Stacey Castor, known as the Black Widow of New York, poisoned two men she married and then tried to frame her surviving daughter with a fabricated suicide note.
Stacey Castor
American Female Murder | Serial Poisoner
- Full Name: Stacey Ruth Castor
- Alias: The Black Widow of New York
- Born: July 24, 1967 – Weedsport, New York, USA
- Died: June 11, 2016 – Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York (natural causes)
- Occupation: Office administrator; HVAC company bookkeeper
- Victims:
- Michael Wallace (first husband, age 38, poisoned in 2000)
- David Castor (second husband, age 48, poisoned in 2005)
- Ashley Wallace (daughter, survived poisoning attempt in 2007)
- Weapon: Ethylene glycol (antifreeze)
- Arrested: September 2007
- Convicted: 2009 – Second-degree murder, attempted murder, and forgery
- Sentence: 51 years to life imprisonment
- Time Served: Approximately 7 years
- Status: Died in prison in 2016 of a heart attack
Classification & Characteristics
Stacey Castor fits the psychological profile of a serial poisoner and narcissistic manipulator, displaying hallmark traits of instrumental aggression – deliberate, goal-driven harm for personal gain.
Her weapon of choice, antifreeze, reflects both planning and patience. Poisoners of this type often exhibit control-oriented psychopathy: they kill quietly, rationally and with chilling calculation.
In Castor’s case, her violence was uniquely intimate – directed at those closest to her. She didn’t just eliminate threats; she rewrote their narratives. By attempting to frame her own daughter, Ashley Wallace, she revealed a moral void deeper than greed – a desire to maintain dominance even as her world collapsed.
Criminologists often categorize her as a Black Widow Killer, motivated by financial gain and the illusion of victimhood. Yet Castor’s manipulation of sympathy, law enforcement, and even her surviving child marks her as something rarer: a woman whose crimes blurred the line between self-preservation and self-destruction.
Chronology of Events – The Antifreeze Murders
The First Husband: Michael Wallace (2000)
In January of 2000, Michael Wallace, Stacey’s first husband, became ill over several days — dizzy, weak, and disoriented. Stacey insisted he had the flu. He died suddenly on January 11, 2000, at age 38.
Doctors attributed his death to a heart attack, and no autopsy was performed. Stacey refused one, saying the family had “been through enough.”
In the months that followed, she collected his life insurance and moved on. Within a year, she was living with another man – David Castor, a local business owner she would soon marry.
Stacey Castor was a resident of Clay, New York and is a convicted murderer.
In 2007, Stacey Castor was charged with second degree murder, second degree attempted murder and offering a false instrument in the first degree.
She was found guilty of intentionally poisoning then-husband, David Castor, with antifreeze in 2005 and attempting to murder her daughter, Ashley Wallace, with a toxic cocktail consisting of crushed pills mixed in with vodka, orange juice and Sprite in 2007.
In addition, Stacey Castor is suspected of having murdered her first husband, Michael Wallace, whose grave lies next to David Castor’s.
The story made national news and Stacey Castor was subsequently named The Black Widow by media outlets.
The Second Husband: David Castor (2005)
Five years later, tragedy struck again.
On August 22, 2005, Stacey called 911, reporting that her husband David Castor had locked himself in the bedroom after a fight and wasn’t responding. When police forced the door open, they found David’s body sprawled across the bed. A glass of bright green liquid sat on the nightstand. A bottle of antifreeze lay nearby.
Stacey wept to police that her husband had been depressed and must have taken his own life. But something felt off. The scene was too perfect.
An autopsy revealed lethal levels of ethylene glycol in his system – the same poison that had quietly killed her first husband. Investigators found Stacey’s fingerprints on a turkey baster used to force-feed David the antifreeze, and inconsistencies in her story deepened suspicion.
Still, without the first husband’s body, detectives couldn’t yet prove a pattern. They began digging.
The Daughter: Ashley Wallace (2007)
Two years later, tragedy nearly repeated itself – but this time, it didn’t end in death.
In August 2007, Stacey invited her daughter Ashley Wallace, now twenty, to spend the day remembering her father. They drank together. Stacey offered her something to calm her nerves. Ashley drank. Then she passed out and didn’t wake up.
The next morning, Stacey called 911, claiming she’d found Ashley unresponsive with a typed suicide note nearby. The note “confessed” to killing both Michael and David – claiming Ashley had poisoned her father and stepfather out of guilt.
But Ashley didn’t die. She woke up in the hospital and denied everything. The “suicide note,” investigators discovered, was written on Stacey’s computer, using phrases copied directly from her police interviews.
When tested, Ashley’s system showed antifreeze poisoning, the same pattern that killed both men. And once again, Stacey’s fingerprints appeared on the glass used to deliver it.
