CHANDLER — After three days of testimony from two dozen witnesses in the trial against former Wellston Public Schools substitute teacher Emma Delaney Hancock, a Lincoln County jury found her guilty Wednesday on two felony counts of soliciting sexual conduct or communication with a minor by use of technology.
Although she was acquitted of three other charges, Hancock cried quietly as Lincoln County Associate District Judge Sheila Kirk read the verdict. Seated in the gallery behind the defense table, members of Hancock’s family showed signs of disbelief and despair. Hancock faced four charges related to her actions with a 15-year-old sophomore at Wellston High School while working as a substitute teacher in 2022. She faced an additional charge for showing two eighth graders inappropriate videos on her phone. Her trial began Monday and concluded Wednesday afternoon.
Jurors found Hancock guilty on one count related to sexual messages she sent to the 15-year-old student and on another count for showing the eighth graders videos of herself kissing another woman and pretending to perform oral sex on someone at a Halloween party.
Hancock was found not guilty on three counts, two of which were “lewd or indecent acts to (a) child under 16,” and one of which was “soliciting sexual conduct or communication with (a) minor by use of technology.” Each of those counts dealt with Hancock’s actions with the 15-year-old student, whose name NonDoc has chosen not to print because he is still a minor.
Before she was taken into custody, Hancock received a moment to say goodbye to her family, which includes two children she has with her husband, Wellston police chief Alfred Hancock. On the two counts for which they found her guilty, jurors recommended three-year sentences. Her sentencing date was set for Dec. 18. At that time, the judge could choose to accept the jury’s recommendation or impose a different sentence. The judge will likely also make a decision about whether the two counts’ sentences should run concurrently or separately.
Billy Coyle, one of Hancock’s attorneys, said Wednesday evening he will likely appeal the jury’s verdict, although he planned to discuss options with Hancock and her family first.
“I thought we fought hard, and I’m proud of her for standing up and going all the way to jury trial with it,” Coyle said. “It takes a lot to maintain your innocence.”
Coyle acknowledged the evidence against his client even though she testified Wednesday that the things being said of her were untrue.
“She maintained her innocence throughout trial. I represented her to the best of my ability, based upon her innocence, but I’m not naive in saying that it was a tough case. There was a lot of witnesses that were against her,” Coyle said. “I thought the theme of the case was punish a woman as hard as a man. And I think that overall, there was just a lot more going on with this case than that. I respect the jury’s verdict (…) and so I just hope we’ll continue to fight our case.”
With early voters packing the Lincoln County Courthouse for much of Wednesday, jurors began deliberations around 3:30 p.m. Slightly less than two hours later, they had reached their verdict.
Hancock is also facing a civil lawsuit filed by the high school student and his father in June. Their petition alleges nearly identical facts to those alleged in this week’s criminal case.
Jurors hear about ‘aggressive make out’
After jury selection Monday morning, jurors spent that afternoon, all of Tuesday and Wednesday morning listening to the 20 witnesses who testified on behalf of the state. Those witnesses included the student who accused Hancock of the illegal activity, his friends, his parents, the two eighth graders and four law enforcement agents.
Hancock, who is now 28 and who goes by her middle name Delaney, testified Wednesday. She denied the existence of a relationship between herself and the 15-year-old student and said they never sent each other sexual messages. She also said she did not show the eighth graders the videos, saying instead that they simply looked over her shoulder as the videos played.
In addition to being married to Wellston’s police chief, Hancock is widely known around town and to WPS students as the daughter of Wellston Mayor Paul Whitnah, who was recently removed from the volunteer fire department for not wearing protective gear.
The state’s witnesses all laid out the story of an alleged relationship between Hancock and the student that began on Snapchat, lasted a few weeks in October and November 2022 and consisted mostly of sexual messages, photos and videos. Snapchat is a mobile messaging app that typically deletes messages after they are sent and received. During the trial, an OSBI agent repeatedly referred to Snapchat as “not very law enforcement friendly.”
Although the jury acquitted Hancock of charges related to physical contact accusations, the student testified that, on two occasions, he and Hancock had “aggressive make out” sessions in empty classrooms during school which featured Hancock rubbing his genitals over his clothes. The student said he also touched her “body and butt” during those times. The relationship allegedly ended when a few students reported what they had heard about it to a teacher and the school notified the student’s parents. Those students also testified during the trial.
Although the 20 witnesses for the state discussed the alleged relationship in detail, jurors were never shown specific messages between Hancock and the student, something the defense attempted to emphasize while cross examining witnesses and during closing arguments.
“They don’t have any evidence at the end of the day,” Coyle told jurors Wednesday afternoon.
Throughout the trial, Hancock’s defense team attempted to cast doubt on prosecutors’ case by pointing out the numerous times the student told his friends of his relationship with Hancock. Although multiple students told jurors Tuesday that the student had flaunted his relationship with the substitute and showed them pictures and messages she had sent him, the student testified Monday he did not tell anyone about his relationship with Hancock until his father confronted him about it after a meeting with the Wellston High School principal.
On Wednesday, Hancock’s defense team recalled the student to the witness stand to emphasize his conflicting testimony to the jury. Jurors were told to consider all of the statements as possible “impeachment evidence.”
Despite his conflicting statements, however, the student was clear on the stand about his relationship with Hancock. Throughout his testimony, he was quiet and appeared nervous. Occasionally, he looked in Hancock’s direction while being questioned by the attorneys.
