6
Janice
Throughout the investigation into David Castor’s death, Janice Mary Poissant, a pretty blonde who’d spent a quarter century with the man, remained the law’s biggest ally. Janice thought Stacey did it, she loved David dearly, and she pledged she would do whatever she could to put that woman—it, the alien from outer space, she called her—behind bars for the rest of her life.
Years later, speaking with a writer, Janice would say she wasn’t sure she had the strength to say some of her memories out loud. They were too powerful. She wanted to state up front that David Castor was not all bad. He was always a loving father, but she’d never before told the whole story of what it was like to be with him.
She wanted to be sure she told a balanced story, including the many, many highlights of her marriage, as well as the lowlights. But she wished everyone to know that the story of why she broke up with David was not the whole tale. It was only the sad and just finale.
And they were so young when it started. Teenagers. Adolescents, really. Janice and David grew up less than a mile apart in the town of Baldwinsville. He lived on Dewitt Drive, she on Dennis Drive. Both streets were off Route 370, which was known as Cold Springs Road when it passed through town. She had an identical twin, Janet, and two younger siblings.
She knew David because they rode the same school bus to and from Durgee Junior High five times a week. To herself, she called him Rudolph, because his nose was always red—in the summer because of the sun, winter because of the cold.
Janice took notice of David, and not just his nose. He wasn’t like the other guys. The other guys were mean and tortured the girls. He was gentle.
Besides, she was friends with one of his sisters, Linda. Janice and Linda had some of the same classes at school and they had been partners for a Halloween painting contest, for which they won first place. Following the contest, Janice spent her first night at the Castor home celebrating, but she didn’t remember seeing David, just Linda’s two youngest brothers, Gary and Steve.
David was the third of six Castor kids. They were, in order of birth: Sandra Lynn, Philip Michael “Mike,” David, Linda Susan, Gary Lee, and Stephen Gregory.
David was also the neighborhood paperboy, riding his bike from house to house. Sometime after the Halloween painting contest, Janice remembered, David rode his bike over to her house for a visit, and this is when she had her first feelings of “true like” for a boy.
When she was thirteen going on fourteen, a horrific, traumatic thing happened to Janice. It changed her. In her own words, she went from being a “good girl to being a bad girl.” She skipped classes, she caused trouble in school, anything to get detention and avoid riding the school bus home and facing the mean boys. She had no choice but to ride that bus in the morning, but twice a day was too much. She fought every day to quit school, but she was too young.
The more serious aftereffects of the traumatic event were a severe loss of self-esteem, and a worrisome self-destruction kick. She almost took her own life twice. The second time, she didn’t make it home from school, and her father found her under a bridge at Baldwinsville’s “Four Corners.”
But somehow David was the magic man, and somehow he pulled her out of it and put a halt to her self-destructive nature.
“He asked me out two or three times before, and I finally said yes. We were outside a school dance.” She hadn’t gone into the dance. She was just hanging around outside the school talking. Janice and David were each with a group of friends outside, beyond the realm of chaperones. David had a friend of his go over and talk to her.
“David would like you to go out with him,” the friend said.
Her immediate response was “No way.” But then she began to think about how nice he was on the bus, how he’d visited her on his bike, and she started to feel that she could trust him. And so she eventually said yes.
David and Janice had their first date on October 3, 1973, when Janice was fifteen and David was sixteen.
From that point on, Janice and David were practically inseparable. Two months after their first date, David gave Janice a necklace, which she still owned. At first, her self-destructive behavior continued. She never told her parents about the bad thing that had happened, and they were confused and hurt by the change that had taken place in their daughter.
Because David and Janice were together so much, and Janice was still chronically getting into trouble at school, there were times that David got detention just because he was with her, a situation that caused him problems with his parents, Joyce and Philip.
Not long after they began dating, David moved in with Janice and her family. There was what Janice called a “misunderstanding” at the Castor home, and David felt he had to leave. When David told his parents that he was moving in with Janice’s family, his dad cried.
The new living arrangements worked out well, because Janice’s parents, Louis and Marion Poissant, adored David. They sensed the change in Janice and David’s positive influence. They felt like they had their girl back.
Besides, as Janice’s dad put it, they “couldn’t have the boy living on the streets.”
As her relationship with David grew, Janice shed her self-destructive persona, but she remained as eager as ever to quit school. She dropped out on her sixteenth birthday. David dropped out as well.
“If David had been with anyone but me, he probably would have graduated,” Janice admitted many years later.
David and Janice wanted to go places and do things. They wanted to go to the movies and go bowling, the usual dating activities. So Janice’s dad helped them buy a 1973 Dodge Challenger.
“David was so proud of that car,” Janice recalled. It could “burn rubber.”