The Arrest and Trial (2007–2009)
The evidence finally converged. Stacey Castor was arrested in September 2007 and charged with second-degree murder, attempted murder, and forgery.
During her 2009 trial, the prosecution described her as a cold-blooded killer who used antifreeze like a weapon of convenience – and who nearly sacrificed her own child to save herself.
The defense called her a loving mother overwhelmed by loss.
The jury didn’t hesitate. Guilty on all counts.
She was sentenced to 51 years to life in prison, a term she called “unjust.”
From her cell, she maintained her innocence until her death.
Death in Prison (2016)
On June 11, 2016, Stacey Castor was found dead in her cell at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
She was forty-eight years old. The official cause was a heart attack.
She never admitted to a single murder.
To this day, her daughter Ashley Wallace – the one she tried to kill – speaks about surviving not only the poison, but the betrayal. “People ask me how I can forgive her,” she once said. “But I can’t forgive something she never took responsibility for.”
Stacey Castor | Serial Poisoner
Stacey Castor | The Serial Poisoner Who Tried to Frame Her Own Daughter
The Story
Stacey Castor hid her darkness behind a mother’s smile – using antifreeze, a forged note and manipulation to erase two husbands and nearly sacrifice her own daughter to cover her crimes.
She wasn’t a stranger to tragedy. By her mid-thirties, she had buried two husbands and collected the sympathy – and life insurance – that came with each loss. But in the quiet of her kitchen in upstate New York, detectives would later say, Stacey mixed not comfort or kindness, but poison.
What began as a story of misfortune would unravel into one of the most disturbing cases of maternal betrayal in modern true-crime history.
A Mother, a Wife, and a Plan
Stacey Ruth Daniels was born in 1967 in Weedsport, New York. She was bright, attractive and quick to charm. In her early twenties, she met Michael Wallace, a hardworking mechanic with an easy laugh and two young daughters, Ashley and Bree.
To the outside world, they looked like an ordinary family. But by the winter of 1999, Michael began to feel sick. He was dizzy, weak, his speech slurred. Stacey told friends he had the flu. Weeks later, on January 11, 2000, he was dead – only thirty-eight years old.
In late 1999, Wallace began feeling intermittently ill. Family members remember him as acting unsteady, coughing and seeming swollen. As his inexplicable sickness persisted over the holiday season, his family encouraged him to seek medical care. He died, however, in early 2000 before he could see a doctor. Their daughter Ashley was 11 at the time and had been alone with him. She blamed herself for his death. She had noticed his terrible appearance that day, but thought nothing of it.
Doctors called it a heart attack. Stacey refused an autopsy, saying she couldn’t bear to put her husband through more. Friends remembered her calmness at the funeral – polite, tearless, composed.
Within a year, Stacey had a new partner: David Castor, the owner of a small air-conditioning business. They married in 2003, and by then, the first husband’s memory had faded into the background of small-town gossip.
The Second Death
In 2003, Stacey married David Castor. In 2005, at 2:00 p.m. one afternoon, Stacey Castor called her local sheriff’s office to tell them that her husband had locked himself in their bedroom for a day following an argument and was not responding to his cell phone. When he did not appear at their shared workplace, she had become worried. She claimed he was depressed. Unable to get a response, Sergeant Robert Willoughby kicked in the door of the bedroom and found David Castor lying dead. Among the items near his body were a container of antifreeze and a half-full glass of bright green liquid.
On August 22, 2005, Stacey dialed 911.
Her voice was panicked, but her words were steady. Her husband David, she said, had locked himself in their bedroom after an argument and wouldn’t come out.
When police forced the door open, they found him lying on the bed, dead. A half-full glass of bright green liquid sat on the nightstand beside a bottle of antifreeze. A turkey baster lay in the trash can.
The scene screamed suicide. Stacey told investigators David had been depressed about his business and his father’s death. She even mentioned, almost as if remembering aloud, that he had said once that antifreeze “tasted sweet.”
Detectives felt uneasy.
The body was oddly staged and Stacey’s tears dried too quickly.
An autopsy revealed lethal amounts of ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze. There were no fingerprints on the glass – except Stacey’s. No saliva residue, either. Forensic specialists said David hadn’t drunk it willingly; it had likely been forced into his system with the turkey baster.
But with no record of foul play in her past, the case stalled. Until they started looking back.
The Exhumation
The coroner reported that David Castor had committed suicide through a self-administered lethal dose of antifreeze. But, when police found Stacey Castor’s fingerprints on the antifreeze glass and located a turkey baster that had David Castor’s DNA on the tip, they began to suspect that Stacey Castor had engineered her husband’s death. They believed Stacey had used the turkey baster to force-feed him once David became too physically weak.
Detectives quietly re-examined the death of Michael Wallace.
