Margaret Ann Jenkins Kastanis was born on April 17, 1952, the daughter of Orrin and Francis May Jenkins, and married Sam George Kastanis. They lived at West Jordan in Salt Lake County, Utah, with their three children: Melissa, eleven, Clinton, nine, and Christine, six.
On the morning of November 17, 1991 Sam Kastanis telephoned the emergency number to say that his son was bleeding and that his fingers had been cut off. Officers arriving at the house found all four of them dead. The children had been attacked with a hammer and a knife. Margaret had been stabbed in the heart.
He said he was innocent. He was arrested and tried for the four killings.
What decided that trial, and what this entry rests on, is a forensic reconstruction. Dr Joseph Burton examined the bodies and concluded that the most likely sequence was that Margaret had killed the three children, cutting her own hand on the knife as she did it, and had then stabbed herself in the heart. Two things pointed that way: she was the only one of the four without defensive wounds, and she was the only one with the blood of all three children on her clothing. Contemporary accounts also record that she had a history of mental illness.
Sam Kastanis was acquitted in July 1993. Jurors said afterwards that they had wept while examining the evidence.
That is the whole of the case against her, and its character should be plain. She was never charged, never tried and never able to answer it, because she died on the day the children died. The finding is a pathologist's reconstruction offered in the defence of another person, and it was strong enough to acquit him. It is not a verdict against her. This archive carries the entry on that basis.
One published source, a memorial record, states that Margaret and her three children were murdered in their home, and then sets out Dr Burton's findings immediately afterwards without reconciling the two. That contradiction is left as it stands.
The earlier version of this entry recorded that she had been under extended treatment with Prozac, which was much repeated in argument about the drug and which no inquiry established as a cause. That remains the position, and the point is worth keeping only because the claim circulated: the sole clinical detail in the accessible record is a history of mental illness.
This is a single incident, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.