Mystery in #FreeKate Case: What Does Kaitlyn Hunt’s BFF Julia Gilmore Know?

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An intriguing detail I reported last week on the Kaitlyn Hunt case:

[Assistant state attorney Christopher] Taylor also recounted a May incident in which Hunt violated the no-contract order by communicating with the victim “through a third party, Julia Gilmore.” In May, Gilmore told a local TV station she “has been friends with Hunt for five years” and, at a Wednesday [Aug. 14] hearing in the case, Hunt’s attorney attempted to compel the prosecution to provide Gilmore’s address, but prosecutors said they don’t intend to call Gilmore as a witness.

Amid all the shocking allegations in the prosecutor’s petition for revocation of bond, the mention of Julia Gilmore seemed trivial, but I was intrigued by the description of the Aug. 14 hearing:

8/14/2013 DEF/ATTY GRAVES/ASA WORKMAN PRESENT FOR STATE’S MOTION FOR PARTIAL CLOSURE OF COURTROOM GRANTED, ONLY IMMEDIATE FAMILY WILL BE ALLOWED IN COURTROOM, DA [defense attorney] MOTION TO COMPEL ADDRESS OF JULIA GILMORE HEARD, SA [state’s attorney] ARGUES THAT THEY DONT HAVE THE ADDRESS OR INTEND TO USE HER AS A WITNESS, COURT ADVISES THE SA IF THEY DECIDE TO USE HER THAT THEY NEED TO SUPPLY DA WITH THE ADDRESS 30 DAYS BEFORE TRIAL DATE, DA RULE TO SHOW CAUSE ON CYNTHIA VOEGTLIN AND ON MIAH SHEPHERD HEARD, DA TO RESET DEPOS, CASE CONTINUED UNTIL 9/26/13 @ 9:00 **CARD GIVEN**

Kaitlyn Hunt’s attorney asked the prosecution to provide Julia Gilmore’s address. I’ve seen evidence Gilmore was in regular communication with Kate Hunt as recently as July, so why would Hunt’s lawyer need the prosecution’s help to find Gilmore now?

This is a question to which I don’t know the answer. Nor do I know why Hunt’s lawyer was so interested in finding Gilmore or why the lawyer thought she was important to the prosecution’s case. But there are dots here, and these dots seem to form a non-random pattern.

Meanwhile there is gossip that “LT,” who was mentioned in testimony by Detective Jeremy Shepherd during Tuesday’s hearing, is Kaitlyn’s new girlfriend Latasha Thomas, 27, who was arrested in 2006 for a traffic violation and marijuana possession and arrested again last year on a felony domestic battery charge.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Detective Shepherd described text messages sent by Kaitlyn Hunt to her underage victim, now 15, boasting that someone had asked whether Kaitlyn shared the younger girl’s . . . uh, companionship with “LT,” to which Kaitlyn replied no, that the younger girl was “all mine.” Watching that testimony, I was not sure about the relevance, but the gossip I’ve heard (and this is only gossip so far) is that Kaitlyn had moved in with Thomas after her arrest, and that Gilmore was reportedly also one of their roommates at some point.

OK, that’s the gossip. Now we return to the prosecutor’s petition for bond revocation, which describes a  May 21 text exchange between Kaitlyn Hunt and her younger victim, “CS”:

CS: “[The prosecutor] asked me today if anyone saw us in the bathroom when we would do stuff. Should I have said names?”
KH: “No! Say nobody.”

There has been speculation that perhaps this other person “in the bathroom when we would do stuff” was Julia Gilmore, but that’s just speculation, of course. However, it would make sense that Gilmore, Kaitlyn’s best friend, who purportedly acted as go-between in Kaitlyn’s violation of the no-contact order, was aware all along of the nature of Kaitlyn’s involvement with the underage victim.

Much about this situation remains mysterious. For example, given that Latasha Thomas has a criminal record, including for drug use and domestic violence, why would Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents — knowing that Kaitlyn was out on bond — permit their daughter to associate with someone like that? And why was Kaitlyn’s lawyer so interested in Gilmore, if Gilmore was not a prosecution witness? Is it possible that there has been some sort of falling-out between Kaitlyn and her best friend, raising concern that Gilmore might testify against Kaitlin?

Anyway, here’s video of a local TV report about Tuesday’s hearing. Notice that Kaitlyn’s dad walks out of the court with his second wife.

In many of their public appearances in May, Steve and Kelley would appear together as if they were still married, when in fact they’ve been divorced for at least five years, and both have remarried. In fact, Kelley’s current husband is actually her third husband, because her second marriage, to an immigrant from the Caribbean, was reportedly annulled.

Because the dysfunctionality of the Hunt family didn’t fit the desired “wholesome all-American” media narrative, their divorce was never mentioned, and Kaitlyn’s stepparents were kept out of the picture.

The whole “Free Kate” myth was a gigantic lie from the start.




 

UPDATE: Thanks to the keen-eyed readers who spotted Latasha Thomas in the video above, leaving the courtroom after Tuesday’s hearing. Furthermore, video from WPEC-TV shows that LT arrived with Steve Hunt and his wife. Here are two screen-caps:

The WPEC-TV story notes that Kaitlyn’s mother, Steve’s ex-wife Kelley Hunt Smith, did not attend Tuesday’s hearing, perhaps because she didn’t want to answer questions about prosecution charges that she assisted Kaitlyn’s violation of the no-contact order.

