Stacey Castor was a woman who seemed to have a tragic life. She lost two husbands to mysterious illnesses and nearly lost her daughter to a suicide attempt.
But behind her facade of grief and resilience, she was hiding a dark secret. She was the one who poisoned her husbands with antifreeze and tried to kill her daughter to cover up her crimes. She was dubbed the “Black Widow” by the media for her cold-blooded actions.
A Deadly Marriage
Stacey Castor married her first husband, Michael Wallace, in 1990. They had two daughters, Ashley and Bree, and lived in Weedsport, New York. Wallace worked as a mechanic and Castor as an ambulance dispatcher. Their marriage was not happy, and they both had affairs.
Michael Wallace is seen here at his wedding.
In late 1999, Wallace started to feel sick. He had symptoms such as coughing, unsteadiness, and swelling. He died in early 2000, at the age of 38. The doctors told Castor that he had a heart attack, and she refused to have an autopsy done. She collected his life insurance money and moved on with her life.
A Second Chance
In 2003, Castor married David Castor, a successful businessman who owned an air conditioning company. She became his office manager and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. However, she was not faithful to him either, and had an affair with one of his employees.
Stacey married David Castor in 2003
In August 2005, she called the police and said that her husband had locked himself in their bedroom after an argument and had not come out for a day.
The police broke down the door and found David Castor dead on the bed, with a bottle of antifreeze and a glass of green liquid next to him. It looked like a suicide, but the investigators were suspicious. They found traces of antifreeze in his stomach and in the glass.
Police set up cameras outside Stacey Castor’s house to track her whereabouts.
They also found a typed suicide note on his computer that blamed his wife for his death. The note had several spelling and grammatical errors, and did not match his writing style.
A Twisted Plot
The police began to suspect that Stacey Castor had killed her second husband and staged his suicide. They also exhumed the body of her first husband and found antifreeze in his system as well. They realized that she had poisoned both of them for financial gain.
Michael Wallace’s body is exhumed on Sept. 5, 2007 so investigators could examine it for signs of anti-freeze poisoning.
They also discovered that she had forged David Castor’s will, leaving everything to her and nothing to his son from a previous marriage. She was arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, and forgery.
But Castor had another plan to escape justice. She decided to frame her own daughter, Ashley Wallace, for the murders. In September 2007, she gave her daughter a cocktail of vodka and pills, hoping to kill her or make her confess to the crimes.
Ashley
She also wrote another fake suicide note in Ashley’s name, admitting to killing both Michael Wallace and David Castor. However, Ashley survived the overdose and was taken to the hospital. She denied any involvement in the murders and said that her mother had tried to kill her.
A Convincing Verdict
Stacey Castor went on trial in January 2009. She pleaded not guilty and maintained her innocence throughout the trial. She claimed that Ashley had killed both of her fathers out of jealousy and resentment, and that she had tried to kill herself out of guilt. She also said that David Castor had written his own suicide note and that she had nothing to do with his will.
The prosecution presented evidence that contradicted Castor’s story. They showed that the suicide notes were typed on Castor’s computer and contained words that she commonly misspelled or misused, such as “antifree” instead of “antifreeze” and “crystal light” instead of “Crystal Lite”.
They also showed that the glass of antifreeze found next to David Castor’s body had only Stacey Castor’s fingerprints on it, not his or Ashley’s. They also played a recorded phone call between Castor and Ashley while Ashley was in the hospital, in which Castor tried to manipulate Ashley into saying that she had killed her fathers.
The jury deliberated for four days before finding Stacey Castor guilty of all charges on February 5, 2009. She was sentenced to 51 years to life in prison. She continued to deny her guilt until her death in 2016, at the age of 48.
Credits: Wikipedia