Stacey Castor was convicted of murdering her second husband, David Castor, by poisoning him with antifreeze at their home outside Syracuse, New York, in August 2005. Two years later, as detectives closed in, she gave her 20-year-old daughter, Ashley Wallace, a drink laced with alcohol and prescription drugs and left a typed note beside her in which Ashley appeared to confess to killing both David Castor and her own father. Ashley survived, denied writing the note and testified against her mother. An Onondaga County jury found Castor guilty in February 2009, and a judge gave her the longest sentence the law allowed: 51 1/3 years to life.
Her first husband, Michael Wallace, the father of her two daughters, had died in January 2000 at the age of 38 after weeks of unexplained illness. Doctors put it down to a heart attack and no autopsy was done. When his body was exhumed in 2007, tests found ethylene glycol, the toxic ingredient in antifreeze, and authorities ruled his death a homicide. Prosecutors used that evidence against Castor at her trial, but she was never charged with his death. She always denied harming anyone, blamed her daughter for both deaths, and died in prison in June 2016, aged 48.
This account describes what was proven in court and keeps it separate from what was suspected. Castor was convicted of one killing and one attempted killing. The death of Michael Wallace remained an uncharged case when she died.
Stacey Castor was born in 1967; she was 40 when she was arrested in September 2007 and 48 when she died in June 2016. Her mother was Judie Eaton and her father was Jerry Daniels. She grew up in central New York.
She told ABC News that friends introduced her to Michael Wallace in the mid-1980s, when she was still a teenager, and that she knew within minutes of meeting him that she would marry him. The couple were married at her parents' home. Their first daughter, Ashley, was born in 1987, and a second daughter, Bree, about three years later. Castor worked days at an ambulance dispatch company and Wallace worked nights as a mechanic. Money was always short; she said later that the couple never argued about money "because they had none."
Michael Wallace was remembered by his family and friends as a sociable man who liked to be the life of the party. Castor said he had struggled for years with drinking and drugs. He doted on his younger daughter, whom he called his "princess," and an old friend of Castor's described Bree as "daddy's little angel." Ashley remembered simpler things: car rides with her father for no reason except to be out together. His sister, Rosemary Corbett, his sister-in-law, Melanne Keim, and his brother-in-law, John Corbett, would spend the next decade pressing for an answer to how he died.
By the late 1990s the marriage had cooled, and friends told ABC News of rumors that each partner was seeing someone else.
In late 1999 Wallace became ill on and off for about six weeks. Keim said he seemed drunk and unsteady. At a family dinner on Christmas Eve, Rosemary Corbett noticed that he was coughing and looked swollen and puffy, and relatives urged him to see a doctor. A doctor's visit in 1999 in which Wallace complained of constantly feeling drunk became the subject of a pretrial ruling in 2009; a feeling of drunkenness is a symptom of ethylene glycol poisoning.
One day in January 2000 Ashley was at home with her father, who was lying on the couch. She later described him making faces she took for a joke, raising his arm and then letting it fall. She left to pick up her sister from school, and it was the last time she saw him alive. At the hospital, doctors told Castor that her husband had died of a heart attack. Rosemary Corbett said his skin from the head to the chest was a deep, dark purple, and she wanted an autopsy. Castor said no. She told ABC News years later that she had believed the doctors and saw no reason to question them.
Wallace was buried in the Owasco Rural Cemetery in Cayuga County. His death was not investigated at the time.
On August 12, 2003, Castor married David Castor. He was a tall, outdoors-loving man who owned his own company, Liverpool Heating and Air Conditioning, where she became the office manager. Friends told ABC News that he treated her well, bought her dresses and took her to good restaurants. The family lived on Wetzel Road in the town of Clay, north of Syracuse.
David Castor had been married before, to Janice Poissaint, and had a son, David Castor Jr. His sister was Linda Horzempa. In a will drawn up in 1989 he had left his estate to his first wife.
