True Crime Campfire - Toxic: Poisoners Grab Bag

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

“Teacup Poisoner” Graham Young began his creepy career when he was still a child, slipping poison to members of his family. Before he was finally caught and sentenced to Broadmoor in 1962, he’d poisoned more than a dozen people and killed at least three. Family, coworkers, friends. And he didn’t stop even after he was incarcerated. A couple of his fellow inmates at Broadmoor fell victim to his deadly chemistry, too. Then there’s Dr. Michael Swango, one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He started young, too. When he was just a kid, he created a scrapbook full of gory newspaper clippings about accidents and murders. And once he started poisoning, he didn’t stop until hundreds of victims lay in his wake. Poisoners fall in love with poison. With watching from a distance as their victims sicken and die. The power is intoxicating. The fact that they can stay hidden in the shadows with the power of life and death in their hands. We’re about to tell you two stories about two very different poisoners. Sources, Trepal Case:Poison Mind by Susan Goreck and Jeffrey GoodA&E's "American Justice," episode "Kill Thy Neighbor"HLN's "Vengeance," episode "George Trepal"Sources, Castor case:ABC's 20/20, "Black Widow"Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Stacey Castor"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Tea cup poisoner, Graham Young, began his creepy career when he was still a child, slipping poison to members of his family. Before he was, he was, was finally caught and sentenced to Broadmoor in 1962, he'd poison more than a dozen people and killed at least three. Family, co-workers, friends. And he didn't stop even after he was incarcerated. A couple of his fellow inmates at Broadmoor fell victim to his deadly chemistry, too. Then, there's Dr. Michael Swango, one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He started young, too. When he was just a kid, he created a scrapbook full of gory newspaper clippings about accidents and murders. And once he started poisoning, he didn't stop until

hundreds of victims lay in his wake. Poisoners fall in love with poison, with watching from a distance as their victims sicken and die. The power is intoxicating, the fact that they can stay hidden in the shadows with the power of life and death in their hands. We're about to tell you two stories about two very different poisoners. This is toxic. Case one. Poisonous Mind, The Murder of Peggy Carr. So, campers, we're in Alturis, Florida, June 1988. A sleepy little town, one of those nobody locks their doors kind of places. We don't need to say it again, do we?

Yeah, I think we've made our position clear on that. A 44-year-old phosphate mine foreman named Pai Carr got a weird typed post-it note in the mail. It said, in all caps, you and your so-called family have exactly two weeks to move out of the state of Florida or you will all die. This is no joke. Okay, so putting aside the admittedly important question of who the heck types on a post-it note, this was creepy as hell. Sure. so he showed it to his stepson Dwayne and then to his preacher and none of them could figure who would have sent something like this and everybody kind of just ended up shrugging it off as a joke okay y'all that note specifically said this is no joke oh my god but pye forgot about it and went about his busy life and a busy one it was pie his teenage son Travis and his adult daughter had recently moved in with pye's new wife peggy and her three teenagers they hadn't been together long so they were still adjusting to

to each other. The kids in particular were always kind of in each other's way, bickering just as often as they had fun together. Dwayne later said, we weren't exactly the Brady Bunch. They were a rambunctious, mixed family with two newly married parents and five kids in their teens and 20s. Despite the newness of Pye and Peggy's marriage, a second go-round for both of them, it was far from perfect. Peggy'd found out her husband was cheating on her.

This is like less than six months in, too, which is bonkers to me. So they fought a lot. In fact, only six months into the marriage, Peggy had moved out, furious and heartbroken about Pye's affair. But Pye had showed up crying and begging her to come home, and she'd let herself be persuaded. But things weren't really the same after that, even though Peggy and her kids were back under Pye's roof. So by the time this weird posted arrived in the mailbox, things at the carhouse were kind of in turmoil, just kind of simmering. Peggy and her daughter Sissy worked as waitresses at a diner, and one day Peggy was a little. was working her early shift when she started to feel sick. She'd been trying to get over what

she thought was probably a flu, so she figured maybe she just wasn't through it yet. She told Sissy she wasn't feeling well, so Sissy relieved her from work. Peggy went home to lie down. Later that day, Dwayne found his mother on the couch. She was acting disoriented, and she was in excruciating pain all over. She was hurting so badly she couldn't even speak. But Peggy knew sign language because both her parents were deaf, so she kept signing to Dwayne, my chest, my feet, my joints, please help me. So they rushed her to the hospital, and by the time she got there, she couldn't even open her eyes. They admitted her and started a battery of tests, but nobody could figure out what was wrong. But they gave her fluids and pain meds and nausea meds, and after a while she

started perking up and feeling better. They asked her a hundred questions, you know, did you eat anything different? Could you have drunk some bad water? But there were no obvious answers. The doctors, and prepare to roll your eyes so hard that they plop out your ears on this one, thought maybe her symptoms were psychosomatic. Yeah, there it is. The favorite diagnosis of doctors who can't immediately solve the problem themselves. Well, I can't figure it out, and I went to Harvard med school. Must be in your head, you silly bitch.

That'll be $500. Bye. Yeah, I wonder which part of the Hippocratic oath tells doctors to call their patients liars. I know, right? You don't know your own body. Anyway, I have to go pretend I'm in charge while the nurses do all the work. Bye. That is scorchingly accurate.

But anyway, she started feeling better, so they released her. She settled in at home with her family taking care of her. And within hours, she was down again. Her feet felt like they were on fire. A pins and needles feeling like when your foot goes to sleep, but magnified a thousand times over. Excruciating. That sounds awful. So Peggy was rushed back to the hospital.

Then, within a day or so, Peggy's son, Dwayne, and Pye's son, Travis, both 16, started feeling that same awful burning in their feet. These were big, corn-fed kids with high pain thresholds, and they were just sobbing in pain. They were admitted to the hospital right alongside their mom. And now, don't you know it? The doctors were starting to wrap their heads around the idea that, Something might actually be happening here. In fact, they started to wonder if the family had somehow been poisoned, perhaps with a heavy metal like arsenic.

Oh, you think? You know, we seriously need more true crime nerds in the medical profession. Because if I'd been one of those ER docs on the first night, Peggy came in, I'd have been like, talk screen, stat. Now, somebody bring her damn husband in here, because I'm going to get a confession out of this motherfucker if it's the last thing I do. Like, we would not be messing around in my ER. No, absolutely not.

Then Peggy's hair started falling out. And for one doctor who had expertise in toxicology, that rang a bell. He told the staff, we need to test them for thallium. Thallium, colorless, odorless, and not found on standard toxicology tests. It was once a common ingredient in rat poison, but it was banned for household use in the 70s because of how insanely fucking deadly it is. Yeah, thallium is terrifying. Thallium, in other words, is not to be messed with. And it's not easy to lay hands on either.

