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Husband is shocked to learn his wife is linked to 1983 Westmoreland slaying
Tuesday, August 24, 1999 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
ALTOONA -- The brief news item on the radio a couple of weeks ago was just a grisly curiosity for Ralph Neely, something about a couple over in Westmoreland County digging up their basement and finding a man's skeleton there.
"I mentioned it to my wife, and no reaction," Neely said yesterday as he sat at his kitchen table, freshly done with one Camel, ready to light another. "I said, 'Isn't that creepy, living in the same house with a body?' And she said, 'Yeah.'
"I guess she didn't make the connection."
But police say Bonnie Neely had a connection to the case, a big one. Shortly after the news item was broadcast, police came to the front door of the Neely's cramped house just outside Altoona and took her away for questioning. Three hours later, they charged her with homicide.
Investigators say Bonnie Neely, now 33, and her mother, Patricia Sloan, 52, living in Beaver County, stabbed and shot Sloan's husband, Willis Casteel, 16 years ago in the farmhouse they rented in Penn Township, Westmoreland County.
Nine months later, mother and daughter moved out -- leaving Casteel's body behind, under two feet of cellar floor, police said.
Now, mother and daughter are back together in the Westmoreland County Jail, where they are being held without bail.
"After police took her away last week, she called from the police station to say police were charging her with murder. I said, 'Murdering who?' " Ralph Neely said. "She said, 'Mr. Casteel.' ... She said, 'I was there' or 'I helped.'
"I just walked in circles there on the floor, not knowing what to do."
And he still doesn't.
This is his wife of 15 years, mother of their two children, the woman he was smitten with back when he was driving a truck and she was a 17-year-old, 10 years his junior, working at the Char Cole, a roadside restaurant in Delmont.
"It's still so bewildering. I don't know what to believe," Neely, a stocky man, said as he sat, looking worn after his first day back at work, driving a gasoline tanker truck.
"I believe she was probably there ... when Mr. Casteel was killed. As far as her participation, I don't know."
His neighbors along busy Greenwood Road in Greenwood, just outside Altoona's north side, offer their portrait of Bonnie Neely, one that doesn't include any dark hues:
Bonnie Neely is the mother of children ages 8 and 5, caretaker to the couple's 8-year-old autistic son, easygoing and a dollar-an-hour baby sitter for a neighbor's three children. She crochets and had a booth reserved at the Blair County craft show two weeks from now.
When retired neighbor Irene Kelley and her husband were house-bound most of last winter, passing colds and flu back and forth, Neely was forever at the door, bringing hot meals from her house next door.
"We talked all the time, because our kids played together," said Annette Servello, a next-door neighbor for the past four years. "She never acted like she had some terrible secret or like she had anything to hide."
Only now are the people in Bonnie Neely's life remembering the statements she casually made and are reworking them as possible clues.
She once suggested her mother was manic-depressive -- but offered no more, Ralph Neely said. In the dozen years the Neelys lived in the Altoona area, he remembers Sloan, who now lives in New Brighton, coming to visit just once and recalls visiting her "just two or three times."
"She said that her mother was crazy, that she'd done crazy stuff, and that she didn't want much contact with her," said Kelley. "But she didn't really say more about it."
And sometimes, when they'd seen a television program depicting child abuse, Bonnie Neely would simply offer, "That sort of reminds me of my childhood," her husband said. But she wouldn't be prodded into saying more.
A year after Ralph and Bonnie Neely met -- and a day after she graduated from Penn-Trafford High School, they were married. They started out in Avalon in Allegheny County, then moved to Altoona and his job driving a truck.
Their home is a lean, two-story, aluminum-sided house in a neighborhood squeezed between a vacant hillside and a truck depot. There is clutter, a dog and four cats -- strays, like the cat with a broken leg that Bonnie Neely found in the back yard.
The focus was largely on Ralph Neely III, the autistic 8-year-old, unable to talk, demanding his mother's close supervision.
"I'd probably describe us both as pretty dull," Ralph Neely said.
But for now, dullness is replaced with bewilderment. Ralph Neely has sent his children to live with his parents. He is easing back into his truck-driving job. And he is almost resigned to the idea that his wife's fate is out of his hands.
On Sunday, he was allowed one of his twice-a-week visits at the Westmoreland County Jail.
"She seems, considering everything going on, in decent spirits," he said. "We talked. We weren't crying constantly. Just on and off."
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