On January 14, 1987, a Columbia County sheriff's deputy in north Florida stopped a man whose speech was slurred, whose eyes were bloodshot and whose breath smelled of alcohol. The man was driving an old Ford Maverick north on Interstate 75. He grew hostile, and the deputies arrested him for disorderly intoxication. In the holding cell he told the officer on duty that he had something to tell him that would "put a stripe on [his] sleeve," and he asked to see an investigator.
The man was Edward Castro, a thirty-six-year-old drifter from San Diego. The car belonged to Austin Carter Scott, a fifty-six-year-old Ocala man whom Castro had strangled and stabbed that morning in a small efficiency apartment in Ocala. Over the following hours Castro gave investigators three statements about the killing. In the course of his taped confession he also described killing George Larry Hill, an interior designer, in St. Petersburg nine days earlier, and a man named Claude J. Henderson in Polk County some months before that.
Castro was convicted of murdering Scott and Hill. He was sentenced to death for Scott's murder three times, because the Florida Supreme Court twice threw out the sentence over errors in how it was reached. In 1997 he fired his lawyers and told a judge he was ready to die. He was executed on December 7, 2000, the same day the Florida Supreme Court heard argument in the presidential election dispute.
The public record of Castro's early life is thin and comes almost entirely from his own defense. The Florida Department of Corrections lists his date of birth as January 26, 1950, and records him as a Hispanic man. The St. Petersburg Times described him at the time of his execution as a drifter from San Diego and as "a California drifter."
At his first trial in Ocala in 1988, the only witness Castro called in the penalty phase was Dr. Barbara Mara, a clinical psychologist. According to the Florida Supreme Court's summary of her testimony, she diagnosed him as having an alcohol- and drug-addicted personality, and she testified that he had been the victim of child abuse, including incest that began when he was four years old. She told the jury this might account for his aggressive behavior. The judge at his second sentencing found as mitigating circumstances that "Castro suffered through poverty, neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, a dysfunctional family life, and social alienation as a child," as well as alcohol dependency and some emotional and mental disturbances. The judge at his third sentencing, in 1993, found two nonstatutory mitigating factors: that Castro had suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child, and that he was an alcoholic.
His public defender in the St. Petersburg case told the jury that Castro had been shaped by a childhood of hunger and sexual abuse, according to the St. Petersburg Times. The same newspaper reported that Castro had a "hankering for liquor and easy money" and had developed a pattern of preying on vulnerable gay men. In late 1986, the Times reported, he arrived in St. Petersburg in a stolen van and checked into a detoxification center to hide from the police. No court record opened for this bio confirms the van or the detox stay, and nothing has been found about any criminal record Castro had in California before he came to Florida.
The first of the three killings in Castro's account is the one about which least is known. During his taped confession, Castro told investigators he had killed a man in Polk County several months before he killed Larry Hill. The man was Claude J. Henderson.
In December 2000, John Aguero, director of the homicide division for the State Attorney's Office in Polk County, read to a St. Petersburg Times reporter from the file on the case. "Mr. Henderson was in the master bedroom," Aguero read. "Tied up. Arms pulled behind back. Tied ankles. Castro says he stabbed him with a knife." The Times reported that Castro had given investigators detailed information about Henderson's death.
Polk County prosecutors never charged Castro with Henderson's murder. Aguero said they had not done so because Castro had already been sentenced to death. No source opened for this bio gives Henderson's age, the date or place of his death, what he did for a living, or who his family were. His killing is a confession only, never tested in court.
George Larry Hill, known as Larry, had an identical twin brother, Nathan Jerry Hill. The brothers came from a large Illinois family. Larry Hill went to college in the North, and he became an interior designer who worked on bank lobbies, office buildings and large homes. His brother remembered him as a man who dressed sharply, cooked gourmet meals and took vacations in Spain. "I worked for a living; he jet-setted," said Nathan Hill, who had served in the Air Force and later worked for Eastern Air Lines until the airline shut down. Larry Hill lived in a house on Palm Lane N in St. Petersburg that he shared with a doctor.
Castro and Hill met over beer at a gay bar in downtown St. Petersburg on January 5, 1987. According to Castro's account to investigators, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times, Hill was wary of him at first but after some persuading took him back to the house. "He took me inside this beautiful house, man," Castro told investigators. "I mean, he had an entertainment center, man, I mean wall-to-wall with VCRs and color TV, man."