The household was not easy. Castor's two daughters, by then teenagers, clashed with their stepfather. Judie Eaton said he expected the girls to do what he said without question. Ashley later testified that he once told her "point blank" that he was not her father and did not want to be. She also said that, after a bad start, the relationship had improved over time.
Those who knew David Castor described a man who loved life. His first wife told ABC News he would never have killed himself. His son, who would become the most public voice for him after his death, said in 2016 simply that "he was a good man; he didn't deserve what happened to him." His father had died not long before him, and his business was under some strain, two facts his widow would later offer to detectives as reasons he might have wanted to die.
The Castors' second wedding anniversary fell in mid-August 2005, over a long weekend. According to Castor's own account, the couple argued that weekend because David had planned an anniversary trip for the two of them and she refused to leave 15-year-old Bree home alone. She told ABC News she had never seen him so angry. He was drinking. She said she kept her distance for the rest of the weekend, and she later gave differing accounts of where she spent one night: on her own couch, she told ABC News, and at a friend's house, she told the 911 dispatcher.
Several people saw David Castor during those days. A friend and neighbor, Michael Coleman, testified that Castor called him over to help, that David appeared drunk and incoherent, and that when she asked whether she should call an ambulance he told her to let her husband sleep it off. Bree testified that she saw her mother struggling to get him back into bed, that he was moaning, and that on the Sunday her mother unlocked the bedroom door with a key so she could see him lying asleep. Castor told friends that he had locked her out of the bedroom and that she could hear him snoring through the door.
On Monday, August 22, 2005, Castor called the Onondaga County Sheriff's Office from work, saying her husband had not come in, had locked himself in their bedroom for a day and was not answering the phone. She told the dispatcher he had been depressed and that she was worried about a gun he kept in the room. Sergeant Robert Willoughby found her waiting in a lawn chair in front of the house. He could hear the television through the bedroom door but got no answer, and he kicked the door in. David Castor was lying on the bed, dead. On the nightstand were cranberry juice, apricot brandy and two glasses, one of them half full of a bright green liquid. An antifreeze jug lay on the floor. Willoughby recalled that when he told Castor her husband was not all right, she screamed that he was not dead.
The chief deputy medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stoppacher, found crystals in David Castor's kidneys that confirmed death from ethylene glycol toxicity. On the information then available, the death was recorded as a suicide.
Two details bothered the investigators from the start. Willoughby, told to check the kitchen trash, found a turkey baster that looked new but smelled of alcohol and held a few drops of liquid. There was no sign that anyone had been cooking. And Castor told Detective Dominick Spinelli that her husband might have got the idea of antifreeze from a television documentary they had seen about Julia Lynn Turner, a Georgia woman convicted of poisoning her husband and a boyfriend with it. Spinelli, who had come to the department from New York City, kept the file open.
Forensic results built the case over the next two years. A fingerprint examiner at the Onondaga County Center for Forensic Sciences, Mark Mills, found Stacey Castor's fingerprints, and not her husband's, on the glass that held antifreeze, as well as on the juice and brandy bottles. He found no prints at all on the antifreeze jug or on the turkey baster. A DNA analyst found David Castor's DNA on the tip of the baster, which also held antifreeze residue. "If David Castor poured a glass of antifreeze, then why isn't there one fingerprint on that container?" Spinelli asked later. Phone records showed that on the day she reported her husband missing, Castor had called him only once, not the several times she described. Investigators came to believe that David Castor had not knowingly drunk the poison, and the death was reclassified as a homicide. District Attorney William Fitzpatrick later told ABC News that suicide by turkey baster was something he had never heard of in his career.