When the lab tests came back, it was official, thallium, in all three of them. Twice as much in Peggy system as the other two. And even though they had the answer now, they weren't sure Peggy would make it. On the day her test results came back, Peggy slipped into a coma. Over the next few days, Travis and Dway both. lost their hair, and Travis had to be put on a ventilator. The doctors were working hard to try to stop the damage and save this family, but the thallium seemed to be winning. Who the hell would do this to a family? That was a question for the police,

of course, so the hospital called the men. Detective Ernie Mincy's first order of business was to figure out how the killer got a hold of the thallium. Outside of a few specific industries, it's not accessible to lay people. They also sent CSIs to test everything in the carhouse for thallium, just in case it was something environmental. They tested the well water, plus hundreds of items in the house, but everything came up negative, until they discovered an eight pack of glass Coca-Cola bottles under the sink. Four of them were empty. The empty bottles contained traces of thallium. There it was. Bingo. And this is so creepy. When they question, in the family about who bought the coax, everyone was like, ah, not me. And Peggy's kids said it wouldn't

have been her. Peggy was addicted to Pepsi, so she wouldn't have bought Coke. Maybe one of their friends brought it over? Maybe. So obviously, the detectives were now investigating an attempted homicide, and Peggy's doctors told them it was likely to be a murder investigation before long. They'd done their best, but Peggy was not long for this world. She just had too much of the poison in her system. It had done too much harm. And soon the doctors had to tell Peggy's family that there was nothing more they could do for her. She had no more brain activity. They had to let her go. And that was that. This kind-hearted, loving woman who adored her kids and worked so hard for them was gone, forever. It hit her kids like a freight train. They just couldn't believe it was happening.

Product tampering is a federal crime, and the first thing the investigators needed to figure out was whether that was what was going on here. They were worried that maybe the cars were the guinea pigs for a larger scale attack still to come. Now, the unsolved Tylenol poisonings in Chicago, which is one of the creepiest cases you'll ever research in your life. And it's still unsolved, by the way. And those were still fresh on everybody's mind at the time.

So they called in the FBI for help. But fortunately, the FBI investigators soon found that the bottles of Coke had been individually opened, then poisoned, and then carefully resealed. a time-consuming task if the poisoner was trying to make the bottles look unopened, which they did. Not something you could really do on a large scale. So it didn't look like this was a product tampering like the Tylenol poisonings after all. So what did that mean?

Well, someone had obviously targeted the cars specifically. So Pye was, of course, the first suspect. He was out of town on a hunting trip when Peggy's symptoms started, which was a little too convenient. and Dwayne, his stepson, was immediately suspicious. Dwayne knew about the cracks in Pye and Peggy's marriage. He knew about Pye's infidelity, and he also knew about something else that got the investigator's antennae vibrating.

Pye had taken out a rather large life insurance policy on Peggy shortly after they got married, and Peggy didn't know about it until recently. And when she found out, totally by accident, she was scared. Yeah, this is where we start screaming. during the horror movie for the heroin to get out of the house. Yeah, exactly. So the investigators were interested, but, you know, as they looked into it more,

they couldn't really settle on the idea of Pye as the killer. I mean, Pye's son Travis was incredibly sick. He had to be ventilated, and Travis and Pye had a really close relationship. Why would he take the risk of killing his own kid? In fact, further testing revealed that Pye had ingested thallium himself. Now, anybody who knows enough about chemistry to know what thallium can do, would not have risk poisoning himself was something that gnarly. So Pye was beginning to fade a bit as the prime suspect.

So then who the hell was it? Well, the cars never locked their doors. So that technically meant that anybody could have snuck in and left those poison coax. That being said, it was a busy home. There were seven people there. So for someone to sneak in, they'd have to be close enough and careful enough to monitor the comings and goings of a big, blended family. They'd have to know everybody's routine. Hmm.

Investigators quickly ruled out the family, but then a witness came forward with an interesting lead. They said there had been some friction between the cars and their next-door neighbors, a married couple named George Trapal and Diana Carr, no relation to Pye and Peggy. The Trapal Cars came across as eccentric. George looked like an aging hippie with the kind of hideous dress sense that comes with living so much in your own head that it doesn't even occur to you to think about what you're wearing. I'm kind of like that myself, actually.

Sometimes I am. Yeah. Yeah. Today I went on a walk and I was wearing sweatpants that I just ended up rolling up because it was so hot. And it wasn't until I got home that I looked in the mirror and I was like, I look like a crazy person. Yeah, I relate to this.

The car kids. found him kind of hilarious as a result of his, you know, demeanor. His wife, Diana, was an orthopedic surgeon, a strong, dominant personality in contrast to George's nerdy, submissive one. They were both members of Mensa, an exclusive club for people whose IQs are in the top 2% in the country. Okay, so this is not the first time that Mensa has come up in one of our cases, as I'm sure you'll remember. And allow me to say, for the record, whoopty shit about flipping Mensa, okay? I got invited to apply to Menza. when I was in college, and believe me, I am a dumb ass.

Like, I cannot even add and subtract without getting a look on my face, like somebody just snuck up behind me and stuck something unexpected up my arse. And most of the people I met there, honestly, seemed like stuck up dorks. Not all, but most. So let's just not get carried away about Mensa. Yeah. But George and Diana were super active in it, and they never seemed to tire of telling people that they were in it, which should tell you about 90% of what you need to know about them,

quite frankly. That's true. We should start our own mensa, like just cool menza. Cool people call it. Absolutely. Murder nerd menza. Ooh, I like that. Yes, please.

So Diana and George were also known for loving true crime and murder mysteries. Oh, uh-oh. I know. You know what those people are like. Anyway, George and Diana were not fans of the cars. They'd had multiple little scraps with them about all the various irritating noises that come with a house full of teenagers. And even Dwayne, Peggy's son. This is so funny to me, admits that they were loud and annoying.

He said, yeah, we'd ride our four-wheelers through his yard, blast rock music. We pretty much tormented him. Yeah, he was very, very upfront about that. Yeah. And so the police's witness said that days before Peggy got sick, she and Diana got in a shouting match about the kids' loud music. Diana was furious, screaming at Peggy to, quote, get your kids under control. According to the witnesses, it was a huge overreaction. She was way too mad for the situation.

So, a feud with the neighbors. A screaming argument mere days before Peggy fell ill? It was probably nothing, but they had to check it out. When one of the FBI agents interviewed Diana, she admitted that she wasn't a fan of the car family, but she wouldn't hurt them. She was a doctor, after all. She took an oath to do no harm and call her patient's liars.

Diana, I'm joking, I'm sorry. Diana seemed super indignant about being asked. Most doctors are wonderful. We're just talking about that small percentage that happened to be massive assholes. I love my doctor. I've had a few of those. Anyway, it's my issue. So, yeah, Diana's whole affect was just, how dare?

How dare you question me? And then the agent interviewed George. Oh, George. Georgie Porgy. So George seemed like he was about a breath away from peeing his pants for the entire interview. He fidgeted, he made these weird little like clucking noises with his mouth, which they could tell was as dry as the goby desert, probably from nerves. And he openly talked shit about the car family for the entire interview, which is really not the greatest idea when you're being questioned about the murder of one of said family. But you do you, baby.