Castro said he became disoriented and "snapped." He took a knife from the kitchen, held it to Hill's face and said, "Hey, man, you've only got one life to give. Pick a spot." He tied Hill up and stabbed him four times in the chest. Asked by Columbia County investigators how he had killed Hill, he answered, according to a transcript of the confession, "With a butcher knife. Is there any more coffee?" Before leaving, Castro wrote on the kitchen cabinets. "Some homophobic epithets were written on the kitchen cabinets," said Richard Ripplinger, the Pinellas County assistant state attorney who later prosecuted the case.
A few days after killing Hill, Castro hitched a ride north to Ocala, in Marion County. There he lived in a small efficiency apartment at the rear of an apartment house, which he shared with a man named John Gallagher.
On January 10, 1987, Castro met Robert McKnight, who had just hitchhiked to Ocala from Iowa, and invited him back to the apartment for a drink. At Castro's trial McKnight testified that once they were there, Castro "ripped up a sheet[,] ... tied my hands and gagged me[,] and was standing over the bed ... asking me where I wanted to be stabbed," holding a steak knife. McKnight said he was released when Gallagher came home. He nevertheless stayed with Castro for four more days before moving to an apartment upstairs. The Florida Supreme Court later ruled that the jury should never have heard this account, for reasons explained below. No charge was ever brought over it.
Austin Carter Scott was fifty-six years old and lived in Ocala. The court records and newspaper accounts opened for this bio say little more about him. He owned an older Ford Maverick and kept vodka and whiskey in its trunk. The Florida Department of Corrections said in December 2000 that it had been unable to locate any of the families of Castro's victims, and no relative of Scott's is quoted in any source found. His work, his family and his life before that January morning are not in the record that survives online.
The accounts of how Castro and Scott met differ. The Florida Supreme Court, in its 1994 opinion, said Castro saw Scott coming out of an apartment and introduced himself. The St. Petersburg Times wrote in 2000 that Castro met Scott in a bar.
The court's account, drawn from Castro's own statements, is this. Castro had been drinking heavily in Ocala for several days. He decided to leave town and concluded that he needed to steal a car to do it. After he and Scott began drinking together in the apartment, Castro told police, he decided he was going to "take this guy out." He left on the pretext of getting ten dollars and instead fetched a steak knife from a neighboring apartment. When he came back, Scott was leaving. Castro waved him down and talked him into coming back inside.
That morning, McKnight came down to the apartment to collect his clothes. He met Castro and Scott as they were leaving together. As Castro passed, he said to McKnight, "this is my hit," and the two men drove off in Scott's car to buy beer.
Back in the apartment, the two drank another beer. When Scott decided again to leave, Castro grabbed him by the throat and squeezed so hard that blood came from Scott's mouth. Scott struggled and scratched at him. "Hey, man, you've lost. Dig it?" Castro told him. Castro then took the steak knife and stabbed Scott. The court put the number of stab wounds at between five and fifteen. The medical examiner testified that she could not say in what order the chest wounds were made or whether Scott had lost consciousness from the strangling before he was stabbed.
Later that morning, Castro invited McKnight down "to be sociable." McKnight found the door locked. When Castro let him in, Scott was dead and Castro's arms were covered in blood. McKnight testified that Castro ordered him to pick up the knife and stab Scott, or "I'd be next." McKnight did so, stabbing the body four or five times in the chest. The two men then wiped the blood from the apartment and took Scott's wallet, his change, his rings and his watch.
Castro and McKnight left Ocala in Scott's car, heading for Lake City. Castro found the vodka and whiskey in the trunk and, by McKnight's account, became "pretty well intoxicated" on the way. According to the Florida Supreme Court, Castro broke the murder weapon into pieces and threw it out of the window during the trip. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Castro was bound for New Orleans.
The trip ended at a gas station in Columbia County. A sheriff's deputy noticed Castro's slurred speech, his bloodshot eyes and the smell of alcohol, and when Castro became belligerent toward two deputies he was arrested for disorderly intoxication. The Times reported that the deputy asked why Castro's clothes were spattered with blood, and that Castro answered that he needed to get something off his chest.
McKnight was not held. He boarded a bus to Chicago, and there he told officers he had information about a killing in Ocala.
At the Columbia County jail, Castro made his first remark about the killing to the corrections officer on duty, the one about the stripe on his sleeve. Investigator Kay Gallegos was called. After Castro was advised of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, he gave the first of three statements describing the killing. He gave the others to Lieutenant Nydam and Investigator Leary. Officers gave him spoken Miranda warnings each time, and he signed written waiver forms on two of the three occasions.
