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Ex-girlfriend testifies in trial
By CARY DAVIS
© St. Petersburg Times, NEW PORT RICHEY -- The clerk was having a conversation with her boyfriend when a woman walked into the convenience store and headed for the drink cooler. The clerk noticed a drastic change in her boyfriend's behavior. The man, John A. Casteel, walked over to a corner and stood there. "He was almost hiding," Elizabeth Gillespie testified Tuesday. "He looked very agitated and angry." After Casteel left the Amoco on Grand Boulevard, the woman who had come in for a soda and cigarettes approached Gillespie. Her hands were shaking, Casteel's former girlfriend said. "She was very frightened and concerned," Gillespie said. "She said, "That was the man who raped me.' " Prosecutors say Casteel, 43, raped the woman twice, once in December 1998 and again 29 days later. He is on trial this week in a New Port Richey courtroom in connection with the first rape. Charged with sexual battery, armed burglary and aggravated assault, he faces life in prison if convicted. The 41-year-old victim's chance encounter with Casteel turned out to be the break in an investigation that had stalled for four months. The woman got Casteel's name from the clerk and called New Port Richey police Cpl. Jackie Pehote, who until then had doubted the victim's accounts of the two assaults. Pehote ran a background check and learned that Casteel had recently been released from prison after serving 14 years for raping a Jacksonville woman in 1983. When Pehote tracked Casteel down and confronted him about the rapes, he admitted having sex with the woman but said it was consensual. Gillespie also confronted Casteel about the woman who had come into the store. "He said he'd never slept with (the woman), but he'd been to her house," Gillespie testified. "He said, "She's the kind of girl who wouldn't give me the time of day.' " Prosecutor Dorothy Vaccaro told jurors in her opening statement Tuesday that Casteel's conflicting statements are only one sign of his guilt. She pointed to DNA tests that she said linked Casteel to the rapes. And she told the jury that they won't just hear evidence of forced sex. She said they also will hear the victim describe how Casteel brutally beat her, bound and gagged her, held a knife to her throat and raped her repeatedly. Casteel's attorney, public defender Phil Cohen, said "there was absolutely no rape." Casteel and the victim, Cohen said, had "some sort of relationship." He did not characterize the relationship or attempt to explain how the incident left the victim with 15 broken teeth and a swollen left eye. A nurse who took a semen sample from the woman hours after the first incident testified Tuesday. The nurse, Joan Finchem, said on cross-examination that she saw no apparent signs of injury in the victim's vaginal area. The trial resumes this morning in Circuit Judge Craig C. Villanti's courtroom. - Cary Davis covers courts in west Pasco County. He can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6236, or toll free at (800) 333-7505, ext. 6236. His e-mail address is
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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