They petitioned to exhume his body, and in 2007, seven years after his death, they did. What they found was unmistakable: crystals of ethylene glycol embedded in his organs – the telltale sign of antifreeze poisoning.
The detectives on the case ordered wire taps on Stacey Castor’s house. They listened in on phone calls for any unusual conversations. In addition, they set up cameras overlooking Stacey’s house and over both her husbands’ grave sites. (They had been buried side by side, at Stacey Castor’s request, so this task was relatively easy.) She never visited the graves.
Two husbands, five years apart. Both had “flu-like symptoms.” Both died under Stacey’s roof. Both left behind life-insurance policies naming her as the beneficiary.
Police knew what it meant.
They just didn’t know how far she’d go to cover it up.
The Daughter
In the summer of 2007, detectives moved in.
They interviewed Stacey’s older daughter, Ashley Wallace, who had been only eleven when her father died. She was twenty now – quiet, loyal, still living near her mother.
Ashley told police she had always believed her father had died naturally and that David’s death devastated her.
Unaware that suspicion had shifted toward her mother, Ashley remained close to Stacey.
Then, one August morning, Stacey invited her over for a “mother-daughter day.” They drank together, reminisced about the men they’d lost. Stacey handed her a drink, something sweet, and told her to relax.
Seventeen hours later, Ashley was found comatose on her bed by her younger sister. Stacey Castor made the 911 call.
Ashley woke two days later in a hospital bed. She had been found unconscious on her bed, next to a typed suicide note confessing to both murders. The note said she had poisoned her father and stepfather out of guilt, and now couldn’t live with herself.
But the evidence told another story.
Ashley’s fingerprints were nowhere on the glass that held the poison. Stacey’s fingerprints, however, were everywhere they shouldn’t have been.
The note had been typed on Stacey’s computer, using words and phrases identical to those she’d spoken in her police interviews.
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Painkillers and A Confession
Tests revealed that potentially fatal painkillers had been found in Ashley’s system and that she most likely would have died if brought to the hospital just a few hours later.
Ashley woke, with police questioning her about the murders and the suicide note found beside her. She said that the last thing she remembered was her mother making her an alcoholic drink. Something she had never done before. She told the officers that she did not write the note and was confused about their questions and accusations.
For two years, investigators had collected evidence against Stacey Castor for the deaths of her husbands. In 2007, she was arrested for second degree murder in David’s death and for attempting to murder Ashley and frame her for the murders of David and Michael.
Prosecutors argued that the computer-generated note where Ashley “confesses” to killing Michael and David had actually been written by Stacey Castor. Ashley was 11 at the time of her father’s death. When brought on the stand, she testified that she did not murder either her father or her stepfather. Nor did she write the suicide note.
Prosecutors argued that David Castor’s “suicide” had never made sense. Given the lack of his fingerprints on the glass, or container, tainted with ethylene glycol, a toxic substance found in antifreeze, and the turkey baster found in the kitchen garbage bearing both ethylene glycol and his DNA. They felt that this suggested he was force-fed antifreeze. Given evidence of the evolution of David Castor’s illness, they concluded that Stacey Castor had, for four days, fed her husband antifreeze through the baster before trying to make it look like a suicide. She had said that her husband got the idea to kill himself with antifreeze while both were watching a news report about Lynn Turner, who murdered two past lovers by using the poison.
The prosecutors presented evidence showing how antifreeze poisoning can be identified from the growth of calcium oxalate crystals in the kidneys, and that this was seen with examination of Wallace and David’s bodies as well.
In addition, they noted money as one of the main reasons Stacey Castor murdered her husbands. She had murdered her husbands partly to collect on their life insurance and estates and had changed David’s will to exclude his son by a previous marriage from the money left to him by David.
“In 2005, people started to put it all together,” Cayuga County Sheriff Dave Gould said. “If Mr. Wallace had been cremated, or if Mr. Castor had not died, we would never have known we had a homicide.”
The Arrest of Stacey Castor
The facade finally collapsed.
Investigators arrested Stacey Castor in September of 2007 for second-degree murder, attempted murder, and forgery.
At her trial in 2009, prosecutors called her a woman who killed with calculation and nearly murdered her own child to hide it. They laid out the evidence – the antifreeze, the note, the fingerprints, the eerie calm.
Ashley Wallace testified, fragile but composed.
She told the jury she’d trusted her mother completely, right up until the day that trust nearly killed her.
Stacey Castor’s defense team was set on creating reasonable doubt in the jury’s minds about Stacey having committed the murders. They wanted to “poke holes” in Ashley’s version of what happened and prove that she could have been capable of murder at age 11. They noted Ashley’s father, Wallace, showing favoritism toward his younger daughter rather than Ashley and cited jealousy as a possible motive for Ashley having murdered at such a young age. For her stepfather, they noted his and Ashley’s tumultuous relationship and how they did not get along with each other. Castor’s mother believed her granddaughter Ashley to be guilty.
