SANDPOINT, Idaho — A bid for post-conviction relief by a former Bonner County man serving a 25-year prison term for killing his wife and trying to pass her death off as a suicide has been rejected by the Idaho Court of Appeals.
Stephen Matthew Lott, 54, had appealed a district court dismissal of his petition, claiming prosecutorial misconduct and his trial counsel was ineffective in a variety of ways.
However, in an unpublished ruling written by Judge David W. Gratton, the Idaho Court of Appeals ruled the district court did not err in dismissing the petition for post-conviction relief. Also hearing the case were Judge Molly J. Huskey and Judge Amanda K. Brailsford.
Lott, 54, was indicted by a grand jury in 2018 on charges of first-degree murder in the death of his ex-wife Christine (née Kucera) Lott and failing to notify authorities of the death in order to conceal a crime. Christine Lott disappeared in 2004 and Stephen Lott gave shifting accounts of what happened to her over the next 12 years.
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