'Black Widow' Stacey Castor poisoned her two husbands with anti-freeze and tried to pin blame on teenage daughter
Stacey Castor found happiness again when she met and eventually married David Castor in 2003, nearly three years after her first husband Michael Wallace's death in 2000. Wallace apparently died of a heart attack, leaving two young girls — Bree, Ashley — and Stacey behind. Although the girls were initially reluctant to uproot their lives and move into their step-father's house in Bedford Hills, New York, with their mom, they found solace in their mother's happiness. Ashley, 16, at the time, however, did not approve of David.
Stacey and David worked together in an office, with the latter owning an air conditioning installation and repair company, and the former being his office manager. Nearly a year after moving in, Ashley continued to have a turbulent relationship with her step-father, who could sometimes drink and be harsh on the teen for acting out. David once removed her bedroom door after she took his premium car out with her friends without his permission. A few days after David received the news of his father's death, Ashley, Stacey and he got into a fight, which ended with him hurling a glass towards Bree. She began bleeding, and that is when Stacey took her two children out of the house. Ashley stayed with her boyfriend, and Stacey went to a friend's house with Bree.
Nearly four days later, when David did not come to work, Stacey decided to go check in on him at home. The house was in a mess, and David's room was locked from the inside. When he did not answer Stacey's repeated knocks and calls, she called the sheriff's office. Officials broke in the door and found David unresponsive with a glass full of some green liquid and an anti-freeze container beside him. He was declared dead as authorities speculated suicide.
At this point, detectives began questioning the family. Stacey told investigators that she had dropped in intermittently at the home in the four days to pick some clothes, and had heard David snoring in his room. She, however, did not see him and walked out. It appeared to be an open and shut suicide case, but officials eventually found something unusual. The glass and anti-freeze container found beside David did not have his fingerprints but Stacey's. Authorities also found something unusual — a turkey baster in the garbage laced with the chemicals of anti-freeze and David's DNA at its tip. David was not much of a cook, then what was he doing with the turkey baster?
Authorities grew suspicious of Stacey and ordered wiretappings of her house to listen in on any unusual phone conversations. They also monitored her husbands' gravesites, who had been buried beside each other at Stacey's request. Officials reasoned that if she genuinely loved her late husbands, she would eventually visit their graves. However, she never did. With mounting evidence against her, the investigators decided to exhume her first husband Wallace's body, suspecting foul-play in his death too. A toxicology screening ruled that Wallace had also been killed through antifreeze poisoning.
Ashley was shocked by the revelation and went to see her mother for comfort. Stacey, for the first time, offered her teenage daughter vodka mixed with orange juice as a bonding process in their grief. Ashley, who considered her mother her best friend, trusted and drank the beverage despite it tasting unusual. Stacey offered Ashley the same beverage the next day too, and the teen drank it. Several hours later Ashley was found unconscious in her bedroom by her sister Bree with an empty bottle of pills lying beside her. A suicide note was also recovered from her bed, which Stacey handed to the paramedics. Ashley was rushed to the hospital in a comatose situation, where doctors stated that she would have been dead if they were minutes late.
The suicide note was a confession letter. Ashley took responsibility for killing both her father and step-father. However, Bree remained adamant that Ashley would never do such a thing. The teen, after gaining consciousness, denied ever writing the letter or taking pills and said that the last thing she remembered was drinking with her mother.
It took two years for investigators to collect evidence against Stacey in the deaths of her husbands. She was arrested in 2007, for second-degree murder in David's death and for attempting to murder her own daughter and frame her for her husband's murder.
"In 2005, people started to put it together," Cayuga County Sheriff Dave Gould said. "If Mr. Wallace had been cremated, or if Mr. Castor had not died, we would never have known we had a homicide."
One key evidence was revealed in what initially appeared as a typo in Ashley's suicide letter. The word "anti-freeze" was incorrectly spelled "anti-free" multiple times in the letter. When officials revisited Stacey's former interviews, they found that she had called the additive "anti-free" in conversations with them.
When prosecutors in the case claimed that Stacey had force-fed David with antifreeze over a period of several days, she maintained her innocense, claiming her husband's death was a suicide. She claimed that David got the idea to kill himself with antifreeze while they both watched a news report of a man murdering her lovers by using the poison.
Prosecutors also noted the main reasons why Stacey had murdered her husbands: money. She had reportedly killed them partly to collect on their life insurance and estates. She had also changed David's will to exclude his son by a previous marriage from the money left to him.
On March 5, 2009, at Castor's sentencing, Chief Assistant District Attorney Christine Garvey said that Stacey was "cold, calculating and without any emotion for what she has done. Human life is sacred. Stacey Castor places no value on human life, not even her own flesh and blood. To Stacey Castor, human beings are disposable."
Meanwhile, an emotional Ashely at the end of her mother's trial told the judge she hated her mother "for ruining so many people's lives," however, she somehow continued to love her too. "I never knew what hate was until now," she said. "Even though I do hate her, I still love her at the same time. That bothers me, it is so confusing. How can you hate someone and love them at the same time? I just wish that she would say sorry for everything she did, including all the lies. As horrible as it makes me feel, this is goodbye mom."
Stacey, who was sentenced for 51 years in prison for the murder of Michael and attempted murder of her daughter, continued to maintain her innocence and died in prison at the age of 48. She is now remembered as The Black Widow, famously named by the media during her years-long trial. Ashley is engaged to be married and is still close to her sister Bree.
'Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story' by Lifetime is set to retell the haunting story of Stacey's machinations. The film premieres on February 1 at 8/ 7c on Lifetime Movies Network.