In a final attempt to convince the jury that she was not guilty, Stacey Castor took the stand.
On cross examination, Fitzpatrick pointed out what he felt were flaws in Castor’s version of that night. She maintained that it was Ashley who murdered Michael and David, though she would not speculate about motives beyond implying that her daughter might be mentally ill. Fitzpatrick pointed out that Ashley’s mother had never sought therapy for her and that at 21 Ashley exhibited no sign of mental illness.
Fitzpatrick asserted that Stacey Castor’s behavior, during David Castor’s and Ashley’s illnesses, made no sense, given the years she had worked for a paramedics company. She did not seek care for Ashley for 17 hours and indicated that David Castor, who was staggering and vomiting and unable to stand, “looked OK.” Likewise, he questioned how a woman who had lost two husbands to poisoning would not seek help for a daughter in Ashley’s state. Fitzpatrick frequently shouted at Castor, inspiring Stacey Castor’s defense attorney to frequently object and even to request a mistrial.
But that didn’t work.
The jury needed only a few days.
They found Stacey Castor guilty on all counts.
On March 5, 2009, at Stacey Castor’s sentencing, Chief Assistant District Attorney Christine Garvey asked Fahey to impose the maximum consecutive sentences because of the brutality of David’s death. Further, he criticized how Castor had “partied in her backyard with friends like nothing was happening” as Ashley was comatose in her room. “She is cold, calculating and without any emotion for what she has done,” he stated. “Human life is sacred. Stacey Castor places no value on human life. Not even her own flesh and blood. To Stacey Castor, human beings are disposable.”
On February 5, 2009, Stacey Castor was found guilty of second degree murder in the poisoning death of David and of attempted second degree murder for overdosing her daughter Ashley with drugs and vodka. With a “jam-packed” courtroom, most were focused on Castor. She, however, had her eyes closed as the verdicts were read. Her lead defense counsel, Keller, announced that Stacey Castor would appeal the verdict, including challenging the inclusion of evidence regarding the death of her first husband, for which Stacey had not been charged.
She was sentenced to fifty-one years to life in prison, a term she would never live to complete.
Judge Fahey told Stacey Castor that he had never seen a parent attempt to murder their own child in order to set that child up for a crime they themselves had committed. He declared Castor was “in a class all by herself”.
The Final Chapter
Behind bars, Stacey maintained her innocence.
She gave interviews claiming she had been framed by police, that her daughter misunderstood, that she was the true victim.
But the world had seen too much evidence to believe her.
On June 11, 2016, prison guards at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility found her unresponsive in her cell. She had died of a heart attack at forty-eight years old.
There were no tears this time. No headlines proclaiming tragedy—just an ending.
Her daughter, Ashley Wallace, lived to tell the story herself. “People ask me if I forgive her,” Ashley said once. “I can’t forgive something she never took responsibility for.”
Epilogue
Two men were buried before their time.
One daughter nearly joined them.
And a woman named Stacey Castor, who believed she could control life and death with a bottle of antifreeze, learned that even the most careful poisons can’t kill the truth.
Source: murderpedia | wikipedia | allthatsinteresting
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📚 Additional Resources
- Wikipedia – Stacey Castor — high-level overview with chronology, references, and external links. Wikipedia
- ABC News (20/20) – Timeline of ‘Black Widow’ Stacey Castor’s crimes — clean, event-by-event recap with photos. ABC News
- ABC News – How detectives caught a ‘black widow’ in her web of lies — reporting around the investigation and forensic casework.
- CBS News – Woman who poisoned husband with antifreeze dies in prison — confirmation of Castor’s 2016 in-custody death via DA’s office.
- Spectrum Local News – Authorities release how Stacey Castor died in prison — DA/FME confirmation of heart attack as cause of death.
📚 Further Reading / Watching
- Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story (20/20 Documentary) – Amazon Prime Video
- Serial Killing Mom: The True Story of Stacey Castor
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- Mommy Deadliest (Michael Benson) – eBook (Amazon) – full narrative of the case; the book that also ties into the Lifetime film.
- Forensic Files – Season 14, Episode 7 “Freeze Framed” (Prime Video) – episode centered on David Castor’s poisoning and the antifreeze forensics.
- Forensic Files – “Freeze Framed” (Free on Tubi) — alternative free-to-stream link for the same episode. Tubi
- Crime Files: The Homefront – “A Poisoned Life: Case: Stacey Castor” (Prime Video) – documentary episode focused on Castor’s crimes and attempted frame-up.
- Poisoned Love: The Stacey Castor Story — Official Trailer (Lifetime on YouTube) — trailer for the 2020 Lifetime film starring Nia Vardalos. YouTube
