Pasco: Documents reveal Gaime's possible defense

Documents reveal Gaime's possible defense

Hundreds of pages of documents were filed Friday in the case of the woman accused of killing a 6-year-old son and trying to kill another.

By JAMAL THALJI, Times Staff Writer
Published July 22, 2005

DADE CITY - Kristina Gaime might not have been alone the night she is accused of killing one son and trying to kill another, according to her attorneys.

Unexplained blood stains. An unidentified woman who greeted a pizza delivery driver at Gaime's Land O'Lakes townhome. Pry marks on the back porch door.

That is the evidence, some new and some not, Gaime's lawyers offered in hundreds of pages of documents filed late Friday to free their client from jail pending trial.

Defense attorney Lyann Goudie has long challenged the state's version of what happened April 12, 1999: that Gaime alone drugged her children with morphine, loaded them into a running minivan, then pumped carbon monoxide inside.

Though a judge threw out much of the state's evidence against Gaime, her attorneys have yet to explain why her children tested positive for morphine. Authorities say a lethal dose killed 6-year-old Mathew Rotell. Adam Rotell, now 14, and his mother survived.

A judge asked: How did the morphine get into the children? What was the defense's theory?

"You'll hear it when we go to trial," attorney Lyann Goudie said afterward.

But that theory may be tucked inside these documents.

Not only is the defense appearing to build grounds for reasonable doubt at the Oct. 31 jury trial, but these latest documents also try to poke holes in the prosecution's case.

Gaime hatched, then botched the murder/suicide plot, authorities say, to keep ex-husband Stephen Rotell away from their children before a pending April 27, 1999 hearing.

But in a July 22 affidavit, Gaime's divorce attorney Catherine Catlin said she never told her client she might lose custody of the two boys, or have to let her ex-husband see them.

And according to a defense expert, there would have been no survivors if Gaime, a trained hospice nurse, was really trying to kill herself and her two boys.

"... I inquired that if a registered nurse with Ms. Gaime's training had access to oral morphine syringes, would she have trouble using the syringes to kill herself/or her children?" defense investigator Kevin Kalwary wrote. "I was told that registered nurses would have no difficulty, whatsoever, in killing themselves or others ..."

Gaime, 41, has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and attempted murder. She faces life in prison if convicted.

This is her lawyers' third attempt to free her pending trial. The judge denied the first two motions, and no hearing has been set to hear the third.

Some of the evidence introduced by the defense includes:

Human blood taken from Gaime's bed comforter. Tests showed it belongs to an unidentified male and female whose DNA could not be matched to Gaime, her family or anyone known to be in the house, according to the defense's forensic consultant.

Two foreign objects lodged in Gaime's skin might have come from a stun gun, according to defense documents. The defense also lists two unknown objects photographed on Gaime's bathroom counter by sheriff's investigators that weren't confiscated.

One object could have been part of a stun gun, the documents said, and the other could have been a "heat inducing substance" that could explain Gaime's burns that night.

A pizza delivery driver said when he brought a pizza to Gaime's townhouse late April 11, that a "short, heavyset woman with a large brown dog" paid for it, those documents said.

That description doesn't match Gaime, her attorneys said, nor did she own such a dog.

There are indications someone tried to break into Gaime's townhome, according to the defense, and other homes in her neighborhood. Syringes with heroin residue were also discovered in the neighborhood, according to the defense.

Gaime bought breakfast foods for the boys and washed, dried and folded laundry the night of the incident.