Anatomy of Murder - A Deadly Cocktail - Part 1 (David Castor)

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

A husband is found dead in his bed. Items found in the home would help unwind a lethal trail and forever fracture a family.View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/a-de...adly-cocktail-part-1Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You've heard the expression that there are monsters amongst us, and there just are. And we get so carried away sometimes with the why, and I think we lose sight of the fact that there really is evil in the world. This was so diabolical, so evil. It's really, it's hard to put into words. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist, and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nikolaazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of investigation discoveries true conviction. And this is Anatomy of murder.
Starting point is 00:00:50 What does it take for someone to commit murder? A motive? Sometimes. Some level of cunning or deceitfulness. Maybe. But whatever. traits are required to commit that ultimate act of cruelty, it takes a special kind of evil to perpetrate violence against a family member and a disturbing lack of remorse to try to get away
Starting point is 00:01:12 with it again and again. Back in September of 2005, a prosecutor in Syracuse, New York, was challenged to answer these very questions when he took on a case that began with an investigation into a local man's mysterious death and ended with a face-off against. to possible serial killer. Bill Fitzpatrick has been the elected district attorney in Onondaga County since 1992. And like many public servants, we've met on the show, even from a young age, Bill seemed destined for the job. It's actually a lifetime dream. My dad was a New York City cop, and I've always wanted to be a prosecutor.
Starting point is 00:01:51 I wish I could say I wanted to be a baseball player or an astronaut or something, but actually since about the age of 11, I wanted to be a DA and a It's a dream come true for me. I'm happy to say that I've known Bill professionally at this point for decades, and I can vouch for both his dedication to law enforcement and his many talents as a prosecutor, which in part is undoubtedly rooted to his earlier years, growing up amongst his father's colleagues in the NYPD. I used to hang around my dad's station house when my mom was a stay-at-home housewife, but sometimes she'd get sick or need a break or something, and so my dad would, you know, stick me.
Starting point is 00:02:30 and my brother in the back of the 88th precinct in Brooklyn, and we just sit around and watch stuff that we probably shouldn't have seen and listen to stuff we definitely should not have listened to. These experiences not only exposed him to the unique culture and brotherhood among law enforcement, which is a world I know too well, but those experiences likely instilled an appreciation for what it takes to dedicate your life to the pursuit of justice. Everybody there was uncle this, uncle that,
Starting point is 00:02:59 all my father's partners. It was great. You grew up with 20 uncles, all of them working in one room, you know, the detective squad. And obviously, experience that had a lot of effect on me. When most people think about New York, they picture the city, Manhattan, the place of police procedurals and rom-coms. But in reality, the state of New York is huge. And Onondanka County, which sits in the middle of upstate New York, is a mix of farmland,
Starting point is 00:03:27 suburbs, and industry with a great diversity of people and natural beauty. I came here to go to school and never left. I came from Brooklyn and fell in love with a place. It's a great place to raise a family. Bill has tried countless cases during the course of his career. But even now as the elected DA, he has never lost touch with the daily grind of investigative and trial work. And I can tell you that it is definitely not common for the elected DA of any larger jurisdiction to continue to try cases themselves, which to me as a career prosecutor says a lot about Bill in the best of ways. I love forensics and I love to teach forensics and I abhor, you know, phony experts and junk
Starting point is 00:04:08 science. And I want to make sure that the best product gets in front of the jury and the best way to do that to keep up on it is to, you know, maintain your trial skills and your preparation skills. Honestly, I do it for selfish reasons, but I also do it for practical reasons because I want to experience what my trial lawyers are going through. It's easier for me if they come in and complain to me about other judges, you know, idiosyncrasies that I can say, yeah, I just try a case in front of him or her. I know I know exactly what you're talking about. And all of that experience from Days is a kid in the squad room to working alongside detectives as an ADA. It would serve him well when he was confronted with what would prove to be one of the most memorable
Starting point is 00:04:52 cases of his long career. On August 22nd, 2005, a woman named Stacey Castor made a frantic call to police. She said that her husband had locked himself in their bedroom following an argument and she had not seen or heard from him for the past day. Still in the bedroom and now unresponsive, she feared that without immediate medical assistance, he might be in serious danger. When the responding officers arrived on scene, she was distraught, insinuating that her husband had been showing signs of depression, and she was afraid that he was at risk of harming himself. The initial responding officer, you know, he just, he was unable to get the door open. But he looked in, he eventually went outside, used the step ladder, looked in the window,
Starting point is 00:05:39 saw something suspicious, namely a body on the bed, and then just kicked the door open. The body was that of Stacey's husband, 48-year-old David Castor. The officer approached ready to administer aid, but David was not breathing and his body was cold to the touch. He was unclosed. He had a little bit of a bed sheet wrapped around him. There was vomitous on various parts of the bed. Sadly, there was nothing first responders could do. David was declared dead at the scene.