The trial judge later excluded Castro's first remark to the jail officer because he had not been warned of his rights before making it. The three statements to investigators were admitted. Castro's lawyers argued over the years that all of them should have been thrown out, first because the unwarned remark tainted what followed, and later because he had been too drunk to waive his rights knowingly. The Florida Supreme Court rejected both arguments. In 1989 it held, relying on the United States Supreme Court's decision in Oregon v. Elstad, that a voluntary but unwarned statement did not automatically taint later statements given after proper warnings, and that the testimony at a pretrial hearing supported the finding that the confessions were voluntary and not influenced by Castro's drinking.
In the statements Castro admitted strangling and stabbing Scott. The St. Petersburg Times, quoting a transcript, reported that he also talked about Larry Hill, and the Polk County file shows he described the killing of Claude Henderson. He did not implicate McKnight. The state itself told the jury at trial that Castro had specifically cleared McKnight of any responsibility for the murder.
The 1989 opinion also records that Castro "conditioned his confession on the receipt of psychiatric help." The trial judge considered that as a possible mitigating factor at the first sentencing and rejected it.
Castro was tried in Marion County in 1988 for first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon. John Moore prosecuted for the Fifth Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office. Anthony Tatti, an assistant public defender, represented Castro.
McKnight was the central witness. He had pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and had been sentenced to five years' probation, and he testified for the state. Officer Greg Stewart described the blood spatter on the walls and ceiling of the apartment. He could not say the stains were Scott's, but he testified that they came from a front-to-back motion from a source in the front of the room no more than three feet off the floor, and a crime lab analyst testified that the stains were human blood consistent with Scott's. William Kohler, one of the owners of the apartment house, testified that several days after the murder he had found a steak knife outside the building.
Castro's defense did not dispute that he had attacked Scott. His theory, as the Florida Supreme Court described it, was that one of McKnight's stab wounds had been the fatal blow. During deliberations the jury asked to rehear McKnight's testimony. Both sides objected to replaying it, and the judge told the jurors to rely on their collective memory.
The jury found Castro guilty as charged. In the penalty phase the state put on no new evidence and relied on what had been heard at trial. The defense called Dr. Mara. The jury recommended death, and on February 9, 1988, Castro was sentenced to death for the murder and to five and a half years in prison for the robbery. He arrived on death row the same day, according to the Department of Corrections. The judge found three aggravating circumstances: that the murder was cold, calculated and premeditated; that it was especially cruel; and that it was committed during a robbery.
On July 13, 1989, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the convictions but vacated the death sentence.
The court found two errors in the evidence. Kohler's testimony about the knife he found was irrelevant, because it was undisputed that Castro had broken the murder weapon and thrown it from the car. More seriously, McKnight's account of being tied up and threatened in the apartment four days before the murder was evidence of a separate crime, and under Florida's Williams rule such evidence cannot be used when its only relevance is to show bad character or a propensity for violence. The state argued that it explained why McKnight had gone along with Castro and obeyed the order to stab Scott's body. The court disagreed, noting that McKnight's state of mind had never been in issue and that Castro had cleared him in his confession.
The court held the error harmless as to guilt, because Castro's own repeated confessions left the jury no other conclusion. It did not hold it harmless as to the sentence. The defense case for mitigation, the court wrote, was that Castro was "an alcoholic, addict, and victim"; McKnight's story painted him as a man of inherent criminal propensity, and that could have tipped the jury toward death. The court also found that the trial judge had refused a defense request to instruct the jury that it could weigh mitigating evidence beyond the factors listed in the statute, a refusal that violated the United States Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Hitchcock v. Dugger. The case went back for a new sentencing before a new jury.
At the second penalty hearing, the jury recommended death by eight votes to four, and the judge again imposed it. This time he found that the murder was committed for financial gain during a robbery, that it was cold, calculated and premeditated, and that it was especially cruel, and he weighed those against the mitigating findings about Castro's childhood and drinking.
By then Anthony Tatti, Castro's public defender at the first trial, had been hired by the State Attorney's Office to prosecute capital cases. John Moore, still prosecuting Castro, called Tatti to discuss how the state might answer motions filed by Castro's new defense lawyers. Tatti testified at a hearing that they had only discussed legal authorities and that he had passed on case citations he had found while researching a different case. The trial judge refused to disqualify the State Attorney's Office.
On March 12, 1992, the Florida Supreme Court vacated the death sentence a second time. Writing for the court, Justice Barkett held that once a disqualified lawyer has "personally assisted in any capacity" in the prosecution of a former client, the whole office must step aside. "Our judicial system is only effective when its integrity is above suspicion," the opinion said. The court also held that the jury should have been told that robbery and financial gain, being the same aspect of the crime, could count as only one aggravating circumstance. Justice Grimes dissented, writing that the conversation had probably not been intentional, involved no privileged information and could not have harmed Castro. The case was sent back for a third penalty hearing, to be prosecuted by a different office.
