A Deadly Cocktail - Part 1 (David Castor)

Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average.

Plus, auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts.

Quote now at progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

Potential savings will vary.

Discounts are not available in all states and situations.

It's time to head back to school and forward to your future with Carrington College.

For over 55 years, we've helped train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Apply now to get hands-on training from teachers with real-world experience.

In as few as nine months, you could start making a difference in healthcare.

Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose.

Visit Carrington.edu to see what's next for you.

Visit carrington.edu/slash SCI for information on program outcomes.

Are you ready to get spicy?

These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.

Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Or turn it down.

It's time for something that's not too spicy.

Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

Spicy.

But not too spicy.

You've heard the expression that there are monsters amongst us, and there just are.

And we get so carried away sometimes with the why.

And I think we lose sight of the fact that there really is evil in the world.

This was so diabolical, so evil.

It's really,

it's hard to put into words.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

I'm Anasega Nicolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

And this is Anatomy of Murder.

What does it take for someone to commit murder?

A motive?

Sometimes.

Some level of cunning or deceitfulness?

Maybe.

But whatever traits are required to commit that ultimate act of cruelty, it takes a special kind of evil to perpetrate violence against a family member and a disturbing lack of remorse to try to get away with it again and again.

Back in September of 2005, a prosecutor in Syracuse, New York was challenged to answer these very questions when he took on a case that began with an investigation into a local man's mysterious death and ended with a face-off against a possible serial killer.

Bill Fitzpatrick has been been the elected district attorney in Onondaga County since 1992.

And like many public servants we've met on the show, even from a young age, Bill seemed destined for the job.

It's actually a lifetime dream.

My dad was a New York City cop, and I've always wanted to be a prosecutor.

I wish I could say I wanted to be a baseball player or an astronaut or something, but actually, since about the age of 11, I wanted to be a DA and it's a dream come true for me.

I'm happy to say that I've known Bill professionally at this point for decades.

And I can vouch for both his dedication to law enforcement and his many talents as a prosecutor, which in part is undoubtedly rooted to his earlier years growing up amongst his father's colleagues in the NYPD.

I used to hang around my dad's station house when my mom was a stay-at-home housewife.

Sometimes, you know, she'd get sick or need a break or something.

And so my dad would, you know, stick me and my brother in the back of the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn, and we'd just sit around and watch stuff that we probably shouldn't have seen and listen to stuff we definitely should not have listened to.

These experiences not only exposed him to the unique culture and brotherhood among law enforcement, which is a world I know too well, but those experiences likely instilled an appreciation for what it takes to dedicate your life to the pursuit of justice.

Everybody there was uncle this, uncle that, all my father's partners.

It was great.

You grow up with 20 uncles, all of them working in one room, you know, the detective squad.

And obviously experienced it had a lot of effect on me.

When most people think about New York, they picture the city, Manhattan, the place of police procedurals and rom-coms.

But in reality, the state of New York is huge.

And Onondaka County, which sits in the middle of upstate New York, is a mix of farmland, suburbs, and industry with a great diversity of people and natural beauty.

I came here to go to school and never left.

I came from Brooklyn and fell in love with the place.

It's a great place to raise a family.

Bill has tried countless cases during the course of his career.

But even now, as the elected DA, he has never lost touch with the daily grind of investigative and trial work.

And I can tell you that it is definitely not common for the elected DA of any larger jurisdiction to continue to try cases themselves, which to me as a career prosecutor says a lot about Bill in the best of ways.

I love forensics and I love to teach forensics and I abhor phony experts and junk science and I want to make sure that the best product gets in front of the jury and the best way to do that to keep up on it is to maintain your trial skills and your preparation skills.

Honestly, I do it for selfish reasons, but I also do it for practical reasons because I want to experience what my trial lawyers are going through.

It's easier for me if they come in and complain to me about a judge's

idiosyncrasies that I can say, yeah, just tried a case in front of him or her.

I know, I know exactly what you're talking about.

And all of that experience, from days as a kid in the squad room, to working alongside detectives as an ADA, it would serve him well when he was confronted with what would prove to be one of the most memorable cases of his long career.

On August 22, 2005, a woman named Stacey Castor made a frantic call to police.