Janice was almost completely dependent on David from the start. He always had a job, and when he’d leave for work in the Challenger, Janice would look sadly out the window, remaining until she could no longer see his taillights.
David and Janice’s relationship was “progressing,” she said, but Janice had reservations, and she knew she would one day have to tell David about the bad thing. David “made the transition bearable, though there were many tormenting stages that came and went. We survived!”
In September of 1976, David and Janice set out to look for a place of their own. David was nineteen, Janice eighteen. That abode turned out to be a mobile home on a two-hundred by eight-hundred lot, out in the country, in Pulaski, a good hour from Baldwinsville, which David purchased at the recommendation of his friend Leo for $6,000.
They were truly roughing it at first. The mobile home had no running water and no electricity. It pretty much had no everything. They carried buckets from a two-hundred-year-old well and lit kerosene lamps. They wore heavy clothes and “put about a ton of blankets on the bed.”
Pulaski was right at the easternmost end of Lake Ontario, in the direct path of the snow belt, an area frequently dumped on by “lake effect” snow. One time, it snowed so hard, it took David eight hours to dig them out.
They were making do. Eventually the water and electricity were hooked up and life became a tad closer to normal. The bigger problem was their parents, both sets, who were not pleased with their unmarried and cohabitating status.
One day, all four parents came to the mobile home and forced a discussion of marriage. When the young couple expressed a willingness on the subject, arrangements were quickly made before David and Janice had an opportunity to change their minds.
They were married on November 6, 1976, at St. Mary’s Church in Baldwinsville, with a reception following at the local VFW. David’s sister Linda made a JUST MARRIED sign and attached it to the back of David’s Challenger. The newlyweds then took his parents’ motor home to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon.
The Challenger, the very symbol of their freedom, eventually had to be taken off the road because they couldn’t afford the insurance. For six years it sat.
It was a lonely time for Janice, who stayed home while David went to work. He would leave before daylight and return home after dark, and she was alone, not knowing the neighbors. The only person she knew was David’s friend Leo, who first led them to the mobile home. She didn’t even know him well, and he was born in 1909.
Janice focused her attention on being the best homemaker she could be, both inside and outside the home. On the outside, Leo taught her how to garden. She built a huge vegetable garden under his guidance. Together, they tilled and planted. Alone, she maintained and canned. Year after year.
On the inside, she was an immaculate housekeeper. Both of her parents worked and she’d learned to cook and clean from the time she was nine. She enjoyed thinking of her role in the marriage as “old-fashioned,” taking care of the domestic end while David brought home the bacon. She would have dinner ready when he got home, even if she had to cook ahead of time and heat his plate up when he arrived.
Yet, there were times when Janice’s loneliness was unbearable, and she struck out from her home, just to see new scenery and maybe meet a neighbor or two.
When David learned about Janice’s midday wanderings, he became angry. “I have enough to worry about at work, without having to worry about you, too.” Janice was to stay home.
And she did. But it was hard. It wasn’t like David was great company when he was around. It wasn’t his fault, but he often came home from work exhausted, and plopped on the couch—too tired for conversation.
Next came a period when he wasn’t satisfied with her on any level. He was blind to the things she did and scolded her for the things she didn’t do.
Janice knew the perfect cure for her loneliness. She should have a baby! She lobbied her case to David, saying, “Imagine how nice it would be to have a little David running around with his father’s red hair and full of smiles!”
On February 27, 1978, Janice confirmed that she was with child. On October 3, 1978, she had David Jr. She’d been prophetic. Red hair. Full of smiles.
Liverpool Heating belonged to Stan Korzinewski, back in the 1950s. Janice’s dad worked there for years and bought the business when Stan retired in the fall of 1978. When her dad filled out the legal forms, he listed the new owners as Louis Poissant and his son-in-law, David Castor. Janice was huge when David Sr. went to work at her dad’s business. It was exactly a month before David Jr. was born.
“My father taught David about the business, taught him everything,” she remembered.
It was a family business, and David Jr., when he got old enough, always helped, too. Young David said that he helped his dad with his work from the time he could remember. He went on service calls with him. Every summer, he would accompany his father for furnace installations. And at home, too. “I remember all the work we did together. I’d be right there helping him, being his gofer, getting tools for him.”
Cousin John Howard was also part of the business. He made service calls and performed installations.
The business was successful—and with a zero advertising budget. Their customers were loyal, and word of mouth always worked to their advantage. They provided quality equipment and service at a reasonable price.
To keep an eye on her all the time, David gave Janice a job. So she was a working mom with a baby. A little busy, but it was better than being alone in the mobile home without much to do.
For Janice, the most complicated part of her busy schedule was having both her dad and her husband as her boss. There were days when her dad would say one thing, and David would say another. She wouldn’t know what to do.