Starting point is 00:06:11 On the nightstand stood the first potential. clues to the cause of David's death, remnants of what appeared to be a drinking binge. But officers also noted the presence of another liquid that the officer couldn't immediately identify. There were several bottles of liquor, and there was a crystal clear glass that had a green liquid in it. That later turned out to be ethylene glycol, antifreeze. A large open bottle of antifreeze was also found under the bed. The potent chemical is fatal to humans, even in very small doses.
Starting point is 00:06:51 And if David had ingested as little as two to three ounces, it may have been what killed him. We have a system here, I'm sure it's similar to a lot of other offices, where unexplained death, we will send an assistant DA out to assist with legal questions, search warrants, witness interviews, whether or not to Mirandize somebody, you know, a thousand things that come up at a potential crime scene. So based on the fact pattern here, the person who dial 911, which brought law enforcement to the home, indicated that she believed that her husband being locked in the bedroom and two days of binge drinking is what likely led to his death. Now, from an investigator's perspective, seems reasonable. But the inspection of the crime scene is handled still in a very
Starting point is 00:07:37 methodical way. No matter what your initial thoughts, Santa Cigua would be from the beginning, fingerprints on a bottle, spillage patterns, or latent trace of evidence nearby. And then obviously the photographing and video capture of the body's position, that's all very important. But only, as you know, after the coroner's autopsy and toxicology, can an official cause of death be ruled. So as they're trying to put those initial pieces together, the ADA, as Bill talked about, was being sent out to work along law enforcement initially, and they interviewed Stacey, who explained how the weekend had started on a high note with plans for romantic anniversary dinner.
Starting point is 00:08:14 And she said that Friday that she and her husband were planning a big celebratory dinner, and it was going to be a special weekend, just to two of them. Her two daughters, Ashley and Bree, from a previous marriage, they were at babysitters, and it was just going to be her and David. Things kind of went south. They got into an argument, this according to her. They got into an argument. It continued on Saturday.
Starting point is 00:08:39 She wound up spending the weekend at a friend's house. And according to Stacey, David was drinking heavily. And rather than confront him at home, she decided to give him space and let him sleep it off. She made minimal efforts to contact him on Saturday evening. Didn't have any contact with him on Sunday. And then when she got home, Monday, to prepare herself to get to work, work, their bedroom door was locked. And that's why she was calling 911. She further explained that David had been expressing signs of true depression over his failing
Starting point is 00:09:15 business and the recent death of his father. And the presence of the antifreeze by his bedside seemed to confirm her worst fear that he had taken his own life. I did not respond to the scene. The assistant DA that did respond came back and said, based on the interview with a surviving spouse, it appears to be a suicide. Now, that conclusion was supported by the medical examiner who reported that David's death was caused by a self-administered lethal dose of anifreeze. Medical examiners opine about cause of death and manner of death. And you've only got five choices, manner of death. You know, homicide, suicide, accident, natural, or undetermined. He put it as suicide, believing the report of Stacey Caster that David had been depressed, that his business was
Starting point is 00:10:08 going under, et cetera, et cetera. Ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze, has a devastating effect on the human body, and it is a drawn-out way to die. Which is precisely why some investigators remained skeptical about the M.E.'s ruling. Probably within 48 hours, I got a call from some sheriff's detectives who, who were working on the case and felt very strongly that it was not a suicide. And the things that jumped out at me immediately were the methodology that was alleged to have been used for their suicide, antifreeze, ethylene glycol.
