🐞Stacey Castor Trial: Closing Arguments - Prosecution

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: And I echo Mr. Keller. I can't thank you enough for taking three weeks plus out of your lives to sit here and do what you're going to do best. Do justice for the people of Onondaga County and for this defendant. You've seen some things and heard some things in the last three weeks most people won't see in their lifetime. A woman that would murder two husbands for the convenience of it and for the profit of it. And then try to murder her own flesh and blood and frame her in death for those two murders. I'm a very, very lucky person. I make my living with my words. I try to persuade people. I try to educate people. I talk to groups. I talk to judges. I talk to lawyers. I talk to kids. And ultimately, at the end of the day, what I'm left with is my persuasive abilities through language. So, after a professional lifetime in using my language, I stand here before you today at a loss for words. When I put pen to paper last night to try to put in perspective and words what this defendant has done over the last eight years, the pen couldn't move. This is literally a case and an occasion where the defendant's actions speak for themselves. I want to talk to you about one word that may be the most overused word in the English language, and that's the word love. Sometimes we say, I love, fill in the blank, a particular team, or I love a particular food. And that's really not the essence of the word love, because in its truest and purest form, it is the greatest gift that has been bestowed on us, our ability to love. And while there may be loves equal to it, there is no greater love than a mother's love for a child. Just a quick anecdote. I am lucky enough to be a father. And when my oldest boy was an infant, my wife and I traveled in early winter to a store. And this may not seem like any big thing to you, but it was a remarkable thing to me, because when she got out of the car with my infant son cradled in her arms, she hits a patch of ice and went down. Now, two million years of evolution tell us that the instinctive, natural thing for someone to do when they hit a patch of ice and are about to possibly seriously injure themselves is to put their arms out, extend them, and brace themselves. My wife never moved her arms, and she took a pretty bad whack to her back. And my son just kind of smiled and burped and had a good time about the whole thing. And there it was in its simplest form. That's what a mother is supposed to do. It's one of life's constants. So when Mr. Keller, with all due respect to him, points out an isolated incident here or there and says, this doesn't make sense or that doesn't add up, how do you make sense? Why should anyone ask you to make sense about what this defendant did? I'm just happy that we're here trying the defendant for the attempted murder of Ashley Wallace and not for two murders, David Castor and Ashley Wallace, because, quite frankly, sense and love have both taken a holiday in the life of Stacey Castor. Now let me talk to you about some things that Mr. Keller said, and I will start off. You can listen to the judge in a few moments when I'm done. He is not going to say that I have to disprove every single thing that Mr. Keller said. I assure you, he is not going to say that. Fingerprints, DNA, they don't mean a thing in this case. Unless, of course, they're Ashley Wallace's on the Lexapro bottle. Then it's a smoking gun. Well, fingerprints and DNA and all the other evidence, of course, they mean something. They paint a portrait of what happened in these cases. And I'll tell you another thing, an interesting thing that Mr. Keller brought up about the attempted murder of Ashley Wallace. No cup, no straw. Interesting. Why not? Because the defendant is getting better. This is her murder number three for her. She's not going to leave this stuff around like she did last time. She's not going to get caught by Mr. Spinelli saying, when I poured the drugs, I mean the vodka into the glass. No, because there ain't going to be any glass this time. Ashley had a drink out of something. Then he tells you that the police only looked at Stacey Castor. They had tunnel vision on it. I told you he'd say that on my opening statement. But that's not true. There was a significant number of police officers that thought the death of David Castor was a suicide. People argued about this. They do what cops do. I'm not going to apologize for that. On the contrary, I'm going to brag about it. They did what good cops do. They followed the evidence. He wants us to, he wonders why, why didn't you wiretap Ashley Wallace's phone? I want you to picture me or one of my assistants. We go in front of the judge and we say, Judge, we want a wiretap on Ashley Wallace's phone. The judge, if he's a good judge or she's a good judge, is going to look at us and say, OK, why? Well, she didn't have a nickname. And when she was younger, she left a cigarette smoldering in the bathroom and they had to call the fire department. And she can't spell very well. And then the judge is going to throw me out on my keister for Easter and say, hey, I've got better things to do. We didn't get a wiretap on Ashley Wallace's phone, because there's