An interview between police and Sam Kastanis rolled along at an even pace for more than four hours before West Jordan detective George Petersen hit Kastanis hard with evidence other officers were phoning to him from the crime scene.
A tape recording of the interview lasted more than two hours. Jurors in the murder trial against Kastanis followed along with a 50-page transcript of the interview Wednesday.During the interview, Kastanis repeated twelve times the story about calling 911 after finding his 9-year-old son, Clint, in a pool of blood in the upstairs bathroom of the Kastanis' West Jordan home, and then walking to the basement and finding his wife, Margaret, and his daughters Melissa, 11, and Chrissy, 6, dead.
Kastanis said he was in the garage during the carnage and concluded his wife, suffering depression, had killed the children and then stabbed herself to death.
After letting Kastanis recount the events of the morning of Nov. 17, 1991, when he called 911 saying he had found Clint motionless in a pool of blood, Petersen confronted Kastanis with something "serious."
"We just had an expert up there looking at some of the prints in the kitchen on the linoleum floor, and there's footprints in there," Petersen said. "One appears to be your shoe and one appears to be your wife's sock print with blood. It appears that you two were struggling a little bit in the kitchen."
"No. No," Kastanis replied.
"Don't tell me no. It's there," Petersen shot back.
"I didn't do it. We wasn't struggling at all," Kastanis said.
"I'm telling you that reads like a road map," Petersen said moments later. "Don't tell me no. That's there."
"That, that's a lie," Kastanis said.
Prosecutors, over the next several days, will bring in the experts who found and analyzed the bloody footprints and other evidence at the crime scene.
But on Wednesday, defense lawyer Ron Yengich wanted to know why the detective had not pursued Kastanis' theory that his wife had done the killing, and why the interview was cut short when the confrontation began.
Petersen said the recorder was shut off because the tape either ran out or because nothing else important was said.
"The balance of what was said between you and Mr. Kastanis maybe was not important to you but could have been in the resolution of this case," Yengich said.
The knife used to stab all four victims was discussed during the interview. Kastanis even drew a sketch of it for the officers on a piece of notebook paper.
"Did you ever ask Mr. Kastanis if anybody else had access to the knife? Did you ask: `Did Margaret have access to the knife?' " Yengich demanded.
"That wasn't in the transcript," Petersen replied.
No matter what officers told Petersen over the phone, Kastanis was still denying any role in the killings when the interview ended, Yengich said. "He told you time and time and time again, `I did not kill my family. I did not kill my wife.' "