A Colorado woman knew what she was doing when she stabbed her young stepson 18 times and then shot him in the head before driving across the country to dump a suitcase containing his remains over a bridge in the Florida Panhandle, a prosecutor said. . she told the jury Monday at the start of her trial.
Authorities allege that Letecia Stauch killed 11-year-old Gannon Stauch in her bedroom a few hours before she was reported missing on January 27, 2020, while her father was on a National Guard deployment. They have suggested that she was not happy in her marriage and that she resented being treated like an unpaid babysitter.
Lawyers for Stauch, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, responded by stating that he suffered a "major psychotic break" as a result of childhood trauma when he killed Gannon.
The dueling narratives of why Stauch carried out the crime came during opening statements in Colorado Springs for a trial expected to last several weeks.
District Attorney Michael Allen argued in his opening statement that the steps Stauch took to cover up her actions are proof that she knew what she had done was wrong and was therefore sane. She cleaned up the blood in Gannon's bedroom, moving his body to various places to hide it before dumping it "like trash" in a river that empties into the Gulf of Mexico in the hope it would never be found, she said.
Stauch also lied to investigators multiple times to try to hinder their investigation, Allen said, changing his version of what happened to Gannon. She claimed that two different men had raped her and then kidnapped Gannon, and later that one of those men had taken Gannon after he was injured in a bicycle accident.
“All of her actions were purposefully designed by her to distance herself from what she did,” Allen said.
But defense attorney Will Cook said the gruesome details highlighted by Allen, including how Gannon was killed and the lack of a motive, are proof that Stauch was "insane" because it all makes no sense.
“All of these are signs and evidence of a mind, a soul, that is broken in the most fundamental and profound way,” he said.
Cook suggested that Stauch developed dissociative identity disorder as a result of being physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by her absent mother's series of partners throughout her childhood, sometimes sleeping in a car in the driveway to escape the abuse. When she killed Gannon, in her mind she was not killing her stepson, but the "demons" of her childhood and life, she said.
Based on surveys of potential jurors, many were skeptical of Stauch's mental health defense, Cook said. He urged jurors to put aside their impulse to make someone pay for such a brutal murder and keep an open mind because the court system requires that Stauch be presumed innocent.
I'm not telling you to like it. I'm just telling you that's the way it is,” she said.
Initially, authorities said they responded after Stauch said Gannon had not returned from playing with a friend. But she did not provide the names of any friends she may have been with or her parents. Within days, she concocted a variety of stories to fool them, including that a man she hired to repair a rug raped her and then kidnapped Gannon, according to investigators.
More than 200 volunteers conducted searches for the boy in the area where the family lived near Colorado Springs while authorities investigated. About two weeks after Gannon's disappearance, searchers found a piece of particle board with Gannon's blood on it in a nearby rural area. Assuming the boy was dead, authorities arrested Stauch in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on March 2, 2022. Gannon's remains were found later that month in the small Florida Panhandle town of Pace.
Stauch was charged with first-degree murder, tampering with a deceased human body, and tampering with physical evidence.
Investigators found Gannon's blood on Stauch's shoe, found his DNA on a weapon linked to his death and learned that he traveled to the Florida Panhandle shortly after he went missing, prosecutors said.
Stauch was also charged with attempting to escape from jail after her arrest. According to court documents, she asked a fellow prisoner to help her out, explaining that she planned to use a broom handle to break her cell window and that it had already been measured to make sure she could get through. .
