She Poisoned Two Husbands, Then Tried to Frame Her Own Daughter | The Stacey Castor Case

She buried two husbands. She cried at the right funerals. She made dinner every night.

And then she tried to frame her own daughter for murder.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we break down the case of Stacey Castor — a Syracuse wife and mother who poisoned the men in her life with antifreeze, then turned on her own daughter when the investigation got too close. What makes this case so unsettling isn't the violence. It's the patience. The performance. The cold, quiet calculation of a woman who was never once suspected — because she was too busy being exactly what everyone needed her to be.

In This Episode:

• The small-town upbringing that raised no red flags — and why that matters
• The death of Michael Wallace, ruled cardiac arrest, revisited years later
• How David Castor died and what the life insurance trail revealed
• The night Stacey poisoned her daughter Ashley and typed a confession in her name
• Ashley's testimony — and what it took to sit across from her mother in that courtroom
• The forensic evidence that unraveled everything: metadata, handwriting, toxicology
• The psychology of psychopathy, performed warmth, and what happens when a daughter becomes a threat

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Transcript

1
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Kaitlyn:
It's just a house. A suburban house in Syracuse, New York.

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Kaitlyn:
Not big or small, just one of those houses that blends right into the street.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind where the blinds were always at the same level, and the car is in the driveway by six.

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Kaitlyn:
Ordinary in the way that makes you drive past without thinking twice.

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Kaitlyn:
But inside that house, there's a woman.

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Kaitlyn:
She's in her 30s, and then her 40s.

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Kaitlyn:
She works, she makes dinner, she takes her kids to school.

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Kaitlyn:
She's the kind of woman you would describe without hesitation as dependable,

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Kaitlyn:
capable, and clearly a good mother.

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Kaitlyn:
The person who shows up, but she got married twice, and then both of her husbands died.

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Kaitlyn:
Both deaths at first look like accidents, like bad luck, like the kind of heartbreak

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Kaitlyn:
that makes the neighbors drop off a casserole and quietly say to each other,

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Kaitlyn:
that poor woman, how does she manage?

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Kaitlyn:
How does she find a way to keep going? And she manages beautifully.

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Kaitlyn:
She always manages beautifully.

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Kaitlyn:
And then one night in September of 2007, her daughter is found unconscious.

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Kaitlyn:
There's pills all around her. There's a note on the desk. And then they look at her test results.

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Kaitlyn:
There's antifreeze. Her daughter does survive, but barely.

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Kaitlyn:
And when her daughter wakes up, someone places that note in front of her,

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Kaitlyn:
and she reads it once and says, I didn't write this.

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Kaitlyn:
Her mother, standing right beside her, says, honey, yes, you did. Who's her mom?

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Kaitlyn:
Stacey Castor. And this is the story of how she got to that moment,

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Kaitlyn:
how a woman builds a life out of performance and patience and a very specific kind of poison.

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Kaitlyn:
Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening

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Kaitlyn:
to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed

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Kaitlyn:
by women, but why they happened, and the psychology behind them.

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Kaitlyn:
Today's case is not a story only about violent outbursts or some sort of crime

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Kaitlyn:
of passion, because there's no rage here, and there's no dramatic breaking point.

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Kaitlyn:
This instead is something quieter, and in a lot of ways more frightening.

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Kaitlyn:
A woman who made cold, careful, deliberate decisions and then made dinner.

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Kaitlyn:
Who looked her daughters in the eye every morning, cried at the right funerals,

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Kaitlyn:
and who for years was never once suspected because she was too busy being exactly

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Kaitlyn:
what everyone needed her to be.

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Kaitlyn:
This is the story of Stacey Castor.

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Kaitlyn:
Wife, mother, and as a jury of peers would eventually decide, murderer.

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Kaitlyn:
Stacey Ruth Daniels was born August 24th, 1967, in Canastota, New York.

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Kaitlyn:
Small town, central New York. This is a place where seasons are brutal,

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Kaitlyn:
but the community is tight, and everyone more or less knows everyone else's

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Kaitlyn:
business, whether or not they actually want to.

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Kaitlyn:
But her parents did divorce when she was young.

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Kaitlyn:
Her mother remarried. And this isn't uncommon, this isn't something to worry

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Kaitlyn:
about. But Stacey grew up in what most people would describe as ordinary, even with a divorce.

