Letecia Stauch (wearing pink in the left-hand image) listens to testimony on April 12, 2023. (Screenshot: Law&Crime Network)
In a Facetime call played for jurors on Tuesday, Letecia Stauch, 39, once complained to a detective about constantly being questioned about her then-missing stepson Gannon Stauch, 11.
“Is there anything more that you might be able to share with me to help me find Gannon,” Detective Jessica Bethel said, then, after a pause: “Where are you now?”
“You keep asking me this over and over and over,” Stauch answered.
“Where are you now?” Bethel said.
In a Facetime call, accused child killer #LeteciaStauch questioned lead detective Jessica Bethel about male deputies being at home while her teen daughter was alone and could not leave the house. Stauch is on trial for the murder of her stepson Gannon in 2020. pic.twitter.com/pVVzqJfZNe
— Law&Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) April 12, 2023
Prosecutors said Stauch knew her stepson’s whereabouts. Authorities claim she stabbed and shot the child on Jan. 27, 2020, in his bedroom in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and hid the remains, eventually taking him to Pensacola, Florida, where bridge workers found him in a suitcase on March 17, 2020.
Stauch is putting up an insanity defense. Her attorney Will Cook told jurors in opening statements that she lived with dissociative identity disorder and experienced both physical and sexual abuse growing up. Prosecutors argue that she knew what she was doing when she cleaned up the crime scene, lied to everyone about not knowing Gannon’s whereabouts, and pushed that suitcase over a bridge railing in Pensacola.
“Everything that happened to Gannon from that point forward was her decision,” District Attorney Michael Allen of the 4th Judicial District told jurors. “She carried out actions to kill Gannon, to put his body in the suitcase and hide it, to hide evidence of what she did to Gannon, told numerous stories to investigators to manipulate the course of the investigation, and finally to discard Gannon inside that suitcase off of a Florida bridge like garbage.”
The child’s father, Al Stauch, was out of town while deployed for the National Guard at the time of Gannon’s death.
Now divorced from Letecia Stauch — or as he called her, “the defendant” — Al Stauch testified about confronting her about her shifting stories of his son’s disappearance.
He told the court that she previously claimed the child had it out for her. To his recollection, that allegation involved his son threatening Letecia Stauch with a knife or coming at her with a knife. He said he never saw anything like this and that he saw no evidence Gannon had it out for the defendant.
“Absolutely never witnessed that, period,” he testified of his son’s alleged grudge.
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