So it was kind of a bizarre interview. And just as the witness had said, Trapal's resentment toward the cars seemed really disproportionate to the situation, like way overblown. He just oozed contempt and animosity for this entire family. And then the agent asked George a routine question.

Why would somebody want to poison your neighbors? Now, they asked everybody this. And so far, everybody had said some derivative of, God, I have no idea, I can't imagine. George Trapal's answer? someone obviously wanted them to leave. Good job, bud. Well played.

Waited to hold it together, Mr. Mensa. Yeah, at this point, I'm fairly certain that I can get into Mensa if this absolute wet blanket can. You definitely good. George Trapal strikes me as someone who would try to grab the water when he slips in the shower. Now, just cut to me banging on the locked and bar door at Mensa HQ, saying, hey let me in I know you're in there you let George Trapal in and he's dumb as shit who cares if I can't do chemistry you're in Lake Flint I think it's a definite now now that they've heard this yeah of course so if the FBI had initially thought that the

neighbor lead was probably a dead end now that he'd actually met George Trapal they were feeling pretty differently about that and it was right around this time that the profile that they had commissioned from the behavioral sciences department came in, and damned if Georgie Boy did not fit that profile to a T. So the profilers had written that the poisoner would be, quote, a white male in his 30s, an intelligent passive person who avoids direct confrontation. The killer would be someone who felt superior to other people, they said, someone who had contempt for anyone he perceived as less intelligent than he.

He'd enjoy hurting the family without having to have direct contact with them, then watching the havoc he created from a distance. Paul fit just about every part of that profile. He was 40, not in his 30s, but close enough. He was a self-taught chemist and a self-described computer programmer, although he wasn't currently working a real job. Yeah, I'm a self-taught surgeon, Whitney. Do you want me to perform your appendectomy? Please, it's actually super inflamed. How soon can you get here? Give me a few hours. George had also done some time in prison in the 70s for, wait for it.

making meth for a drug ring. Yep, he was the Walter White of a meth lab, and he was totally unapologetic about it, too. Like, while he was locked up, he told other prisoners that he had every intention of going right back to cooking meth once he got out. Now, why is this important? Well, one of the items used in cooking meth happens to be thallium.

This is definitely something we should be putting in our bodies, right? So any self-respecting self-taught chemist would know exactly what it is and what it can do. But in his initial interview with the FBI, George, he told the agents he had no idea what thallium was. Just tell what? I knew it. Dumbass. So, despite all that, George's friends rushed to his defense when they spoke to the FBI.

George couldn't be capable of this. George was a Buddhist. He loved his cats. He saved bugs and spiders from certain deaths. He respected life. Oh, he's a Buddhist. And no one religious has ever done anything wrong ever. It's impossible.

Yeah, tell that to the folks who lived through the Spanish Inquisition, but okay. And this was interesting. One friend told the agents that years earlier they'd baked some cookies laced with hallucinogens for a road trip, then offered them to hitchhikers. And these poor hitchhikers would freak out because, of course, they would. And George just thought their reactions were hilarious. And apparently this was something George enjoyed doing on the regular. So, wow, that's a psychopath move.

What was it again? George has so much respect for life? Yeah, I would venture to guess that he respects the lives that don't interfere with his. The lives that haven't incurred his contempt for not being smart enough for him. Yeah, just go fuck yourself, Walter Shite. I find it telling that he saved insects and loved cats so clearly he viewed the cars as lesser beings than bugs and other animals. Rather than exonerating him, I think the, oh, he's a Buddhist line, only serves to make. him more monstrous. By now, Dwayne and Travis had recovered and come home from the hospital.

And when Dwayne found out they were looking at George Trapal as the possible suspect, Dwayne was knocked sideways. He said, God, I love Dwayne so much. Every line he says in every interview I've seen is so fucking funny. Dwayne is unintentionally hilarious. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think he means it to be funny, but it's so funny. He said, I just thought he was a nerd. He's not like that. He wouldn't do this. He's got this real southern accent. He's like, I just thought he was an arbor.

And it's like, you sound, oh, Dwayne, you are so funny. But the FBI were hot on the trail by now. But they didn't have any proof. Certainly nothing they could use to get an arrest warrant. They were going to need to get creative. They knew George was smart, which, sure, whatever. So they decided to send a detective undercover to earn his trust. They chose Detective Susan Goric. Susan was smart, well-read. She'd have no trouble

fitting in an immense meeting. And she was unassuming, laid back, and easy to talk to. They thought she was exactly the type George might open up to. When will murderers learn to listen to Drake? No new friends. Oh, friend. New friend. I'm the smartest boy. Everybody wants to be my friend. It's always an undercover officer. It's always. Always. Anytime you're under the microscope for a murder, trust no one. Trust no one.

So this began a nearly year-long undercover mission for Detective Goric. She and her team regularly went through Trapal's garbage. They put an undercover on the back of the garbage truck, actually. His job was to mark the bag from George and Diane's house so they could go through it later. And then in April, George and Diana organized a murder mystery weekend for the Mensa nerds. And Detective Goric knew that this was her inn. She signed up for the murder weekend under the alias Sherry Gwynne. Sherry was a shy woman trying to escape an abusive husband.

A little bit of a kitten with a wounded paw vibe to play on George's desire to seem like a big, strong man. Blech. Attendees of the event showed up. up at a hotel for the weekend, where assigned names and scripts and roleplayed through the murder plot, which actually sounds like so much fun. I'd totally be into that myself as long as it was done right. I would be all over that. Trapal was super into this event. He even wrote one of the clue books called Voodoo for Fun and Profit. Now, campers, I want to remind you that this man was in Mensa. Mensa.

In this book, he wrote for his murder mystery weekend within months of being questioned about a poisoning death by the FBI. He wrote, Most items on the doorstep are a neighbor's way of saying, move or else. Again, may I say, sir, well played, my man. Good job. What the hell was he thinking?

Unbelievable. He just thought he was so clever. This, of course, reminded the investigators of the threatening post-it note Pye had received shortly before the murder. Side note, by the way, the cover art of this little homemade book included an illustration so racist that both Whitney and I literally shrieked when it came up on the screen. We were like, ah, so bad. Well, because I, like, I had to pause it too and rewind because I was like, did that just, is that? Ugh, that was awful. What? Yeah.

So, despite all their errors of intelligence, it looks like not a single person there had a brain cell despair. Susan, as Sherry, quickly managed to ingratiate herself with George Trapal, and she found him to be a, quote, nice guy. Charming, easy to talk to, kind of soft-spoken. She said, he was a little bit like an encyclopedia, intelligent, egotistical. He could talk for an hour on any topic. Yeah, that must have been exhausting. You know, Detective Gorg really took one for the team here, y'all. Spending as much time with this freaking dick-head as she did.