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Kaitlyn:
Their family wasn't wealthy, but it wasn't destitute.

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Kaitlyn:
The working class is what we typically call this.

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Kaitlyn:
In a small upstate New York town, where you got by and you didn't make a fuss about it.

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Kaitlyn:
But here's the thing about Stacey's childhood that I want you to look at.

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Kaitlyn:
Because it matters more than it might seem right now. There was no dramatic

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Kaitlyn:
trauma, yes, and there was no abuse on record or obvious wound that explains what comes later.

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Kaitlyn:
Because she was not the kid the teachers worried about, and she was not someone

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Kaitlyn:
flagged by counselors to pull aside in the hallway.

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Kaitlyn:
She was kind, friendly, socially capable, unremarkable in that way,

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Kaitlyn:
and really just a typical kid.

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Kaitlyn:
But what forensic psychologists would tell you about cases like her is that

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Kaitlyn:
sometimes the absence of red flags is the significance.

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Kaitlyn:
Sometimes the story is about a child whose particular wiring,

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Kaitlyn:
that specific combination of low empathy, high social intelligence,

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Kaitlyn:
and an innate need for control was never disrupted.

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Kaitlyn:
It wasn't challenged. No correction.

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Kaitlyn:
And so it just grew quietly underneath everything else. Because Stacey was bright.

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Kaitlyn:
She read people well. She understood from a young age that the right impression

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Kaitlyn:
carefully managed and consistently maintained.

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Kaitlyn:
Could open doors, that circumstances would otherwise keep shut.

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Kaitlyn:
That charm was a resource. That warmth, performed convincingly enough,

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Kaitlyn:
was as good as the real thing.

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Kaitlyn:
She carried that understanding with her right out of her small town and into

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Kaitlyn:
the rest of her life. And she never put it down.

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Kaitlyn:
Stacey moved through her teenage years the way socially intelligent people often do.

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Kaitlyn:
Pretty smooth. And she was pretty. She was well-liked. And she had that quality

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Kaitlyn:
around her that people couldn't quite put their finger on, but they consistently described the same way.

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Kaitlyn:
She seemed to know exactly what to say, and she made people feel seen,

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Kaitlyn:
chosen in a way, like she could look around a room and decide specifically that you were worth her time.

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Kaitlyn:
And like a lot of gifts, that particular one can go both ways.

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Kaitlyn:
Now, Stacey does marry young, but that could be a thing of the times versus

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Kaitlyn:
what we're looking at psychologically here.

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Kaitlyn:
And her first husband, his name was Michael, Wallace.

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Kaitlyn:
She was barely out of her teens when they wed, which tells you something about

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Kaitlyn:
the pace that she was keeping.

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Kaitlyn:
She was moving fast, moving away from something, probably the small town or

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Kaitlyn:
the ordinary circumstances, maybe the life that felt like it had a ceiling where she was living.

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Kaitlyn:
She was headed towards a version of herself that she had already decided she was going to be.

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Kaitlyn:
And the first marriage didn't last. It ended in divorce.

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Kaitlyn:
But what's notable about how she handled really every setback in her life?

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Kaitlyn:
She didn't collapse or fall apart.

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Kaitlyn:
Instead, she looked around, recalibrated, and figured out the next move. But then she kept going.

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Kaitlyn:
Psychologists who study antisocial personality patterns will tell you that this

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Kaitlyn:
kind of emotional resilience, the ability to absorb loss or failure and come

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Kaitlyn:
back without apparent damage, is not always what it looks like.

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Kaitlyn:
For most people, bouncing back requires processing, grief, adjustment,

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Kaitlyn:
the slow integration of what happened.

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Kaitlyn:
But for someone whose relationship to emotion is primarily performative.

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Kaitlyn:
Well, there's not really much to process, is there? Because you don't really grieve performance.

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Kaitlyn:
You just update the script. And Stacey updated the script.

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Kaitlyn:
The next chapter of it was about to begin. But that next chapter meant she also

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Kaitlyn:
had to deal with the last chapter.

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Kaitlyn:
So she got back together with Michael after their divorce.

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Kaitlyn:
Now, they didn't necessarily remarry, but they decided to be a couple again

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Kaitlyn:
and try to make things work.

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Kaitlyn:
At least that's what Michael thought. Because in August of 2000,

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Kaitlyn:
Michael Wallace suddenly died.

