Special Report:
Locked up forever

Debate builds over the fate of 46 teen killers sentenced to life in prison without parole

Gwen Florio, Sue Lindsay and Sarah Langbein, Rocky Mountain News
Photography by Dennis Schroeder, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 16, 2005 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

More stories »

Ira Castor remembers his telephone ringing at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 17, 1996.

It was Floyd Wilson, his mother's neighbor.

Your mom's bathroom window is broken, Wilson told him.

No big deal, Castor figured. His 76-year-old mother, so energetic he called her "Granny Go-Go," was always working on her knickknack-crammed ranch home outside Brighton. He figured she'd been painting, again, and had knocked a ladder through the glass.

The phone shrilled a second warning.

Your mom's car is gone, Wilson said. Has been since Friday, he said.

Ira Castor slammed down the phone in his Lochbuie home, sprinted to his truck and floored it toward Brighton.

An emotional debate

Fifty-one weeks after those telephone calls, two teenagers, Kevin Blankenship and Antonio "Tony" Farrell, were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of Barbara Jane Castor.

The two are among 45 young men and one woman in Colorado's prisons who were juveniles when they committed murders that got them locked away forever.

That's one in every eight lifers in Colorado.

A debate over how to handle such cases is playing out nationwide, putting many states, including Colorado, under a spotlight.

The issue:

Are such unyielding sentences appropriate for those arguably too young to fully understand or control their actions?

Or, are their crimes — all murders — so heinous that the risk is simply too great to ever give them a chance at freedom?

Awaiting his fate: Antonio Farrell is held before sentencing at the Adams County Detention Center in 1997. He was 17 when he and another teen killed Barbara Jane Castor, 76.

The debate gained momentum in March, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional for anyone younger than 18, a practice that had been allowed in 19 states, although not in Colorado.

Such organizations as the international Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Colorado Springs-based Pendulum Foundation see eliminating mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles as the next logical step.

Lawmaker gets involved

"We are throwing away the key to some lives — not all — that might be rehabilitated," said state Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs.

Hefley sponsored an unsuccessful bill last spring that would have added Colorado to the handful of states where juveniles convicted of even the most brutal crimes eventually could be eligible for parole.

"In a majority of cases, these people could become thoughtful, sensitive, remorseful adults," said Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor who co-authored one of the briefs cited by the Supreme Court in its ruling striking down the death penalty for juveniles.

"A life without parole can be more demoralizing than a death sentence," Drizin said. "It's the death of hope."

But prosecutors see the sentences as a crucial deterrent to a crime rate that, a decade ago, seemed out of control.

Most of the state's young lifers were sentenced in the mid- to late-1990s, when the juvenile crime rate peaked.

Today, violent crime by juveniles in Colorado, as well as nationally, is at its lowest level since the mid-1980s. No crime has landed a Colorado juvenile in prison for life since 2000, according to Department of Corrections records.

Most of the lifers sentenced as juveniles in Colorado are in their 20s, with little experience of the freedoms — or responsibilities — of adulthood. When one of Colorado's young lifers was asked what he missed most about life on the outside, he answered:

"Peanut butter Cap'n Crunch."

The Pendulum Foundation, which seeks more flexible sentencing for juveniles, emphasizes their youth.

"Children," it calls them.

"Our Colorado teenagers."

Or even, "our Lost Boys," a nod to the fact that all but one are male.

Bob Grant, who heads the Colorado District Attorney's Council, uses a different word.

"I refer to them as murderers," he said, "because they are."

The teenagers in question shot their victims, stabbed them, strangled them. They beat them with their fists, a baseball bat, a pair of fireplace tongs, a rock, even a victim's platform shoe.

Their youngest victim was a 3-year-old boy who stopped a gang member's stray bullet while napping in his car seat. The oldest was an 86-year-old woman whose teenage neighbor said his idea of "doing something sexual" got out of hand.

These inmates are serving life sentences for killing 46 people.

The victims include Barbara Jane Castor, a mechanic's mother who was fiddling under the hood of her Cutlass outside the Kmart in Brighton when two boys asked her for a lift.

Family photo: Barbara Jane Castor was 76 when she was abducted in November 1996 and left to die in a freezing field. Her family called her "Granny Go-Go" because of her energetic lifestyle.