Both Janice and her mother, Marion, worked in the office as secretaries/bookkeepers/office keepers. When Janice’s mom quit and returned to her previous job with General Electric, Janice took over the office. She had a cordless phone so she could work throughout the facility. Taking over was a big confidence booster. Her lack of education worried her, but when the time came, she knew enough math to do the job.
After six years of being covered with a tarp, the Challenger was back on the road. The old muscle car needed a new engine. David ordered one and he and Janice did the labor themselves.
David’s in-laws, the Poissants, built a new house in Pennellville, and everyone pitched in. David and Janice helped dig out the basement and shingle the roof.
Janice and David lived together, slept together, worked together. The only time they were apart was when he had to go out on service calls.
Luckily, David Jr. was a breeze to take care of. Such a good baby, and as a toddler content to play quietly with his toys. If he had fussed like other babies, life would have been much harder.
Janice’s office was a sitting room furnished with a desk, couch, chair, and television.
One day, at her mother’s urging, Janice went to the mall. The young woman had never done anything like that before. She spent the day window-shopping, reveling in this unprecedented freedom.
When she told David about the day she’d spent at the mall, he became angry. “If you do that again, we’re going to end up just like our friends—divorced!” he said.
He explained that there was no need for her to have her own car or money. He would protect her. He would take care of her needs. He was all she needed.
When David Jr. was old enough to start school, September 1983, big David and Janice had a tough decision to make. They loved it, but they lived in the middle of nowhere. He could go to the centralized school closest to home, or go live with Janice’s parents where the school was nearby. David and Janice signed papers making Louis and Marion the guardians of David Jr. during the school year. Janice and David still saw David Jr. every day, since they commuted back and forth anyway for work.
“As a family, we each had our snowmobiles. We each had our four-wheelers. David never took any of his big toys and went out with friends. It was always with us, as a family,” she said.
Snowmobiling had always been big. David purchased a 1976 Olympic 440 Ski-Doo just before they got married. David Jr. started driving it when he was seven, in the field across the road. Later they would go on six-hour trail rides together from their home to the easternmost edge of Lake Ontario and back.
They were campers, staying in a series of ever-improving travel trailers pulled by a series of ever-improving Ford trucks. They’d go to Darien Lake Fun Country or River Forest Park, depending on the season. For fun on the water, they’d go out on the lake in David’s twenty-foot Citation Cuddy Cabin, or buzz around in his Jet Ski. There were motorcycles, too—a series of Kawasaki bikes.
Janice recalled when David Jr. got his first four-wheeler, a brand-new 1986 Honda for his eighth birthday. Eventually big David bought a Suzuki for himself and a 1997 Polaris 400 Scrambler Automatic for Janice. They used to ride through the mud and come home laughing and covered in mud.
In 1985, her father found a perfect place to move the growing business. There was an existing house on Wetzel Road from which he could run the business and a lot in back, where they could build the warehouse/factory. Plus, it was only five minutes from his house.
The warehouse was built immediately, and it was enlarged in 1996 to its current size.
Janice felt her marriage was relatively strong until that Easter of 1987 when Dave had his accident. He’d tried to get Janice to learn how to ride a motorcycle. She liked riding behind him on his bike, but thought it might be fun to have her own and ride alongside him.
He bought her a Husqvarna dirt bike to learn on, but it didn’t go well. She liked automatics and was never comfortable with anything she had to shift.
The dirt bike was too big, or her legs were too short. Either way, she had to stand on tiptoes when she straddled it, and it was difficult to keep her balance.
She finally gave up that spring after a praying mantis landed on her shirt as she rode, sending her into a panic that caused her to lay down the bike.
After that, David just wanted to get rid of the thing. His brother agreed to buy it. So on Easter Sunday, David put on his helmet and took the dirt bike out for a test ride.
Janice and David Jr. stood at the front door, watching the field across the road where David was riding. First they saw engine parts shooting across the sky, and then a human body flying through the air.
Janice ran barefoot across the road. She could still remember the feel of the chilled blacktop on the soles of her feet. On the other side, she found David unconscious. The dirt bike looked as if it had exploded. There was something oozing from her husband’s mouth.
“Go get the nurse who lives down the road and call 911!” she screamed. David was rushed to the hospital, where he was put in the intensive care unit (ICU) with a bad concussion and a deep cerebral contusion. The helmet he was wearing had saved his life.
When Janice first saw him in the hospital, David’s arms and legs were tied to the bed. She was told that he’d been “extremely agitated” when he first regained consciousness.
Delirious, he’d said odd things. For instance, “Janice, untie me. Can’t you do anything right?” Janice was hurt by this, until she learned from a nurse that he’d lost his memory.
The brain injury left him at first with amnesia so bad that he didn’t recognize his son or his wife. “He knows the name ‘Janice,’ but doesn’t recall who the name belongs to,” the nurse said.