They slowly built a friendship, lots of phone calls, lunches. George gave her advice about getting away from her abusive husband. In fact, at one point, he told her, you know, a little poison could solve this problem for you. Yeah. So that parked up her ears, but of course, you know, it wasn't proof that he killed Peggy Carr. So the undercover operation chugged along for a while with a frustrating lack of progress. But there were some tantalizing little things that emerged during their hours and hours of conversations. Once, as they sat at a park eating lunch, Trapal told her that he thought of himself as a divided person.

He said, there's a bit of my brain which I call the watcher, because it just sort of sits in the background and really understands what's going on. And if anything of interest occurs, it alerts the rest of me. Well, that's not just all kinds of flipping creepy or anything. So creepy. And slowly Detective Goric, aka Sherry, realized that George actually hated people who he decided weren't as smart as he was. Underneath that soft-spoken personality, he was a narcissist

who not only needed but demanded control. Susan came to believe that Trapal saw the family next door as chaos. something that was out of his control. He couldn't take it, so he sought to contain it, control it. Unfortunately, she still didn't have any proof. And then one day, she overheard George say that he was planning on selling his house, and she immediately knew that this was her chance. She said, oh, you're moving? I'm looking for somewhere to live.

And soon after that, Susan as Sherry moved into the Trappal Carr's old house, and unbeknownst to George and Diana, she brought along a few roommates. some detectives and CSIs, and they didn't need a search warrant since Detective Goric as Sherry was a paying tenant. And it didn't take them long to find a small vial in the garage stuck toward the back

of a dusty shelf, its label red, thallium. They sent it, and some other stuff, in for testing, and they waited. Now, moving into the Trapal's house also gave undercover badass Goric an opportunity to ask George about the poisoning and get his reaction. She said,

As soon as she moved in, the neighbors had started regaling her with the story of the car family poisoning. During one of their lunches, Detective Goric's hidden surveillance recorded the conversation. When she asked George, you weren't afraid, were you? He said, no, apparently it was some sort of personal vendetta. I mean, it's not like they're running around poisoning everybody. How could you know that, Georgie? Mm-hmm. The case wasn't closed.

There was no official word yet on what had happened, or why. Nope. Interesting. It's also interesting to know how edgy the conversation seemed to make him. Yeah, so Detective Goric decided to ramp up that tension. The next time she saw George, she told him that a couple of detectives had come to her door looking for him. Georgie took it big. He got all flustered and irritable, kept telling her to shut up and let him think for a second, and he started pressing her on what they wanted him for. At one point he said, well, if they're interested in me, it's because of probably the poisoning next door a few years ago, which just because I lived in the area, I might be a suspect. I hope I'm not a prime suspect. As he left her and headed for his car, Detective Goric said quietly into her body mic. He's leaving now, and he is very worried. after this meeting the items from the tripal home were returned from testing the vial found in the garage yes indeed had traces of thallium and that was enough to finally put the old habeas gravis on george at the new house where he was living with his grumpy-ass wifie diana

when the detectives got to his door diana opened the door and as soon as she saw him she refused to let him into the house and she tried to block them physically. They actually had to move this woman aside to get into the house. And when they did, they were treated to the side of George, standing at the top of the stairs, wearing nothing but a pair of bikini underwear. Blue, in case you were wondering. And when he was told he was under arrest,

all he said was, okay, can I put on some clothes? Yes, please. Fucking weirdo. Please don't perp walk him. And his blue, tidy whiteys or tidy blues. You know, wear whatever you want. It's your underwear. I don't care. But also, there's just something so comedic about that scene.

Nobody needs to see that. They had a search warrant for George and Diana's new house, so they got to work. And holy shit, did they find a whole creepy cornycopia of evidence. Just so many chemicals. All of the chemicals. They also found photocopies from a book called Poison Detection in Human Organs. It had a chapter on the symptoms and bodily effects of poison in humans. This included a section on thallium.

The pages were covered in George Trapal's fingerprints. And they found a hidden basement room, window sealed, walls heavily soundproofed, and the middle of the room was a table with stirrups, like what you'd find in a gynecologist's office. They thought it looked like a torture table. Yeah, and what it probably was, in fact was a BDSM table because they also found a bunch of sex toys

but no shade on BDSM but that thought is horrifying enough if you've ever met George and Diana because these people are unpleasant. Yeah, but at the end of the day, it was just another layer to the fascinating onion that was George Trapal. The fascinating and rather stinky onion.

So stinky. That was Georgie boy. On April 7th, 1990, George Trapal was charged with first degree murder in six counts of attempted murder for the murder of Peggy Carr and the poisoning of her family. He was held without bail. The prosecutors wanted the death penalty.

The defense was worried that George's eccentricities would alienate him from the jury. They thought he might come across as a bit smug because, you know, he is. Although I'd argue, a bit smug is an understatement akin to calling World War II a little dust up.

So, unsurprisingly, given those concerns, George never took the stand, but the juror still watched him. He struck them overall as cold. He did occasionally smile, but there was nothing reassuring about it. It seemed as reptilian as the rest of his facial expressions. The juror said there was something about his face that made them mistrust him almost on sight. It reminds me a little of Principal J. Smith from season one, doesn't it you? Oh, definitely.

Yeah, him and his creepy goad eyes. The state did a good job of narrowing the scope of the suspects. They said they started with the whole world as suspects, and through the evidence, they would show the jury how it could have only been George. Undercover goddess Susan Gorg took the stand to present her findings, including surveillance video that showed her discussing the poisoning with him. The defense argued, or whined, let's say, that the investigators were persecuting poor Georgie because of his weird personality.

Which, okay, I have a weird personality. I like bones as decor and anime, and I have what is probably a disturbing amount of research about murder and body disposal methods on my computer at any given time. But people like me just fine. I like you. In fact, I'd argue that they find me charming and eccentric. If people as a whole don't like you, it's you. it's you, not them with the problem.

Yeah, and every time I've seen any of his friends go on TV to talk about him, like they seem insufferable too. Like, I just want to punch them on side every last one of them I've ever seen. They're the type of people that would like, you go see a movie and they're like, but you didn't really understand it. Amen, precisely. So the defense argued that it didn't make sense that a genius would leave behind so much evidence. Well, well, well, is that an admission that he might not be a fucking genius?

Also, book smarts aren't the end-all be-all of intelligence. I've never been accused of murder and I'm not a genius. All right, let me tell you something. Smart people do dumb-ass stuff all the time in these cases. Geniuses who get caught immediately are a dime a dozen in true crime, and I think there are a couple of reasons for that. So first of all, it is harder than you think to commit the perfect murder. You have to think of everything.

The investigators, all they got to do is get lucky once, but you have to be impeccable, and that is not an easy ask. And secondly, people are cocky, especially smart people who are also narcissists like George. George assumed that he was the smartest person in any room he was in, and I just don't think he could conceive that a bunch of small town cops could suss him out. How'd that work out for you, sugar? So his defense attorney, this was charming, also implied that Diana could have been the one who poisoned the cars, but that theory fell flat when put up against the FBI profile of the killer. Diana was, as you've probably noticed, a force to be reckoned with. When she had a problem with the cars, she went right over there and screamed at him.