She said that her husband had locked himself in their bedroom following an argument and she had not seen or heard from him for the past day.

Still in the bedroom and now unresponsive, she feared that without immediate medical assistance, he might be in serious danger.

When the responding officers arrived on scene, she was distraught, insinuating that her husband had been showing signs of depression and she was afraid that he was at risk of harming himself.

The initial responding officer, you know, he just, he was unable to get the door open.

But he looked in, he eventually went outside, used the stepladder, looked in the window, saw something suspicious, namely a body on the bed, and then just kicked the door open.

The body was that of Stacey's husband, 48-year-old David Castor.

The officer approached ready to administer aid, but David was not breathing and his body was cold to the touch.

He was unclothed.

He had a little bit of a bedsheet wrapped around him.

There was vomit on various parts of the bed.

Sadly, there was nothing first responders could do.

David was declared dead at the scene.

On the nightstand stood the first potential clues to the cause of David's death: remnants of what appeared to be a drinking binge.

But officers also noted the presence of another liquid that the officer couldn't immediately identify.

There were several bottles of liquor, and there was a crystal clear glass that had a green liquid in it that later turned out to be ethylene glycol antifreeze.

A large open bottle of antifreeze was also found under the bed.

The potent chemical is fatal to humans even in very small doses.

And if David had ingested as little as two to three ounces, it may have been what killed him.

We have a system here, I'm sure it's similar to a lot of other offices, where unexplained death, we will send an assistant DA out to assist with legal questions, search warrants, witness interviews, whether or not to mirandize somebody, you know, a thousand things that come up at a potential crime scene.

So based on the fact pattern here, the person who dialed 911, which brought law enforcement to the home, indicated that she believed that her husband being locked in the bedroom and two days of binge drinking is what likely led to his death.

Now, from an investigator's perspective, seems reasonable, but the inspection of the crime scene is handled still in a very methodical way.

No matter what your initial thoughts on a Sega would be from the beginning, fingerprints on a bottle, spillage patterns, or latent trace of evidence nearby, and then obviously the photographing and video capture of the body's position, that's all very important.

But only, as you know, after the coroner's autopsy and toxicology, can an official cause of death be ruled.

So as they're trying to put those initial pieces together, the ADA, as Bill talked about, was being sent out to work along law enforcement initially, and they interviewed Stacey, who explained how the weekend had started on a high note with plans for a romantic anniversary dinner.

And she said that Friday that she and her husband were planning a big celebratory dinner, and it was going to be a special weekend, just the two of them.

Her two daughters, Ashley and Bree, from a previous marriage, they were at babysitters, and it was just going to be her and David.

Things kind of went south.

They got into an argument.

This is according to her.

They got into an argument.

It continued on Saturday.

She wound up spending the weekend at a friend's house.

And according to Stacey, David was drinking heavily.

And rather than confront him at home, she decided to give him space and let him sleep it off.

She made minimal efforts to contact him on Saturday evening.

didn't have any contact with him on Sunday.

And then when she got home Monday to prepare herself to get to work, their bedroom door was locked.

And that's why she was calling 911.

She further explained that David had been expressing signs of true depression over his failing business and the recent death of his father.

And the presence of the antifreeze by his bedside seemed to confirm her worst fear that he had taken his own life.

I did not respond to the scene.

The assistant DA that did respond came back and said, based on the interview with the surviving spouse it appears to be a suicide now that conclusion was supported by the medical examiner who reported that david's death was caused by a self-administered lethal dose of anifree medical examiners opine about cause of death and manner of death and you've only got five choices manner of death you know homicide suicide accident natural or undetermined he put it as suicide believing the report of Stacey Caster that David had been depressed, that his business was going under, etc., etc.

Ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze, has a devastating effect on the human body, and it is a drawn-out way to die.

Which is precisely why some investigators remained skeptical about the ME's ruling.

Probably within 48 hours, I got a call from some sheriffs, detectives who were working on the case and felt very strongly that it was not a suicide.

And the things that jumped out at me immediately were the methodology that was alleged to have been used for the suicide.

Antifreeze, ethylene glycol.

It's a horrible way to die.

You don't die instantly by any stretch of the imagination.

You die, you know, almost cell by cell.

Even ingesting a small amount of the chemical causes loss of balance, blurred vision, and increasing incoherence.