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Kaitlyn:
The official cause of death at this point was cardiac arrest.

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Kaitlyn:
He was in his 30s at this point, but he hadn't been ill.

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Kaitlyn:
His death was clearly a sudden and devastating moment.

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Kaitlyn:
And Stacey was, by all accounts, a grieving ex-wife.

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Kaitlyn:
Sad, but composed. She did the appropriate heartbroken act.

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Kaitlyn:
So no one questioned her. And here's what nobody knew in that summer of 2000.

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Kaitlyn:
Michael had not died of a cardiac arrest. He died of poisoning, of ethylene glycol.

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Kaitlyn:
What is that? It's antifreeze.

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Kaitlyn:
That same sweet-tasting colorless liquid that you put in a car radiator.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind that dissolves easily into juice or soda or a glass of something left on the counter.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind that if you don't specifically test for it, it's going to look like a dozen other things.

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Kaitlyn:
And the medical examiner didn't know to test for it at this point. Why would they?

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Kaitlyn:
He was a young man who died suddenly, yes, heart attacks do happen.

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Kaitlyn:
And yes, it was heartbreaking, but the entire family seemed shocked,

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Kaitlyn:
and they all acted appropriately.

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Kaitlyn:
So when Michael Wallace went into the ground, Stacey Castor moved forward,

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Kaitlyn:
and she collected what there was to collect.

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Kaitlyn:
She grieved for the appropriate amount of time.

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Kaitlyn:
And then she looked around, and now it was time for the true next chapter.

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Kaitlyn:
Husband number two, David Castor. David Castor was another good man.

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Kaitlyn:
And I want to say that plainly because the story is so dominated by Stacey that

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Kaitlyn:
David can feel like a background character in his own life.

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Kaitlyn:
But he was not. He was a person.

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Kaitlyn:
He had a trade. He worked in air conditioning and refrigeration,

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Kaitlyn:
which is, yes, a field that antifreeze is part of the job. And he had a quiet life.

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Kaitlyn:
He was steady, reliable, the kind of guy who fixes things and didn't make a lot of noise about it.

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Kaitlyn:
And I think she liked that type because she got married to him in 1991.

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Kaitlyn:
And they had two daughters together, Ashley and Bree. And from the outside, there was a family.

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Kaitlyn:
Stacey was the organized one and the one who kept the schedule and made the plans.

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Kaitlyn:
And David came home and did his part. It worked.

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Kaitlyn:
It appeared to work at least. And it looked like a normal family in the way

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Kaitlyn:
that things were in the 90s.

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Kaitlyn:
But what was happening beneath the surface? the financial tension, the relational drift.

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Kaitlyn:
The slow erosion of a marriage that had never been built on anything Stacey actually wanted.

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Kaitlyn:
That was the invisible part to everyone around Stacey, because Stacey was good at invisible.

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Kaitlyn:
It was by this point her primary skill. And in August of 2005,

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Kaitlyn:
David Castor became ill.

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Kaitlyn:
He was found at home, disoriented, barely conscious.

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Kaitlyn:
He was taken to the hospital. His kidneys were failing.

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Kaitlyn:
Doctors could not immediately explain why. And on August 22,

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Kaitlyn:
2005, David Castor died.

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Kaitlyn:
The initial ruling, natural causes.

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Kaitlyn:
Cardiac event. Stacey did her thing. She grieved. She wore black. She made arrangements.

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Kaitlyn:
She stood at the funeral and accepted condolences from people who looked at

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Kaitlyn:
her and saw exactly what she needed them to see, a widow, and this time a mother,

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Kaitlyn:
a woman holding it together for the sake of her girls.

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Kaitlyn:
She collected the life insurance, $187,000 in total from policies on David.

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Kaitlyn:
She sold his truck. She settled his affairs.

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Kaitlyn:
And within a fairly short period of time, she began a new relationship.

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Kaitlyn:
And yes, it was a pattern. This man's name was Anthony, Anthony Pignataro.

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Kaitlyn:
He was a former physician, but his medical license had been revoked after a

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Kaitlyn:
patient died during a procedure that he performed.

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Kaitlyn:
He was charismatic, but he was complicated.

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Kaitlyn:
And in retrospect, extremely lucky to be alive.

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Kaitlyn:
Because in 2005, the same year that David died, Anthony started to get sick.