George was the quiet one, the passive one, much, much more the profile of a poisoner. So the jury deliberated for just six hours. they found George Trapal guilty on all counts and sentenced him to death. He would have the choice between two methods of execution. One was the electric chair, the other ironically was lethal injection. Death by poison. Trapal appealed, but all his appeals have thus far been denied and he still sits on death row today, writing a prison newsletter for MENSA.

Full of brain teasers and other such stuff. I wonder how many of his fellow inmates are MENSA members who screwed up their murders, too. His friends have gone on TV more than once to defend him and insist that he was only convicted because he was different. Uh-huh. Shut up, nerds. Anyway, his wife is still an orthopedic surgeon in Florida, so if you're down there and you need your bones worked on, watch your ass. Diana Carr. Just remember that name, Diana Carr.

Okay. Moving on to Case 2. Ruthless. The story of Stacey Kaster. So, campers. We're in Weedsport, New York, the afternoon of August 22nd, 2005. 38-year-old Stacey Castor called 911. She was worried about her husband of two years, David. She said they'd had a big fight the night before. David had been drunk, despondent. At one point, he'd told her to take the kids and get out.

But later, he'd said that if she'd left, he'd, quote, make her sorry. It was ugly. Later, David had stormed off and locked himself in their bedroom, refusing to come out. So she slept at a friend's house that night, and in the morning, she'd gone to work at David's heating and air business, expecting him to show up later in the day, but he didn't show. And when she called home, he didn't pick up the phone. She tried not to panic at first. She knew he was mad at her, so maybe he was just giving her the cold shoulder.

But when she kept trying and failing to reach him, she decided she'd just be just. just couldn't take it anymore. David had been depressed lately, and Stacey knew he kept a shotgun under the bed. She didn't want to think about why he might not be responding to her calls. She left work and headed for home, and now she was calling for police to go with her into the house and see what was going on. She didn't want to go in alone. A sheriff's deputy met with her at the house, and Stacey told him the story. She said David had been acting kind of weird the day before when they were fighting. He'd been acting weird lately in general. His business wasn't going well, she said, and he'd recently lost his father. Stacey hung back as Deputy Willoughby knocked on the bedroom

door. No response. Not even when the deputy said, Mr. Castor, police department. So concerned for David's well-being, the deputy had Stacey stand back while he kicked down the door. The smell of vomit hit them immediately as they stepped inside the room. And there, on the bed, was David. He was lying face down on the bed, clearly dead. The mattress was covered in vomit and blood. It looked like an unpleasant death and probably not quick. Stacey was instantly hysterical. Just devastated, sobbing.

She begged them, please don't let him be dead. Please bring him back. Just heartbreaking. She had to be helped out of the room. On the nightstand sat two glasses, an empty bottle of diet cranberry juice and a bottle of apricot brandy. One of the glasses still had a bright neon green liquid inside. Kind of like crem to menth if you ordered it from the Joker's website.

Right, Greek. And on the floor next to the bed was an empty plastic bottle of antifreeze. Oof. So that chartreuse liquid in the glass was antifreeze, aka ethylene glycol, a deadly toxin and a terrible way to die. So investigators' first thought was suicide, and Stacey Caster's tearful explanations seemed to back that up. David had been so depressed, and they just had that big fight.

now she was all alone and not for the first time see Stacy had been widowed once before her first husband had died of a heart attack years earlier leaving her to parent their two kids alone when David had come along he felt like a lifeline now here she was

going through this nightmare for the second time Stacy was 18 when she met her first husband Mike Wallace at a bar he was there that night with a friend and charmingly the friend suggested they bet on which one of them could take Stacy home that night That's the kind of thing that makes a girl feel really special. So special.

What a beautiful story. Mike won, obviously. And at 26, he was quite a bit older than Stacey, but he was a party monster, and the two of them hit it off right away. Mike was all about the fun life, and for a while there, he had a little bit too much fun. So much, in fact, that he served some time in prison for DUI. He had some problems with drugs, too. But by all accounts, that stint in jail finally woke him up. And once he and Stacey had their first child, a daughter.

daughter they named Ashley, Mike became a different, much calmer guy. He was still the life of the party, just not the type to stagger out drunk at the end of the night. In fact, he was more fun to be around now that he was getting his shit together. Mike and Stacey made it official with a wedding in 1990. Their second daughter, Bree, was born a year later. Mike worked at a commercial HVAC company, and Stacey worked in billing for an ambulance company. They were a close family. They spent a lot of time together. Mike stopped drinking and seemed to be taking his health more seriously. Everything was clicking along nicely. But then, on January 11, 2000, 11-year-old Ashley came home from school to find her dad unresponsive and struggling to breathe on the couch.

She called her mom at work and said, Mom, dad's making funny faces. She was confused and she knew something was wrong, but she was just a kid. She didn't understand that he couldn't breathe. She just told her mom, maybe you should come home. So Stacey did, and what she got there and realized how serious the situation was, she called 911. But sadly, by the time the EMTs arrived, Mike was gone. Despite his age, only 38, three ER doctors told Mike's family that they felt sure he died of a heart attack. They asked Stacey if she wanted an autopsy, and Stacey said, oh no, I'm sure it was a heart attack, just like you said. No autopsy necessary.

I mean, an autopsy is an upsetting thing for a family member to contemplate after all. So Mike was buried on his family plot, and that was that. A horrible loss for those two little girls. Stacey took them to Disney World right after Mike's death to try and cheer them up. And now, Stacey was a single mom. She struggled to keep the relationship with her daughters while working to keep the bills paid. Ashley later said her mom wasn't really around much in those days. As the slightly older sibling, she was the one who looked after her sister Brie.

She said, I did all the things my mom was supposed to do. Aw. Sounds like a stressful, kind of lonely life. And then it went on like that for a little while. But then, in late 2001, a mutual friend introduced Stacey to David Castor. Despite looking enough like him to pass for his brother, Stacey definitely had a type. David was pretty much Mike's opposite. it. He owned his own

age fact business. He didn't drink or party. He was a straight-laced guy, outdoorsy, loved being outside with the people he loved. So to a single mom with two daughters to raise all of that meant stability. It might not be super sexy. You know, you're not going to see it play out in the movie

starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, but to Stacey, David Castor, look pretty much like a life raft in the middle of a churning sea. Please, give me a man that pays his bills on time over a whirlwind any day. Amen. Whirlwind means drama, and drama means emotional ups and the nouns.

Ryan Gosling can kick rocks. Except not really, because he seems nice. Call me Ryan. Lord, have mercy, she's hitting on Ryan Gosling. Somebody come get her. So, David was recently divorced, and his son was grown and out of the house, so he was lonely looking for love when he met Stacey. And it shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that he and Stacey hit it off pretty quick.

