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.