Doctors confirmed what the nurse had said. There was a possibility that he’d need to be taught everything all over again—right from the beginning, from infancy. They wouldn’t know for sure until the swelling in his brain went down.
Janice stayed with him in the hospital and watched with hope as he improved daily. After a few weeks, he returned home, where he slowly and sometimes painfully recovered his memory. Eventually all of his memory came back, but he was never the same.
Perhaps the accident had caused a permanent brain injury and he no longer had mature impulse control. He grew rapacious for material things. He blurted out statements that popped in his head. He acted out without weighing consequences. Aspects of his personality, such as his preference for grown-up toys over people, became intolerable.
During the fall of 1987, “Grandpa” Leo, who had helped Janice plant her first garden, passed away.
Janice was an abused woman, but she couldn’t see it. It wasn’t as easy for her to see as it was for those on the outside looking in. She lived under these conditions day to day. She told herself that there was nothing wrong. The way she saw it, she was just old-fashioned. She hung the clothes outside on the line to dry. She cooked meals from scratch, and not from boxes. Dinner was always on the table waiting for David when he came home. She mended, she sewed. David was her hero. David saved her.
He had so many toys, it was difficult for Janice to find anything to give him for Christmas. One year, instead of buying him something, she gave him a “personal certificate,” for a “daily head-to-toe fingertip-to-fingertip massage” for a whole year.
It took a long time to sink in. She had started with him when she was so young. Her body was now mature, but he treated her like the little girl on the school bus, the damaged one who’d been broken by cruelty.
And the nostalgic delusion was rich in her psyche, too. She saw him as she’d seen him on that school bus, with his nose red and not like the other boys. He would always be her knight in shining armor, the one who had gotten her out of her self-destructive mode.
He always said he did things because he loved her, because she needed protection. Wasn’t it obvious? “You need a keeper for a husband,” he maintained.
Janice remembered that her sister tried to talk her into going to Vera House, a local shelter for abused women. But Janice said no. She didn’t know what Vera House was, and she didn’t want to go there.
It sank in slowly, but it sank in. Janice felt smothered by David. She’d met him as a young girl, and now middle age was upon her and she developed an identity crisis. She needed independence. She tried to make him see, but he wouldn’t. She talked to him. It didn’t take.
“I felt like I was losing me,” she said. He’d been verbally abusive ever since she knew him. “He would fight me and I would always back down, but I got to a point where I felt there was no more Janice.”
Janice’s sister echoed her feelings: “Where’s my sister? I want my sister back,” she would say.
The lightbulb went on the day in 1994 when sixteen-year-old David Jr. left home, complaining about the same controlling nature in his father that Janice felt. Her only child took off. He’d wanted her to come with him. He was gone for a while; then he returned long enough to finish school and enlist in the army for four years.
The Castors threw a graduation party on June 20, 1997, and things didn’t go well. Big David tried to control the situation, oblivious to the fact that a certain amount of chaos was necessary for a successful party. He ordered that gates be put up in the house to restrict guests’ movements. Guests were forbidden to use all of the bathrooms except for the one in the basement. During the party, as his father tried to suck the joy out of it with rules and restrictions, David Jr. turned to his mother and said, “How do you do it?” David’s family had planned to have Thanksgiving at David and Janice’s that year—they had never hosted the festivities before—but those plans were scrubbed when family members observed David’s behavior at the graduation party.
She left him for the first time in 1997, but she went back after just a couple of days. After that, “things got good” for a little while. But he couldn’t fix what was wrong, because he couldn’t see that anything was wrong.
“My dad retired while David and I were still married, and after that, David was in charge,” Janice said. Louis J. Poissant retired in October 1994 and sold the business to his son-in-law for $50,000, one-half contracted and one-half verbal promise.
In February of 1997, the Castors moved from their mobile home in Pulaski to the house on Wetzel Road in Liverpool. By that time, the marriage was in trouble. One night, while in bed, Janice and David argued. He wanted to, she didn’t. “He got a gun out,” Janice recalled. “He wanted me to shoot him.” Luckily, he couldn’t find the bullets, and the next day, he acted as if nothing had happened.
David told Janice that she had a good life. He provided well for her. They went on vacations—Hawaii, Colorado, Disney in Florida, Key West, Busch Gardens, Williamsburg. The vacations provided David and Janice with opportunities to relax, and good things happened.
The marriage’s highlights were a checklist of joy: riding with the motorcycle club; cross-country skiing, which looked like it was going to be boring but was incredible; coating each other with mud from the rooster tails off their four-wheelers; racing on frozen Kasoag Lake on snowmobiles at one hundred miles per hour; the cross-country trek to Barnes Corners, when they stopped at a swimming hole with the beautiful waterfalls and stone walls; the outing on the boat and skinny-dipping in the lake, in awe of the complete freedom they felt.
