The murder of Katherine Foster

There was no forensic breakthrough in this case. It was solved by words that Jamie Kellam Letson herself wrote and spoke. The first investigation, which a Mobile police sergeant later said was handicapped by detectives who did not understand campus life, produced no substantial suspect. A lead in February 1983, when a university security guard died in an apparent suicide and officers found a copy of Foster's autopsy report in his house, faded after records showed that the guard had been on duty at the time of the killing. Prosecutors told the jury that in 2002 Letson, working through the twelve-step process in Alcoholics Anonymous in Pascagoula, wrote an unsigned letter addressed to Foster saying she had been obsessed with Foster's boyfriend and that Foster was in her way. Her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor testified that Letson also described the shooting to her, and that she had refused to talk to investigators until a court order made her. Investigators reopened the case after learning about the letter. The Alabama Attorney General's Office prosecuted at the request of Foster's family, the Mobile County sheriff and the Mobile police chief, and a grand jury indicted Letson in November 2008. After her arrest, the office said, she gave police a detailed confession, which was presented at her sentencing and which it said was corroborated by evidence at the scene. At trial the defense argued that Letson had a habit of inventing stories, that the confession was fiction written to impress a friend, and that a dead security guard and two gunshots heard on campus pointed elsewhere; the forensic pathologist testified that he had revised his estimate of the time of death from 8 to 24 hours before the body was found to 24 to 48 hours. The jury deliberated about six hours before convicting her of first-degree murder on May 27, 2010. Sources disagree on a few points: one account says the body was found early on February 22, while testimony put it at February 23, and the Attorney General's Office dates the confession to roughly eight years before the trial while the trial reporting dates the letter to 2002.