Within weeks of the death Castor moved to secure her husband's estate, which later reporting valued at about $300,000. In September 2005 she asked her longtime friend Lynn Pulaski and Pulaski's husband, Paul, to sign as witnesses to a will that left the estate to her and cut out David's son. They agreed, and dated it August 13, 2003, the day after the wedding. A document examiner at the Center for Forensic Sciences, Dwayne Wisbey, concluded at trial that David Castor's signature on it had been simulated by someone else. The Pulaskis testified under a grant of immunity. The will became the basis of the charge of offering a false instrument for filing.
An Auburn lawyer, Norman Chirco, handled the estate for Castor in her role as its personal representative. In September 2005 he was in contact with the police about fingerprinting Castor and her daughters. That contact became the center of her later appeals.
Castor buried David Castor in the Owasco Rural Cemetery, in the plot next to Michael Wallace. His headstone read in part "Husband of Stacey R." The proximity was noticed. Spinelli wondered whether Wallace's death at 38 was a coincidence or part of a pattern, and he made what he called the unusual decision to seek an exhumation. "The last thing I want to do is disturb someone that's at peace," he told ABC News.
Michael Wallace's body was exhumed in Cayuga County in September 2007. Toxicologists found evidence of ethylene glycol, and Cayuga County authorities ruled his death a homicide caused by ingesting it. A forensic toxicologist from Pennsylvania who examined his tissue later testified at Castor's trial.
On September 7, 2007, Spinelli and Detective Valerie Brogan of the Sheriff's Office brought Castor in for an interview at headquarters that lasted about three hours. She repeated that she had called home several times on the day her husband died. When Spinelli showed her a photograph of the two glasses on the nightstand and asked which one she had poured, he testified, she began, "When I poured the anti-free..." and then said she was flustered. When he told her that only her fingerprints were on the glass that held antifreeze, she ended the interview and asked for a lawyer. Spinelli noted the unusual word because it stood out. Brogan later recalled Castor saying, "That's it. I'm done. I want an attorney."
By then the Sheriff's Office was recording Castor's phone calls under a wiretap.
Ashley Wallace was 20 and had just started college. On her first day, two detectives came to tell her that her father's body had been exhumed and that he had not died of a heart attack. She was distraught and called her mother. She remembered thinking it was wrong to disturb him.
Ashley testified that her mother suggested, after a hard week, that they drink together. On the evening of September 12, Castor bought a six-pack of a flavored malt drink. Ashley drank it, became sick, and was given a pill to sleep it off. The next day, September 13, after she came home, her mother had another drink ready, a mixture of vodka, Sprite and orange juice. Ashley said it tasted bitter and "horrible," but she drank it because she trusted her mother. She felt as if she were in a tunnel, lay down, and remembered nothing more until she woke up in a hospital.
Bree, then 17, testified that when she came home from work on September 13 her mother told her to leave her sister alone. Early on September 14 she heard a noise from Ashley's room and found her sister convulsing and vomiting, eyes open and glassy. She screamed for her mother, who called 911. On the recording Castor told the dispatcher that her daughter had taken pills and a bottle of vodka. When Bree went back into the room she found a typed note on the pillow, but her mother took it from her; Bree asked a deputy to read it, and after the first two lines Castor told the deputy to take it away.
Ashley had been in her room for about 17 hours. At Upstate University Hospital, the emergency physician, Dr. Daniel Olsson, found her heart beating at 170 to 190 times a minute and erratically, and a sheriff's sergeant at the hospital feared she would not survive. Her blood alcohol level was 0.14. Toxicology tests found sleeping medication, antidepressants and painkillers, some at concentrations well above prescribed levels; the drugs reported included Ambien, codeine and hydrocodone. When she came round, her arms restrained after she had pulled out a tube, a detective asked her how many pills she had taken and why she had written the note. She told him she had written no note and did not know what he was talking about.
The note was about 750 words long and signed with Ashley's name. In it, she seemed to confess to poisoning both her father and her stepfather, saying that the men had been cruel to her and her mother, to tell her mother that everyone would now know "it wasn't you, it was me," and to ask, "Please don't hate me." It also said that Michael Wallace had been given rat poison, a detail Fitzpatrick said investigators had never made public. Four times the note spelled antifreeze as "anti-free."
