Former IU student at trial

Fairfield, Ill. -- The number 13 is playing a recurring part in testimony in the trial of a mother charged with stabbing her 10-year-old son to death.\nA forensic pathologist told the jury hearing Julie Rea's murder trial on Monday that Joel Kirkpatrick had suffered 13 stab wounds when he was found dead in his mother's home Oct. 13, 1997.\nRea, who was charged in 2000 while attending IU, is being tried on murder charges in Wayne County Circuit Court, where the trial was moved to because of extensive news coverage. Rea blames the boy's death on a masked intruder who she says attacked the two in the middle of the night at her Lawrenceville home.\nRea's former husband, Len Kirkpatrick, had earlier told jurors that his ex-wife was obsessed with the number 13. The couple had been married on the 13th day of the month, and witnesses testified that Rea took pains to increase the chances she would give birth to her son on the 13th day of the month.\nRea, 33, had lost custody of her son to Kirkpatrick months before the boy's death. She had requested the boy visit her on the weekend he died, Kirkpatrick said.\nUnder cross-examination Mon-day, Dr. John Heidingsfelder, the pathologist who performed an autopsy on the child, said two of the 13 stab wounds he counted could be considered a single wound, since it included cuts where a knife had entered and exited the boy's body.\nRea, who now lives in Huntington, W.V., faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.