The signs of it almost mimic intoxication from what we would consider regular alcohol.

So while David may have appeared to be drunk in the hours before his death, in reality, his body was shutting down, losing functions of his kidneys, liver, and eventually his brain.

As I said earlier, you know, a horrible way to die, not something that you would think of using as a methodology of suicide.

But that's not the only thing that was making investigators suspicious that this was not a death by suicide.

Just statistically, in terms of suicide, most men use firearms and most women will use some type of narcotic or chemical agent.

But in this case, with David Castor, he had a shotgun under his bed.

And I'm having difficulty why he chooses to kill himself over essentially a 72-hour period as opposed to killing himself in a millisecond by, you know, putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

So I was pretty much all in that this had to be very, very intensely investigated as a potential homicide very early on in the case.

And so just 48 hours after David's mysterious death, investigators were in search for more than just answers.

They were looking for a killer.

Summer's winding down, and it's the perfect time to ease your child back into learning with IXL.

iXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning through fun, engaging, and personalized content.

IXL is used in 96 of the top 100 U.S.

school districts and is the perfect tool to keep learning going without making it feel like school.

I've watched kids in my own extended family using IXL.

It captures their attention and keeps it, all while helping them catch up in areas they're struggling or helping them get ahead.

Make an impact on your child's learning.

Get IXL Now.

And Anatomy of Murder listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at iXL.com/slash anatomy.

Visit ixl.com/slash anatomy to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

This summer, the sun isn't the only thing that can burn you.

Don't let your wireless bill sizzle your budget.

Whether you're booking road trips or beach days, your wireless bill shouldn't slow you down.

Say goodbye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw-dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages.

Mint Mobile is here to rescue you.

And for a limited time, Mint Mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month.

All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.

This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank.

Get this new customer offer in your three-month unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a month at mintmobile.com/slash anatomy.

That's mintmobile.com/slash anatomy.

Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month.

Limited time new customer offer for first three months only.

Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plans.

Taxes and fees extra, see Mint Mobile for details.

David Castor started his weekend at an anniversary dinner with his wife, Stacey.

But by Monday morning, David was dead, apparently the victim of a self-administered dose of antifreeze.

Her story was that, you know, his business was failing, he was depressed, his father had died recently, and they took that at face value.

But Onondaga County DA Bill Fitzpatrick, he had his doubts.

Everybody knows of David Caster.

He's just a good guy.

He was a very successful heat and air conditioning guy.

He was a blue collar all the way.

David Caster was a business owner who ran an air conditioning installation and repair company in upstate New York.

According to his friends, he was known to be responsible, self-sufficient, and committed to his work.

And he was also dedicated to his blended family.

He had been married to his wife Stacey for two years, and he was a committed and loving father to both his son from a previous marriage and to Stacy's two young daughters from her first marriage, Ashley and Bree, whose father had died unexpectedly at 38 years old.

David was a loyal husband and a loving stepfather, but in the aftermath of his death, Stacy admitted that things at home had not always been perfect.

A little bit of a strained relationship with his two stepdaughters, but according to them, in time it had grown a little better.

I mean, he wasn't their biological dad who they missed and loved very, very much.

Of course, you never know when a person who seems perfectly happy might be suffering from mental health issues in private.

But the more Bill and his investigators learned about him, the less David seemed like someone on the verge of taking his own life.

He did lose his father that July, but the grieving process, according to all his friends, was perfectly normal.

You know, he was very saddened by his father's death, but it wasn't unexpected.

He had been sick for a while.

You know, by all accounts, no enemies, no reason to have killed himself, and appeared to many friends and neighbors to, you know, have been in a good relationship with Stacey Caster.

And by all accounts, his marriage to Stacy appeared to be fine.

So it didn't seem like marital discord could have been the cause of his recent depression.

They socialized, they had lots of friends, they would sometimes entertain at their house.

It wasn't anybody that said, oh, I knew, you know, I saw this coming.

They fight all the time.

It wasn't anything like that.

So while the ME had ruled his death a suicide, investigators were still taking steps to collect as much information and evidence to either confirm that conclusion or completely overrule it.

Fortunately, we had a very smart road patrol deputy made some cursory examination at that point looking for anything, a suicide note.