There was Jacksonville to visit old-time friends; Houston to visit her twin, who was pregnant with her first child; in campers to Myrtle Beach; several trips to Niagara Falls—even after their honeymoon and always that same hotel with the mirror on the ceiling over the bed and the heart-shaped Jacuzzi.
David put her in the Jacuzzi with bubble bath, bubbles overflowing everywhere, and gave her a glass of wine. At the bottom of the glass was the first diamond ring she ever received.
Then back to Houston to meet the new niece, Mindy. Then to Hawaii, Janice on an airplane for the first time. They rented a condo in Avon, North Carolina, and on one very dark night, she and David went for a walk, just the two of them, carrying only a blanket. They passed a group of people sitting around a campfire. One of them was playing guitar. David and Janice walked, hand in hand, into the pitch blackness. They came to the water, laid out the blanket, and made the best-ever love.
And Key West, 1999, which turned out to be the last vacation. Back home, back at work, the relaxed and fun David always disappeared.
After searching and searching, Janice finally located a book that explained her marriage. It was called The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. She took the book’s advice and wrote David a letter, a list of demands that she be treated more like a grown woman, with at least some of the freedoms that other women enjoyed, her own money, a car to go places.
Even if you were perfect, which you are not, she wrote, I need more than just you in my life. Even if you made me feel one-hundred percent good, which you don’t, I need more than just you in my life.
David read the letter. “I don’t deserve to go on after what I’ve done,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” Janice reassured him.
He said he would change, but the control he exerted was still there.
“He merely changed his tactics,” she noted.
If she wanted to go somewhere, he made her feel so guilty. He told her she hated him and was making him suffer for all he had done to her.
And when she went someplace, wherever it might be, she was only half there: there but not there. She would give up. Reliant on routine, she’d return home.
Sensing that he was losing the control he needed, David took the verbal abuse to a new extreme. She was f’ing stupid, he said, an f’ing idiot. No f’ing brains.
He was very mean, telling her that if she got her way, the horrific thing that happened to her before they started going out was going to happen again.
Was that what she wanted?
The abuse became physical. He grabbed her, his grip painfully tight, like her arm was being crushed in a vise grip. When she did manage a trip outside without him, there were hours-long interrogations when she returned. He told her they needed to be together all the time.
“When we die, you’ll be buried next to me, right?” David would say. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Janice refused to make that promise. Nobody knew when their time was going to be up, and under what circumstances it would come.
“When we go, we go together,” David said.
One of their rare good days came on July 24, 1999, when David Jr. married his longtime girlfriend, June. Janice and her husband danced to his favorite song, “Lady in Red,” and when the band’s time was up, David Sr. agreed to go in halves with June’s dad to keep the band playing.
David and Janice were together for a long time, a lifetime. They split up after twenty-six years together and twenty-three years of marriage. She left him in January 2000 for the fourth and final time. The final straw came on a Saturday night when David “did an extreme” to her that nearly “did her in.”
She loved Dave when she left him—but she couldn’t do it anymore. She left with the clothes on her back and her purse. If you included the house and the business and everything, she left behind $300,000 in assets.
She went to a grocery store and felt her grip on reality slipping. When her senses snapped back, after she imagined hearing her son’s voice, she called a friend and asked her to take her to “the shelter.” She called David Sr. and told him she was going. He screamed for her not to leave, but she couldn’t be dissuaded. She told him the van was in the grocery store parking lot and the keys were under the seat.
Janice’s friend picked her up at the grocery store and took her to Vera House, named after Sister Mary Vera. For the first few days, she didn’t eat or sleep. She was on her own among strangers for the first time.
While she was there, David drank and drove, heading who knows where, until he was busted for DWI.
“Leaving him was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my entire life,” she said. “I had never been on my own before. It was traumatic. I went from one extreme to the other, from being completely controlled, to being completely free.”
She lost her home, her job, and her husband all at once. When she left, she didn’t leave a forwarding address and there was no way for Dave to contact her.
With Janice out of David Sr.’s life, David Jr. became the brunt of his father’s frustrations. David Sr. was putting “every emotion you could possibly have” on his son.
“I could see that this burden was weighing heavily on David Jr.,” Janice said. “He would tell me that nothing was wrong, but I knew better. I could tell.”
Janice said she’d held no grudge against her husband when she left him. While it was true that their relationship was one of dominance and submissiveness, it was not a sadomasochistic relationship.
David wasn’t controlling because he wanted to be mean and she didn’t stay because she enjoyed being mistreated. It was just the way things had developed.
She just wanted big David to learn from his mistakes and be happy. The business remained his. She didn’t want to take it away from him. She just did what she had to do.