UPDATE II: OK, now it gets weird. A search of court records for Latasha Thomas’s October 2012 case, when she was charged with domestic battery, shows that at her first court appearance, Thomas was ordered to have no contact with Katlin Sanders. According to the Palm Beach Post, Katlin Marie Sanders graduated from Sebastian River High School in June 2012. So, in October 2012, there was a “domestic violence” case in which Thomas, 26 at the time, was accused of attempting to strangle a girl who had just graduated from high school four months earlier? And now, less than a year later, we find Thomas in a relationship with the most famous teenage lesbian in Indian River County Florida America human history?

Anybody got any thoughts on this? It’s just weird, like Sebastian River High School is some kind of lesbian magnet.

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178 comments

  4. Dunno, but the racists came out tonight at Scoop’s.

    I know people got mad over the WWII vet who was beaten to death, but it was like someone sent a link to stormfront or something.

    Seems too many people think skin color and sexual deviance is all that matters.

  5. It’s a big town. Lot’s of good folks there, still. It’s not Detroit or East St. Louis.

    However this whole thing is as bad as watching HBO.

  10. At least, that ‘s what she must have told her parents. When I read the crazy rant by Kaitlyn’s attorney about how terrible it was that the victim’s parents had yelled at her for lying and had taken away all her personal belongings (presumably so she doesn’t have anyplace to conceal an ipad anymore), I pictured her parents now taking turns running alongside her when she goes on her runs.

  12. Really?

    I’m black and I spend lots ot time around black teenagers and young adults daily so I shouldn’t be expected to know that. /sarc

  13. It’s hard to read stuff like that. As RSM said there are dots. Kate had only dated boys prior to this. Sudden change in behavior? Moved in with LT after the first court appearance, why? What might you look for in a underage prostitute?

    It was Kelley’s comparison of Kate and the victim that got me thinking about prostitution.

  17. Just looking at the pictures LT is associated with Steve’s second wife? Kelley absent from the hearing?

  20. Really? How awesome for you!

    I wonder why you didn’t refer to it in the way rapper’s do then? Rapper’s used it well before Terrell Suggs, but then you should know that.

  21. You’re looking to argue over something that is entirely inconsequential; if you review the entire thread you will see I never once referred to or mentioned the term “baller.” Rather I attempted to explain why a relatively young person might use the phrase “ball so hard” in a non-sexual sense. Your introduction of “baller” was entirely irrelevant to that discussion.

  22. Were getting a bit far away from the narrative of star crossed teenagers in love here. Julz knows whats really going on. Maybe more than what Mrs Hunt Smith knows?

  25. I feel a movie coming on with a low wide angle shot of dirt crossroads and some banjo music in the background KH the next Martin Luther King jr

  26. I agree that Kelley may not have known what was really going on. I disagree on a star crossed lovers narrative. While they use the term girlfriend they don’t talk about love. A factual puzzle piece is the detective’s testimony of ‘she’s mine.’

  28. The ‘Street Corner Girl’ wants to ball all day. Led Zeppelin didn’t just borrow from black blues, they were paying homage.

  31. I’m coming back to this case because several things don’t make sense to me. First, all the media reports say that Kaitlyn Hunt was a varsity girls basketball player and she met the victim on the team.

    But Sebastian River girls’ team was girls’ state champion in 2011-2012 and went to the Final Four in 2012-13. Its inconceivable to me that a championship caliber team from a school with 1,900 students would have a barely 5 foot tall girl on their varsity team.

    I also find it hard to believe that a 14 year old freshman could make a varsity team at a large school.

    I based these conclusions on being around athletics at a similarly sized high school. So I searched team rosters and box scores for the last two years and I don’t see her name anywhere. Could it be that she and the victim were on the girls JV team?

  36. Thanks; that would make sense although articles like this one quotes her lawyer as saying she was on the varsity basketball team.
    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57585885-504083/kaitlyn-hunt-update-fla-teen-charged-over-same-sex-underage-relationship-speaks-out/
    “”For someone who is an honor student, a cheerleader, played varsity
    basketball, [and has] never been in trouble – it just seems extremely
    inappropriate to push the felony charges,” Graves said in the news
    conference.”

  40. Out of 20k texts, with Latasha in the courtroom, he brings up LT.

    All in favor of ‘this detective is just looking into the violation of a pretrial order’ raise your hand.

  42. And all the more suspicious. Predators abound in Florida (perhaps in other locales as well) and teens are the preferred target population for recruiting by the sexual predators (hetero-, homo- and bi- sexual) and shoplifting crews.
    The appearance of an adult lesbian, of an age with Kate’s step-mother, leads one to suspect deeper involvement of the putative adults in the Hunt family in a possible pederasty recruitment ring, raising more questions about Steves depth of involvement.

  45. I immediately thought it was a sexual reference. It was falling out of use when I was a teenager, but “to ball” was used to mean “have casual sex”. I read enough that I ran across it fairly often.

    Niven and Pournell used it in dialog in “Oath of Fealty”.

    I had never heard of the sports context, but I don’t really follow sports.

  46. Geez… step-mom is only 27? She looks years older. Can’t imagine how young she was when Stevie started dating her considering they’ve been married for over 3 years.

  47. I just read LT’s battery charges further… battery by *strangulation* and hindering the 911 call?

    Holy $hit. I guess the fact that non-fatal strangulation is a risk factor for subsequent homicides in domestic abuse cases is of no consequence to the Hunts. I have to wonder what they DO consider violent behavior? Would they be bothered if she dated a murderer who cannibalizes? Likely not.

    I’m [beyond] shaking my head.

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