The murder trial of Jamie Kellam Letson, charged in the 1980 killing of University of South Alabama student Katherine Foster, moved toward a close this week in Mobile County Circuit Court, with the defense’s central theory largely dismantled and the state leaning on Letson’s own words.
The theory that collapsed
Much of the defense argument had been built on an old law enforcement theory that pointed toward a University of South Alabama campus police officer, a man detectives once regarded as strange and who took his own life in 1983.
Detectives who responded to that suicide found circumstances they described as troubling. Over time, though, the theory came apart. An enclosed space in the dwelling that investigators once viewed with alarm was explained as an accommodation for an elderly relative with Alzheimer’s disease who was prone to wandering. Suicide, it developed, ran through the officer’s family, with several relatives, including his mother, having killed themselves, which weakened the inference that guilt over Foster’s death had driven him to it.
Underneath all of it lay a single error. A 24-hour discrepancy about when Foster disappeared caused detectives and forensic scientists to miscalculate in several directions at once. It bolstered Letson’s alibi, and it lent credibility to the suspicion that the campus officer had held Foster captive for a day or more before killing her.
A defense witness who helped the state
Former Mobile Police Department detective Wilbur Williams, who retired in 1998 after 25 years and later became chief of police in Andalusia, testified Monday as a defense witness. His testimony appeared to strengthen the prosecution instead.
Williams agreed the campus officer had been a suspect, but said his opinion would have been decidedly different had he known of Letson’s confessions. He said the defense lawyer who spoke with him about the case had not told him of those developments. Once the chronology of Foster’s disappearance and death was correctly established, Williams said, suspicion fell heavily on Letson, who had opportunity, her alibi dissolved by the corrected timeline, and motive.
What jurors could and could not hear
Jurors would not consider what may be Letson’s most damning statement. Interviewed by Mobile detectives, she is said to have described the killing in detail, but because she had asked for a lawyer, Judge Michael Youngpeter disallowed the prosecution’s use of that statement.
Prosecutors instead exploited other admissible admissions at every opportunity. According to a police transcript, Letson met on Nov. 21, 2008, with Mobile detective Mike Morgan, Deputy Chief Jimmy Barber and District Attorney’s Office investigator Donna Cayton, after apparently waiving her right to counsel.
In that interview she described walking with Foster into woods near the campus traffic circle, and firing. "She was in front of me and I shot her in the back of the head," she said, according to the transcript. She recalled a roar inside her head and a thought that followed: "Oh, my God, what have I done?" She said she believed she fired a second time, and that Foster had staggered rather than fallen at once, a detail that matched physical evidence long unexplained: Foster’s own blood on the sole of her shoe.
Asked where the gun came from, Letson said she had taken it from her grandmother, intending to kill herself with it. She said she threw it into a garbage container on campus. Pressed on details, she said repeatedly that she could not be certain. "Now I’m telling you I was real crazy when all this was going on," she said. "I’ve already told you I shot the girl."
Motive, in her own account
Letson described an obsession with a young man, Tom Jaudon, that she said had begun in high school and grew worse at the university, and that she had told family and friends he was her boyfriend when he was not. "I made up all this stuff in my head," she said.
A veteran assistant district attorney, JoBeth Murphree, was under defense subpoena but apparently would not be called. The trial was expected to conclude Thursday or Friday.