In his search of the caster's home, he didn't find a suicide note, but he did discover something that seemed just odd enough to be considered relevant.

He looked in the trash.

He was, with her permission, he was looking for some type of note or anything of maybe that the guy had discarded, and he winds up finding an almost brand new turkey baster.

It was in the kitchen in an area readily accessible from anywhere in the house.

It was just a little trash basket that just happened to be in the kitchen.

And it was buried under some other trash to suggest there was an effort made to conceal it.

You know what I just think if the words that's odd at a crime scene are ever spoken, you know at that very moment, whatever it is, that's going to require a deeper dive.

And so a turkey baster in a trash can

is an odd observation.

So when I was thinking about it, I went both ways, right?

Because again, like it doesn't have to be Thanksgiving for you to baste a pot roast, a meatloaf, a chicken, or maybe you're making turkey.

So again, I don't think using it or having it is necessarily that odd.

However, putting it in the trash when it didn't seem like it had broken, there was anything odd.

Again, like we don't know where it's going, but just this item that seems to be pretty new and in good condition, it being there,

if their head is tilting, they're going to recover it.

And to your point, Scott, you don't know where it's going to lead until later, but that's the job of evidence collection is to pick it up and see if it fits into place into a crime later on.

And collect it, they did at Asega.

And also, according to Bill, there were some interesting and telling clues in the photographs of the bedroom where david's body was located as i looked at the photos several days later one of the things that i noticed was that there was a trail of vomitus that came from the bed and pooled on the carpet of the bedroom in between those two events And in between those two events, the pooling of the vomitus and the trail of the vomitus dripping off the bedspread, was

the jar of

and yet there was no vomitus

on the antifreeze jar, indicating that the scene may have been staged, that someone put that in there after the fact.

Which meant that perhaps David's ingestion of antifreeze was not intentional after all.

And maybe he was not alone, as his wife Stacey had told police when he finally succumbed to the lethal poison.

There was a camp in the sheriff's department that believed her.

They said, no, I questioned her and, you know, she came across.

She was very candid.

She answered all my questions.

And I believe her.

And I think the guy killed himself.

And then there was the camp that said, no, it's not adding up.

It doesn't make sense.

In a situation like that, let's err on the side of caution.

Let's treat it as a homicide until we are convinced otherwise.

But if David was the victim of a homicide, who was in the circle of possible suspects?

Most people are murdered by someone they know.

so we want to surround ourselves with investigating not only his spouse, but was he having an affair?

Was he having a business dispute?

Were there people arguing with him about work that he had done?

Did anybody have a reason to hate the guy?

Was he having an affair?

A jealous husband found out about it.

So you do what's essentially a psychological.

financial and personal autopsy of a person, not just cutting open the body and finding out how they died, but also finding out how they lived and would something in his life have contributed to his death.

And it can be a very time-consuming, painstaking process.

But once again, it seemed that David was no more likely a target for murder than he was in the mindset of taking his own life.

He wasn't in any financial trouble.

He didn't seem to engage in any at-risk behavior or relationships.

He just didn't seem like the type of guy or seem to be in contact with anyone that would have made him attract any enemies.

We looked at his business relationships, nothing.

Most customers raved about him, said he was very conscientious.

No evidence of any type of extracurricular activity with another woman.

And it seems like Bill's checking all the boxes here, right?

So without an immediate suspect, it was critical to create a timeline of his activities and the whereabouts in the hours leading up to his death, as well as a list of everyone he was in contact with.

And it became more and more apparent that he was murdered sometime that weekend.

The universe of suspect gets much smaller when you consider that they had to have had access to him for a period of time during that weekend.

And let's just say the obvious, the person he was most in contact with during that period was his wife, Stacey.

So it became a priority to scrutinize the details of her alibi for that entire weekend.

Now, she had already told investigators that she and David had gotten into an argument on Friday night, which she claimed triggered his drinking binge, which continued all day on Saturday.

And then we found out that Saturday night, Stacy went to the house with another couple that she was very friendly with, and

all three of them saw David in a very catatonic state, that he was mumbling, he was stumbling.

He actually ripped the towel rod off the wall in the bathroom because he was trying to steady himself to stand up.

