On Monday, a jury in Colorado rejected a woman’s claim that she was insane when she attacked her stepson, finding her guilty of m*rder in the de@th of her 11-year-old stepson.
Over three years after the prosecution said that Letecia Stauch stabbed Gannon Stauch 18 times before striking him in the head and then shooting him once, Letecia Stauch was found guilty of all charges she was facing in the slaying of Gannon Stauch CBS News reported.
According to the prosecution, Stauch ki!!ed the boy in January 2020 because she despised him and wished to harm Al Stauch, the boy’s father, whom she intended to leave and was away on a National Guard deployment.
Stauch did not dispute that he had m*rder*d Gannon and transported his body across the nation in a suitcase in the trunk of a hired van. But she claimed to be insane and entered a not-guilty plea.
According to the defense, she ki!!ed Gannon during a “psychotic break” brought on by the stress of being physically, mentally, and se*ually abused as a child.
#BREAKING: A Colorado jury finds Letecia Stauch GUILTY of all charges in the death of her stepson, Gannon Stauch.
She was convicted of first-degree murder, murder a child under 12-years-old, tampering with a deceased human body, and tampering with physical evidence. pic.twitter.com/kzBiOTIYjo
— Court TV (@CourtTV) May 8, 2023
The state mental hospital’s experts concluded that Stauch was sane when Gannon was slain despite having a personality condition with borderline and narcissistic characteristics.
According to Colorado law, that implies knowing the difference between good and wrong and having the capacity to create the intent to commit a crime.
Dr. Dorothy Lewis, the primary witness for the defense who wrote the book “Crazy, Not Insane” and appeared in the HBO documentary of the same name, concluded that Stauch had dissociative identity disorder—a condition in which a person has two or more personalities as a result of trauma—and was not in a state of mind when Gannon was ki!!ed.
However, the prosecution emphasized that Lewis was ignorant of the legal definition of insanity in Colorado. Stauch was treated at a military health clinic when referred to a psychologist.
She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in the weeks before the m*rder of Gannon. In her testimony, Stauch’s therapist Ronda Niederhauser stated that Stauch was conscious of her surroundings and did not exhibit any signs of being a threat to herself or others.
Authorities think Stauch ki!!ed Gannon in his bedroom a couple of hours before Gannon went missing on January 27, 2020, claiming he hadn’t returned from playing with friends. Numerous volunteers assisted in the hunt for the kid near the family’s home in Colorado Springs.
Investigators then discovered that Stauch made up several tales to deceive them, including the claim that a man she hired to fix a carpet assaulted her before kidnapping Gannon.
Al Stauch authorized the FBI to listen in on their phone conversations with him after growing suspicious of his wife to get additional information about where Gannon was from her.
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Hours of audio from those calls and videos of Stauch being interviewed about her mental health made up a significant portion of the testimony during the five-week trial.
Bridge inspectors discovered Gannon’s remains in a suitcase hidden beneath a bridge in the Florida Panhandle in March 2020. In Pensacola, where she was staying with her daughter, the prosecution said Stauch secretly left her hotel room to dispose of her son’s body, hoping it would be washed into the Gulf of Mexico.
After a lengthy trial, Stauch was found guilty of first-degree m*rder, first-degree m*rder of a child by a person in a position of trust, tampering with a corpse, and tampering with tangible evidence.
As the verdict was read, she sat at the defense table between her two attorneys without appearing to react. Later, she sat alone, sipping water as people chatted in the courtroom.
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