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.
Stubblefield, 20, a Calumet College student and track athlete, was 35 weeks pregnant with his child when she disappeared on Nov. 10, 2015. Her body has never been found.
She planned to name her son Amir.
Fuller, now 29, formerly of Fort Knox, Kentucky, while in the Army, but originally from Gary, was sentenced to 94 years in May 2023 on two counts of murder and one count of obstruction of justice.
In a 3-0 decision, Appeals Judge Cale Bradford rejected Fuller’s attempts to pick apart the evidence used against him at trial.
In the appeal, Fuller argued his rights had been violated by several bits of evidence admitted, the court erred by rejecting his motion to dismiss, and he questioned the sufficiency of the evidence — i.e. the trial went on despite being a circumstantial case.
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.
Bradford wrote there was enough evidence pointing to Fuller’s guilt.
Stubblefield texted her mother around 5 p.m. that day that she planned to meet up with Fuller, according to court documents.
Fuller’s new girlfriend saw him dump some of Stubblefield’s things, including a laptop and identification card out a car window while they were driving. The cousin testified at trial that he and Fuller once joked about if Fuller would kill Stubblefield, because she was pregnant. In retrospect, he was sickened by it. Fuller also hid in his new girlfriend’s basement before he was arrested days later.
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.
Many of the errors Fuller cited in the end were “harmless” for his legal defense at trial, he wrote.
After Stubblefield met Fuller that night outside Williams Elementary School, they started arguing and Fuller later told the cousin that he tried to stab her in the temple, choked her to death, and he dragged her body to the surrounding woods.
Investigators later found her broken eyeglasses, which they said was a sign of a struggle, her inhaler, and her shoes by the school.
Police cadaver dogs searching wooded areas around Williams Elementary School in Gary, 1320 E 19th Ave., picked up the presence of human remains during a couple searches, but never found the body. Stubblefield’s car was moved across the street.
Fuller’s motion for a new trial was denied in November.