The three of them just just left him in bed with a conclusion, the false conclusion, that he was drunk, that he had been drinking, that he was still upset about the argument that he and Stacey had had, and that his way to deal with that was to just drink excessively.

But incoherence, lack of balance, they are also symptoms of antifreeze poisoning, which means that by Saturday night, David may have already been suffering the effects of the poison.

And the only person who had access to him prior to this visit by friends, at least from what they can tell at this moment, was was Stacey Castor herself.

That theory got legs when investigators lifted fingerprints from the glass on the bedside table that contained the antifreeze.

Fingerprints that they matched not to David, but to Stacey.

And remember that turkey baster the responding officer found in the garbage?

Turns out it had David's DNA on the tip and antifreeze in

the main container of the liquid that you would use.

Now, the picture of how the poison may have been administered was coming into focus.

It would seem that the turkey baster was used at some point to force feed the lethal liquid directly into David's throat.

But even that seems hard to do to someone against their will.

That's one of the first things you had to think about.

I'm sure it is what exactly you and I thought about here too, Scott.

I mean, even assuming that David may have been intoxicated or even sleeping, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't resist resist or gag.

So what was Bill's theory on how David may have been poisoned?

Well, I think it has a lot to do with how antifreeze tastes because believe it or not, the green stuff that you put in your car's engine, it actually is sweet to the taste.

And so it may be quite hard to detect if it was mixed with another drink that is also sweet.

And Stacey herself had actually already dropped a hint at what that drink might have been when she gave her first statement to police.

She admitted he was consuming Diet Pepsi on Saturday when she went over there and they continued the argument that they were having.

You know, he was in rough shape at the time.

As I said, that's a perfect mechanism to disguise the antifreeze because both are sweet.

The poison would have taken some time to take effect, mimicking the effects of intoxication by alcohol until eventually David was rendered unconscious and unable to defend himself.

And then when he he became more and more comatose and more and more disabled in bed, that's when she turns to the turkey baster.

She's probably trying to pour it into his mouth with that glass that was on the nightstand.

That's why her fingerprints are on it.

Just, you know, stick it down his throat.

So he might gag a little bit, but eventually it's going to get into his system.

But if this scenario was true, it was describing David's wife Stacey as someone capable of planning and carrying out an act act of almost unimaginable cruelty.

Absolutely, because remember, she admitted that she even returned with friends who they could witness David's so-called drinking binge, all the while knowing that she had actually poisoned him and he was likely just hours from death.

And as his DNA in the turkey baster proved, At some point, she even returned when he was unconscious to administer even more antifreeze and stage the scene to make it look like a death by suicide.

This was not a crime of passion.

This was a meticulous, cold-blooded act of murder.

As you might imagine, once I became more and more convinced that this was at the very least a suspicious death and needed much more intensive investigation, I was curious, what happened to husband, number one.

The answer I got was, well, he died of a heart attack.

Okay, well, so much.

for that theory that she was a serial killer.

But, you know, I'm of the old school where I say, okay, the records show he died of a heart attack i want to see records i want to see medical records well guess what there weren't any stacey's first husband and the father of her two young daughters was a man named mike wallace whose sudden death at 38 had been attributed to a heart attack one day ashley comes home from school she finds her dad mike wallace lying on the couch She's 12 at the time, very upset, calls, has enough sense to call the authorities.

Ambulance gets there.

They make efforts to try to revive him.

Unsuccessfully take him to a local hospital.

This is a different county in this county.

And they have a coroner system, not a medical examiner system.

And the coroner writes it off in large part on information from Stacy that he had had a bad ticker.

But no autopsy had ever been done.

And given Bill's suspicions about Stacy's role in David's death, he was starting to wonder what kind of person he may be dealing with.

A DA in the state of New York has almost unfettered discretion in ordering an exhumation.

If he or she believes that criminal activity can be afoot, despite the unpleasant nature of disturbing the dead, the public interest is far outweighed by the prosecutor's right to know exactly how the person died.

So as you might imagine, I said we're going to exhume Mike Wallace and find out

what happened to him.

I just had to know.

I had to know concretely and for certain what the guy died from.

Wallace's remains were exhumed from a cemetery in the adjoining county.

His body was then subjected to a full forensic examination.

