Tampabay: Letters reveal Gaime's worries

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Letters reveal Gaime's worries

The woman accused of killing her son was obsessed with retaining custody, papers show.

By CHASE SQUIRES

Hundreds of pages of letters and documents released Friday portray Kristina Gaime as a woman obsessed with custody of her children, electronic bugging and death.

The material, released by prosecutors, offers a glimpse into the chaotic months leading to the death of Gaime's 6-year-old son, Mathew Rotell, at his Land O'Lakes home.

Gaime, 35, is charged with murdering him and trying to kill her other son, Adam Rotell, 8, by drugging them and poisoning them with exhaust from the family minivan. Mathew was found dead in the van April 12. Adam survived.

In one letter, apparently complaining to a friend about the relationship of her former husband, Stephen Rotell, with the boys, Gaime asks, "How do I teach a 6 yr. old (sic) how to trust a God that lets such terrible things happen to him? He wants to kill himself . . . Does it take death to believe and to protect him?"

Files released Friday include 26 pages of handwritten letters from Gaime to police, her alarm company, her parents, a friend, and apparently to both her first husband, Stephen Rotell, and second husband, Jerry Gaime.

She instructs the alarm company not to trust anyone who calls with the secret code word. She tells a friend lawyers are bugging her home and having her followed.

She refers in one letter to an illness, "My stomach thing," and notes, "I had made a comment to my mom, in my home, about if my condition was serious that she would need to fight . . . for custody or he would take the kids up north and give the boys to someone who will let them stay with him and he could do whatever he wanted."

In letters to a friend, "Donna," she calls Stephen Rotell a "monster" and says he won't give up their ongoing court fight until he has custody of the children. She worries she is about to lose her children.

"What if I lose my guys. How do you live without children?" Gaime wrote. "I couldn't. I won't be able to do it."

Many pages are only partially visible, as prosecutors erased names and key points of potential courtroom testimony. But a clearer picture emerged of the events leading up to Mathew's death and the morning his body was discovered by his grandmother, Kathleen McDuffie.

The file includes several transcripts from Gaime's five-year divorce and custody battle with Stephen Rotell, including pages of her allegations that Rotell sexually abused the boys and that they were showing signs of odd, sexually charged play after his visits -- allegations a judge and state child safety investigators rejected.

It also includes a step-by-step description of the morning McDuffie was summoned to her daughter's home in the Lake Heron subdivision. McDuffie recounted the discovery in a statement to investigators and in a previously sealed transcript of a child custody hearing.

McDuffie said she was surprised to find her daughter's minivan parked in the garage, and when she went inside she found her daughter -- complaining she fell down the stairs -- on a couch. Adam was playing in the kitchen sink, cooling drink pouches in a bowl of water and ice.

After a few minutes, McDuffie said she realized Mathew was missing. Adam told her his brother was in the van.

"He is sleeping," McDuffie recalled her grandson saying. "I keep telling mommy that his legs are blue but she can't get off the couch to go check on him."

McDuffie said she ventured into the garage and found her grandson on the floor of the van.

"I just started screaming, "Oh my God. He is dead. He is dead,' " she said. "And the only reason I knew that was because the blood had already pooled in the back of his legs and they were blue."

The key conversations Gaime had with her father and mother in the moments before and after the body was discovered are deleted from the files released Friday, but her father, Gary McDuffie, told prosecutors that she was incoherent when she summoned him to her house by telephone, mumbling something about a blood clot in her leg.

When he arrived at the scene, after his wife had found Mathew's body, Gaime appeared drugged, her father said.

"She wasn't coherent," he said. "She wasn't my daughter . . . . She said something about an airplane. And then she had this little smirk on her face, (when) she just lost her baby. It wasn't right. And then she said something about how to hook up VCRs."

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