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Kaitlyn:
Mysteriously sick. And he was hospitalized for it. His kidneys began to fail.

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Kaitlyn:
Doctors were baffled. But he recovered.

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Kaitlyn:
Barely. And it would be years before anyone thought to test his system for antifreeze.

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Kaitlyn:
And when they did, oh, I know you know, they found it. But we're not there yet

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Kaitlyn:
because before the investigation circled back to Anthony, and before anyone

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Kaitlyn:
started looking closely at either man's death, something else happened entirely.

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Kaitlyn:
Something that would crack the entire story open.

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Kaitlyn:
Because by 2007, the investigation into David Castor's death had quietly reopened.

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Kaitlyn:
Investigators had started asking questions, pulling records,

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Kaitlyn:
looking at the life insurance payouts, and looking at the timeline.

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Kaitlyn:
Looking at the fact that a relatively healthy man in his 40s had died of kidney

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Kaitlyn:
failure with no prior history of illness and no clear medical explanation.

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Kaitlyn:
Stacey knew they were looking. She was not a stupid woman.

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Kaitlyn:
She had always understood that the weakest point in any cover story is the people

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Kaitlyn:
who might remember something, who might talk, who might one day put the pieces together.

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Kaitlyn:
Her daughter Ashley was 20 years old in the fall of 2007.

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Kaitlyn:
She had grown up watching her mother grieve, watching her mother manage,

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Kaitlyn:
and watching her mother hold things together.

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Kaitlyn:
She loved her mom. She had no reason not to, but she was also starting to ask questions.

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Kaitlyn:
The quiet, persistent questions of a young adult who's trying to understand

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Kaitlyn:
what happened to her father.

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Kaitlyn:
And those questions, to someone like Stacey, were not innocent. They were a threat.

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Kaitlyn:
A loose, dangerous threat.

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Kaitlyn:
On September 14, 2007, Stacey mixed a drink.

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Kaitlyn:
Vodka and fruit punch. At least, that's likely what she mixed.

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Kaitlyn:
And into that drink, she dissolved a significant quantity of substances.

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Kaitlyn:
Belonging to the medicine cabinet that she had in her home, enough substances

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Kaitlyn:
to shut down the central nervous system.

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Kaitlyn:
But she also added antifreeze. And then she gave that drink to Ashley.

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Over the course of that evening, Ashley became increasingly disoriented.

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Stacey encouraged her to drink more. She may have given her additional substances

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directly at some point, and Ashley lost consciousness.

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And she was put into her bed. And while her daughter lay dying on the other

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side of the wall, Stacey sat down at the family computer and typed a note.

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The note was in Ashley's voice, or Stacey's best approximation of it.

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It expressed guilt, grief, and a young woman's supposed confession to having

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poisoned her own father.

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It was designed to do two things, explain Ashley's death as a suicide,

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and close the investigation into David Castor's murder by providing a culprit,

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a dead culprit, who could never contradict the story.

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It was, by any measure, a breathtaking piece of calculation. Two birds, one stone.

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Every open thread tied off. Stacey placed the note on the desk.

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She left the substances in plain sight, and the next morning, she called for help.

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What she didn't expect? Ashley wasn't dead.

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She was found unresponsive and barely breathing, but she had a pulse that paramedics

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later described was nearly undetectable.

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She was rushed to the hospital and put on life support.

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And for a period of hours, it was genuinely not clear whether she would survive, but she did.

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And when she was well enough to speak, a nurse placed that note in front of

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her and asked her to read it.

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Ashley looked at it for a long moment, and then she said, I didn't write this.

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I would never write this.

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My mother wrote this. The investigation, which had been quietly building for

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months, became something else entirely.

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Investigators moved quickly once Ashley was out of danger. They took the note

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and sent it to a forensic document examiner.

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They pulled the family's computer.

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They subpoenaed the phone records. And they went back to the hospital toxicology

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from Ashley's admission. and they ran additional panels looking for things a

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standard talk screen might miss.

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What they found piece by piece was this. The note had been created on the family

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computer and not Ashley.

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The computer use that day had been minimal and did not include the document in question.

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But during a window of time when Stacey was home and Ashley was already incapacitated,

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the handwriting analyst, because Stacey had also handwritten additions to the note,

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concluded that the writing was not consistent with Ashley's known samples.