Between Castro's first death sentence in 1988 and his third penalty hearing in 1993, a Pinellas County jury convicted him of murdering Larry Hill and he was sentenced to life in prison. Richard Ripplinger prosecuted. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Ripplinger pressed for the death penalty, and that Nathan Hill and his siblings could not bring themselves to sit through the trial. "I've never been so sick in my life," Nathan Hill said. "A twin feels pain of another twin."
The exact date of the Hill trial, the degree of the murder conviction and the reasons the jury chose life have not been found in a source opened for this bio. The Florida Supreme Court's 1994 opinion confirms only that Castro "was convicted of murder after his first sentencing, but before this 1993 resentencing."
The third penalty hearing was held in 1993. A local newspaper ran an article the day before jury selection, quoted in Castro's appeal brief: "Edward Castro, 42, has twice been sentenced to die in Florida's electric chair for killing Austin C. Scott during a robbery in '87, but both sentences were overturned on appeal, though his first-degree murder conviction still stands." The judge questioned each prospective juror individually. Two jurors who had seen the article, Gloria Bell and Olive Milam, served on the panel after the defense ran out of peremptory challenges. A prospective juror, Terry Strayer, was excused after saying his religious beliefs might prevent him from imposing death and that he felt bound to follow a "higher law."
The jury again voted eight to four for death. This time the judge found four aggravating factors. The first was new: Castro now had a prior conviction for another capital felony and for a crime of violence, the Hill murder. The others were that the killing was committed during a robbery, that it was especially cruel, and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. He found no statutory mitigating factors and two nonstatutory ones, the childhood abuse and the alcoholism, and concluded that the aggravating factors "overwhelmingly outweighed" them.
Castro raised eleven issues on appeal. On September 8, 1994, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence. It agreed with Castro on one point: the record showed that he had planned to rob Scott, but not the "careful design and heightened premeditation" needed for the cold, calculated and premeditated factor. With three valid aggravating factors and what it called a weak case for mitigation, the court held the error harmless. On the cruelty factor, the court noted that Scott had struggled while he was being strangled, and that Florida law allowed a court to infer that strangling a conscious victim involves foreknowledge of death, extreme anxiety and fear. It rejected the argument that the Hill conviction could not be counted because it came after the first sentencing, holding that a resentencing is a fresh proceeding at which all relevant facts may be considered.
Chief Justice Grimes concurred, but would have upheld the premeditation finding as well. "This was not a robbery gone awry," he wrote. "Once Castro saw Scott, he decided to kill him. He obtained the knife and carried out his purpose."
Most condemned prisoners in Florida pursued years of further appeals after a direct appeal was lost. Castro stopped. The St. Petersburg Times reported that in 1997 he fired all of his lawyers and told Circuit Judge Jack Singbush that he was ready to die. "To proceed any further would be to allow myself something I never allowed my victim, the opportunity to beg for my life," he told the judge.
On November 14, 2000, Governor Jeb Bush signed two death warrants, one for Castro, set for December 7, and one for Robert Dewey Glock II, set for December 8. The Florida Supreme Court was at that moment handling the litigation over the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. According to an account published by the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society, Glock filed a last-minute petition; Castro, who had waived his right to raise further claims, did not.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held vigils on the evening of December 7 in Starke, Gainesville, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee and other cities. Its director, Abe Bonowitz, called the execution a "state-assisted suicide," arguing that the state was letting a confessed murderer choose his own punishment, and asked why the state had not stepped in when Castro was being abused as a child. Amnesty International included Castro in an urgent appeal covering six men set to be executed in three states over four days.
On Thursday, December 7, 2000, minutes before it heard argument in the election case, the Florida Supreme Court stayed Glock's execution. Castro's went ahead.
His mother and seven other relatives said goodbye to him over the three hours allowed by the prison that day. Family members of the condemned were not allowed to watch. He ate a T-bone steak and accepted an injection of Valium. When the curtain opened in the death chamber at Florida State Prison near Starke, St. Petersburg Times reporter Kathryn Wexler wrote, he was lying on the gurney with his arms outstretched and needles in each. He turned his head toward the one-way window of the witness gallery, smiled as if he recognized someone and winked.