Seeking solace: Richard Castor, front, and his nephew, Troy Castor, comfort one another on Nov. 20, 1996, after a news conference concerning Castor's murder. Richard Castor is her son, Troy her grandson.

'A lot of madness'

The new tires on the old Cutlass caught Kevin Blankenship's attention, he told authorities.

Only a week after stealing a car and running away from their fractured homes in Rockford, Ill., he and Farrell were broke and at loose ends in Colorado.

Not that their situation was much worse than what they'd left behind. Blankenship's father, a near-stranger to him, was dead of a drug overdose; his mother was on welfare and crack, and had been entangled with a series of men, court documents show.

Blankenship was small for 16, only 5-foot-4, and asthmatic. Baby fat rounded his features. A skinny mustache penciled his lip. He kept running away from whichever relative was housing him at the time.

"There was a lot of madness back there," Blankenship recalled recently in prison.

So when Farrell suggested heading to Colorado, where he'd lived for a time and had a girlfriend, Blankenship was game, even a little excited, he said.

"I had never seen mountains before, so that was something new," he said.

Farrell did not respond to a Rocky Mountain News request for an interview. But court records describe a life that was even more tumultuous than Blankenship's.

Farrell had been in and out of mental institutions since he was 7. By 17, Farrell had experienced years of physical and sexual abuse, and had tried to kill himself. He'd also threatened to kill his mother and tie up his stepfather, rape him and kill him.

He told a psychiatrist that he'd heard voices most of his life: "Two males, two little devils. They talk regularly with deep voices."

The youths' single week on the road turned into an extension of the chaos they'd fled. They stole a second car in Ogallala, Neb., and lived in it until the carburetor busted. After that, they hung around the Tomahawk Truck Plaza in Brighton until they were asked to leave. They hit up elderly people for rides.

One couple gave them a ride to the Kmart, where they spotted the Cutlass and its driver, Blankenship told investigators.

She turned out to be a nice old lady. Talkative. Gave them a ride, no problem, chatting all the while to Farrell, beside her, and Blankenship, in the back seat.

She told them about her husband and his Alzheimer's.

She told them he died a few years back.

She told them she lived alone.

Then Kevin Blankenship jammed a gun into the soft flesh of her throat, and Barbara Jane Castor stopped talking.

Site of slaying: Part of a concrete dam stands near where Castor died in the fall of 1996. Her teenage killers bound her, covered her 130-pound body under more than 300 pounds of debris — logs, chunks of cement, a tire — and drove away in her Oldsmobile Cutlass. That night the temperature plunged to 11 degrees, and 6 inches of snow fell.

A time to remember: Ira Castor, left, and Richard Castor pay an emotional visit recently to the remote site northeast of Strasburg in Adams County where their mother was left to die. Kevin Blankenship, 16, and Antonio "Tony" Farrell, 17, were convicted of first-degree murder in Barbara Jane Castor's slaying and sentenced to life without parole.

No discretion for judges

Although most states allow life sentences for juveniles, they diverge wildly in how those laws are applied. Blankenship and Farrell are both from Illinois, which has 1,342 inmates serving life without parole. But only five committed their crimes as juveniles.

Colorado has 46 young murderers among its 360 lifers.

Here, the road to life without parole begins with death.

Only those found guilty of first-degree murder — killings that are premeditated and intentional, or committed during other felonies — get life. But they always get it.

The law mandates life without parole for first-degree murder, just as it mandates that jurors can't know about the inflexibility of the penalty when they're deliberating. Nor does the judge have any say. There are only two ways out of prison: reconsideration by the appeals court or support from the governor, who can commute the sentence.

That troubles Karen Ashby, the presiding judge in Denver Juvenile Court.

"I think judges should have the discretion to make decisions in individual cases, based on the circumstances in those cases," she said.

Judges, she said, are more likely to take into account the views of all concerned — the victim, the defendant and the community — than district attorneys, whose chief role is to prosecute cases, she said.

Under Colorado's system, the decision on how to charge an individual rests solely with prosecutors. A decision to pursue second-degree murder instead of first-degree, for example, could shave years off an offender's prison time.

