A Colorado Springs woman accused of murdering her 11-year-old stepson suffers from multiple personality disorder due to severe childhood abuse and underwent a mental break when she killed the boy three years ago, her defense attorney argued in court Monday.
Attorney Will Cook began laying out an insanity defense during opening statements in the jury trial of Letecia Stauch, 39, who is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her stepson, 11-year-old Gannon Stauch.
The boy was killed Jan. 27, 2020, but his body was not found for weeks, prompting extensive missing-child search efforts — including an emotional plea from Gannon’s parents for his safe return — and drawing national attention from media and internet sleuths in the early days of COVID-19.
Although Letecia Stauch was arrested weeks after Gannon’s killing, the process of bringing the case to a jury was slowed by the pandemic and questions about her mental competency to stand trial.
In court on Monday, prosecutors alleged that Stauch was sane when she killed Gannon inside his bedroom, hid his body in a remote area nearby and then rented a van and drove the boy’s body to Florida, where she dumped his remains under a bridge.
Cook argued that Stauch was out of her mind and shouldn’t be held legally responsible.
“There is no motive,” Cook said, showing jurors a photo of Gannon and his stepmother smiling together the day before he was killed. “There is no reason. It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane. A smiling photo, and the next day, Gannon is gone. No reason for it.”
Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen pointed to Stauch’s extensive efforts to cover up the crime as proof of her sanity. She cleaned the very bloody crime scene, hid Gannon’s body and lied about what happened, he said.
“All of her decisions, all of her deliberate actions, betray her claims of insanity,” Allen said. “She knew that what she had done to Gannon was wrong.”
Stauch reported Gannon as missing from the family’s Colorado Springs home in January 2020, prompting an extensive search effort. His body was found in March 2020, inside a suitcase under a bridge near Pensacola, Florida.
He had been shot, stabbed 18 times and suffered a skull fracture. His body was wrapped in bedding from the family’s home, and bullets found in the suitcase appeared to have been fired from a gun kept in the family’s home.
Stauch pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, which means she claims she cannot be held criminally responsible for the killing because she was legally insane at the time of the crime. If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she would be committed to a mental health facility for treatment, rather than prison, and could eventually be released if she is later found to be sane.
If found guilty, she faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
Cook told jurors during opening statements Monday that Stauch developed dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder, after suffering years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriends when she was a child.
“The person she was killing that day, attacking, it wasn’t Gannon,” Cook said. “It wasn’t Gannon to her. She didn’t wake up that day and go, ‘I’m going to kill my stepson.’ No. She was killing the demons… from the dark depths of her childhood and her life.”
Allen rejected those claims by focusing on how Stauch carried out the killing — she attacked Gannon in his bedroom, he said, first stabbing him, then crushing his skull, and then shooting the boy. Stauch hid Gannon’s body in a storage room before moving it to a remote area along the El Paso/Douglas county line and later driving it to Florida.
“The one place where a boy like Gannon should have felt the safest — his bedroom — turned into the stuff of nightmares,” Allen said. “That bedroom is where he was brutally murdered.”
Investigators never found the tool Stauch used to stab Gannon, the clothing she wore during the attack or the shell casings from the family’s gun, Allen said. Stauch scrubbed the walls and floor of Gannon’s bedroom and put her bloody shoes in the washing machine, he said.
“The defendant took very deliberate action,” he said. “She decided to hide her crimes from the world.”
Stauch faces 12 charges in connection with the slaying; prosecutors on Monday dismissed a single count of child abuse resulting in death, saying that the facts of the case no longer support that charge.
The jury trial is expected to last six to eight weeks. Prosecutors will begin presenting evidence at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
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