And in 2003, they made it legal. And for a while, for Stacey at least, it was a fairy tale. Kind of a mundane suburban fairy tale, but a fairy tale nonetheless. Stacey started working as David's office manager at the heating and air business, and they seemed to have a really good relationship. Ashley and Bree were a little less enthused about the situation. They didn't like David at first, which is understandable, right? I mean, he's not their dad.

Plus, David didn't make a secret of the fact that he wasn't especially stoked at the prospect of being a dad again. He'd already raised his kid, he didn't really want to do it twice, so he could be a little bit testy with the girls sometimes. Like their mom, who according to friends had always been inquisitive and stubborn, they were the type of kids to question everything, and David was the type of stepdad who wanted them to do what he said when he said it, which is not a great combo. So things were a little bit tense between him and the girls,

at least for the first few years. But that didn't seem to trouble Stacy. The main fly in the ointment for Stacey was money. David was into big boy toys, stuff like boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, anything with an engine, he was all over it. And they had a lot of fun together with all that stuff. I mean, who doesn't want to go jet skiing? But the problem was that David didn't usually hesitate to splurge when he saw something he liked. So he bought all kinds of shiny new toys, many of which just kind of sat in the garage most of the time.

And Stacey's perception was David went on these little shopping space. Breeze, and she got stuck dealing with the bills. Your classic, you make me feel like I have an extra kid dynamic, where one spouse is the big kid and the other is the mean mommy, or mean daddy, as the case may be, which is not a fun situation or a sexy one for either party. It wasn't all bad, though. Mostly, they got all on great, and some other good stuff developed over time, too. Namely, David and the two girls started warming up to each other. Ashley said that by the time her high school graduation rolled around, David was sitting in the audience beaming with that happy father look.

He still wasn't exactly stepping up to the dad role, but the girls felt like he did want to be a friend, a supporter, a cheerleader for them. It meant a lot. That was a happy day, Ashley's graduation. It felt like they were a family. And now, only three months later, David was dead. As I'm sure you true crime obsessives already know, when investigators get called to the scene of an unexpected death like this one, they have to treat it as a homicide until it's proven to be something else. My personal hero, Detective Dominic Spinelli, mostly because his name, was assigned to be lead detective, and he was determined to cross every T and dot every eye. This comes up so much on true crime shows that it's really cliche, but cliches become cliches because they're true. true, after all, and something just didn't feel right to Detective Spinelli. His spidey sense was tingling.

Don Spinelli had a finely honed spidey sense. Colleagues said he almost seemed psychic sometimes. His instincts were so good. For one thing, the CSIs found something weird in the kitchen trash. A turkey baster that reeked of alcohol and anti-freeze and had drops of neon green liquid inside. What the hell was that about? Then there was the fact that David was naked. People don't tend to kill themselves without their clothes on.

They put a lot of thought into how their body will be found, and being found naked would be humiliating. And if he wanted to kill himself, why would he put himself through the hellish death of antifreeze poisoning? He worked in heating and air. He knew perfectly well how much an anti-free death would suck. And he had a shotgun right under the bed. So although they suspected suicide, they want to do their due diligence, dig into it and make sure

it wasn't something else. They began by trying to determine what, if anything, would have made David take his own life. They spoke to his ex-wife Janice, the mother of his kids, and she was just thunderstruck. She said there was no way he would have committed suicide. David was happy and fulfilled. He was a father. He'd never leave his kids without him. And he said, he hadn't even left a note? No way. She didn't buy it. When they spoke to Stacey, she tearfully told them they'd just had their two-year anniversary weekend. In fact, the fight they'd had, though night before, was about how they wanted to celebrate. David wanted to close down the H-FAC shop and go on a two-week-long trip, just him and Stacey.

Stacey didn't want to leave Brie home alone for that long. And she said that at some point during the argument, David had stood up, grabbed a bottle of Southern Comfort, good choice, stormed off into the bedroom and locked the door. Stacey realized this flight was going to take a little while to resolve and it was going to be a toxic environment to be around until it did. So she told her daughters that they should spend the weekend at friends' houses. And she sent them off. She'd gone to a friend's house herself, she told the investigators.

A couple times that evening she'd gone over to check on David and found that the door was still locked, but she told her friend she could hear him snoring on the other side. And we know the rest. When he didn't show up to work and she couldn't reach him on the phone, she called 911. So the medical examiner quickly determined that David had died from ethylene glycol poisoning. Enough antifreeze, in fact, to kill an elephant.

The doctor knew the initial thought was suicide, so that's what he put on the death certificate. But Detective Spinelli wasn't so sure. He had a hunch. Figuring maybe the crime lab could deliver some answers, he sent the turkey baster and the stuff from the nightstand, the glasses, and the bottles, for fingerprinting and DNA. Meanwhile, by the winter of 2005, Stacey was busy executing David's will, which was a nasty surprise for his family. According to David's will, Stacey was the sole heir to his estate, meaning David's son got nothing.

Buckkiss, not one thin dime. He wasn't even mentioned in the will, which is bananas. And it cut him to the quick. But he thought, you know, maybe dad was madder at me than I realized. Their relationship had suffered when David and his ex-wife divorced. So maybe his dad had changed his will in a moment of anger. Man, it hurt like hell. And it shocked him.

He would never have thought his dad would do that to him. Cut his kid out like that and not even explain why? So Stacey made out like a bandit from David's death. She even inherited the business, which she ended up selling for $200,000. She blew through a big chunk of her inheritance pretty fast, renovating the house. David's family felt like she was eradicating every sign of him from the place, bit by bit. And her daughter said, after the death, life went back to the way it had been when Mike died. Stacey wasn't around much anymore. Once again, it was just Ashley and Bree.

And then, after months of processing, those lab results finally came back, on the glass with the anti-freeze and that mysterious turkey baster they'd found in the kitchen trash. And when he saw the results, Detective Spinelli's eyebrows hit the ceiling. The antifreeze glass had only three fingerprints, all of which belonged to one Stacey Caster. David's fingerprints were nowhere to be found. So if David hadn't touched that glass, then how the hell had the antifreeze gotten into a system? Not only that, but the turkey baster had David's DNA all over the tip and ethylene glyco. call residue inside. If David had used it while locked in the bedroom, how did it get in the kitchen trash? Suspish, to say the least. Investigators theorized that he may have been passed out

or drunk when someone, the grieving widow, forced the poison down his throat. They needed to dig into Stacey's life, her motives, her past, and when Spinelli went to try and interview Stacey's first husband and found out he died of a, quote, heart attack around the age of 40, that spidey sense started vibrating again. The old Spinelli Spidey Sense. Time to dig into Mike Wallace's death. And when I say dig, I mean that literally. They had Mike's body exhumed. And when they got to the cemetery to do so after fighting through a lot of red tape that took about a year, they did a double take. Stacy had buried second husband David right next to first husband Mike with her name on both headstones, which is just knucking futs. Yeah, that's bonkers. That's just, that's just creepy

as hell. I don't know any other. Oh, Lord. One of the investigators who was there that day had the fleeting thought, what the hell is she doing? Starting collection? Yeah, exactly. The site of those two headstones side by side, each marked with Stacey's name, gave him a little chill. The weirdest thing to me about this is that she put her name on both headstones. Because, like, you know, your first husband dies, like you bury him. Your second husband dies, where do you put him? That's the question. But was she going to pull a King Solomon and cut herself in half post-mortem so she could rest

eternally with both of them? You could, theoretically, I suppose. A little gruesome, but. And when they got Mike's body to the medical examiner, for an autopsy, they realized they'd gotten lucky. Mike was amazingly well preserved, enough that they could still ID him by fingerprints. Wow. And when the Emmy completed the autopsy, Mike's cause of death was clear as day.