Alison Parker of Human Rights Watch said that although many states have life without parole, few mandate the sentence.

"Frankly, from a human rights perspective, that raises concerns," said Parker, author of Thrown Away: Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Colorado.

Colorado differs from many states in another respect. It allows district attorneys to "direct file" a juvenile case in adult court. Until 1993, a judge had to hold a hearing to transfer the charges, Grant said. That same year, the law was expanded to allow children as young as 12 to be tried in adult court for violent crimes, although transfer hearings are still required for children younger than 14.

A significant change in sentencing laws had already occurred in 1990, making life in prison truly a life sentence. Previously, lifers were eligible for parole after 40 years, Grant said.

The 1993 changes in the law converged with a surge in killings by teenagers that came to be known in Denver as the "Summer of Violence."

More than 43 people across the state were slain by juveniles in 1993, the most in a single year since at least 1984, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Rapes and violent assaults also were up, and continued to run high through 1998.

The youth of the killers and the savagery of their crimes shocked the public:

• A 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds punched, kicked and clubbed a teacher until she bled to death.

• A 16-year-old was among seven gang members who kidnapped a 14-year-old girl. The group gang-raped and sexually tortured her for hours before stabbing her 28 times and throwing her into Clear Creek.

• A 17-year-old was sexually assaulting an 11-year-old neighbor when her mother walked in. He beat the mother and daughter to death with a baseball bat.

All of those youngsters now are serving life without parole.

"The worst of the worst," Grant called them, when opposing Hefley's bill. "There's no cookie bandits on that list."

Grant cites firsthand experience for his adamant support of tough sentencing laws. He was the Adams County district attorney when Barbara Jane Castor went missing and a youth tipped off authorities that two kids named Kevin Blankenship and Tony Farrell had spent the weekend partying at Castor's house before family members realized she was gone.

'She was plumb feared'

Blankenship's weapon was only a broken BB gun, but it makes sense to Ira Castor that his mother would have climbed right into the trunk when told.

"She was plumb feared of guns," he said.

Ignoring the screams and banging from the trunk, Farrell drove out onto the plains, along gravel roads where the view in all directions is of rolling fields and grazing land. The roads were well-graded, and the ride was fairly smooth. But the last quarter-mile was so bumpy, along a frozen mud track across a field, that Farrell turned off the road and drove across the field beside it, Blankenship told authorities.

The car topped a hill and descended the other side, out of sight from a couple of nearby farmhouses. It stopped by a dry creekbed. The boys opened the trunk. Barbara Jane Castor's hands were raw from pounding against it.

The day was cold, but Castor believed ladies shouldn't wear pantsuits. Her green dress, pink sweater and tan raincoat were adequate for running errands but not to withstand the bitter winds that sweep the empty stretches of the plains. She kept a brown wool blanket, a gift from her mother, in the Cutlass in case of emergencies. This was surely an emergency.

The blanket was taken from the car.

Then it was torn into strips.

'Foolish, foolish choices'

Kids are different.

That pretty much sums up the argument that more leeway is needed in sentencing juveniles.

The report from Human Rights Watch says teens have less ability to control their impulses, think through the consequences of their acts and resist peer pressure.

Hefley says she has reviewed studies showing that "truly, the brain is not developed and these young people make foolish, foolish choices."

Difficult childhood environments compound the problem, say Hefley and other advocates. Jacob Ind, who was 15 when he recruited a 17-year-old friend to help him kill his mother and stepfather, alleged years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Blankenship's childhood was, according to a prison report, "extremely dysfunctional . . . and marred by physical abuse." At his trial, his attorney described him as "dumb as a rock," a characterization that still rankles.

"I knew I didn't really consider myself to be a real intelligent individual," Blankenship said recently in prison. "I didn't think I was all the way down there."

In Farrell's young lifetime, he's been variously diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, including depression, identity disorder and "major depressive disorder, recurrent with psychotic features, congruent with mood."

He told doctors he had hallucinations, blackouts and migraines. His maternal grandparents were both schizophrenic; his father, an alcoholic; his stepfather, bipolar, according to a psychiatric report. His mother was diagnosed with borderline manic and post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said.

