Letecia Stauch murder trial: Brother doubts insanity claim

Six days after 11-year-old Gannon Stauch disappeared from his family’s Colorado Springs home in January 2020, his stepmother Letecia Stauch loaded her belongings into a rented cargo van to move across the country.

As authorities scoured the boy’s neighborhood and prepared for extensive searches with drones, sonar, dog teams and volunteers, his stepmother struggled to move a heavy suitcase into a van behind a Budget Truck Rental location, her half-brother, Dakota Lowery, testified this week at Letecia Stauch’s murder trial.

She wouldn’t let him help her with the suitcase, he said on the stand. When he asked what was inside, she told him it was softball gear.

“I didn’t feel right about it,” he said softly, becoming emotional. “I just felt like it was too heavy for her.”

Weeks later, construction workers discovered Gannon’s body in that same suitcase, under a highway overpass in Florida. The 11-year-old had been shot, stabbed 18 times and suffered a skull fracture. Authorities later charged Letecia Stauch with first-degree murder.

“When he was found, I knew she did it,” Lowery testified. “When I seen that suitcase, I knew she was acting funny about it.”

His account came on the sixth day of testimony in what is expected to be a six-week jury trial in El Paso County District Court for Letecia Stauch, 39, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the killing of her stepson.

Prosecutors say she killed Gannon in his bedroom, then carefully cleaned up the crime scene and hid Gannon’s body in a remote area nearby before driving the body to Florida and dumping the suitcase under a bridge.

Stauch’s defense attorneys suggest she had a mental break during the killing and cannot be held criminally responsible for Gannon’s death because she was legally insane. Both sides sought to bolster their positions in the early days of the jury trial.

Prosecutors have focused this week on the lengths that Stauch went to to try to cover up the crime, including offering many different lies about what happened to Gannon. In a 911 call the day Gannon disappeared, she said Gannon had gone to visit a friend and did not come home. In phone calls with Gannon’s father and her then-husband Albert Stauch just a couple weeks after Gannon disappeared, she claimed a man broke into the family’s home, raped her, then beat and kidnapped Gannon.

“I said, ‘Where is the bloody mess, the clothes, the rags?’” Albert Stauch testified. “And she said, ‘Well I disposed of it.’”

Albert Stauch was working with law enforcement at the time, and the phone calls were recorded and played in court. During the emotional conversations, Albert Stauch confronted his wife about details in her stories that didn’t make sense and pushed her to tell the truth about what happened to Gannon. She repeatedly cried, screamed and asked for immunity from criminal prosecution in the calls. She would not explain why she needed immunity.

Through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses, Stauch’s defense attorneys have sought to show she had a traumatic childhood and suffered from mental illness. Lowery, who is 14 years younger than his sister, testified that his father was an alcoholic and beat their mother, sometimes so severely that their mother would take the children to a hotel room until he sobered up.

Lowery testified that when he was a toddler, his father gave him so much alcohol that he passed out. Letecia Stauch left home when she was 16, Lowery testified. Sometimes, when she came back to visit, she would leave Lowery knives to protect himself, he said.

Lowery said he initially thought his sister might have “snapped and went crazy” when she killed Gannon. But he said after learning about her actions after the killing, he no longer believes her claims of insanity.

“Too much got done for her to be saying that,” he said.

The trial continues Friday.

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