Starting point is 00:10:50 It's a horrible way to die. You don't die instantly by any stretch of imagination. You die almost cell by cell. Even ingesting a small amount of the chemical causes loss of balance, blurred vision, and increasing incoherence. The signs of it almost mimic intoxication from what we would consider regular alcohol. So while David may have appeared to be drunk in the hours before his death, in reality, his body was shutting down, losing functions of his kidneys, liver, and eventually his brain.
Starting point is 00:11:23 As I said earlier, you know, a horrible way to die, not something that you would think of using as a methodology of suicide. But that's not the only thing that was making investigators suspicious that this was not a death by suicide. Just statistically, in terms of suicide, most men use firearms, and most women will use some type of narcotic or chemical agent. But in this case, with David Castor, he had a shotgun under his bet, and I'm having difficulty why he chooses to kill himself over essentially a 72-hour period as opposed to killing him. himself in a millisecond by, you know, putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. So I was pretty much all in that this had to be very, very intensely investigated as a potential homicide very early on in the case. And so just 48 hours after David's mysterious death, investigators were in search for more
Starting point is 00:12:22 than just answers. They were looking for a killer. David Castor started his weekend at an anniversary dinner with his wife Stacey, but by Monday morning, David was dead, apparently the victim of a self-administered dose of antifreeze. Her story was that, you know, his business was failing, he was depressed, his father had died recently, and they took that at face value. But Onondaga County, DA Bill Fitzpatrick,
Starting point is 00:13:00 He had his doubts. Everybody knows of David Caster. He's just a good guy. He was a very successful heat and air conditioning guy. He was a blue collar all the way. David Caster was a business owner who ran an air conditioning installation and repair company in upstate New York. According to his friends, he was known to be responsible, self-sufficient, and committed to his work. And he was also dedicated to his blended family.
Starting point is 00:13:25 He had been married to his wife Stacey for two years, and he was a committed and loving father to both his son from a previous marriage and to Stacey's two young daughters from her first marriage, Ashley and Brie, whose father had died unexpectedly at 38 years old. David was a loyal husband and a loving stepfather, but in the aftermath of his death, Stacey admitted that things at home had not always been perfect. A little bit of a strained relationship with his two stepdaughters, but according to them, in time, it had grown a little better. I mean, he wasn't there biological. dad, who they missed and loved very, very much.
Starting point is 00:14:04 Of course, you never know when a person who seems perfectly happy might be suffering from mental health issues in private. But the more Bill and his investigators learn about him, the less David seemed like someone on the verge of taking his own life. He did lose his father that July, but the grieving process, according to all his friends, was perfectly normal. You know, he was very saddened by his father's death, but it wasn't unexpected. He had been sick for a while.
Starting point is 00:14:30 You know, by all accounts, no enemies, no reason to have killed himself and appeared to many friends and neighbors to, you know, have been in a good relationship with Stacey Castor. And by all accounts, his marriage to Stacey appeared to be fine, so it didn't seem like marital discord could have been the cause of his recent depression. They socialized. They had lots of friends. They would sometimes entertain it at their house. Wasn't anybody that said, oh, I knew, you know, I saw this coming. They fight all the time. It wasn't anything like that. So while the ME had ruled his death of suicide, investigators were still taking steps to collect as much information and evidence to either confirm that conclusion or completely overrule it. Fortunately, we had a very smart road patrol deputy, made some cursory examination at that point looking for anything, a suicide note.