He spent three months in a psychiatric hospital in 1996 and was released six months before Castor's murder. By September, he was "crying all the time." In October, he was "feeling bad." In November, "I'd hit stuff just to hurt myself in other ways."

November is when his voices — "my two devils" — came back.

They were with him when he fled to Colorado.

They spoke to him on Nov. 15, the day he and Blankenship abducted Castor, according to a psychiatrist's report.

"They said, 'It's all your fault. You're hurting her.' "

Prison schooling: A ninth-grade dropout, Blankenship earned his GED after other inmates tutored him. He recently wrote a letter to the governor arguing that society helped cultivate many of the state's young killers. This photo was taken in May at the Limon Correctional Facility.

George Kochaniec © News

Charged with murder: Kevin Blankenship leaves Adams County Court on Nov. 20, 1996, when he was 16. He was subsequently convicted.

Left to die

The lone remaining abutment of the washed-out concrete dam rears above the otherwise monotonous prairie vista.

Barbara Jane Castor was down below, on the side of the dry creekbed, screened by tangled brush.

It was two weeks before Thanksgiving. Strips of the blanket that could have warmed Castor instead secured her wrists. String bound her legs together, along with more pieces of her mother's blanket. A final scrap of wool became a blindfold. Castor was placed on her back, and her arms yanked above her head and tied to pieces of rebar.

Someone could have walked within a few yards of her without seeing a thing. Not that anyone would have passed. Harvest season in these acres of farm fields was long past. The nearest town, Strasburg, was nearly 20 miles away.

It was getting dark. Stuff was heaped on her. Logs. Chunks of cement. The spare tire was placed on her face, but she jerked her head out from under it, Blankenship told investigators. Another log went on top of the tire. More than 300 pounds of debris pressed down on the 130-pound woman with a bum knee.

Barbara Jane Castor couldn't move, but she could still talk.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

Then she begged: "Don't do this. Don't do this."

Finally, she prayed. "God help me," she said.

That gave the teens pause. As the youths drove away, they discussed their fears that "God'll get us," Blankenship told authorities later.

"We started praying and stuff," Blankenship told investigators.

But they just kept on driving.

'Boggles the mind'

Lynn Hefley's bill, lauded by activists working for changes in juvenile sentencing, ran into trouble almost immediately. The first version would have made juveniles sentenced as adults eligible for parole after serving a portion of their sentences.

District attorneys, led by Grant, vehemently objected.

Even some of the bill's supporters said some of the young lifers were exactly where they needed to be.

Harold "Hal" Gaither, a retired Texas juvenile court judge who testified on behalf of the bill, agreed with Hefley that some juveniles merit a second chance.

"The best way is to be able to sentence them and observe them for a long period of time," Gaither said.

However, Gaither said any sentencing reform should allow for locking up the worst offenders for life.

"What some of these kids are capable of doing just boggles the mind," he said. "Some deserve to stay behind bars for the rest of their lives, and keep them in there after they're dead."

Opponents of the bill tend to believe that is true of all juvenile murderers, said Richard Swanson, a psychology professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver and the former deputy director of the state's Youthful Offender System.

The public, Swanson said, "sees juveniles as an increasing threat to them. Their kind of reflexive response is to put them away and don't ever let them out again."

But he wonders about the costs of keeping someone in prison for life instead of rehabilitating an inmate who might eventually contribute to society.

The average cost to incarcerate a prisoner in Colorado in 2004 was $27,825. That means spending nearly $1.4 million to keep a teen murderer behind bars for 50 years.

"Society, a jury, whomever, has to decide at some point whether he's salvageable," Swanson said. "Or is he so bad we're going to use a cell for the next 60 years?"

Frank Moya, who represented Blankenship during his murder trial, said he'd include his former client among the handful who might merit another chance.

"He's not a scary kid," Moya said. "This is someone who, 20 years from now, I wouldn't be afraid was going to go out and hurt someone else."

Blankenship refused during a prison interview to discuss Castor's kidnapping.

Moya has his own ideas about what happened that day.

"Farrell went over the edge. And (Blankenship) was just too dumb to jump out."

A party — and confession

Blankenship had plenty of opportunities to jump.

Barbara Jane Castor went to Kmart on a Friday. When police picked up Blankenship and Farrell the following Monday, the two had spent three days together, off and on, at her house.