Castor was arrested at the hospital on September 14, 2007, and charged with the murder of David Castor. She was held without bail. On September 27 Fitzpatrick added a charge of attempted murder, saying she had given her daughter a tainted drink and then typed the note to make the poisoning look like a suicide. He said Ashley had cooperated with his office and denied any connection to either man's death. Castor was 40.
The trial opened in Onondaga County Court in Syracuse before Judge Joseph E. Fahey. A jury of 10 women and two men was chosen by January 12, 2009, and six alternates were seated the next morning because the trial was expected to run for weeks. Fitzpatrick prosecuted with Chief Assistant District Attorney Christine Garvey. Castor was defended by Charles Keller. WSYR-TV carried testimony live, and News 10 Now broadcast her testimony and the closing arguments.
Before testimony began, Fahey ruled that the jury could hear evidence about Michael Wallace's death, even though Castor had not been charged with it. New York courts allow evidence of an uncharged crime only for limited purposes, and here the issue was identity: whether the same person was behind both poisonings. Fahey also ruled that autopsy photographs of David Castor could be shown, over Keller's objection.
In his opening statement on January 13, Fitzpatrick told the jury that most of the evidence would be scientific: fingerprints, DNA, toxicology, document analysis, wiretaps and the exhumation. "But the single most important piece of evidence is this note," he said. "Whoever wrote this note killed David Castor and Michael Wallace." Keller answered that the prosecution's case was "guesses and theories" and that the evidence made sense only if Ashley Wallace was the killer.
The defense theory was set out over the following weeks. Keller argued that Ashley, at 12, had poisoned her father because he spanked her severely and favored her younger sister, that she had poisoned her stepfather out of hatred for him, and that in 2007, consumed by guilt and fearing her mother would go to prison for her crimes, she had written the confession and tried to kill herself.
Ashley was the first witness, on January 14. She described a normal childhood and said she had loved her father. She testified that she knew nothing about antifreeze, had never had anything to do with rat poison and had never used the word "anti-free." Fitzpatrick played wiretapped calls between mother and daughter from the days after detectives spoke to her. Ashley cried as she told the jury she had not killed her father or her stepfather.
Keller's cross-examination was long. He went through her statements to police, the grand jury and relatives. He noted that she had told investigators her father was making faces and grabbed his chest before he died, but had told hospital staff he was snoring. He produced a letter she had written to a former boyfriend saying she could not live in the house any more, a note in which she referred to two earlier suicide attempts she had not mentioned to detectives, and a recorded call in which, on learning that her mother was under investigation, she insisted that her stepfather had killed himself.
When the defense later tried to recall her, Fahey refused, ruling that Keller should have asked his questions when she testified for the prosecution. He also refused to let a family friend testify that Ashley had apologized and asked for forgiveness when she first woke in the hospital; the Appellate Division later agreed the statement was too ambiguous to admit.
Over about two weeks the prosecution called 44 witnesses. Willoughby described the scene in the bedroom and the turkey baster in the trash. Mills and the DNA analyst, Kathleen Hum, gave the fingerprint and DNA findings. Spinelli described the "anti-free" slip. Diane Leshinski, a retired sheriff's investigator, agreed under cross-examination that even while the death was officially a suicide, detectives had received information pointing to two possible suspects: Castor and her daughter.
An insurance company witness testified that Castor had taken out a $50,000 supplemental insurance policy through her group insurance at Rural Metro. The Appellate Division later cited a life insurance policy on her first husband as part of the evidence tying her to his death. Prosecutors put her motive in both cases as money: the husbands' life insurance and estates, which they said came to more than $100,000.