“I didn’t want to beat him up or destroy him, and the business was his livelihood,” she recalled. “Although in the state he was in, he was going to lose the business.”
Janice’s father-in-law stepped in and helped David, and saved the business for him. Her mother-in-law said she was hurt terribly by the separation, but she wanted Janice to know she still loved her and she would always be welcome in the Castor home.
Janice left Vera House after receiving a phone call from Texas from her twin sister, Janet. Their mother was gravely ill, her heart, so Janice flew there to be with her.
Miraculously, her mom recovered, doctors shocked her heart back into working order, but while in Texas, Janice learned from her twin that David had told her family, including her mom and dad, all about the horrible thing that had happened when she was thirteen.
“He said that it had been haunting you and that’s why you left him,” Janet explained.
Janice was stunned. For one thing, she had never wanted her father to know her horrible secret. For another, David was refusing to take any responsibility for their breakup, and was blaming her past.
On April 10, 2000, Janice returned to the shelter. Two days later, she retained a divorce lawyer from Hiscock Legal Aid. At first, she attended counseling classes, “Onward and Upward,” designed to teach her to be more independent.
After a few weeks in class, she moved on to the “Displaced Homemaker’s Program,” where she learned work skills, such as how to use a computer. When she “graduated” from the shelter, she went to live with friends for a time, and then shared an apartment with a couple she hardly knew.
She bought a beat-up old car to get around and got a job at a hotel just down the road—which was a good thing because she’d been denied unemployment.
Life went smoothly until August when, against Janice’s instructions, the Department of Labor gave her address to David. That meant she had to move.
She stayed briefly with old friends in Onondaga Hill before finding a nice apartment in Syracuse. For nine months, she’d lived out of a suitcase, and now, for the first time in her life, she got to set up house for herself and only for herself.
There was an enveloping feeling of independence that most people feel as teenagers, many others as young adults. Janice, on the other hand, was forty-two.
It wasn’t long before David again learned her address. She couldn’t move again, because she had a yearlong lease, but she did put an extra dead bolt on the door.
In April of 2001, a friend of Janice’s was murdered by her husband in Weedsport. The former couple shared custody of their son. He shot her and then turned the gun on himself in front of the kid. That incident amplified Janice’s domestic terrors.
That summer, Janice earned her GED.
David got a new girlfriend named Jenny. He brought her in to work at the office and forced his father to leave. His dad had brought a TV with him to work to watch an hour-long show he enjoyed. David had a fit. He cut his dad’s pay and gave himself a raise. Predictably, his father split. David asked Jenny to marry him, she said no, and they broke up. He quickly recruited another girlfriend, this one named Valerie, and repeated the pattern. He proposed; Val said no; Val was gone.
David and Janice’s divorce became final on August 31, 2001. Janice was not impressed with the job her lawyer did. In retrospect, Janice thought she would have been better off paying the lawyer not to represent her.
Janice gave away what little money she got from the divorce, but she did keep the trailer in Pulaski, and that was where David Jr. went to live after he got out of the service.
By that time David Castor’s divorce was final, Janice Poissant was promoted to supervisor at the hotel, and Stacey Daniels Wallace was a widow wondering how she was going to raise two girls on her own. She spotted David and, like fishing in a barrel, easily hooked him.
Predictably, Stacey was hired on as girlfriend/ office manager at Liverpool Heating, just like Jenny and Val and Janice before her. But when David asked this one to be his wife, she answered with an enthusiastic yes.
David and Stacey were married on August 16, 2003. David didn’t tell his parents until after the fact, and his parents notified his ex-wife. Using the same grapevine, Janice received occasional updates on David’s new family. All Janice knew about Ashley and Bree was that they didn’t clean up after themselves and this drove David nuts.
When Janice heard David had remarried, she instinctively knew that there was no love there. “He was a perfect target with a lot of assets,” Janice recalled. He owned a good home and had a very prosperous business. Plus, he had all of those toys. The new wife wanted what he had more than she wanted him, and he was so desperate not to be alone that he couldn’t see it.
The year 2005 was one of death. On January 17, Janice’s dad died in Texas after a long asbestos-related illness. David wanted to attend the funeral. Janice said no, but she felt bad about it.
On July 22, David’s dad passed away from mesothelioma—also from asbestos exposure. Janice went to the funeral home. She didn’t remember if she saw Stacey, but she did say hi to her ex-husband. She’d thought he was his brother Steve and didn’t realize her mistake until it was too late.
Janice’s first distinctive memory of Stacey was at the Pine Plains Cemetery in Clay, standing around the burial plot. She briefly saw her standing next to David and looked away.