They played pool in her basement and watched her TV. They showered in her bathroom. They raided her fridge. But they didn't eat the eggs. Those, they threw at the walls. They smashed her piggy banks and took an ax to the walls, looking for more money, Blankenship told investigators.

"It was probably the worst-trashed house I'd ever seen," Adams County Sheriff's Sgt. Mike Kercheval told the Rocky Mountain News at the time.

Blankenship didn't break from his friend until authorities split them up. Suddenly alone, Blankenship began calmly detailing the crime to authorities. When Farrell found out, he threatened to kill Blankenship.

Today, they're in different prisons.

Details from that confession helped ranchers lead authorities to Barbara Jane Castor's body.

They found her on Tuesday, almost exactly 48 hours after Floyd Wilson's Sunday afternoon call to Ira Castor. The wait, Castor's son said, was agonizing.

A single question looped incessantly through his mind.

"Where you at, Mom? Are you calling to us and we ain't here?"

Barbara Jane Castor's own wait was considerably shorter.

Sometime that Friday night it began to snow, 6 inches by the time it was over, a gleaming pale cloak over Castor's makeshift tomb.

"My mother," said Ira Castor, "is a person who can't stand the cold."

The mercury plunged to 11 degrees that night.

At that temperature, flesh freezes in 30 minutes.

It can hurt to breathe.

At some point that night, Barbara Jane Castor stopped hurting.

Starting a discussion

Hefley plans to bring back her legislation in 2006.

The new proposal, she said, will be "substantial," as opposed to this year's final version, which was amended, then amended again, after contentious hearings on the issue.

In the end, the bill included only a proposal to study how juveniles are charged and sentenced as adults in Colorado. Both the Senate and House approved the bill by generous margins.

It went to Gov. Bill Owens on May 23.

Four days later, he vetoed it.

Owens, who prides himself as a tough-on-crime governor, has commuted only one sentence. That was in 2000, for a person convicted of theft and aggravated motor vehicle theft, according to Mark Noel in the governor's office.

When he vetoed Hefley's bill, Owens said that studying the issue "exhibits a bias . . . that certain sentencing practices, which have demonstrably reduced crime in this state, are not working."

The governor also objected to scrutinizing the direct-file system.

"There is no evidence that this system, which helps keep violent offenders off our streets, is broken," he said.

Nonetheless, the governor said, "I remain open to discussions of how to enhance Colorado's juvenile justice system."

Kevin Blankenship is trying to start that discussion.

In a letter to the News, Blankenship responded to a question about how much time he thought he deserved to serve.

"My answer is NONE according to law," he wrote.

He explained his reasoning in another letter, this one written to Owens at the behest of the Pendulum Foundation. In 2 1/2 single-spaced pages, Blankenship told the governor society had failed its responsibility to young people.

That letter represented an achievement, Blankenship said during his prison interview. When he entered prison as a ninth-grade dropout, "I couldn't read or write or spell."

Other inmates tutored him to the point where he earned his GED, he said. "It takes a genuine individual to do that," he said of their help.

In his letter to Owens, he wrote:

"How can you expect a Malnourished mind to display intelligence when it has been depraved or miseducated?"

Life sentences for juveniles treat the young lifers "as if what we were demonstrating wasn't a learned behavior, like we came out of the womb as problem children."

He signed off, "Peace!"

Blankenship said his ability to write such a letter demonstrates the changes he's made during his near-decade in prison.

Letters aren't his forte, though, he said. He prefers writing stories.

The diminutive Blankenship's favorite is a children's story he's titled "Little One."

"Little One," he said, "is about a little orphan boy in Egypt.

"He couldn't read or write or spell. An older individual took him in and schooled him. He was short for his age, but intelligent. He talked to other boys his age, but they shut him out."

Unlike Blankenship, Little One got a second chance. He was able to rise above his peers. He did so by exhibiting the two qualities that Blankenship lacked on Nov. 15, 1996.

Little One, Blankenship said, showed "courage and honesty."

Once scorned, Little One became the Pharaoh of all of Egypt.

The End.

floriog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2361; lindsay@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5181; langbeins@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2536

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News