no reason to get a wiretap on Ashley Wallace's phone. And Ashley Wallace is suicidal, suicidal. How many times did she refer to a suicidal? She's a kid, for God's sakes, when she's writing these letters. She's a teenager. She's writing letters to a boyfriend and she's talking about thoughts that she had five years earlier when her father died. Give me a break. And then they tell you that, oh yeah, we gave David's son, out of the goodness of my heart, some money and a car. He gave David's son some money and a car because the will that he was contesting was a fake, just like he said it was. Only you didn't tell anybody that. And you managed to get away with it for four years. And all these, well, Mike Coleman, oh, jeez, I couldn't call an ambulance, and Bob Ross. Listen to what she says she told Bob Ross on the phone. She says, no, I told him not to come over. That's what she said in her testimony. And the stuff about 185 pills, I don't know where that came from. I know where 60 pills came from because that's the proof of the case. Mr. Keller's embarrassed to talk to you about 185 pills. He should be embarrassed to talk to you about 185 pills because there's no evidence about that. Anybody that calls Mike Oxner to the stand should be embarrassed about 185 pills and about a lot of other things. But let me talk to you about, you know, Mr. Keller quoted me on my opening statement. I'll quote him on his opening statement. He said originally on his opening statement that the note, Exhibit 1, was written before 2.37 p.m. on Wednesday, September the 12th. That's what he said to you on his opening statement. Now, he's allowed to change his mind. That's okay. So now, he tells you that it could have been written sometime between 9.30ish on the night of September the 13th. And remember, he said I looked at this word 11 pip. This is what he said to you an hour ago. I looked at this word 11 pip file. It's the file that works with Windows and Word. And I looked at it, and because of the nature of the file, I can tell you with absolute certainty that nothing was written on that computer in Word and nothing was printed off that computer after that date. And remember, he had his chart up here? And he had the date September the 13th. Remember that? Now, again, if that were true, that would be it for us. I don't even think I'd have to make a closing argument. My closing argument might have been something like this. You got us. I got some bad news. I had the computer guy. Hey, you want to know why you didn't cross-examine him? I'll tell you why you didn't cross-examine him. First of all, I don't think I needed to. You saw Mr. Bracken. But here's what their computer guy said. Can I tell you what was printed? Absolutely not, because I can't recover the spool file. So I don't know what was printed. I just know that there was printer or spool activity on 9-12-2007 at 8-34 p.m. 9-12-2007. Then he goes on to explain how the 8-34 p.m. would actually be 9-34 p.m. And then he's asked this question about exhibit RR. And, folks, right here, you can see the date. 9-12-2007 8-34 p.m. 9-12-2007 8-34 p.m. You'll have that with you in the jury room if you like. So, Mr. Grant, can you say forensically with certainty that that's the last time something was printed off this computer? Answer. I can say that. Yes. So, the original window of 2-30, because we now all agree that it had to have been generated after 8-40 a.m. on Wednesday, September the 12th. The people's theory is that it was printed sometime around 2-30. That's pretty clear for Mr. Bracken's testimony. I'll explain to you why in a second. But now the defense wants you to expand that window. Let's give the devil his due. Okay. I'll expand the window to 9-30. So, where was Ashley beyond any shadow of a doubt from 8-40 a.m. until 9-30 p.m. on September the 12th? At 8-40 a.m., we know she's at school. In fact, she's at school all day, all morning, until about 3-15 when her mother picks her up. This isn't in dispute, folks. So, at 3-15, they get picked up. They go around. They're driving around. They're waiting to talk to Mr. Keller. They're unsuccessful. They go out to dinner. And they get home, according to the defendant, at 7 p.m. Now, Ashley, from 8-40 a.m. until 7 p.m. has been absolutely nowhere near the computer that generated Exhibit 1. In fact, the only person that's been near it most of the day is the defendant. So now, they want to tell you, well, maybe the window was 7 to 9-30. Where was Ashley from 7 to 9-30? She was at home with her mother, the defendant, with a bunch of other people, her boyfriend, Oxner, her sister, her sister's boyfriend, and who was on the computer at 8-30 when I reminded her with a wiretap during over a half an hour phone call that takes you past 9 o'clock? The defendant. So, were you telling me that at 7, what, 15, Ashley sat down at the computer and generated a 756-word note and nobody saw her? Because that's the only way it could have happened for the defense. when Mr. Keller said, we would have said, you got us, he was right, we do got you. So, if someone says, you know, I just got a reasonable doubt, you know, all this stuff, I don't know, she's a terrible speller, she didn't have a nickname, oh God, I can't make a decision, I got a reasonable