At 6:01 p.m. he was asked for a last statement. "Tell my mother I love her, and I'd like to take the opportunity to apologize to the families of the victims," he said, looking at the ceiling where the microphone hung. He thanked "everybody who's shown me love. That's it." The lethal drugs began at 6:02 p.m. He was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. Thirteen official witnesses watched in silence.
Castro was fifty. He was the sixth prisoner executed in Florida in 2000, the highest number in a single year in the state since 1984, and the fiftieth since Florida resumed executions. The Department of Corrections records that he spent thirteen years on death row. The Death Penalty Information Center records the method as lethal injection using a three-drug protocol. The St. Petersburg Times noted that he was the sixth Florida prisoner to die by lethal injection; at his 1993 resentencing, the local press had still written of Florida's electric chair.
The Department of Corrections spokesman, C.J. Drake, said officials had been unable to find the families of Castro's victims. No member of Austin Scott's or Claude Henderson's family is quoted in any source found.
Nathan Jerry Hill, Larry Hill's twin, did not go to Starke. He stayed in his apartment in north Tampa with his wife of forty-one years, Betty. Speaking to the St. Petersburg Times before the execution, he said it made no difference to him that Castro was being executed for another man's murder. "I'm just glad the S.O.B.'s dying," he said, crying. His wife told him to stop when he said he would like to take a shot at Castro himself. When a reporter told him that night about Castro's apology, he said, "I feel weak in the knees." He was sixty-four.
The case is closed. The Florida Department of Corrections' execution list, checked for this bio in October 2026, records Edward Castro as the fiftieth person executed in Florida since 1976, with a date of offense of January 14, 1987, a sentencing date of February 9, 1988, an execution date of December 7, 2000, and Marion County as the county of conviction. The death of Claude Henderson was never charged, and with Castro's death no charge can be brought.
Proven in court: Castro murdered Austin Scott and robbed him, a conviction upheld by the Florida Supreme Court in 1989 and never disturbed. He was also convicted in Pinellas County of murdering George Larry Hill.
Confessed but never tried: the killing of Claude J. Henderson in Polk County. The only details found come from Castro's own account as read from the prosecutor's file in 2000.
Alleged but never charged: Robert McKnight's account of being tied, gagged and threatened with a knife on January 10, 1987. The Florida Supreme Court ruled it inadmissible at the trial; it was never tested as a separate charge. McKnight himself pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact for stabbing Scott's body and helping clean the apartment.
Disputed or unclear: who struck the fatal blow. Castro's defense argued at trial that one of McKnight's stab wounds killed Scott; the jury convicted Castro, and the medical examiner could not say whether Scott was conscious when he was stabbed. The number of wounds Castro inflicted is given in the 1994 opinion only as between five and fifteen. Where Castro and Scott met, at an apartment or in a bar, differs between the court and the newspaper. The stolen van, the stay at a detox center, the plan to reach New Orleans and the description of Castro preying on gay men come from newspaper reporting, not from any court finding opened for this bio.
Classification: Castro was convicted of two killings committed nine days apart in different cities, and confessed to a third. None of the sources found describes him as a serial killer, and the St. Petersburg Times called him a California drifter who confessed in 1987 to three murders.
January 26, 1950: Edward Castro born, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
Several months before January 1987: by his own later account, Castro kills Claude J. Henderson in Polk County.
Late 1986: Castro arrives in St. Petersburg, according to the St. Petersburg Times.
January 5, 1987: Castro meets George Larry Hill at a bar in downtown St. Petersburg and stabs him to death at Hill's home on Palm Lane N.
January 10, 1987: in Ocala, Castro meets Robert McKnight, who later testifies that Castro tied him up and threatened him with a knife.
January 14, 1987: Castro strangles and stabs Austin Carter Scott, 56, in his Ocala apartment, takes his car and is arrested in Columbia County for disorderly intoxication. He confesses.
February 9, 1988: after a jury trial in Marion County, Castro is sentenced to death for first-degree murder and to five and a half years for robbery.
July 13, 1989: the Florida Supreme Court affirms the convictions and orders a new penalty hearing.
Between 1988 and 1993: Castro is convicted in Pinellas County of murdering Larry Hill and sentenced to life.
March 12, 1992: the Florida Supreme Court vacates the second death sentence because the State Attorney's Office was not disqualified.
1993: a third jury recommends death, eight to four; Castro is sentenced to death again.
September 8, 1994: the Florida Supreme Court affirms the death sentence.
1997: Castro fires his lawyers and tells Judge Jack Singbush he is ready to die.
November 14, 2000: Governor Jeb Bush signs his death warrant.
December 7, 2000: Castro is executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, Starke. He is pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m.