Starting point is 00:15:26 In his search of the castor's home, he didn't find a suicide note, but he did discover. something that seemed just odd enough to be considered relevant. He looked in the trash. He was with her permission. He was looking for some type of note or anything, a baby that the guy had discarded, and he winds up finding a almost brand-new turkey baster. It was in the kitchen in an area readily accessible
Starting point is 00:15:48 from anywhere in the house. It was just a little trash basket that just happened to be in the kitchen. And it was buried under some other trash to suggest there was an effort made to conceal it. You don't want to say if the words that, that's odd at a crime scene or ever spoken, you know at that very moment, whatever it is, that's going to require a deeper dive. And so a turkey baster in a trash can is an odd observation. So I was thinking about it, I went both ways, right? Because again, like, it doesn't
Starting point is 00:16:18 have to be Thanksgiving for you to baste a pot roast, a meatloaf, a chicken, or maybe you're making turkey. So again, I don't think using it or having it is necessarily that odd. However, putting it in the trash when it didn't seem like it had broken there was anything odd. Again, we don't know where it's going, but just this item that seems to be pretty new and in good condition, it being there, if their head is tilting, they're going to recover it. And to your point, Scott, you don't know where it's going to lead until later, but that's the job of evidence collection, is to pick it up and see if it fits into place into a crime later on.
Starting point is 00:16:52 And collect it, they did, out of Siga. And also, according to Bill, there were some interesting and telling clear. in the photographs of the bedroom where David's body was located. As I looked at the photos several days later, one of the things that I noticed was that there was a trail of vomitus that came from the bed and pooled on the carpet of the bedroom in between those two events. And in between those two events, the pooling of the vomitist and the trail of the vomitus dripping off the bedspread was the jar of antifference. freeze, and yet there was no vomitus on the antifreeze jar, indicating that the scene may have
Starting point is 00:17:37 been staged, that someone put that in there after the fact. Which meant that perhaps David's ingestion of antifreeze was not intentional after all. And maybe he was not alone, as his wife Stacy had told police when he finally succumbed to the lethal poison. There was a camp in the sheriff's department that believed her. They said, no, I questioned her, and, you know, she came across. She was very candid. She answered all my questions, and, you know, I believe her.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And I think the guy killed himself. And then there was the camp that, you know, said, no, it's not adding up. It doesn't make sense. In a situation like that, let's err on the side of caution. Let's treat it as a homicide until we are convinced otherwise. But if David was the victim of a homicide, who was in the circle of possible suspects? Most people are murdered by someone they know. So we want to surround ourselves with investigating not only his spouse, but was he having an affair? Was he having a business dispute? Were
Starting point is 00:18:37 there people arguing with him about work that he had done? Did anybody have a reason to hate the guy? Was he having an affair? A jealous husband found out about it. So you do what's essentially a psychological, financial and personal autopsy of a person, not just cutting open the body and finding out how they died, but also finding out how they lived and would something in his life have contributed to his death. And it can be a very time-consuming, painstaking process. But once again, it seemed that David was no more likely a target for murder than he was in the mindset of taking his own life. He wasn't in any financial trouble. He didn't seem to engage in at-risk behavior or relationships. He just didn't seem like the type of guy or seemed to be in
Starting point is 00:19:22 contact with anyone that would have made him attract any enemies. We looked at his business relationships, nothing. Most customers raved about him, said he was very conscientious. No evidence of any type of extracurricular activity with another woman. And it seems like Bill's checking all the boxes here, right? So without an immediate suspect, it was critical to create a timeline of his activities and the whereabouts in the hours leading up to his death, as well as a list of everyone he was in contact with.
Starting point is 00:19:54 And it became more and more apparent that he was murdered sometime that weekend. The universe of suspect gets much smaller when you consider that they had to have had access to him for a period of time during that weekend. And let's just say the obvious, the person he was most in contact with during that period was his wife, Stacey. So it became a priority to scrutinize the details of her alibi for that entire weekend. Now, she had already told investigators that she and David had gotten into an argument on Friday night, which she claimed triggered his drinking binge, which continued all day on Saturday.