doubt. Somebody, say, when on September the 12th, did Ashley Wallace write the note that we now both agree was penned by the killer? She didn't. You don't have to strain your credulity to accept the people's theory, you just have to say, geez, the computer expert for the people say that there was no word activity after approximately 2.30 on September the 12th. The note, in my judgment, my professional opinion, was generated in word, just like the other two fragments. Ergo, the note was written between 8.40 and 2.30, just like Mr. Keller and I both said on our opening statements. And there isn't a dispute in the world that Ashley wasn't anywhere near that computer during those times. And the second thing I want you to do for me, if someone, if Mr. Keller hit a nerve with someone and someone walks in that room and says, I don't know, I got a reasonable doubt. In addition to that, say, okay, here's a question I got for you. The defense toxicologist agreed with everything that our toxicologist said. And what did our toxicologist said? And there's a lot of stuff there to digest, I understand. But it's the simplest things to convict you. What did our toxicologist say? She said that somebody, somebody dosed Ashley Wallace dosed between 4.30 a.m. and 5.30 a.m. that morning. It had to be. It's a physical impossibility that someone did not dose her. And it's a physical impossibility that Ashley Wallace dosed herself. She was unconscious according to the testimony that their toxicologist agreed with. You've got these charts about blood alcohol content and drugs and so forth and so on. Folks, what's happening here, she was given a knockout punch at about 1 p.m. that afternoon. And then who's the only person other than Brie that consistently goes in that room to, quote, check on Ashley. This nonsense about a feeding tube and an IV container. How about a teaspoon? Her little concoction that she kept hidden in the closet of this conglomerate of drugs and alcohol. That's why her BAC was 0.14 on Friday morning because she was constantly being dosed throughout the day. Folks, I'm not going to be as long as Mr. Keller. I have all the faith in the world in you. I remind you, I picked you because of your intelligence, not because of your lack of it. And I picked you because of your God-given common sense, not because of your absence of it. And I want to take you through this case from the base of this mountain of evidence right until the summit of this mountain of evidence, starting with Ashley Wallace. And we all sometimes, don't we, play the what-if game? What if, you know, what if this happened? What if that happened? I always think of my own family. My great-great-grandfather, Willie McCarran, left Ireland, I don't know if we got any Irish people here, left Ireland in 1848, the great potato family. came across the Atlantic and he was going to land in Philadelphia. They were going to raise a family there and he was going to send for his family and they were all going to rush over to Philadelphia. But fate intervened. He died at sea. And he's buried somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Had he lived, had he lived, I wouldn't be here. Why would I be here? His family would have left Ireland, met a whole slew of different people, married, had kids, and I would never have been here. So sometimes we think of what if, and I think of what if, what if the tox results hadn't come back on Michael Wallace? What if David Castor's death had been ruled a suicide and that was the end of it? What if Dominic Spinelli just gave up on this case? What if Ashley Wallace died? What if I didn't have the opportunity to bring her here with you? What if you had to decide this case in isolated fragments? But that's the end of the what if game because you don't have to decide this case in isolated fragments. You do have the information about Mike Wallace. You do have all the information about David Castor. And you do have a living, breathing survivor, God bless you, from this defendant, Ashley Wallace. We all make decisions in our life and you make decisions as George. Why do I believe somebody? What is believable or unbelievable about that person? Let me give you three plain, simple, common sense reasons why you believe Ashley Wallace. And if you believe her, the case is over. I could have called her and the medical examiner and sat down and absolutely justifiably stood here and said to you, you should vote guilty against this defendant. Three common sense reasons. Number one, the judge will talk to you about appearance. You make judgments in your life. You buy something, you marry somebody, you make decisions about your children, about life, about jobs, and at the end of the day, you have a comfort level. I've assessed the data, I've looked at the individual, I've made a judgment, I believe this person. What was Ashley's appearance like on the witness stand? Was she consistent? Did she make some inconsistency? Sure she did. She's 21 years old and she's talking about the death of her father and her stepfather. Sure. She's talking about someone that tried to kill her. Sure, she might have had four bottles of whatever the heck it was or three bottles or five bottles. Was she forthright? Was she appropriately emotional? And that's reason enough to