The computer evidence was central. A sheriff's detective, Jerry Mansell, described seizing the family computer from the house on September 14, 2007. Frank Brakin of the Center for Forensic Sciences told the jury he had recovered fragments of the note, which had been deleted, in two files under Castor's user account. The fragments differed from the printed note in spelling and wording, which suggested at least two drafts, and one had to have been written before 3:34 p.m. on September 11, the other before 2:27 p.m. on September 12, times when Ashley was at school. An expert later testified that the first draft was written four days after Michael Wallace's body was exhumed. On a wiretapped call between Castor and a friend in those days, typing could be heard in the background. Under cross-examination Brakin agreed that the computer had no passwords, so anyone in the house could have used the account. Keller sought a mistrial over computer tests the prosecution had run that the defense had not had time to repeat; Fahey denied it.
Medical witnesses described the effects of ethylene glycol and the drugs in Ashley's blood. Dr. Christine Stork of the Central New York Poison Control Center testified that the codeine in her system, without morphine, meant it had been taken only an hour or two before she reached the hospital, which suggested that someone had been giving her drugs while she lay unconscious. Toxicologists testified to ethylene glycol in the remains of both men.
Lynn Pulaski admitted her part in the backdated will. Bree Wallace described the anniversary weekend in 2005 and the morning she found her sister.
The defense called a linguist from Brooklyn College, Dr. John Roy, who testified that the spelling, punctuation and sentence structure of the note were more consistent with Ashley's writing than with her mother's. A pharmacology professor from the University at Buffalo, Francis Gengo, testified that to reach the levels measured at the hospital, Ashley would have had to take a large quantity of drugs between about 3:30 and 5:30 that morning, and Keller argued she must have taken them herself. A defense computer expert said there was no way to know exactly when the note was written or printed. Judie Eaton, Castor's mother, testified that Michael Wallace had punished Ashley harshly and favored Bree. Fitzpatrick asked her no questions. Castor's fiancé, Michael Ochsner, admitted on the stand that he had lied to the grand jury about a pill bottle.
Castor testified in her own defense on January 29 and 30, 2009, relating events from Michael Wallace's death to the morning Ashley was found. She said she still loved her daughter. Asked by Fitzpatrick to list any reasons Ashley might have had to kill her father or her stepfather, she said she did not know. She admitted that Spinelli had heard her say "anti-free," but said she had broken off mid-word because she meant to say something else. She admitted asking two friends to witness and backdate David's will.
Fitzpatrick's cross-examination was loud and aggressive, and Keller objected repeatedly; local reports put its length at 95 minutes or about two and a half hours. He pressed her on why a woman who had worked for years at an ambulance company did not get help for a husband who was staggering and vomiting, or for a daughter who lay unresponsive for most of a day. Castor stayed calm throughout and held to her account that Ashley had poisoned both men and then tried to take her own life. When asked directly whether she had poisoned her husband, a reporter noted, she said "No, I did not" while nodding.
In closing on February 2, Keller told the jury the fingerprint evidence meant nothing, that the drugs could have got into Ashley's body only if she took them herself, that investigators had fixed on his client and ignored her daughter, and that only two people knew the truth and everyone else was guessing. Fitzpatrick answered that the defense asked the jury to believe a 12-year-old and then a 17-year-old had committed "two perfect crimes." He argued that the note shared a habit of Castor's own writing, typing "it" where she meant "I," and said the drugs could have been given to Ashley with a teaspoon while her mother got up during the night.
The jury deliberated for about 16 hours over four days, asking for read-backs of phone company records, the 2005 911 call, and the testimony of Bree and Ashley. On Thursday, February 5, 2009, it found Castor guilty of second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder and offering a false instrument for filing. She sat without expression. There was a gasp from the front row, where Ashley sat with her sister and members of both the Wallace and Castor families. "Justice was served," David Castor Jr. said. Ashley left the courthouse in tears without speaking. Fitzpatrick said Ashley's testimony and the note had been the keys to the case. "Stacey Castor didn't make one big mistake," he said. "She made a series of mistakes." Nine jurors who spoke to reporters said they had found most of Castor's testimony unbelievable and had focused on the timeline and on her opportunities to poison her husband and her daughter.
