The odd and tragic case of Mark Castillo took another erratic turn Wednesday, when the 43-year-old father abruptly pleaded guilty to drowning his three young children in a city hotel bathtub, carefully timing their submersion with a stopwatch.
Castillo's unexpected guilty plea to the murders, which he calculated to punish his estranged wife, came after lawyers and court officials spent a week choosing a jury for his trial.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Wanda K. Heard found Castillo, who arrived in court in sweats and a T-shirt instead of his customary suit, mentally capable of entering the plea and sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without possibility of parole.
The judge recommended that Castillo serve the time at the Patuxent Institution, a correctional mental health center in Jessup.
"I was wrong," Castillo said during a brief statement to the court. He read a passage from Ecclesiastes 8:8 from a Bible the judge retrieved at his request: "No man has authority to restrain the wind with the wind, or authority over the day of death."
The plea came after a quick series of morning maneuvers, surprises and revelations, similar to those that have marked the past year and a half since the children were killed March 29, 2008. The Montgomery County man has repeatedly confessed, tried to fire his attorneys and to plead insanity, all of which he repeated Wednesday.
He declined to withdraw a January insanity plea, leading the judge to deem it still in effect, potentially doubling the trial time. Castillo also asked to dismiss his attorneys, which Heard talked him out of doing. He broke into sobs when the judge acknowledged some unidentified "abuse" he'd been subject to in lockup, before he ultimately asked to plead guilty. He was calm from that moment on.
That final decision spared his family and former wife, pediatrician Amy Castillo, weeks of having to relive the details of the murders. She was called to the courtroom from her hotel as the plea unfolded. In an impromptu statement before sentencing, Amy Castillo reminded the court of all she had lost when her ex-husband took the lives of their children.
Anthony, 6, was a mama's boy who never got to finish kindergarten, very smart and very loving, she said. Austin, 4, was a "wild kid, like his father" with a great sense of humor. Athena, 2, had just begun to talk.
"I never even got to hear what she had to say," Amy Castillo said, adding that she also lost a fourth person in the tragedy.