believe her. It really is as simple as that. And look at what the defense wants you to believe. The defense wants you to believe that she murdered her father with antifreeze and rat poison because he spanked her. That she murdered her stepfather because he made her clean up her room. She tried to kill herself, failed, is now evil enough to let her mother take the rat for something that she did. And then what? What's the other thing? You remember he told you about, well, a 12-year-old is capable of committing a crime. But that's not the question. The question is, is this 12-year-old capable of committing a crime? And I'll talk to you all day about 12-year-olds that commit crimes. You ever, Mr. Keller brought up, you know, you watch the news, you see that, [00:20:33] Speaker ?: hey, [00:20:34] Speaker 1: when the news talks about a 12-year-old committing a crime and it's a serious crime, a school shooting or some other aberrant act, there's all kinds of clues and instances and things happen that, and the 12-year-old is usually saying, I did it. You know, you got me. They're 12, for crying out loud. It's not any 12-year-old, it's this 12-year-old. What is it when the witnesses who've testified for the defense allegedly know her better than anybody on the planet and I ask Mrs. Kasser, why did he actually kill her father? I don't know. That's it? 16 months, you're putting your trust in these people and you tell them, I don't know? Not even going to talk about the grandmother. You know, well, you know, remember the smoking gun? David left the dinner table and slammed the door. Whoa! That was it. Okay, maybe it's not Ozzie and Harriet, but slam the door one more time and you're going to drink the Kool-Aid. I'm not going to put up with this. This isn't right. A bunch of silliness. One so serious it would be laughable. And don't forget the no-nickname defense. Brie was the princess, so Ashley wanted to get even. The no-nickname defense. I've got to be careful. Myself, I called my 16-year-old a knucklehead during this trial. I'd better not go home and have dinner with him. I'd be in trouble. A psychotic 12-year-old, maniac, and not one person sees a clue, a hint, a smidgen of evidence about it. Reason number two, common sense. Things that you really don't even need me to educate you about. She's 12 years old and then 17 years old and she commits not one perfect crime but two. Once she does so well, the murder of her father, it's not even detected as a crime. Doctors come in, they talk to the defendant and they say, well, he died of a heart attack and I don't know absolutely negligence but why they did it, I don't know and I don't care. they did it. Mom doesn't suspect, grandma doesn't suspect and Ashley tells you that while her father is on the couch and what we now know from Dr. Stoppinger, he is suffering an agonizing, horrible, slow death that anybody who was an adult would have been able to pick up on, he tries to make Ashley laugh by making faces at her because he's such a terrible, rotten guy that his thoughts weren't about himself, they were about his daughter and what does she do? She gives him rat poison to speed up the job and no one suspects a thing. Now we go five years later, she commits murder number two. Almost perfect this time too. It was about to be called a suicide. She doesn't even, there's no witnesses. The defendant can't tell you that. She's locked in. She can't tell you, oh, I forgot, Ashley went in with some cranberry juice and she had a jug under her arm. I don't remember what it was but looked funny now in hindsight. She can't tell you that. Not with a straight face. And the reason she can't is because it didn't happen. There's no witnesses, no fingerprints, not a single fingerprint of Ashley Wallace in their bedroom. Not one. No DNA. She goes in and out unseen. And the stepfather is trusting enough that he takes some concoction that she gives him and now he's dead. And now she's committed two perfect crimes at the tender age of 17. And she's not even smart enough to act sad at the funeral. She's duped the sheriff's departments in Cayuga County and Onondaga County. She's duped her mother, her grandmother, all her other relatives. But she can't even act sad at the funeral. And then, after the exhumation of her dad, she tries to kill herself because, as the note said, the cops are closing in on me. Closing in with what? Somebody tell me. Mr. Keller told you for two and a half hours what a lousy case they have, but he never told me that. Closing in with what? No, this cold-blooded vixen who has nerves of steel decides to do the most cowardly thing imaginable, take her own life, and then, literally within minutes of regaining consciousness and her faculties, says to the first cop that asks her, what are you talking about? I didn't try to kill myself. Occam's razor, all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. Ashley says she didn't try to kill herself at that very, very spontaneous moment because she didn't try to kill herself. her mother tried to murder her. Common sense reason number three. Now, I'm not going to rehash Mr. Roy's testimony. Mr. Keller didn't even refer to it, so I don't see any reason to talk about that. You know, Will Rogers, rest his soul, used to say, an expert witness