Michelle Warner’s case is looking less like a missing person’s case, and more and more like a homicide situation, where the police don’t know where the body is located. Hate to be so crass in my opening line, but I suspect you might concur with my frankness. Local news stations for Houston have been all over Michelle Warner’s case, whose primary scene of crisis and tragedy appears to have transpired last Saturday night, September 22nd. The contours of what must have happened that night are focusing more clearly as I type this!
Not to digress too severely, but I think this is due to the expanded news coverage for the Houston area. Reporters are getting at it, interviewing Michelle’s family and closest friends, such as Stefanie Helton. Stefanie knows Michelle wouldn’t just take off, such as her boyfriend, Mark Castellano, claims. Considerable film footage of Michelle’s apartment complex (the Regency Square), in the 7200 block of Bellerive, which is in Sharpstown (southwest Houston), shows detectives going in and out of her apartment, busy in their chosen trade.
We’re hearing the carpet has been inundated with bleach; the implication here is that it looks like someone tried to cover up blood stains by dousing them with bleach. This is the usual, and not too subtle or smart, MO of desperate criminals, who want to do a quickie of a mop-up job on a bad thing just done, in the heat of some passions that got out of hand. Not that we know exactly the situation with this bleach, but this is what’s leaking out ubiquitously from these local news stories I’ve been watching this morning!
A neighbor saw Mark Castellano loading boxes into Michelle’s car, according to a KHOU 11 report I read. Mark hid his face, then took off in Michelle’s car. We hear he went to Odessa, Texas with the estranged couple’s 3-year-old son, Cayden. We do know the couple got in a heated argument that night. Part of the story is Castellano told a family member of Warner, that he threw a pet cat up against the wall. This rings true, but other aspects of his version of last Saturday night are subject to questioning.
Don’t know that Michelle ever left the Regency Square on her own volition. Mark says she hit him, then stormed out in anger. But why didn’t she take her own car? Rather, why did he flee in her car? This is what immediately slapped me in the face this morning, when researching Michelle Warner’s troubling set of circumstances. And why was she living with this Castellano character in the first place?
The answer we’re given is it was financial and they had that boy together, Cayden. Yet they didn’t hit it off too good, apparently! Her best friend, Stefanie Helton, seems to know quite a bit about their sour relationship, since she had worked with them at a health-care service provider, Quality Infusion Care (ABC News). Furthermore, Stefanie points to some mental health issues Mark was having in the not too remote past.
Helton termed these problems as ‘psychotic spells’; the nature of these problems Castellano was having could use a little more definition and elaboration. Yet we sense, Mark may have experienced some proclivities towards violence. This is clear to me now! Naturally, as is always the case, it’s a little more complicated than you would suspect, after a cursory examination of the available, salient facts.
Michelle herself had some issues (Click 2 Houston has dug up this not so positive information), and may have slid back into drug addiction. She’s done some jail time in the past for drug possession and had some problems with theft and credit card abuse. Still, nobody’s perfect (I’ve had my fair share of problems with credit cards), but what I see as her biggest flaw, is getting involved with this Castellano character.
