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Gaime case unravels in maze of criminal law

The tangled case of Kristina Gaime reveals how police searches can become major stumbling blocks.

By JAMES THORNER and JAMAL THALJI
Published April 23, 2005

	An appellate court upheld a ruling that prosecutors can't use this apparent suicide note left by Kristina Gaime when she allegedly tried to kill herself and her two sons in 1999.

It seemed a slam-dunk case of premeditated murder.

Prosecutors had a drugged, dead 6-year-old lying in a minivan full of carbon monoxide. A big brother who lived to tell police what he saw.

And most of all, they had what looked like a written confession for a murder-suicide plot.

The boys' mother, Kristina Gaime, hinted at it in an April 1999 note addressed "Dear Police."

"I didn't want anyone to find us in time," it said.

But this supposedly air-tight case has sprung leaks.

Just weeks after the sixth anniversary of the killing, the Pasco County woman could walk from her cell free on bail, the case against her badly weakened.

This week the 2nd District Court of Appeal, unanimously agreeing with a February 2004 decision by Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper, ruled that much of the strongest evidence against Gaime can't be used at her trial.

Tepper accused the detectives of mishandling the case and collecting evidence without proper search warrants.

Out goes the alleged murder-suicide note. Out goes the garden hose investigators said Gaime used to feed auto exhaust from the minivan's tail pipe to its cabin.

With the lesser evidence still at their disposal, prosecutors will try to prove Gaime's role in the April 1999 death of Mathew Rotell and the near fatal poisoning of her other son, Adam Rotell, then 8.

"I would think we're probably stuck with what we've got," Assistant State Attorney Phil Van Allen said Friday.

It was April 12, 1999. Kristina Gaime and her two sons had just returned from a spring break cruise to the Caribbean.

The home health care nurse, 34 at the time, was known by Land O'Lakes neighbors as "Super Mom," the owner of the townhome where all the kids came to play.

The boys' father, Stephen Rotell, had divorced Gaime five years earlier. Since then they had clashed bitterly in court to win custody of their offspring.

Gaime had accused her ex-husband of molesting the boys three times. Rotell was cleared each time. A new hearing that could have awarded custody to Rotell was scheduled for April 29.

But on that warm, sunny Monday morning, when the boys were due to return to elementary school, Mathew was found dead.

Responding to a 911 call from Gaime's mother, Pasco County sheriff's deputies found the first-grader's body on the floor of the family minivan.

The garden hose lay nearby.

Gaime was semi-conscious on a sofa, with unexplained burns and sores on her backside. Adam was alive and in the house, but blood tests showed morphine was still coursing through his veins.

Deputies seized the hose without a search warrant, but then went to a judge to get three warrants under the rationale of searching for the medicine fed to the boys.

Warrants in hand, detectives found notes and letters, some in drawers, others in a blue box and safe. At least one note contained sentences investigators considered damning:

"I obtained the meds today. I need to do what has been done ... Know that the kids nor I suffered. First, I medicated the boys, and then I started the car and stuffed up the exhaust pipe and then put a hose from the exhaust into the car ... The boys were already asleep and dreaming very happy thoughts. May God forgive me."

On May 4, three weeks after Mathew was killed, Gaime was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder.

Bitterly argued and endlessly delayed, the Gaime case has turned into a legal odyssey.

The biggest delay: a switch in defense teams, and strategies, in 2003. Out were Angelo Ferlita and Bob Nutter and the insanity defense. In were Lyann Goudie and Mark Ware, who attacked the state's case on constitutional grounds.

The entire Gaime case turned on that two-day hearing in 2004, when the judge heard from the detectives, weighed the arguments, and ruled.

She threw out the hose taken three hours before a search warrant was even issued.

"At that time there was an unexplained death," Tepper said. "There was no evidence at that time that there was a crime."

Gaime never consented to the search, the judge ruled, and given her condition was unable to. Her parents couldn't consent to a search of their daughter's home, either.

The judge eviscerated the three warrants detectives did obtain, writing "... the search warrant violated the ... Fourth Amendment," and questioning the investigators' credibility. The detectives were authorized only to search for medicine, Tepper wrote. Therefore, everything but the medicine including the "Dear Police" note, was out.

Tepper also wrote that she did not believe the detectives' conflicting accounts of how they found the purported suicide note, calling Detective Brett Landsberg's testimony "less than genuine."

Tepper threw out the second warrant, executed April 14, in part because it was based on Adam's statements to detectives. But detectives never told the issuing judge Adam suffered from a learning disability, had trouble keeping track of time and said throughout the interview that he was confused.

The third warrant was used to search the contents of a blue box and a safe for more medication. Tepper tossed out that warrant, because it was based on detectives' statements that they were searching for pills Adam told them his mother gave him.

"Throughout the interview ... Adam repeatedly denies that his mother gave him any pills," the judge wrote.

Adam's statements to detectives can't be used against his mother anyway; in March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court banned hearsay evidence. And prosecutors don't expect to call him in person because doctors have said it would be harmful to him.

Police searches are among the trickiest areas of criminal law, said John Fitzgibbons, a former federal prosecutor turned private defense attorney in Tampa.

Police are allowed to seize "contraband" such as illegal drugs that they stumble upon while searching for something else. But that doesn't mean they can expand the scope of a search without limits.

"There are literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of legal opinions. It's one of the most litigated areas of law over the years," Fitzgibbons said. "It's so hard to find a hard and fast bright line ... it's almost a case by case basis."

Tampa defense attorney Rick Leal said deputies were out of line grabbing private papers in a search for medicine.

"They assumed that anything they found they could take," Leal said. "But that's not true."

A status hearing for Gaime is set for Wednesday. Both the prosecution and the defense have declined to comment on a possible plea agreement. When the state receives the appellate court's mandate, it will have 15 days to decide on its only option: ask for a re-hearing.

The appeals court upheld Tepper's ruling without issuing an opinion, which means "you don't know what they based their ruling on," Van Allen said. "The (appellate court) didn't leave us with a whole lot of wiggle room."

Van Allen said he expects a trial date to be set then. Gaime's bail motion will be considered May 5.

Prosecutors say they'll fight to keep Gaime behind bars.

Those involved in the case have said little.

Tepper has ordered lawyers not to discuss evidence. Gaime has granted no interviews from jail. Goudie has told Gaime's family not to to talk to reporters. Gaime's ex-husband and father of the boys, Stephen Rotell, has repeatedly refused interviews.

Tepper's ruling helped spark a re-evaluation of the way the Pasco County Sheriff's Office conducts searches. Deputies underwent retraining last year.

Detective Landsberg is still with the Sheriff's Office, working in the juvenile investigations unit. Detective Kim Norris, another investigator in the case, left the department around Christmas.

Sheriff Bob White, who was elected after Gaime's arrest, referred all questions about the case to the State Attorney's Office.

Lee Cannon, who was sheriff at the time, has nothing to say now.

"I don't have anything to do with it," he said from his new job as a Realtor. "I'm not the sheriff."

[Last modified April 23, 2005, 00:54:19]