At the grave site, Janice did a surprisingly bold thing. She asked if she could say a few words, and, of course, David’s family said sure. So Janice said, “Dad, I love you so very dearly!” That said, she shifted the subject: “I would like to thank David Sr. for our time together.” One would imagine that got Stacey’s attention. “Thank you for what we had,” Janice continued. Without their long and loving relationship, she noted, there would be no David Jr. She also thanked David’s family for always being so kind to her.
Unknowingly, David Castor Sr. had one month to live.
After his dad’s funeral, there was a family gathering at Mom Castor’s, and Janice and Stacey found themselves in the same house. They did not acknowledge one another, but Janice admitted to looking at her as much as she could.
Mostly, Janice remembered Stacey standing at the picnic table in the garage helping herself to some food. Janice could see the lack of love there. Stacey was emitting some troubling vibes. Maybe it was what Janice had said at the grave site, or maybe because she sensed that Janice didn’t trust her, but Stacey gave off very strong keep-your-distance vibes. One time Janice glanced over at Stacey and felt shivers run up and down her spine.
David Jr. asked for Janice’s permission before speaking to his father. She gave it wholeheartedly, reminding him that their marital problems had nothing to do with him. This broke the ice and David Sr. got to meet his grandchildren before he died.
On August 22, 2005, Janice took her mom to a specialist. She had survived her major heart scare, but she still required regular medical attention. At the doctor’s, her mom mentioned David. This caused Janice to burst into tears. She cried hard and long. It was a bizarre reaction to a casual mention.
Janice would come to blame clairvoyance. She must have known somewhere deep inside that the love of her life had died. After taking her mother to her sister’s, she became restless and was taking a drive when her cell phone went off. It was her daughter-in-law, June, telling her to go to June’s parents’ house.
When she arrived, David Jr. was waiting for her. “Mom, Dad is dead,” he said.
She refused to believe it. June’s father said it was true. He’d driven past the house on Wetzel and saw all the cop cars and yellow tape. He stopped and asked and was told his daughter’s father-in-law had committed suicide.
Janice lost feeling in her legs and crumbled to the ground at the edge of the driveway. She didn’t remember much after that. She was taken inside and then home, all the time her brain swimming with if only this and if only that. She’d had a premonition in the doctor’s office. If she’d gone straight to him, would she have been able to save him?
Janice knew right away that suicide was out of the question. Then, as she learned more about what Stacey was saying, she became suspicious. When Stacey told the story, she made David sound like an alcoholic, and Janice knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t even a regular drinker. Just on special occasions.
David’s siblings—well, mostly David’s younger sister Linda—later gave Janice a full report on David’s funeral. Stacey showed no emotion. Ashley and Bree were emotional. Maybe too emotional, and it occurred to some that the girls were enjoying the drama. They acted as if they liked David, when everyone knew they didn’t.
“It was the weirdest funeral ever,” Linda said. Something about it didn’t feel right.
One old friend was overheard to say, “Stacey was a paramedic. She should have known what to do.”
The murmurings of discomfort among David’s friends and loved ones at the funeral boiled into a teeth-grinding fury as they proceeded to the grave site—which was, as more than one complained, in the “middle of freakin’ nowhere.” Stacey was putting David in a place he didn’t belong. No one could believe how far away it was. The anger grew when they arrived at the grave site and saw that David was to be buried next to Stacey’s first husband.
A few days after the funeral, Janice received a letter from Stacey.
It read: Janice, Although I don’t know if you’ll ever read this letter I feel I need to share something with you. Stacey wrote that she wanted to thank Janice for respecting and honoring the promise Stacey claimed to have made to David by not coming to the funeral.
I hope you know that it had little to do with my personal feelings, but I made a promise to him and I had to keep that, Stacey wrote. Stacey didn’t know whether or not Janice chose to go to the funeral home on her own. As long as I don’t know, I didn’t break my promise.
She also wanted Janice to know how proud she should be of David Jr.: I’m positive you already are, Stacey wrote. You raised an amazing young man.
Stacey wrote that she felt very cheated that she hadn’t had an opportunity to get to know David’s only son better. Stacey wrote that young David was probably the gentlest, kindest young man she had ever met. And she knew it was due to Janice’s influence in his life.
I hope this has not upset you in any way, the letter concluded. That was not my intent at all. I hope both you and David Jr. find peace in your lives. You both deserve it. Sincerely, Stacey.
As soon as Janice read that letter, she told her son that she was reading between the lines. She told him that his father, first of all, would never ask that Janice wouldn’t be allowed at his funeral, and second of all, why would he ever say such a thing in the first place? He didn’t know he was going to be murdered.
“I knew that it was Stacey who didn’t want me there. She threw in that stuff about David Jr., even though it was true, just to keep me happy,” Janice said.
That part about David Jr. and her finding peace in their lives—that was Stacey’s way of telling them to move on with their lives and leave everything to her.