is just some guy from out of town. Well, Mr. Roy is from out of town, but he may not be an expert witness. The fact is that there is one irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible fact about that note. It's disguised. That it really isn't in dispute. Somebody tried to disguise their identity in that note. Why would Ashley do that? Her name's at the bottom. She tried to kill herself. Did she, like you would expect, pick up a pad, goodbye cruel world, sorry mom, you didn't do it, I killed dad, I killed David, goodbye, love Ashley. No, she writes this computer-generated war and peace thing, 750 plus words, and tries to disguise it. Here's the dumbest thing I've heard yet. The two fragments, right? The two fragments, which are practice runs of the note, they've got misspellings in them, and then the note has corrections, and vice versa. They have correct spelling in the fragments and misspellings in the note. Let me see if I got this right. So, Ashley Wallace writes the note, says she kills her father with antifreeze and rat poison, then kills her stepfather with antifreeze. Don't think I'm a bad speller, though. I don't want you to think bad about me. Oh, my God, I've got to fix the spelling. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. Only one person had a motive to disguise that note and make people think that Ashley wrote it. And that's the defendant in this case. I want to talk to you just briefly again about the evidence here. Evidence doesn't mean anything according to my opponent, but I think it means an awful lot. This is a staged scene. The antifreeze is there, the jug underneath. You see how the has been dosed and vomited and it has gone down the side of the bed and has obviously pulled on the floor. But there's a problem. See, the person that planted this antifreeze jug under the bed to stage this scene didn't realize that we would pick up on that because there's no vomitus on the top of the antifreeze jug. It's been staged. It's been made to look like a suicide. Talk about timing and when these things happened, when he was dosed. And when I think, again, I say it's the simplest things that convict you. A turkey baster. You want to know how Ashley got dosed when her mother tried to kill her? We already know she's an expert at it. Obviously, David is passed out in the bed and is probably not being able to drink things normally, so she gets a turkey baster to finish him off and then leaves it in the trash. And let's not call a doctor. Who's the only one asking about him? A little teenager, a little girl, Bree. David doesn't seem right. He seems sick. And what did Bree see? What was the last thing Bree saw when on Sunday the defendant opened the door and let her look in? Exactly what you see in that crime scene photo. David lying naked across that bed in the last moments of his life. The defendant chose to give a statement back then. You'll have it in evidence with you. You can look through it. I've always referred to a lot of it during the cross examination of Mrs. Castor. I want you to listen to when it was that Ashley had the opportunity to do this. How suddenly four or five years after the fact we suddenly have this detail about the trip to the post office which isn't anywhere in the statement. And you say well that's not that important. Folks take a look at this statement. It is chock full of minutiae and detail about Walmart, about who got what for lunch and who had extra sauce and all this other stuff. and now she wants to tell you that during the most crucial weekend of my life or one of the most crucial, one of the top three anyway, I forgot to mention that I took off for an hour and went to a post office and sent a certified letter that by the way nobody has seen. Why does she do that? Obviously, to try to dupe you. She duped the sheriffs, she duped the sheriffs in Cayuga, now she thinks she's going to dupe you and she's going to tell you, oh, I forgot, it was an honest mistake, but I was at the post office and there, there's the window that Ashley had to commit this terrible crime. You believe everybody in this case, Ashley had a possible opportunity of minutes on Friday. The defendant was supposed to be with David alone. It was supposed to be a dinner where they were going to be alone. The kids had made plans to be at other people's houses. And I want you also to listen to the testimony of Dr. Stapiger, how it is that someone dies from antifreeze poisoning. It isn't, I look a little drunk, I drank some antifreeze a couple of days ago, I drank a fatal level, and then I suddenly keel over and I die like on TV. This is an agonizing, slow, painful process that takes hours and hours and hours. It shuts you down organ by organ. And for you to say that, well, in hindsight, I might have done things differently is to ignore reality, to ignore reality. She is the adult in this house, and even the kids knew that there was something wrong, wrong, even Bree knew that there was something wrong with David. And she almost got away with it. The investigation continues. Mr. Spinelli and Miss Brogan, they continue to interview witnesses, they continue to talk to people. And then on September the 5th, Michael is taken out of the ground, and then on September the 7th, it's time to talk to