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It was consistent with Stacey's, and Ashley's blood work confirmed antifreeze,

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the same substance that investigators now believed had killed David two years

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earlier and had nearly killed Anthony around the same time.

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David's body was exhumed. A new toxicology screen was run.

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They needed to make sure how he actually died this time, and they found the

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poisoning, not cardiac arrest. It was not natural causes.

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Intentional poisoning over what appeared to be an extended period of time.

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And Michael Wallace's death, the one back in 2000 that had been filed as a cardiac

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event and quietly forgotten, was re-examined as well.

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There was the same substance, the same method, and the same woman present in both cases.

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So Stacey was arrested in January of 2008.

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And then she did something that

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tells you, more than anything else in this story, exactly who she was.

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She gave a television interview, on camera, in her own living room.

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Calm as still water, she denied everything. She cried at the right moments,

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but not too much and not too little.

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She pointed the finger at Anthony, the disgraced former doctor.

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She said he had access. She said she was a grieving widow who was being scapegoated.

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Of course, she was performing right up until the handcuffs went on and probably a little after, too.

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But her case went to trial, which began on February of 2009.

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The prosecution, led by District Attorney William Fitzpatrick,

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had built a case that was, by that time, extraordinarily difficult to argue against.

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They just had too much evidence. the toxicology from David, Ashley's hospital

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admission, Anthony's records.

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Everything said the same thing.

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Antifreeze. And then there was the forged note and the computer metadata,

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Kaitlyn:
plus the handwriting analysis and the testimony of forensic document examiners

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who had spent weeks pulling it apart.

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And then there was the life insurance.

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187,000 on David. And these policies that Stacey had taken out on a man who

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was not ill, well, she did it pretty much right before they died.

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And then there was Ashley.

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Ashley took the stand against her mother. And think about what that takes to

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sit in a courtroom with the woman who raised you sitting 20 feet away to describe

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in clinical precise detail the night that this woman who you love and should

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love you, tried to kill you.

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And to hold yourself together in front of a jury while you explain that the

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person you loved most in the world, she put antifreeze in your drink and then

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typed a note in your name so that when they found your body,

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they would think you did it to yourself.

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People in that courtroom said that they would never forget Ashley's testimony,

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the composure of it, the steadiness.

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She didn't rage or collapse. She simply told the truth, clearly and completely, and she let it stand.

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The defense argued that Anthony was the real killer, that he had motive,

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and that he had access to antifreeze through legitimate reasons.

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That Stacey was being framed by a man trying to save himself.

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They tried, but all the evidence, really, how could you point in that direction?

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No matter how hard you want to push into that, there's really no evidence to support it.

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And on February 5th, 2009, after a trial that had lasted several weeks,

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the jury returned its verdict.

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Stacey was found guilty of second-degree murder in the death of David Castor,

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and she was found guilty of second-degree attempted murder in the poisoning

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of her daughter, Ashley.

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She was sentenced to 51 and a third years to life in prison.

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She was 41 years old. She maintained her innocence. She continued to appeal.

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But on June 11th, 2016, she died in prison. I bet you can't guess this one.

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She died of a heart attack. She was 48 years old.

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The same cause of death, the official kind, that she had once deranged for others.

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So now we get to the question that I think about most with this case.

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Not what she did, because the record is clear on what she did,

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but who she was. What was actually happening inside of this woman?

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Forensic psychologists who have reviewed Stacey's case most commonly apply the

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framework of psychopathy, specifically the traits identified by researcher Robert Hare.

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A grandiose self-image, a manipulative interpersonal style, a pathological ease with lying,

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and a near total absence of remorse, and a consistent failure to take responsibility

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for harm caused to others.

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These are not traits that appear suddenly. They are developmental.

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They build over years, shaped by the particular combination of wiring and environment

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that Stacey was handed at birth and grew up in.

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Not that it was bad, it was just a perfect storm for her.

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But here's what I keep coming back to, the layer of this case that I find genuinely hard to resolve.

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Kaitlyn:
By most accounts, Stacey was a real mother to her daughters,

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not just technically and not just by performance, Though performance was always

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a part of it, but she showed up and she was present.

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Ashley and her sister Bree grew

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up in a household where her mother was engaged, a tentative, involved.

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Ashley really loved her mother. She said that. She even said so herself.

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She said it even after everything. But then Stacey tried to kill her.

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Kaitlyn:
How do you hold both of those things?