Starting point is 00:20:33 And then we found out that Saturday night, Stacey went to the house with another couple that she was very friendly with. And all three of them saw David in a very catatonic state, that he was mumbling, he was stumbling, he actually ripped the, towel rod off the wall in the bathroom because he was trying to steady himself to stand up. The three of them just left him in bed with a conclusion, the false conclusion, that he was drunk, that he had been drinking, that he was still upset about the argument that he and Stacey had had, and that his way to deal with that was to just drink excessively. But incoherence, lack of balance, they are also symptoms of antifreeze poisoning, which means that by Saturday night, David may have already been suffering the effects of the poison.
Starting point is 00:21:22 and the only person who had access to him prior to this visit by friends, at least from what they can tell at this moment, was Stacey Castor herself. That theory got legs when investigators lifted fingerprints from the glass on the bedside table that contained the antifreeze, fingerprints that they matched not to David but to Stacey. And remember that turkey baster, the responding officer, found in the garbage? Turns out it had David's... DNA on the tip and antifreeze in the main container of the liquid that you would use.
Starting point is 00:22:00 Now, the picture of how the poison may have been administered was coming into focus. It would seem that the turkey baster was used at some point to force feed the lethal liquid directly into David's throat. But even that seems hard to do to someone against their will. That's one of the first things you had to think about. I'm sure it is what exactly you and I thought about here too, Scott. I mean, even assuming that David may have been intoxicated or even sleeping, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't resist or gag. So what was Bill's theory on how David may have been poisoned? Well, I think it has a lot to do with how antifree's tastes, because believe it or not, the green stuff that you put in your car's engine, it actually
Starting point is 00:22:41 sweet to the taste. And so it may be quite hard to detect if it was mixed with another drink that is also sweet. And Stacey herself had actually already dropped a hint at what that drink might have been when she gave her first statement to police. She admitted he was consuming Diet Pepsi on Saturday when she went over there and they continued the argument that they were having. You know, he was in rough shape at the time. As I said, that's a perfect mechanism to disguise the antifreeze because both are sweet.
Starting point is 00:23:15 The poison would have taken some time to take. take effect, mimicking the effects of intoxication by alcohol until eventually David was rendered unconscious and unable to defend himself. And then when he became more and more comatose and more disabled in bed, that's when she turns to the turkey baster. She's probably trying to pour it into his mouth with that glass that was on the nightstand. That's why her fingerprints are on it. Just stick it down his throat, so you might gag a little bit, but eventually it's going to get into his system. But if this scenario was true, it was describing David's wife Stacy as someone capable of planning and carrying out an act of almost unimaginable cruelty.
Starting point is 00:24:01 Absolutely, because remember, she admitted that she even returned with friends so they could witness David's so-called drinking binge, all the while knowing that she had actually poisoned him and he was likely just hours from death. And as his DNA in the turkey baster proved, at some point, she even returned when he was unconscious to administer even more antifreeze and stage the scene to make it look like a death by suicide. This was not a crime of passion. This was a meticulous, cold-blooded act of murder. As you might imagine, once I became more and more convinced that this was at the very least a suspicious death and needed much more intensive investigation, I was curious, what happened to husband, number one.
Starting point is 00:24:49 The answer I got was, well, he died of a heart attack. Okay, well, so much for that theory that she was a serial killer. But, you know, I'm of the old school where I say, okay, the records show he died of a heart attack. I want to see records. I want to see medical records. Well, guess what? There weren't any. Stacey's first husband and the father of her two young daughters was a man named Mike Wallace,
Starting point is 00:25:10 whose sudden death at 38 had been attributed to a heart attack. One day, Ashley comes home from school. She finds her dad, Mike Wallace, lying on the couch. She's 12 at the time. She's very upset. Calls, has enough sense to call the authorities. Ambulance gets there. They make efforts to try to revive him unsuccessfully, take him to a local hospital.