The student told jurors he gave Hancock his phone number in the fall semester of 2022 so she could send him information about an assignment. Shortly thereafter, he said they became friends on Snapchat and began sending each other messages that were not sexual in nature.
Eventually, the student said he sent a shirtless picture of himself to Hancock from the baseball locker room.
Coyle asked why he decided to send the photo.
“Really, honestly, couldn’t tell you why,” the student said. “When I did send it, she snapped me back and said, ‘Are we sending half naked pictures?’”
Coyle asked if the student was “surprised by the response.”
“Kind of because it was like, if she wasn’t OK with it, she would have told me that she wasn’t OK with that,” the student said.
After the initial interaction on Snapchat, the student said the relationship turned sexual. He described a picture Hancock sent — either that same night as the shirtless picture or the next night — where she was supposedly lying in bed with a blanket covering the bottom half of her breasts and her hair pulled forward covering the rest. The student asked Hancock to turn the flash on for the picture and to move the blanket. The student said she then sent a picture fully exposing her breasts.
Between Oct. 23 and Oct. 30, 2022, the student said Hancock sent multiple nude photos and videos to each other including a photo of his erect penis and a video of Hancock masturbating. Hancock denied that such images were shared, and Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agents said no files were able to be recovered from Snapchat.
Although the student said it makes him uncomfortable to talk about the things that happened, he offered detailed descriptions about the timeline of events, such as when his father was called to the school and informed of the allegations. The student said his father asked him about Hancock when he arrived back home, at which point he told his dad “everything that happened.”
“I was embarrassed and shaking really bad,” the student testified Monday. “I just was embarrassed because I was letting my dad down. Like, he raised me better than that.”
The student and both of his parents told jurors he transferred from Wellston High School to Epic Charter Schools for the rest of his sophomore year and the entirety of his junior year. Both parents said the events had a major impact on their son.
“He gets depressed,” the father told jurors. “He decided he was going to go back to [Wellston High School] this year, and [my wife] was just talking to him, probably about a week ago, and he says it’s not the same.”
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‘She’s my wife. I believe her. I’m on her side.’
Early Tuesday morning, before the jury had entered the courtroom, Assistant District Attorney Rachel Thompson walked over to the defense table and told Hancock and her counsel that the prosecution had just found out about another alleged inappropriate incident between Hancock and a student. According to Thompson, one of the students set to testify that day had revealed that she was once asked to accompany Hancock to get her nipples pierced.
After a short back-and-forth between the lawyers, the judge ultimately barred the prosecutors from bringing the alleged incident up in front of the jury. Prosecutors said they had wanted to use the situation as further evidence that Hancock lacked boundaries with her students while substitute teaching.
But Kirk, the judge, seemed to agree with the defense attorneys, who argued that the incident was outside the scope of the case and that it should have been brought up earlier if prosecutors wanted to present the allegation.
Prosecutors called seven of the student’s friends to testify Tuesday. All said they saw him and Hancock exchange Snapchat messages, and a few said they saw pictures Hancock had sent him. One witness said he saw a message Hancock sent saying she wanted to dress up as a stripper for the student for Halloween.
Prosecutors also called multiple OSBI agents to the stand Tuesday to discuss their investigation, although they did not call Kevin Garrett, who was in charge of the investigation. Garrett won election in August to be Lincoln County’s new sheriff, but he caught some flak during his campaign over how he handled the Hancock case.
OSBI agents testified that they were able to confirm the existence of multiple messages between the student and an account with the name “Delaney,” but they were unable to gain the content of those messages.
Jason Holasek, an investigator with District Attorney Adam Panter’s office, testified about his experience asking Snapchat to preserve the relevant data and eventually sending a search warrant to the company.
Holasek said he attempted twice to recover the content from Snapchat’s servers, but owing to the app’s default design to automatically delete opened snaps from the server, he said was unable to recover any snaps from either the student’s account or Hancock’s.
That allowed Coyle to cast doubt on whether the content being sent was explicitly sexual. He pointed out that even though the jury had heard about naked photos and videos Hancock had allegedly sent, there was no physical evidence that the communications included any content pointing to an “inappropriate relationship.”
The last two witnesses to testify Tuesday were the two eighth-grade females to whom Hancock showed inappropriate videos. Prosecutors showed jurors the videos they had recovered from Hancock’s phone.
“I remember we were sitting in the classroom, and she was our substitute teacher, and we were in the kitchen area of this classroom, and she started laughing at her phone,” said one of the students. “[We] asked what was funny, and [Hancock] showed us a video from a Halloween party, and it was a video of her pulling a girl’s pants down and sucking on a fake penis.”
Both girls said they reported the incident to their principal after news came out about Hancock’s actions with the high school student.
On Wednesday, jurors heard from four witnesses called by the defense, including a friend of Hancock’s who attended the Halloween party, Hancock’s father and her husband.
“She looked me dead in the eyes and said, there’s nothing [on her phone]. I mean, I believe that there’s nothing there,” Alfred Hancock told jurors. “She’s my wife. I believe her. I’m on her side.”
Hancock herself took the stand as her own final witness.
“The only explanation I have is he was using a vape pen — which I was in the wrong for — and the story got blown up into something it wasn’t,” Hancock testified.
On cross examination, Assistant District Attorney Kelly Trimble pressed Hancock on her claim that all of the witnesses against her were lying.
“I feel like there were a couple of inappropriate instances but I don’t think that defines who I am as a person or a teacher,” Hancock said.
