I had been avoiding details of the Letecia Stauch preliminary hearing because I knew it would be bad. I could not have imagined it was this bad.
Really an illustration of the depths of depravity that humanity is capable of. Gannon Stauch was an 11 year old boy from Colorado Springs who was
allegedly murdered by his step-mother Letecia while his father was away for National Guard training. She initially told police he had gone to a
friend's house and not come home.
I followed Gannon's case from the beginning, from the very first ridiculous missing person poster that his step-mother Letecia put out. How it said
he stayed home "sick" and yes she did put the word sick in quotation marks on the poster, just to illustrate a little bit more of her deep hatred of
an 11 year old boy who did nothing wrong.
What really happened is far, far worse. After claiming that Gannon was sick from school and texting in to her own recently acquired teaching job (yes,
this woman was an elementary school teacher), telling her job that her step-dad just got hit by a car (outright lie), she took "sickly" Gannon with
her to a Petco about 35 minutes from their home. We don't know yet what happened in the intervening 2 hour gap between the first Letecia sighting at
the Petco and her return trip to Petco 2 hours later. At neither point was Gannon actually seen on surveillance footage. When Gannon gets into the car
at the house, he does not appear injured.
When she arrives home, she is seen on surveillance, but Gannon is not leading to immediate wild speculation that she had killed Gannon and dumped his
body somewhere in all the Petco excursions. However, investigators believe she did bring him home and kill him in his own bed, as evidenced by the
huge bloodstain found under his bed which stained the carpet pad and concrete below.
The night before all this activity, there had been some type of incident in the home. After heavy suspicion fell on her, Letecia posted a video on her
Facebook of the incident that night in an attempt to quell rumors and vindicate herself. Letecia was nothing if not active on social media, blaming
Gannon's biological mom, who lives in South Carolina for him being missing. However the video did nothing but fan the flames. In it, Gannon can be
heard whimpering and crying as she demands he "tell me you didn't do it on purpose" and he is so.....distraught, crying. Many people believe they
hear him say "I'm bleeding" in the video. In a demented twist, shortly before her arrest, she posted a video she had taken of Gannon in Hawaii,
seemingly waving goodbye and jumping off a dock. This would prove prophetic.
Letecia had fled, 3 days after Gannon was reported missing. She had seemingly gone back to South Carolina and the cops were mum about the whole
situation. Letecia continued to bait social media, by doing a telephone interview where she repeatedly blames Landon, his biological mom for his
disappearance and actually makes the statement that whoever did it is probably miles away thinking that the cops aren't even looking at them. Wow.
Truth.
Letecia also attempted to obtain fake polygraph results in order to present them to a reporter from Crime Online and "prove" her innocence.
Ultimately, Letecia Stauch was arrested for Murder, but Gannon's body had not yet been found. A couple weeks after her arrest, roadway construction
workers in Escambia County, Florida found a suitcase containing his body under a highway overpass. Letecia had driven all the way from Colorado to
Florida with an 11 year old boy's dead body in a suitcase. With her daughter, aunt and another party yet to be named.
At the preliminary hearing, we learned some gruesome details about Gannon's murder. He was beaten, had a skull fracture and broken ribs, stabbed 18
times and shot in the head. He had defensive wounds on his hands and I hope he fought like hell against this absolute beast of a woman. Somehow,
Letecia managed to clean up the blood in about a 3 hour time period so well on the surface of the carpet, that when the police entered the house to
look around initially when Gannon was reported as a "runaway" they noticed nothing amiss.
www.denverpost.com...