Around that time, David Jr. also received a letter from Stacey. It said she was in possession of his father’s will. She was sorry to inform him that he was not mentioned.
Stacey requested an in-person meeting at David Jr.’s home to discuss the things of his father’s that he wanted. David showed the letter to his mother, who fumed.
Janice was worried that Stacey would take advantage of her son, so she gave young David a pep talk.
“Don’t trust her,” Janice said. “Your emotions are high. You’re not thinking straight. That’s normal. It’s not a good time to negotiate. Even if you do take some items, don’t finalize it. Tell her you need more time to think about it. Don’t sign anything! Don’t trust her!”
Janice promised to be in the car somewhere in the vicinity at the time of the meeting so she could swoop in and save her son, in case something happened. “I can be there in a few seconds if you need me,” Janice emphasized.
The meeting was short. Afterward, Stacey left so Janice could pick up her son in private. Janice picked up David Jr. and asked him how it went. “She brought some stuff to the house for me,” David Jr. replied. They were army savings bonds, a teddy bear, a toy truck and car, a handprint he had made in plaster when he was in grammar school, some jewelry of his dad’s.
“Did she show you a copy of the will?” Janice asked.
“No.”
“Did you sign anything?”
“No.”
Yes, he named some items he wanted in addition to those he’d just received. No, he did not finalize negotiations in any way, and, yes, he asked for more time to think of items he wanted.
Time passed and eventually Janice advised her son it was time to get back in touch with Stacey. They would run an experiment to gauge Stacey’s sincerity.
“What were some of those items you said you wanted from your father?” Janice asked.
“Some tools and stuff,” David Jr. replied.
“Call Stacey, tell her you want to come over and pick up the tools. Tell her you’re working on one of your vehicles and you need the tools.”
David Jr. called Stacey, and she said, sorry, he couldn’t have the tools because “everything needed to be liquidated.”
“She has no intention of giving you anything else,” Janice said. “She wants it all.”
Janice first learned that the authorities were investigating David’s death through his youngest brother, Steve. It was also from Steve that Janice learned David died of antifreeze poisoning. It was a tough time. She was working two jobs—at a welding company and at the hotel—and was having trouble keeping anything organized in her personal life. Steve also said that Janice probably knew some things that would be of interest to the sheriff’s deputies who were investigating David’s death. Steve gave Janice the name and number of Detective Dominick Spinelli, the investigator in charge. She called and introduced herself to the detective as a woman who had been with the victim for twenty-six years, 24/7, and she knew he didn’t commit suicide. Spinelli said he’d come to her and they chatted. She gave Spinelli the letter Stacey wrote to her a few days after David’s funeral. She told him about the will her son still hadn’t seen, that it was impossible for that will to be real if it didn’t mention David’s son.
Janice got in touch with Frank Josef, the attorney who prepared David’s real will. She requested a copy of that document so she could show Spinelli what a real David Castor will looked like. She next called David Horan, her ex-husband’s Prudential Life Insurance agent, who verified that Stacey had received the money. She checked on David’s three retirement funds and discovered Stacey had cashed in all three.
She didn’t really want to know, but she couldn’t help herself, and she looked up death by antifreeze. She was horrified by what she read. During her research, she encountered stories about the Turner murders in Georgia. There were so many similarities.
Janice knew that Stacey’s first husband also died prematurely. Police needed to look into that. She called Spinelli, who said they were on top of it. “These things take time,” he told her, and swore her to secrecy.
She continued to help with the investigation in every way she could, supplying Spinelli with contact information for employees of the business, including the names of the two women David had proposed to before meeting Stacey.
Sometimes Spinelli would call Janice with specific questions: “Who’s Bob Ross?” It was a name he’d seen in the contested will. Janice explained that Robert and Cindy Ross were friends from way back, but they had sided with David after the divorce. Janice spoke with Cindy on the phone once after David’s death and expressed her disbelief regarding David’s “suicide.” It didn’t take long for Janice to realize the Rosses were on Stacey’s side, and the conversation was not a long one.
Janice made sure the grapevine remained open between her and the Castor family. Everyone who drove past the Wetzel Road home kept an eye out for Stacey or other activity. It was through word of mouth that Janice learned Stacey had a boyfriend. She’d been seen out with him, kissing in public. He’d been spotted pulling a Christmas tree into the house.
After Janice’s father died in January 2005, David owed Janice’s mother money from when David bought out the business. Now that debt belonged to Stacey, so Janice contacted an attorney to help her mother collect. The attorney recommended just calling Stacey and asking for her to pay up, thus saving legal fees, so that was what Janice did.
“Hello.”
“Stacey?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“Janice.”
“Janice who?”
“Janice Poissant! I’m wondering if we could meet someplace and talk.”
“I wish never to speak to you. Don’t call me again,” Stacey said, and hung up.