Jurors saw footage on Friday in which stepmother Letecia Stauch, 39, admitted to a forensic psychologist about shooting Gannon Stauch, 11, but she maintained she mistook her stepson for a man in a black cape. The doctor, Loandra Torres, testified that the defendant was sane during the slaying.
Prosecutors said that on Jan. 27, 2020, Letecia Stauch stabbed the child 18 times, shot him once in the head (missing twice), cleaned up the scene, lied to law enforcement and her family in constantly shifting stories about Gannon's whereabouts, and eventually took his remains in a suitcase all the way from Colorado over to Pensacola, Florida, where she pushed it over a bride railing. Bridge workers discovered the suitcase — and the remains — on March 17, 2020.
The defense maintains that she was legally insane, living with dissociative identity disorder. The prosecutors said, however, that she knew what she was doing.
Dr. Jackie Grimmett, a forensic psychologist who evaluated defendant Stauch for competency to face charges but not to determine insanity, found she had narcissistic and borderline personality traits. She dismissed the defendant's claims about having multiple personalities. Grimmett called dissociative identity disorder a debilitating experience, with people being unable to hold down jobs and relationships, or to be productive. The doctor noted Stauch naming the purported personalities.
"The alters present themselves to you," Grimmett said, describing a typical case. "You don't create them, and you don't name them kind of whimsically."
She said she didn't see the defendant changing personalities. Grimmett suggested that by discussing the different personalities and also claiming to talk to vampires, Stauch was trying to feel better about her situation.
In video played for the court on Friday, defendant Stauch told Torres about shooting Gannon, but thinking that a man in a black cape broke into their home. She suggested she mistook him because of the way a cover was wrapped around him.
"Never in a million years," she said, insisting she would never purposefully hurt her stepson.
She asserted she would not be in the country if she meant to do it.
"They paint me as this monster and I did all these crazy things — I never once knew it was Gannon," she said. "I, in fact, didn't even know it was Gannon until later on."
"Hearing the devil could be associated with psychosis," forensic psychologist Loandra Torres said before explaining that Stauch did not exhibit signs of psychosis. "It's just not a particularly credible symptom in the way she presented it."
— Law&Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) April 27, 2023
Torres testified that Letecia Staunch had no mental disease or defect that impairs her understanding of reality that would make it so she was incapable of forming judgments or thinking things through. The defendant showed signs suggesting the capacity to form some intent, the doctor said.
"She's not lacking in that," she said.
