The 911 call came from the Kastanis house at 3524 West 6825 South in West Jordan, Utah, on the morning of Sunday, November 17, 1991. Sam Kastanis told the operator that his nine-year-old son was bleeding from the nose. As the call went on, by the later account of prosecutors, the injuries he described grew worse: cut fingers, then a boy seriously hurt and not breathing. The operator heard him say, "Margaret, you've killed yourself."
Clint Kastanis was found in the bathroom. In a basement bedroom lay his sisters, Melissa, eleven, and Christine, six. In another basement bedroom was their mother, Margaret, thirty-nine, stabbed in the heart, a hammer and a knife near her left hand. Each of them had been cut with the knife; the three children had also been struck on the head with the hammer.
Margaret Ann Jenkins was born in Murray, Utah, on April 17, 1952, to Orren and Frances Jenkins, and married Sam George Kastanis on May 6, 1978. Her obituary remembered weekends away and working in the yard together, and a gift for music and poetry. She had been a den mother, a Webelos leader and an assistant Cubmaster, and loved her Cub Scouts. Melissa was called Missy. Christine, born April 1, 1985, was Chrissy.
From the start Sam Kastanis said his wife had done it, and that he had seen the weapons in her hands. He told police he had been in the garage that morning working out the figures for selling the house and buying another, although, prosecutors said, she had told him she wanted a divorce and he had said he would not seek custody. She had signed the contract to sell the house the evening before. He said he came in at about 10:30, followed drops of blood to his son and called for help. Interviewed for more than four hours, he told the same story a dozen times.
Investigators did not believe him. He was held briefly, released, went back to his job with the Salt Lake County public works department and sold the house. Seven months later, after blood-test results came back from the FBI laboratory, he was charged on June 16, 1992, with four counts of aggravated murder, a capital offense. The probable-cause statement said some of the knife wounds on Margaret, Clint and Melissa were consistent with defensive wounds, the kind suffered fighting off an attacker. His sisters stood outside the courtroom and said the whole family believed him innocent. "We're just heartsick because he's innocent," said one of them, Helen Pavich.
The trial opened in June 1993 before Judge J. Dennis Frederick, and it turned on blood. For the prosecution, Rod Englert, a blood-spatter analyst and Oregon sheriff's captain, testified that he was "110 percent certain" Sam Kastanis had killed his wife and children with the hammer and knife, and set out where, when and how. The defense, led by Ron Yengich, argued that Margaret, severely depressed, had killed the children and then herself. Its central witness was the forensic pathologist Dr. Joseph Burton. Comparing the children's wounds with the cuts on Margaret's hand, Burton concluded that the most likely sequence was that she had killed the three children, cutting herself on the knife as she did, and then stabbed herself in the heart. In his analysis she was the only one of the four without defensive wounds, and the only one with the blood of all three children on her T-shirt.
Those two readings of the wounds cannot both be right, and the record does not resolve them for anyone but the jury. The charging papers said Margaret had defensive wounds; Burton said she did not. The jury acquitted Sam Kastanis of all four counts in July 1993. Jurors said afterward that they had not found Englert believable, one noting that no other witness had claimed that kind of certainty, and that they had wept over the evidence.
So the case against Margaret Kastanis is a reconstruction presented in her husband's defense and accepted by a jury as reasonable doubt. It was never tested as an accusation against her. She was never charged and never able to answer it, because she died the same morning as her children. Her family's memorial records say that she and the three children were murdered in their home, and then set out Burton's findings beside that statement without choosing between them.