Not a heart attack, not even close. When they opened his body, they immediately noticed what looked like veins in a gold mine. Crystals. The telltale kind created by ethylene glycol toxicity. Yep. Mike was full of antifreeze. Interviews with his family made it all make sense in hindsight. For weeks leading up to his death, Mike had been feeling awful.

He was staggering, exhausted, sick to his stomach all the time. One time he just vomited right on the coffee table like he was sitting next to Ashley and, you know, just with no warning just threw up all over the place. And these are all symptoms of slow, gradual antifreeze poisoning. Stacey's friends said she'd been talking about wanting to leave Mike after the holidays. She suspected he might be cheating on her Okay. Point of order to the individuals that wait until after the holidays to murder their spouses

because we see this a lot. Yeah, it's really weird. They're like, oh, we don't want to ruin the holidays. It will still ruin Christmas for the kids. Of course. It will ruin the entire month or season for them forever. You're not being merciful. You're being a twat. Just get a divorce.

It's less traumatizing in the long run. Yeah, you know I love watching hit man stings, you know, where somebody's trying to hire somebody and they end up, of course, getting an undercover cop instead. And there was this one where this woman, and I remember this vividly because she's wearing a Batman t-shirt. And I'm like, man, you don't deserve Batman comics. Anyway, so she was sitting there talking just matter-of-factly as can be about wanting to kill her husband. And they had kids together and everything. And she wanted to make sure she did it after Thanksgiving. So the kids could have one last Thanksgiving with their dad.

God bless her. Like, oh, aren't you, your pin arose on you. You're a a doll. Are you serious right now? Good God. God. So investigators now felt sure that Stacey Castor had murdered both her husbands. They just needed to prove it. So they brought Stace in for an interview, reassuring her that they just needed her help with some paperwork to close out the case. They didn't tell her they'd exhumed Mike. But this didn't seem to reassure Stacey. She usually came across as very articulate, very intelligent, but she was edgy as hell just from the very start of this interview, chain smoking and kind of jiggling her leg and saying stuff like, I have the death certificate. What's this all about? Not good. Baby girl was losing her

grip. Yeah. Remember, Stacey Caster Oil, you can change the manner of death on a death certificate if new evidence comes to light. Yeah, and it got worse. At one point seemingly at random, she told the detectives about a show she'd watched on TV where a woman killed two of her husbands with anti-freeze. Well played, Stace. Way to hold it together, girl. You know, when you're under suspicion for killing your husband with Annie Freeze, most definitely make sure you bring up watching a TV show about that very thing, you know, just so they know exactly where you got the idea. And the interesting thing was, she mispronounced anti-free every time she said it. She said anti-free. And it was so weird that both the detectives in the room, like, remembered it and made note of it, anti-free.

Hmm. So the detectives didn't keep her too long that day. They'd had an ulterior motive for bringing her in in the first place. See, they'd gotten a warrant to tap her phones. And this interview was just a way of kind of priming the pump, getting Stacey nervous so she might start making incriminating phone calls. They just wanted to plant a tiny little seed of fear in her mind and then turn her loose. As soon as she left the police station, she started making calls. But unfortunately, for the detectives, she didn't say anything incriminating. In one call to a friend, she said, It scares the living shit out of me because I didn't do this. But at least they could tell they'd made her jumpy. That was good. And then they ratcheted up the pressure. On Wednesday, September 12th, the investigators showed up at Ashley Wallace's college to ask her about her mother.

More specifically, they told her what they thought her mother had done. And Ashley, God bless her, was pissed. She didn't believe a word of it. She thought they were being lazy, accusing her mother just because they, quote, couldn't figure out why David would kill himself. Oh, bless her heart. And here's the thing about that. Rarely do people need a reason to kill themselves. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, that's not really how it works, is it? I find her phrasing here really interesting because the police don't need a reason either. If it's suicide, they're usually pretty quick to close the case. This should have told Ashley that they knew something that she didn't. but the trust of her mother ran deep enough that she made this excuse. So if they were hoping to get some intel from Ashley, those hopes were quickly dashed. They listened in on a call where Ashley indignantly told Stacey about the detectives coming to her school. To your school, Stacey was the quintessential angry mama bear.

How dare they upset you like that? And also came out in this conversation that they told Ashley about. the exhumation of Mike's body. Rout row. And the antifreeze they found in his system. Stacey must have shit a brick. Yep. And then two days later, the wiretaps caught something else.

A 911 call from Stacey requesting an ambulance. It's my daughter Ashley. I think she tried to kill herself. Ashley had overdosed on pills. Her younger sister, Bree, had found her unresponsive and breathing shallowly. When the detectives heard this call, the hair on the backs of their necks stood up. The spidey senses were blaring now. Yeah, Detective Valerie Brogan actually said that monster tried to kill her daughter. Wow. Yeah. They immediately rushed

over to the castor house where they found the sad remnants of Ashley's overdose. The scene bore an eerie resemblance to David's death scene. An empty bottle of vodka, four empty pill bottles vomit on the bed. And then they found the note. Typed, no signature. A suicide note, which had been lying on the bed next to Ashley's prone body when briefed her. The note, written almost totally without capitalization or punctuation, as one long sentence, read in part, Mommy, when you read the letter, just remember I love you and everything I did is because I love you. I'm sorry all of this is happening to you, but now everyone is going to know what really happened, and they know it wasn't you, it was me. No one was ever supposed to know about Daddy.

I told you when Daddy died it was all my fault, and it was Daddy doing things you never knew about. He was drinking. He was smoking pot again, too. He was mean to you and to me, and he only ever loved Bree. I couldn't let him do those things to you anymore. You think I don't remember how things were, but I do, and I didn't want to ever live like that anymore. It wasn't fair to you or me. The cops said there was anti-free in Daddy's body, but did they tell anyone about the rat poison, too? When I got home from school that day, I knew what was going on. Daddy was barely breathing. I knew he was going to die. That's why I didn't call you for help or anyone else. I wanted to make sure he couldn't be mean to you or me anymore. Wow. Wow. Wow. So here was Ashley confessing to murdering her dad when she was 11 years old, apologizing to her mom that, quote, all this was happening to her, that people were blaming her when really Ashley was the one at fault. And it got worse. She wrote, And then you married David, and he was mean to you too, mean to all of us.