Keller said he would appeal, beginning with the decision to let the jury hear about Michael Wallace. "It complicated the issues," he said. "Essentially, it was piling on."
At the sentencing on March 5, 2009, Ashley, with Bree beside her, read a statement to the court. "I hate my mother for ruining so many people's lives," she said. "I don't even know why she did it." She said she never knew what hate was until then, that she still loved her mother and found that confusing, and that she wished her mother would say she was sorry, "including all the lies." Speaking to her mother directly, she said, "As horrible as this makes me feel, mom, this is goodbye." David Castor Jr. told the court that Castor had tortured his father and deserved to spend the rest of her life in prison. Castor did not look at her daughters. Asked whether she wished to speak, she said only, "No, sir."
Fahey said the evidence was overwhelming and that he had no doubt of her guilt. He told her that in 34 years as a lawyer and judge he had never seen a parent willing to sacrifice a child to shift blame away from herself, and that she was "in a class all by yourself." He called what had been done to both men "premeditated torture." He imposed the maximum on each count and ran the terms consecutively: 25 years to life for the murder of David Castor, 25 years for the attempted murder of Ashley Wallace, and 1 1/3 to 4 years for the false will. Fitzpatrick said she would have to serve at least 51 1/3 years before she could be considered for parole, and that given her age she would very likely die in prison. A 2012 legal news report gave her earliest parole eligibility date in prison records as June 2055.
Speaking outside the courthouse afterwards, Ashley said reading the statement had been hard but a relief. She said she never wanted to speak to her mother again, though she would try one day to forgive her, and that she believed she had survived in part "to bring justice to David, my dad and myself."
On April 24, 2009, ABC's 20/20 broadcast a two-hour special on the case, reported by David Muir, a former Syracuse television anchor who had been in court for the verdict. Castor gave Muir an interview from prison in which she continued to deny everything, called the verdict "unbelievable" and said she was in shock. "I would die for my kids," she told him. "I could never hurt them like that." Ashley, interviewed separately, said her mother had been her best friend. "I would've done anything for her," she said. "But she tried to kill me instead." Bree said she had been glad of the verdict. National coverage had by then given Castor the nickname "Black Widow."
Dr. James Knoll, director of forensic psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, answered viewers' questions for ABC. He said he had analyzed the note for the district attorney, without testifying, comparing it with writing samples from mother and daughter and drawing on his review of more than 200 genuine suicide notes. In his opinion the note was not written by Ashley and more likely than not was written by her mother. He pointed to idiosyncratic grammar shared with Castor's writing and to the note's repeated insistence, about 14 times on one page, that Castor bore no responsibility. He also cautioned viewers against reading guilt into her calm manner or body language on the stand, which he said had no reliable scientific basis. He had not examined Castor.
Castor appealed. On October 5, 2012, the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, unanimously affirmed the conviction in People v. Castor, 99 AD3d 1177. Its main rulings were these:
The evidence about Michael Wallace was properly admitted. The court found clear and convincing evidence of a distinctive method, antifreeze poisoning, and of Castor's identity as the person who used it. It pointed to the life insurance policy, her refusal of an autopsy, the note's reference to rat poison and her admission that there was rat poison in the house. It also held that Wallace's death was inextricably interwoven with the charged crimes, because the note discussed it and it supplied a motive for the attempt on Ashley's life. The jury had been properly told it could use that evidence only on the question of identity. This was a ruling on what evidence a jury could hear, not a conviction; Castor was never tried for Wallace's death.
Her statements at the hospital on September 14, 2007, were admissible, and the police had lawfully entered the house in response to the 911 call and stayed while they waited for a search warrant. The note itself had not been seized at all: Castor had asked an officer to take it from Bree. Ashley's denials at the hospital were admissible as excited utterances.