You can just imagine that investigators in Onondaga County must have been bursting with anticipation as they waited for the results.

You could see the brain tissue and then, you know, every few milliliters or so, there was a bright spot, which was a crystal, which shut down his bodily functions.

The telltale crystals that formed in Mike's brain tissue told the medical examiner all he needed to know.

Oh, he said without question, cause of death, ethylene glycol poisoning.

Mike's death had been surprising and sudden, and no one had ever suspected murder.

But with the new autopsy results, his visit to his doctor in the days just before his death might provide further evidence of his own poisoning.

He actually went to a GP, general practitioner, a couple of weeks before he was murdered.

And in the physician's report, the doctor suggests that he has an ear infection and that's affecting his balance and his speech.

But he writes a perfect description.

of antifreeze poisoning.

Michael said to the doctor, I feel like I'm drunk, but not when I'm not even drinking alcohol.

Two husbands killed by poison.

Three children left without fathers.

And one wife who may or may not be a serial killer.

When was the last time money stressed you out?

Made you feel guilty?

Jealous?

Money can make us feel lots of things, but what if it made you feel hopeful?

Get more out of your money and start building a better future with acorns acorns is a financial wellness app that helps you invest for your future save for tomorrow and spend smarter today sign up now and acorns will boost your new account with a five dollar bonus investment join the over 14 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over 25 billion dollars with acorns head to acorns.com slash anatomy or download the acorns app to get started.

Paid non-client endorsement.

Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns.

Tier 2 compensation provided.

Investing involves risk.

Acorns Advisors, LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor.

View important disclosures at acorns.com slash anatomy.

Summer is here and your to-do list hasn't gotten any shorter.

Remember that patio set you promised to build by Memorial Day?

Or the grouting tutorial you watched but never actually followed?

Enter TaskRabbit, your secret weapon for a carefree summer.

TaskRabbit connects you with skilled taskers to help with moving, mounting, furniture assembly, home repairs, and more.

Why wait for you to do it when a tasker can do it instead?

I've called taskers to do everything in my home from hanging pictures, assembling furniture, and next up on my list is to get some help with furniture that needs to be moved.

Every time they've been reliable, on time, and helped whittle down my to-do list.

That's worth a ton to me.

Tackle your to-do list today and get 15% off your first task at taskrabbit.com or on the TaskRabbit app using promo code anatomy.

That's promo code anatomy at taskrabbit.com.

For 15% off your task, TaskRabbit book trusted help for home tasks.

There was a growing amount of evidence that David Castor had not died by suicide, but was intentionally poisoned by his wife, Stacey Castor.

And after exhuming the remains of her first husband, Mike Wallace, there was also proof that it may not have been her first murder.

What began as a welfare check, then ruled a suicide, was now a homicide investigation.

One potential obstacle, however, was the original ME's opinion on the cause and manner of death.

So manner of death is not in any way, shape, or form etched in stone, and it can change based on information outside of just a bare examination of the body.

So in this case, it wasn't in any way fatal to the prosecution.

One of those things that you have to deal with as a trial lawyer.

And the guy readily admitted, yeah, absolutely.

I ruled it a suicide.

Doesn't change my opinion about the cause of death.

But now, confronted with this.

new evidence that you have uncovered, I am changing the death certificate manner of death to homicide.

You know, Anasteaguer, there's all kinds of complications in this scenario.

You know, we do know that Wallace's death was ruled by natural causes.

I think it was a heart attack.

And there would have been not many interviews, really not any investigation really done at all.

And so, in order to really connect these two cases, it would require a whole new type of investigation.

And I mean, the roadmap would have to start from square one.

And there's so many things to have to go through and be able to get down that road.

And the first thing that Bill had to do in Onondaga was: remember, his cause of death was also ruled as a death by suicide, but now they have evidence of murder.

And the thing that while the medical examiner, and we've talked about this before, is going based on the medical findings, it's also based on the information they're getting from other sources, you know, investigators and other people in the investigation.

So that's how it first was death by suicide.

But now with this evidence, as Bill said, they'll have to change this back.

And like you said, Scott, like similarly, now you have the death of someone else based on this exhumation.

However, that other complication is that Mike Wallace, that death, it happened in another county.