So that Friday, when David came home, is when I first did it. It was easy. I asked him if he wanted something to drink, and I put the ante free in his glass with some soda. He drank two whole glasses. And Ashley then went on to describe dosing David again later that weekend with the turkey baster and some of that apricot brandy they'd found on the nightstand. She said, you were asleep on the couch. The letter ended in part. No one was ever supposed to know, but now they do, and they think,

think you did it, but you didn't. It was me. I can't go to jail for the rest of my life and I can't live like this. I did the only thing I could to help you, Mommy. Remember, I love you more than anything, and I did it for you. Please forgive me. So, holy shit, it would appear that this girl just confessed to two murders. Meanwhile, the doctors at the hospital worked to keep her alive, despite a dangerous combination of alcohol and prescription drugs in her system. They finally brought her to consciousness and as soon as she was aware, the medical staff and then the detectives started asking her questions. What happened? Why did you try to hurt yourself? And on and on and on. As that was just getting started, Stacey appeared in the doorway of Ashley's hospital room.

She walked quickly to her daughter's side and started stroking her hair, talking softly to her, holding her hand. Ashley, confused and a little out of it still, later said she knew in her gut that something was wrong with this display. She said it felt fake. Like her mom was putting on a show for the other people in the room. Finally, Stacey left the room and Brie burst out, Did you write that note? Ashley had no idea what she was talking about.

What note? Bree told her, and Ashley baffled to her core, just kept saying, no, no, I didn't write any note. What are you talking about? Of course I didn't kill Mike or David. What is going on? The last thing Ashley remembered before waking up in the hospital was having a few drinks with her mom that afternoon. Ashley had been telling her mom about her conversation with the detectives at her school the day before.

And suddenly, Stacey said, you know what? We've both had a hard week. Let's get drunk. This was odd. I mean, this wasn't a typical mother-daughter activity for Stacey and Ashley, but Stacey seemed excited about the idea. And Ashley didn't want to disappoint her. So she said, sure, okay. Stacey mixed some vodkas and Sprite, which that's literally the most basic white girl drink in the world.

God. And handed Ashley a glass. She just said, keep stirring. Make sure it's all mixed. So Ashley did, but the drink tasted disgusting. She kept saying, Mom, it's gross. But Stacey insisted she finish it. Just drink it real fast.

Ashley did what her mother told her, and the last thing she remembered was falling asleep and waking up in the hospital, getting interrogated by doctors and detectives. What must it have been like for this girl to realize what all this meant? I mean, what must that have felt like to a girl who had loved and defended her mother and got mad when the detective suggested that her mother might have done something bad, only to understand now that her mother was a viper, a liar and a fake and a murderer? her. Her mother tried to kill her and frame her for her own crimes. I mean, I imagine there were some

tough moments for Ashley once all that sank in, but bless her heart, she came out the other side of it determined to help the prosecution stop her mother before she heard anybody else. Another little tidbit of info emerged right around this time. A friend of Stacey's admitted to one of the investigators that she'd helped Stacey forge David's will, the one that left his whole estate to her and cut out his only son. I hope it reassured David Jr. to know that his dad didn't really cut him out. Regardless, it was habeas grabas time. The detectives picked her up for the first-degree murder of David Castor and the attempted murder of her daughter Ashley. The prosecution's argument at trial was that Stacey was motivated by

money. David's spending on all his big boy toys was cutting into the profits from the business, and Stacey couldn't stand watching and spend all that money. And the defense, in one of the sleaziest moves I think I've ever seen in 20 years of true crime, pointed the finger at Ashley, Stacey's own firstborn child, who, by the way, was 11 when her dad died. Wow. Not that this trial was for Mike's murder, because it wasn't, but still, I mean, according to that suicide note, she'd murdered her dad in cold blood at that age. So I guess the theory was Ashley was the bad seed or something.

It's just unbelievable. Yeah, I don't even know that I knew what anti-freeze was at that age. I'm sure I didn't. Let alone that it was deadly. Like, I remember one time I was like, because I lived in a cold climate, my mom was like, oh, go warm up the car. So I went to the garage and turned on the car without putting up the garage door. And I was like, I thought I was being clever because it's like, oh, it doesn't let the cold air in. It'll be extra warm.

And my mom comes in and she's like, you know that'll fucking kill you, right? Are you trying to kill us? And, yeah, it's stupid. I'm in sixth grade, whatever. Kids don't understand shit like that, is what I'm saying. They don't understand death. I can't believe the defense use this strategy. I think it's just all they had.

Yeah, kids who murder are way more likely to use a weapon to murder. And they're more likely to kill another kid. Yeah. They especially don't go after adults that are like three times their size. Not usually, no. Butting psychopaths usually pick someone smaller than they are. Sure, of course. The prosecution, of course, called Ashley as a witness, and she said her heartbreak written all over her face that she had nothing to do with her stepdad's death.

She hadn't written that note. She hadn't tried to kill herself. And a forensic tech investigator testified about a forensic analysis they'd done on the computer on which Ashley allegedly wrote the note. The timestamp on the file showed that the note had been written while Ashley was at school in the presence of multiple witnesses. There was no way she could have written that bogus confession. Also, a linguistic analysis of the note revealed some interesting stuff. The linguist testified that the language in the note mirrored Stacy's own language from her initial interview with the detectives. And remember antifree?

Mm-hmm. Whenever antifreeze came up in the note, it was spelled exactly the same way. Yeah, bitch can't spell antifreeze. Lord have mercy. On top of that, using the time stamp from the letter file on the computer, the investigators went back and checked the wiretaps for that day and time. And lo and behold, Stacey had made a phone call right around the time the letter was written, and they could hear typing in the background of the call. Yeah, smart. They'd also tested the cocktail of drugs that Ashley had in her system.

Hydrocodone, diet pills, sleeping pills, vodka. I mean, there was a ton of stuff in there. So obviously, that was why Stacey kept telling Ashley to stir the drink so that the pill power. or didn't settle. She wanted to make damn sure her daughter got all those drugs into her system. She wanted to make damn sure she died. So Stacey took the stand in her own defense as

narcissists so often do, and I know it will shock you to hear that she went over like a lead balloon with the jury. Just cold and unemotional, even when describing her own daughter's alleged suicide attempt. And it was a really stark contrast to Ashley's testimony

which was very tearful and emotional. So it didn't do her any favors. And after two days of deliberations, Stacey was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years to life for the murder, 25 for the attempt on Ashley's life, and four for the forgery of David's will. She was ordered to serve 51 years of that sentence before parole would even be on the table as a possibility. So basically, you're not going anywhere. You're going to be carried out of here in a body bag. During sentencing, certified badass Ashley confronted her mom. She told her she hated her.

She told her she'd betrayed her and her sister and their dad and David. And as far as Ashley was concerned, this was goodbye forever. Her mother was dead to her now. And this stone cold bitch continued to play innocent and point the finger at her daughter until mercifully she died in prison in 2016 of a heart attack. So, calm is a bitch, Stacey. And so were you. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

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