westerfield's RV was frequently parked in the neighborhood and sometimes children played in it.

The prosecution showed jurors child pornography from Westerfield's computer, including pictures of young girls being raped by men. But Feldman said Westerfield had tens of thousand of pornographic images and all but a handful were large-breasted adult women, which Feldman said, "you'll learn is his taste."

But most of Feldman's statement to the jury concerned the behavior of her parents. On the night Danielle went missing, her mother, father and two female friends smoked a joint and drank in the family garage. The women then spent the evening at Dad's Café, a bar and restaurant.

Defense lawyer Steven Feldman

"This isn't the girls' night out. This is the girls' night out to party," he said, noting that each woman consumed several cocktails and smoked more pot in the parking lot. The women danced suggestively with each other and flirted, he said, in hopes of luring men back to the van Dam's for sex, Feldman charged.

Among the men at the bar that night was Westerfield although both sides acknowledge he left before Brenda van Dam, her two female friends and two male friends returned to the van Dam house.

Prosecutor Dusek derided the focus on the sex lives of the van Dam's and friends in his opening, referring sarcastically to a kiss and embrace between one of the women and Damon van Dam as "the exciting part of the case."

Feldman, however, intimated that the gathering was sexual and told jurors the van Dams had given six false statements to police before telling the truth.

Five witnesses testified late Tuesday afternoon, including the two men who discovered Danielle's body.

"What did you see," Dusek asked volunteer Karsten Heinburger of the moment his search party stumbled upon the dump site.

"Danielle's body," he said. "The body was laying down on her back. Her head was facing to her right."

Testimony continues Wednesday morning.