The Indiana Court of Appeals denied Derron Fuller’s appeal Thursday — nearly a decade after Rochelle Stubblefield disappeared while meeting him at a Gary elementary school playground by his house.
In a 3-0 decision, Appeals Judge Cale Bradford rejected Fuller’s attempts to pick apart the evidence used against him at trial. He also argued he was denied due process at trial — most significantly that detectives lost the cousin’s seized cell phone during the course of the case, and the cousin’s police interview got corrupted, preventing his lawyer from challenging the witness’s credibility — and that investigators were never able to pull information from the device.Stubblefield texted her mother around 5 p.m. that day that she planned to meet up with Fuller, according to court documents.
There was circumstantial evidence that Stubblefield was dead and her child had never been born, Bradford said. For example, her driver’s license hadn’t been renewed, her Social Security number wasn’t used, there have been no hits for her DNA in a national missing person’s database, and she had never left the country, Bradford wrote in the 21-page opinion.