this defendant. And for the first time, she's given her Miranda warnings, and she cries. tells him, oh yeah, there were a bunch of calls, every half hour, every 45 minutes. And then she listens to the testimony from the telephone people, and now it's, well, it was cell phone. His cell phone must have been on. He listened to what the telephone people had to say. Cell phone to cell phone, or cell phone to landline, or landline to landline, or landline to cell phone, there was one call that morning. It's funny how the little things trip you up in a case. One phone call at 1254. And then, the classic moment, when I poured the antifree, I mean the cranberry juice. What was it again now about Spinelli? Was he, he was, I don't know if you got it. And by the way, when she tried to reenact it, do you notice how the first time she tried to reenact it, she actually said antifreeze? I don't know what it was about Spinelli controlling her mind and having her, you know, he simply asked her about the position of these items on the nightstand which are completely inconsistent with her story. And what does she do? Again, it's the simple things that convict you. When I poured the antifree, there's three syllables to the word antifreeze. Some of you former teachers on the jury know that. antifreeze. She caught herself when? You didn't catch herself at all. She said antifree. Oh, I mean cranberry juice. You're confusing me. And this was documented on September the 7th, one week before the note was found. The 9-11 fragment, the Harvey Black file, it contains a lot of things that are similar. It contains a lot of things that are dissimilar from the final note. But we know that someone, someone wrote this note prior to September the 11th at 3.30. And the second word fragment, or the second note fragment. And we know again, someone wrote this before 2-27 on Wednesday, September the 12th. You don't have to suspend your common sense and your intelligence to follow the people's theory of this case. It's relatively simple. When this note was written, there wasn't anybody else home but this defendant. And you could hear her clicking at that keyboard when she was talking to Danny Coleman earlier that day. And what's the biggest difference between the Harvey Black fragment and the word 11 pip fragment, the detail about Mike Wallace. And where did the defendant go just before she wrote? She went over to her mother's house to, I think she said to look at some papers because there was some material that she had to bring to her lawyer. She went over there to get additional detail about Michael's death so she could include that in the note and make it more believable. And on September the 12th she does a practice run on the murder. She gives Ashley a drink that tastes terrible and Ashley gets sick and ill even though she had been drinking on a rare few other occasions. This time was different. So this 4-0 student at Bryan and Stratton is almost killed on the night of the 12th. And she gets up on the 13th and goes to class. Her boyfriend is with her, Matt Gandino, a good kid who testified in front of you. And on the way home her mother picks her up and says, let's stop. We're going to get a bottle of vodka. And later she says, I might not be here for your 21st birthday. And the last text message that Ashley Wallace, this inhuman killer who is about to end her own life because she thinks the cops are closing in on her, the last text message she sends in her life is to her boyfriend Matt and it says, I love you too, baby. she wants to be with her mom. She wants desperately to love her mom. She's already lost her father and her stepfather and her mom says, take a drink. The story that Ashley told about the straw and the counting, did it have believability to it? Did she say it smoothly or did she say it sharply or did she have to refer to previous testimony or did she just say it naturally as if it was actually true because there is no middle ground. She is either absolutely bald-faced lying to you or it actually happened. The evidence points overwhelmingly to it have actually happened. And what does the defendant say about Ashley on this date? She talks in exhibit 79. You can read it in the jury room. At least three different occasions in this relatively short exhibit, she says that Ashley was sleeping normally. 17 hours, she was sleeping normally. Don't you go in and check on your own flesh and blood? Don't you go in and hydrate the child? Don't you go in and wake the child up and say, I don't want you to sleep through the night. I want you to get rested. What is wrong with you? Is there something wrong with you? Do you need a glass of water? Can I get you a sandwich? This is not rocket science. This is basic human instinct to go in as a mother and protect your flesh and blood. And what does she say during a wiretap that she acknowledges she said simply because the word is irrefutable. We have the physical evidence that she said the word and we didn't have that. I guarantee you as sure as I'm standing here that Stacy Kasser would tell you, I never said the word drool. I never said that. Well, she can't say that because we've got it on tape. Just like she can't deny that she told Detective Phelps that Ashley was sleeping normally. And since when did the