Trying to find ‘peace’ after mom’s slaying
Castellani tells true story of adultery, arsenic, murder and manipulation
Fifty-some years of holding it inside.
A half-century of not knowing the whole truth about who you are, of bottling up the horror your father inflicted on your mother, the horror he inflicted on you.
Jeannine Castellani had had enough. She needed the world to know. She needed to know herself. She needed peace.
Her story, and the sensationalism that surrounds it, has just been published by Vancouver writer Eve Lazarus as Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing True Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer.
“It was hard. I’m having a hard time now,” Castellani said about finally opening up. “But as hard as it is, it feels better to talk about it.
“It’s like a slow erosion. It sits in there; I didn’t know (the details) my whole life, a lot of it wasn’t talked about. I know I have to go through this to get peace.
“I’m not there yet, but I will be. I will get there.”
When Jeannine was 11, her father, Vancouver CKNW radio personality Rene Castellani — the Crazy Dialer, the Maharaja of Alleebaba, the Maddest Ad Man — murdered his wife, Jeannine’s mother Esther.
The day after Esther was buried, the widower Rene took Jeannine to Disneyland, along with a 25-yearold CKNW switchboard operator named Lolly and Lolly’s younger son.
It was a switch from the doting husband Rene had played before Esther died, bringing Esther her favourite milkshake every day, vanilla, from White Spot.
Even when Esther was admitted to hospital, Rene dutifully brought her daily treat.
It took three months after Esther was buried for police to discover that her body, which had been exhumed, was laced with arsenic, the main ingredient in the now-illegal weed killer Triox police found under a sink in Rene’s home.
It was two days after he and Lolly had applied for a marriage licence.
“My mother was a loving woman,” Jeannine, now 65, said at a book launch for Murder by Milkshake last week. “She is the bravest woman I know, she was full of life and love. I don’t know how else to sum it up; she was just a pleasure to be around.”
Relatives told her Esther gave the best hugs.
“I always felt well taken care of and safe, lot of laughs, a lot of good memories of the first part of my life.”
But she was 11.
Rene and Lolly kept planting seeds of doubt in her mind: Maybe it was her aunt who made mommy sick, we didn’t share a bed at Disneyland, and so on.
So Jeannine clung to her dad’s innocence, even committing perjury at his trial when she was 13.
“Coerced, yes, absolutely, in a very manipulative way,” Jeannine said.
She and Don, Lolly’s son, have reconnected. Don is estranged from his mom, and doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.
“After reading the book, and I never knew anything about her testimonies, I believe she had to have known something, she had to have,” Jeannine said. “She was not honest.”
One example: Lolly testified that Jeannine had been preparing herself for her mom’s death, when no one even knew her mom was dying.
“I don’t know what she knew, how much she knew; she had to know something.
“My dad had been priming me to get to know Lolly, taking me to CKNW, sitting me down at the switchboard, making like it was a fun time: ‘She has a little boy, you’ve never had a brother.’ “It was a lot of manipulation.” It took two trials because the first one was overturned, but Rene was convicted (twice) of capital murder, which carried a death penalty. But use of the death penalty was suspended two weeks before he was scheduled to hang and he went to jail for life.
Apparently a model prisoner, Rene was out within a couple of years on day parole, working around Abbotsford and going back to Matsqui at night.
Within 10 years he was fully paroled and got a radio job in Abbotsford before remarrying and moving to Nanaimo.
When he died in 1982 of pancreatic cancer and Jeannine attended the funeral, she was asked not to say anything because Rene’s latest wife knew nothing of her murderer dad’s past.
“At one point I wished he had hanged for his crime, but that wouldn’t have brought me here today and I might not know the things I now know,” Jeannine said.
“So, I think he should have served life, but that didn’t happen.
“I’m not past the anger yet. I’m hoping to get there.”