The trial court had erred in letting a police witness tell the jury that Castor invoked her right to remain silent during the September 7, 2007, interview, but the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence on the attempted murder count was legally sufficient and the verdict was not against the weight of the evidence.
In a companion appeal, the court found that Fahey should not have rejected without a hearing Castor's motion arguing that her right to counsel had attached in September 2005, when the estate lawyer, Chirco, spoke to police, so that the 2007 interview should never have taken place. It sent the matter back for a hearing.
Fahey held the hearing and denied the motion in December 2013. Chirco testified that he had represented Castor only as the estate's personal representative, had not known she was a suspect, had identified himself to police as the estate's lawyer, and could not have advised her in a criminal matter without a conflict of interest. On May 1, 2015, the Appellate Division unanimously affirmed in People v. Castor, 128 AD3d 1357, holding that a lawyer relationship formed in a civil matter did not bring the right to counsel into play in the criminal investigation. Her lawyer, J. Scott Porter, said he would seek leave to appeal to the New York Court of Appeals. No later ruling in her favor was found, and her convictions stood when she died.
Castor served her sentence at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester County. In April 2009 she was brought back to Syracuse while Fitzpatrick asked Fahey to release the grand jury minutes in her case to Cayuga County officials who were considering a prosecution for Michael Wallace's death.
On the morning of Saturday, June 11, 2016, she was found dead at Bedford Hills. She was 48 and had served about seven years. The state corrections department gave no cause, and the Westchester County Medical Examiner's Office performed an autopsy. Keller said he was surprised and that no one had expected it. Fitzpatrick said his first concern was to learn the cause so he could advise her two daughters of any health risk they might share. On December 9, 2016, the Onondaga County district attorney's office said she had died of a heart attack.
Ashley Wallace was told of her mother's death by Fitzpatrick. He said she had made clear she had no wish to see her mother again, and he described her as a remarkable woman who was doing well in her life, though he said she would never have closure. "It's still her mother," he said. "They went to Disney World together. They had some good times together and she's also the woman who tried to murder her." Beyond her testimony, her statement at sentencing and the 20/20 interview she gave at 21, no later interview in a major news outlet was found for this account, and her later private life is not described here.
David Castor Jr. had tried for years to have his father moved away from the Owasco cemetery plot that Castor had bought. After her death he said he was glad she was gone and did not want her ever to rest beside his father. Days later, a judge ruled that the family could remove David Castor's remains from the cemetery and destroy the headstone that bore Castor's name.
The case was the subject of a true crime book, Mommy Deadliest, by Michael Benson, published by Pinnacle in late 2010, and of an episode of the television series Forensic Files. Lifetime broadcast a television film, Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story, on February 1, 2020, directed by Jim Donovan, with Nia Vardalos as Castor, Mike Dopud as David Castor and Chanelle Peloso as Ashley.
Proven by jury verdict, and final: the murder of David Castor in August 2005, the attempted murder of Ashley Wallace in September 2007, and the forged will. Castor denied all of it to the end of her life.
Suspected, never charged: the death of Michael Wallace in January 2000. After the 2007 exhumation, authorities ruled it a homicide caused by ethylene glycol, and the trial judge and the Appellate Division found clear and convincing evidence, for the limited purpose of admitting it at trial, that Castor had committed it. That is not a criminal conviction. In February 2010 the Cayuga County district attorney, Jon Budelmann, said he intended to prosecute some day but was in a "holding pattern" because Ashley, the key witness, had been traumatized by the first trial. "I do think there's a need for justice for Michael Wallace," he said, "but not at the cost of further injury to Ashley." Ashley's lawyer, Edward Dunn, said she felt justice had been done and did not want to relive those memories. No charge was ever filed, and Castor's death ended any possibility of a trial. The defense at trial maintained that Ashley, then 12, was responsible; the jury rejected the defense case as a whole, but no court ever tried the question of Wallace's death directly. In 2016 one local report said Wallace's death had "never" been ruled suspicious, which conflicts with the homicide ruling reported by the Associated Press and others after the exhumation.