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Because the easy answer, the comfortable answer, is to say that all of it was fake.

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Kaitlyn:
That the warmth was just another performance and that there was nothing real

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underneath any of it. But I just don't think that's quite right.

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Kaitlyn:
I think what's more accurate and more disturbing is that there was a hierarchy.

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And at the top of that hierarchy was Stacey.

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Kaitlyn:
Her safety, her control, her version of events. And when questioned,

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specifically by Ashley, when she asked questions, not deliberately or aggressively,

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Kaitlyn:
just being alive and asking questions, she stopped being a daughter and officially

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Kaitlyn:
became a problem that needed to be solved.

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Kaitlyn:
And that must have been the shift, that moment when a person you love becomes an obstacle.

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Kaitlyn:
And that's what psychopathy looks like in practice. Not the absence of all feeling,

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Kaitlyn:
the conditional nature of it all.

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Kaitlyn:
The way that feeling evaporates the moment it conflicts with self-interest.

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And then there's the forged note. I keep coming back to the note because to

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Kaitlyn:
write a note in your daughter's voice.

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Kaitlyn:
So think about this. You're sitting down at a computer while your daughter is

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Kaitlyn:
unconscious in the next room.

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And you're finding her words, her cadence, her grief, and her guilt,

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Kaitlyn:
that's not something most humans could do, even if they wanted to.

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Kaitlyn:
The psychological distance required to perform that act to inhibit your child's

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Kaitlyn:
innermost voice as a tool for framing her, it's almost incomprehensible.

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Kaitlyn:
Unless you have spent your entire life treating other people's inner lives as

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Kaitlyn:
material, as something to read, to replicate, and to use, In which case,

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Kaitlyn:
it might not feel monstrous at all. It might feel like just the next move.

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Kaitlyn:
Researchers who study women who commit intimate partner crime consistently note the same pattern.

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Kaitlyn:
These crimes are methodical.

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Kaitlyn:
Patient. They unfold across months or years.

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Kaitlyn:
The domestic setting, the kitchen, the bedroom, the glass of juice on the counter,

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Kaitlyn:
becomes both the crime scene and the perfect cover, because who suspects the caregiver?

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Kaitlyn:
Although, after listening to a few of these episodes of GBRLIFE of Crimes,

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I'm hoping you're starting to look at any caregiver as more than just immediately innocent.

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Kaitlyn:
They may be innocent, but always take a second glance. Either way, when it comes to Stacey,

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Kaitlyn:
it's clear that, yes, she was mentally ill with likely antisocial personality

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Kaitlyn:
disorder as a psychiatric diagnosis.

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Kaitlyn:
And psychopathy involves documented neurological differences.

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Kaitlyn:
Reduced activity in those areas of the brain associated with fear and empathy and moral reasoning.

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Kaitlyn:
And studies have shown repeatedly that people who score high on psychopathy

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Kaitlyn:
measures process emotional information differently at a fundamental structural level.

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Kaitlyn:
So there was something different about Stacey's brain entirely.

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Kaitlyn:
That is almost certainly true. But does that mean that she doesn't know what she was doing?

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Kaitlyn:
Because I'm sure that's the next question you wanted to ask.

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Kaitlyn:
No. The evidence answers that question definitively.

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Kaitlyn:
Because she planned and prepared and she covered her tracks for years.

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Kaitlyn:
She knew exactly what she was doing and she knew it was wrong.

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Kaitlyn:
In the legal sense, in the moral sense, in the human sense, she just didn't

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Kaitlyn:
experience that wrongness the way the rest of us do.

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Kaitlyn:
It didn't stop her. It didn't even slow her down.

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Kaitlyn:
And even though it didn't slow her down, it's scary to think it's possible she

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Kaitlyn:
was born this way, but it's also possible she wasn't. And it was possibly...

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Kaitlyn:
A creation. The creation of a type of human that none of us ever really want to meet.

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Kaitlyn:
Especially because when you really think about it, someone like Stacey,

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Kaitlyn:
wearing a mask her entire life, became exactly who the mask was.

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Kaitlyn:
Because when you wear a mask long enough, you stop being able to feel where

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Kaitlyn:
it ends and when your face begins.

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Kaitlyn:
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions,

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Kaitlyn:
and I'm Kaitlyn reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light.

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Kaitlyn:
Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought

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Kaitlyn:
we knew about the criminal mind.