Starting point is 00:25:35 This is a different county. In this county, they have a coroner system, not a medical examiner system, and the coroner writes it off. in large part on information from Stacey that he had, you know, he had had a bad ticker. But no autopsy had ever been done. And given Bill's suspicions about Stacey's role in David's death, he was starting to wonder what kind of person he may be dealing with. A DA in the state of New York has almost unfettered discretion in ordering an exhumation. If he or she believes that criminal activity can be afoot,
Starting point is 00:26:11 despite the unpleasant nature of disturbance, being the dead, the public interest is far outweighed by the prosecutor's right to know exactly how the person died. So, as you might imagine, I said, we're going to exhume Mike Wallace and find out, you know, what happened to him. I just had to know. I had to know, you know, concretely and for certain what the guy died from. Wallace's remains were exhumed from a cemetery in the adjoining county. His body was then subjected to a full forensic examination. He can just imagine that investigators in Ondaga County must have been bursting with anticipation as they waited for the results. You could see the brain tissue and then, you know,
Starting point is 00:26:56 every few milliliters or so, there was a bright spot, which was a crystal, which shut down his bodily functions. The telltale crystals that formed in Mike's brain tissue told the medical examiner all he needed to know. Oh, he said, without question, cause of death, ethylene glycol, poisoning. Mike's death had been surprising and sudden, and no one had ever suspected murder. But with the new autopsy results, his visit to his doctor in the days just before his death might provide further evidence of his own poisoning. He actually went to a GP, general practitioner, a couple of the weeks before he was murdered.
Starting point is 00:27:37 And in the physician's report, the doctor suggests that he has an ear infection, and that's affecting his balance and his speech. But he writes a perfect description of anti-freeze poisoning. Michael said to the doctor, I feel like I'm drunk, but not when I'm not even drinking alcohol. Two husbands killed by poison, three children left without fathers, and one wife who may or may may make. not be a serial killer. There was a growing amount of evidence that David Castor had not died by suicide, but was intentionally poisoned by his wife, Stacey Castor. And after exhuming the remains of her first husband, Mike Wallace, there was also
Starting point is 00:28:34 proof that it may not have been her first murder. What began as a welfare check then ruled a suicide was now a homicide investigation. One potential obstacle, however, was the original M.E.'s opinion on the cause and manner of death. So manner of death is not in any way, shape, or form etched in stone, and it can change based on information outside of just a bare examination of the body. So in this case, it wasn't in any way fatal to the prosecution. One of those things that you have to deal with as a trial lawyer and the guy readily admitted, yeah, absolutely. I've ruled it a suicide. It doesn't change my opinion about the cause of death, but now confronted with this new evidence that you have uncovered.
Starting point is 00:29:20 I am changing the death certificate manner of death to homicide. You know, I don't think of there's all kinds of complications in this scenario. You know, we do know that Wallace's death was ruled by natural causes. I think it was a heart attack. And there would have been not many interviews, really not any investigation really done at all. And so in order to really connect these two cases, it would require a whole new type of investigation. And I mean, the road map would have to start from square one. And there's so many things to have to go through and they'd be able to get down that road.
Starting point is 00:29:57 And the first thing that Bill had to do in Onondaga was, remember, his cause of death was also ruled as a death by suicide. but now they have evidence of murder. And the thing that while the medical examiner, and we've talked about this before, is going based on the medical findings, it's also based on the information they're getting from other sources, you know, investigators and other people in the investigation.