word drooling become a figure of speech, means there's some type of saliva or other type of vomit that's coming out of your mouth. There's drooling. A dog drools. We talk about an animal drooling. She's talking about her own daughter. Ah, yeah, she's in there drooling. And she also talks about, there's two other things on the tape that she wants to deny for you. She talks about the bottle of vodka. You listen to her conversation with Ochsner on that tape recorder. There's no mention whatsoever that there's no indication that Ochsner knew about what was going to happen that weekend supposedly about this little dalliance at the DeWitt Hotel or some such nonsense. Neither Coleman's were, I mean, it was kind of painful. They were both asked, well, you remember, you guys had plans that weekend, didn't you? No, I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Keller. I'm sorry. You didn't have any plans that weekend. The bottle of vodka was exactly what she said it was for. I'm going to have a drink with you because I'm not going to be around for your 21st birthday. And just like she did back in 2005, Stacey Kasser puts the bottle of vodka in the freezer. When that happens, folks, it's time to eat at McDonald's when you have Stacey Kasser putting a bottle of vodka in the freezer. Drooling. And who's asking about Ashley all night and all day? Brie. Once again, it's Brie out of the mouths of babes. And there was that one kind of eerie moment. It was late at night. I don't remember the exact time, but I'm sure it was at night. And Brie walks in the room, and of course, it's dark, and she's worried about her sister. Her sister's not breathing right. She doesn't seem right. Plus, she's been sleeping all day. It's not right. And what happens? What are you doing? Come on. Get out of here. She's fine. Get out. Who did that? Stacey Kasser the defendant. Leave her alone. Leave her alone. She's fine. Close the door. She's drooling, sleeping normally, just like David Castor. Passed out normally on the floor. Passed out normally in the bed. Passed out normally in the tub. It's normal. He's breathing. His eyes are open. I don't know what planet this woman lives on, but I hope you caught my asking her about the Gatorade. How do you get the Gatorade, which is like the 400th word in this note? Oh, I skimmed. Oh, I read it. I forgot to tell you. Actually, I did read it. I did read it. I read the whole thing. But I told the police back then that I only skimmed the first couple lines and I couldn't read it anymore. In fact, I told my lawyer that just a couple of minutes ago. But now that I can't get to the Gatorade word in 27... Remember, she started reading like... She's trying to get to the Gatorade word in the 27-second window. She can't do it. She can't do it because she slipped up. Like she slipped up in a lot of things in this case. See, it's the little things, folks. It's the little things that convict you. She calls 911. And she's worried about the room being a pigsty. I mean, actually, every mother who's lost two husbands to poisoning and whose daughter is lying in front of her near death is going to be worried that the EMTs will think she's a bad housewife. That's normal. She stays at Danny's home on August 21st. First time ever. That's normal. She checks the alarm on Bree's phone on September 13, 2007 to make sure that Bree's going to be there to find Ashley. That's normal. She's looking for Matt Dandino's ATM card in the dark. That's normal. Her husband, according to her, she's worried about whether or not he may have taken his own life. And she makes one phone call. One phone call to the house. That's normal. She says the word anti-free on September the 7th. And it appears four times in Exhibit 1. But that's normal. On the 911 call on September the 14th, she wants to make darn sure that everybody knows there's a note. She wants to make sure that Mike Oxner finds that note and make sure the police know about that note. And that's normal. She's shaking by herself in the dining room while her daughter is in her bedroom dying. And Bree comes up and tries to console her and she tells her to F off. And that's normal. She knows about the Gatorade at the end of the note but she told you that she only skimmed the first couple of lines and that's normal. The first time she ever answered her daughter's cell phone and talked to Matt Gandino was on the afternoon and she tried to kill her and told Matt not to come over because that's normal. She phonies up a will, lets her friends almost face criminal charges, but that's normal. And she hides the Lexapro bottle behind some toilet paper with her fingerprints on it and that's normal. She tried to convince the doctors in 2000 that Mike died of a heart attack. She tried to convince the police in 2005 that David took his own life. Remember the references to ex-wife and psychiatrist and speeding. Take all of that as true. Take all of that as true. You know what? It's the little things. Now she says, no, no, no, I wasn't trying to convince him that it was a suicide. Sure she was. You remember? Remember the seven-hour marathon in the garage and they're drinking Pepsi and she's alone with him? Right? No, Ashley. She's drinking Pepsi. What does she say? She says, he didn't want me to drink that