Killer says she was protecting son's rights
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BY JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star
YORK — Wilma Castor could have been the first woman sentenced to die in Nebraska’s electric chair.
But the state has never put a woman on death row, and Castor proved to be no exception. She is one of eight women serving life sentences at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women in York.
Although she professed her innocence at her 1997 trial — she said someone else killed her ex-husband Thomas Brown in the roadside ditch where he was found — she now admits she killed him. And if she had to do it over, well, she’d still defend her sons’ rights, but she would find a different way to do it.
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Castor told her story recently at the women’s prison.
She has been married three times, the first time to Brown, and they had two sons. In 1996, she was 50, single again and living in Nevada when she got a call from her firstborn, Tommy, who was in the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
He told her how he had ended up there. She hung up the phone and brooded for a while. Her ex-husband, now a widower, had seemed to toss their children aside in favor of his stepchildren, she thought.
She called him to tell him to come to Nevada to help move her back to Nebraska. She said Brown brought a U-Haul and helped her move back.
Rich Anderson, former Buffalo County attorney, says that’s not true. He says Castor showed up on her ex’s doorstep.
When she got back to Nebraska, Castor says, she moved into an apartment in Columbus with her younger son, Eddy. When Thomas Brown said they could live with him in Kearney, she quit her job at Kmart and got a job at Kearney Keno. Brown was gone a lot, his railroad job taking him to eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska during the week.
Everything went OK for a while, she said.
This is how she tells the rest of the story.
Thomas Brown gave Eddy a credit card for gas so the 20-year-old could visit his son. But when Brown got a bill for more than $270, he decided it was too high and, in anger, said he wouldn’t pay it.
His older son also was calling from prison, saying he needed money. The parents argued over whom he should be supporting, his own children or his stepchildren.
On Thanksgiving Day, Brown bought a turkey and invited other family members over. After dinner, he left the house, then returned and passed out in his recliner, she says.
Authorities say Castor killed her ex-husband that night as he slept in the chair.
The way she tells it, it was the next day, after Brown wrote each of them a big check and they went Christmas shopping. When they returned to the house, the arguing started again.
“He said he wasn’t going to take this BS anymore, and I said, ‘Neither am I,’ and I pulled out a .22,” Castor said. “He laughed at me. I said, ‘Go ahead and laugh, but it’s the last time.’”
The pistol, which she had had about 10 years since working as a security guard, was lying on an end table in the living room, she says. She picked it up.
“I was always taught if I was going to point a gun at someone, I’d better use it.”
She shot the gun; she remembers pulling the trigger twice.
“I hit him two times in the throat,” she says. “That makes me a bad shot. I was aiming for his head.”
She actually shot three times. The autopsy said she hit him twice in the chest and once in the throat.
Castor claims her mind is a total blank about the rest of the day. She doesn’t know how the body got from the living room to the ditch. She does recall her son started down from his bedroom after the shots and she sent him back up.
“I don’t know if Eddy helped me (move the body) or if I did it,” she says. She believes her ex weighed from 280 to 300 pounds.
The courts say Eddy helped and convicted him of being an accessory to a felony. They also say the murder took place on Thanksgiving night, and the mother and son went shopping the next day on forged $2,000 checks — one for her and one for Eddy — and put $600 worth of purchases on Brown’s debit card.
Prosecutors say Castor killed her ex-husband because he was upset his son had gotten a gasoline charge card in his name without his permission and then had used it.
Anderson, now an attorney with the Lincoln Police Department, says Castor and her son put Brown’s body in the basement while she went to work. After she got off, under cover of darkness, they removed and dumped the body.
Castor does remember leaving Kearney and driving with Eddy to Grand Island, where she picked up some bounced checks she had written to a Skagway store.
And then she thought: I’ve got to get the hell out of here.
So she went to Nevada and got a job at the Plantation Casino. Eddy went to Oregon to be with his girlfriend and baby.
Eventually, someone found Brown’s body, and the police tracked down Castor and told her to come back to Nebraska for questioning. She did.
Today, Castor denies it was a crime of greed.
“I would say I was protecting my children,” she says. “I was fed up with the way he was treating my two boys.”
Castor can’t protect her children anymore.
Tommy drowned in a sand pit lake in 2001 near Kearney, a year after she began serving a life sentence, plus other time, for first-degree murder, five counts of second-degree forgery, use of a firearm to commit a felony and misuse of a financial transaction device.
Now she spends her days working as an inventory clerk in the prison kitchen. She’s up at 6 a.m. and to work by 6:30. She chooses to stay at work until 5:30 each evening.
“I can always find something to do,” she says.
The inventory sheets she fills out are the only way she keeps track of the days.
After work, she returns to the 120-square-foot cell she shares with two other women.
As she lays on her metal bunk, she can face the wall or the toilet, which is several feet from her face and has no door.
Everything she has must fit in one trunk.
Castor spends much of the $3.78 she earns daily on yarn, yarn and more yarn. She has a crocheting habit.
When she first came to the prison she mingled quite a bit, she says.
“Eventually I found that if I stay in my room and crochet, time goes faster … and I don’t have to deal with the BS, the pettiness, the bitchiness, the childish stuff I don’t want to be a part of.”
Her mother came to visit once, but she’s not in great health. Her son used to come about four times a year but now comes about once. She calls him frequently and writes letters to her mother.
Castor, who recently turned 59, will spend the rest of her life behind the razor wire and chain-link fence, where she is told when to get up, when to go to bed, when to eat, when to take a shower and what to wear.
She has a TV in her room that she bought. She watches it while she crochets.
“It drowns the noise in the hallway,” she says.
She chooses not to participate in most activities or classes.
If she leaves the prison for a doctor’s appointment or goes to the hospital for medical procedures, she must wear chains and leg irons.
“It’s not a picnic, but you adapt,” she says. “What else can you do?”
Does she have sympathy for the man she killed?
She pauses.
“I never really thought about that one,” she finally answers. “I suppose I would.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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