Starting point is 00:30:17 So that's how it first was death by suicide. But now with this evidence, as Bill said, they'll have to change this back. And like you said, Scott, like similarly, now you have the death of someone else based on this exhumation. However, that other complication is that Mike Wallace, that death, it happened,
Starting point is 00:30:34 in another county. So Bill doesn't even have jurisdiction of it, but he's looking at it because, again, I don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole of legalese, but we prosecutors love this term, Molyneux, which is this hearing we can do if we want to use evidence of another crime in our case. So just think about this, right? If you can prove, and Scott, we've talked about this, that the other murder of her first husband was also by antifreeze. Well, that is a pretty uncommon thing. It's pretty unique. So to link it saying, hey, look, this is going to prove the person's identity being Stacey because she's the only one that was with both these people at the time.
Starting point is 00:31:09 They both died by similar means. Like, of course he wants to pursue it for that reason. Like, it's not going to be a given that he can pursue it in court, but as someone who has had those arguments and I've used them in cases where someone has committed other similar murders or other places, it's just an amazing thing to have in front of the jury if you can get it. So Stacey Caster was not only married to both men, her fingerprints were found on the glass of antifreeze found by David's bedside. So despite her alibi and her denials, Stacey Castor was identified as their prime suspect.
Starting point is 00:31:41 Based on the evidence collected, investigators requested warrants to place wiretaps inside her home as well as some well-placed video cameras outside her home. And they were betting that with the news of her former husband's exclamation, Stacey might be inclined to make an admission of guilt to a friend or family or otherwise, and we see that all of the time. in a way that may reveal her motives. And that is exactly what happened, although not in the way that investigators could ever have imagined. There's a couple of massive developments in the case that happened very similar in time. I went to a judge and got a wiretap on her phone. I had plenty of probable cause to request that,
Starting point is 00:32:26 and it was later sustained by an appellate court that there was sufficient. So we were listening in on her calls. And the timing was important to me because exactly at the moment we went up listening on her calls was when we exhumed the body of her first husband, Michael Wallace. With police listening in, Stacey even mentioned to a friend that police had exhumed Michael Wallace's body. So she must have been aware that police were likely closing in.
Starting point is 00:32:57 As it turns out, the one week that, we had the wired up, with the exception of one very, very significant thing, which I'll mention in a minute, there wasn't anything of real value on the wiretaps, except on this one day in September when we're listening to her, she calls very early in the morning. She calls 911 to report that her daughter, Ashley, has tried to kill herself. And I got that call within minutes. We were literally listening in real time to her calling the 911 Center. I'm in an ambulance of 41, 27 works a road.
Starting point is 00:33:37 Here, what is the nearest under the cross street? Glenwood. And what's the problem here? My daughter, I believe, has taken some girls. Paramedics rushed to the castor's home, where Stacey's daughter was barely clinging to life. They go in and they find an empty bottle of vodka. in Ashley's bedroom.
Starting point is 00:33:59 At her bedside, an empty bottle of pills, and in her mother, Stacey's hand, a typed suicide note, she claims she found in her daughter's room. Her mother is emotional, but nevertheless, she seems more intent on the note itself. Like, don't forget, don't miss this note here. The typed note signed with Ashley's name
Starting point is 00:34:23 included a shocking confession, that it was Ashley. not her mother that had poisoned both her father, Mike Wallace, and her stepfather, David Castor, and she could no longer live with the guilt of committing both murders. Wow, it was an astonishing turn in the investigation. Could investigators have got it wrong? Had the elaborate staging of David's suicide been Stacey Castor's attempt to cover up for her teenage daughter all along? We will answer those questions and more in the exciting conclusion of this story in part two,
Starting point is 00:34:57 So be sure to listen. On the next, Anatomy of Murder. Whoever wrote that note killed Mike Wallace and David Castro. It couldn't be anybody else. Ashley still drooling on herself. That poor kid was exhausted. I showed that to the jury. I said, does that in any way, shape, manner, or form suggest a woman that's about to kill herself?
Starting point is 00:35:21 This was so diabolical, so evil. It's hard to put into words. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audio Chuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamonde, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa and Phil Jean Grande.
Starting point is 00:35:57 So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.