Investigated, no charge: the death of Castor's father, Jerry Daniels, in February 2002. Michael Wallace's relatives told reporters in 2010 that Daniels was recovering from a lung ailment in St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse and was due to go home when he died suddenly, a day after his daughter visited and brought him an open can of soda. They said she had him cremated and became executor of his estate. Fitzpatrick confirmed his office was looking at the death and said Castor had had financial motives, but the autopsy had found natural causes and he said he was not optimistic about ever obtaining proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Nothing further was reported, and this remains an allegation only.
Unresolved details: the date of Wallace's exhumation (September 2007 in most reports; one 2010 report says 2008); whether Ashley was 11 or 12 when her father died; whether Castor spent a night of the 2005 anniversary weekend on her own couch or at a friend's house; how long Fitzpatrick's cross-examination lasted; and the drugs found in Ashley's blood, which early police statements gave as Ambien and Ritalin and later trial reports as Ambien, codeine and hydrocodone among others. Early broadcast reports that Castor's fingerprints were on the turkey baster were corrected during the trial; no fingerprints were found on it.
1967: Stacey Castor is born; she grows up in central New York.
Mid-1980s: meets Michael Wallace through friends.
1987: first daughter, Ashley, is born; a second daughter, Bree, follows about three years later.
Late 1999: Michael Wallace falls ill on and off for about six weeks.
January 2000: Wallace dies at 38; doctors attribute it to a heart attack; Castor declines an autopsy. He is buried in the Owasco Rural Cemetery.
February 2002: her father, Jerry Daniels, dies in a Syracuse hospital (later investigated; no charge).
August 12, 2003: marries David Castor.
Mid-August 2005: the couple's anniversary weekend; David Castor becomes ill.
August 22, 2005: Castor calls the sheriff's office; David Castor, 48, is found dead in the locked bedroom; the death is first recorded as a suicide.
September 2005: the backdated will is witnessed by friends.
September 2007: Michael Wallace's body is exhumed; his death is ruled an ethylene glycol homicide.
September 7, 2007: Castor is interviewed for about three hours and says "anti-free"; she ends the interview and asks for a lawyer.
September 11 to 12, 2007: drafts of the note are written on the home computer.
September 12 to 13, 2007: Castor gives Ashley drinks; Ashley lies unconscious for about 17 hours.
September 14, 2007: Bree finds her sister; Ashley is hospitalized and survives; Castor is arrested and charged with murder.
September 27, 2007: an attempted murder charge is added.
January 12 to 13, 2009: jury chosen and opening statements given in Onondaga County Court.
January 14, 2009: Ashley Wallace testifies.
January 29 to 30, 2009: Castor testifies.
February 2, 2009: closing arguments; deliberations begin.
February 5, 2009: guilty verdicts.
March 5, 2009: sentenced to 51 1/3 years to life.
April 24, 2009: ABC's 20/20 broadcasts a two-hour special.
February 2010: the Cayuga County district attorney describes the Wallace case as on hold; the Onondaga County district attorney confirms he is looking at Jerry Daniels's death.
December 2010: Michael Benson's Mommy Deadliest is published.
October 5, 2012: Appellate Division affirms the conviction and orders a hearing on the right-to-counsel claim.
December 2013: Judge Fahey denies the post-conviction motion after a hearing.
May 1, 2015: Appellate Division affirms the denial.
June 11, 2016: Castor dies at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, aged 48.
June 2016: a judge allows David Castor's family to move his remains from the Owasco cemetery.
December 9, 2016: the district attorney's office says she died of a heart attack.
February 1, 2020: Lifetime broadcasts Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story.