Pepsi. He made me go get some of my Pepsi on my own. What does that tell you? That tells you she's trying to convince the cops that he knew the Pepsi was poisoned. That's why he didn't want to give her any. That's what she's trying to tell the cops. She's trying to set it up as a suicide. And it almost worked. She's getting good at it. This is number two. When number three came around, she's a pro with Ashley because now she's going to do this note. And now, this trail of horror and deceit and evil and murder is about to come to an end. Mike Wallace and David Castor linked forever by a common killer. Two regular guys. Everybody knows a Mike Wallace and a David Castor in their life. Hey, Mike, can you shovel my walk for me? I hurt my back. Or, hey, Dave, can you stop at the store and get an extra carton of milk for my mom? She's not feeling... You know, just guys, you meet a thousand times a day. Only one person shed a tear. Ashley Wallace. Killed by their own wife. An agonizing, irrefutable, plain as day type of agonizing death while she stood by and watched. Ashley told you about the bad times with her stepdad and she told you about the good times with her dad. She told you how proud David was when she graduated high school. Is she making that up? Mr. Keller speaks for Mrs. Castor and now I speak to you for David and I speak to you for Ashley. If her grandmother wants to get up here and slander her, that's her business. She has to live with that. If her mother wants to trash her, that's her business. That's the least of her worries. I believe that you, you, have seen the real Ashley Wallace. Who in this room could say that at 12 years old, I've lost my father at 17, I've lost my stepfather and at 20, my own mother tried to kill me and frame me and then say, I want to be somebody. I work hard. I love my boyfriend. I'm a 4-0 student and I want to be something. I want to be an accountant. I'm not going to let, I'm not going to let what she did take me down. I'll survive. For 16 months, I've lived with the notion of the nightmare of thinking, what if she had succeeded? And I couldn't put Ashley on the stand because I had to put the M.E. on the stand to talk about her autopsy. And what if, and what if, and what if, what if David's death had been ruled a suicide? But she just had to write the note. She just had to do one more thing. Those are guys like Spinelli, you know, those annoying cops that try to get out of the truth. I'll bet you saw it as a phony when you first saw it. You know, they, T-H-A-Y, and then two words later, not three sentences later, but two words later, it's T-H-E-Y, David, D-A-V-E-D, D-A-V-I-D, the punctuation, anti-free, the second time in your life you probably heard anybody ever use that word, anti-free. I said to myself, would a jury, would a jury be smart enough to figure it out? There's only a signature there. If only, if only I had something like a window of opportunity on the computer where no one else could have been on the computer except the defendant. I did. I didn't know it, but I do now. So I read that note and I read it and I read it and there on line 20 it was harder than with daddy because you were always home or with him, but it did it. It did it. And, well, what good is that? It did it. It's weird. It doesn't make any sense. It's kind of a tick that someone has in their writing. But if I don't have anything to match it to, what good is it for you? And then, Lynn Pulaski comes into our lives and wants to tell us about the will being a phony. And she wants to tell us about what really happened. And she says, oh, by the way, here's some letters the defendant gave to me. And I've been waiting 16 months to show somebody. And there it is. I am going to stay right here and prove it didn't do this. I wanted to jump out my office window and tell the world that I've been patient. I had the opportunity to tell you you couldn't ask for a better signature than that. All the letters, the three handwritten letters, by the way, not the ones to the lawyers and stuff, the ones where she says, I'm innocent, this is a nightmare, and Ashley did this, and Ashley's this, and Ashley's that. She was right the first time. It did do it. And it's sitting right in this courtroom. You remember Occam's razor, just like Mr. Keller and I agree, and you remember your oath, and you deliberate this case fairly, because I've now taken you to the peak of that mountain of evidence. I started out by telling you I was at a loss for words to describe this defendant. You can solve that problem for me, because the word for this defendant is guilty. Ashley Wallace didn't have anything to do with the death of her father. She didn't have anything to do with the death of her stepfather. When I was in law school, we took all kinds of courses. Most of them I had forgotten mercifully. But there was never a course that said Justice 101. Different professors might have had different definitions of it. Might have said it was this or that or whatever. But nobody ever really said, okay, this is a definition of justice. This is it. But today, right now, justice is sitting in front of me. You are about to bring justice to this case. And ladies and gentlemen, I can't think of 12 people more qualified to do that. Thank you very much.