So Bill doesn't even have jurisdiction of it, but he's looking at it because, again, I don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole of legalese, but we prosecutors love this term, Molino, which is this hearing we can do if we want to use evidence of another crime in our case.

So just think about this, right?

If you can prove, and Scott, we've talked about this, that the other murder of of her first husband was also by Auntie Freeze.

Well, that is a pretty uncommon thing.

It's pretty unique.

So, to link it saying, hey, look, this is going to prove the person's identity being Stacy because she's the only one that was with both these people at the time.

They both died by similar means.

Like, of course, he wants to pursue it for that reason.

Like, it's not going to be a given that he can pursue it in court.

But, as someone who has had those arguments and I've used them in cases where someone has committed other similar murders to other places, it's just an amazing thing to have in front of the jury if you can get it.

So Stacey Castor was not only married to both men, her fingerprints were found on the glass of antifreeze found by David's bedside.

So despite her alibi and her denials, Stacey Castor was identified as their prime suspect.

Based on the evidence collected, investigators requested warrants to place wiretaps inside her home, as well as some well-placed video cameras outside her home.

And they were betting that with the news of her former husband's exhumation, Stacey might be inclined to make an admission of guilt to a friend or family or otherwise.

And we see that all of the time in a way that may reveal her motives.

And that is exactly what happened, although not in the way that investigators could ever have imagined.

There's a couple of massive developments in the case that happened very similar in time.

I went to a judge and got a wiretap on her phone.

I had plenty of probable cause to request that and it was later sustained by an appellate court that there was sufficient.

So we were listening in on her calls and the timing was important to me because exactly at the moment we went up listening on her calls

was when we exhumed the body of her first husband, Michael Wallace.

With police listening in, Stacey even mentioned to a friend that police had exhumed Michael Wallace's body.

So she must have been aware that police were likely closing in.

As it turns out, the one week that we had the wire up, with the exception of one very, very significant thing, which I'll mention in a minute, there wasn't anything of real value on the wiretaps, except on this one day in September, when we're listening to her, she calls very early in the morning.

She calls 911.

to report that her daughter Ashley has tried to kill herself.

And I got that call within minutes.

We were literally listening in real time to her calling the 911 center.

I'm in an ambulance at 4127 West Low, Levinson nearest across the street.

Clenwood.

And what's the problem?

My daughter, I believe, has taken controls.

Paramedics rushed to the caster's home where Stacy's daughter was barely clinging to life.

They go in and they find find an empty bottle of vodka in Ashley's bedroom.

At her bedside, an empty bottle of pills, and in her mother, Stacy's hand, a typed suicide note, she claims she found in her daughter's room.

Her mother is emotional, but nevertheless, she seems more intent on the note itself.

Like, don't forget, don't miss this note here.

The typed note signed with Ashley's name included a shocking confession confession that it was Ashley, not her mother, that had poisoned both her father, Mike Wallace, and her stepfather, David Castor.

And she could no longer live with the guilt of committing both murders.

Wow, it was an astonishing turn in the investigation.

Could investigators have gotten it wrong?

Had the elaborate staging of David's suicide been Stacey Castor's attempt to cover up for her teenage daughter all along?

We will answer those questions and more in the exciting conclusion of this story in part two so be sure to listen on the next anatomy of murder

whoever wrote that note killed mike wallace and david castri it couldn't be anybody else ashley still drooling on herself that poor kid was exhausted now you showed that to the jury i said does that in any way shape manner or form suggest a woman that's about to kill herself.

This was so diabolical, so evil.

It's hard to put into words.

Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

Anatomy of Murder is an audio chuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa and Phil Jean-Grande.

So, what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?

Your home should show off who you are, telling your story in every detail, meeting you where you are.

Ashley has styles that balance timeless appeal and modern trends to bring your personal look home.

Pairing eye-catching design with features like stain-resistant performance fabric, Ashley offers well-crafted, affordable pieces built to stand up to to real life.

Plus, they provide fast, reliable white glove delivery right to your door.

Visit your local Ashley store or head to Ashley.com to find your style.

In March 2017, police in Ketchiken, Alaska got a worried call.

And I haven't heard from them, so I'm getting worried.

It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia.

When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch.

Is it a suicide?

Is it a murder?

What is it?

From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska is out now.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.