Death Of Couple Points To Pastor

Susan and Lowell Engel were introduced by “Pastor Jimmy.” He married and befriended them.

And when they discovered he had taken $45,000 of their money, they apparently accepted his explanation that he was buying a house for all three to share.

The battered and decomposed bodies of the couple were found in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains last week, and the Rev. James S. Castria was questioned as a “potential suspect,” a prosecutor said Thursday.

Castria was scheduled to meet with police again Tuesday when he smashed a car into a bridge abutment and died in what police consider a suicide.

On the front seat of the car, state troopers found Saturday’s edition of The Pocono Record with the frontpage headline: “Officials identify victims as N.Y. couple.”

Clergymen who knew Castria were at a loss to reconcile their recollection of him with a suicidal murder suspect.

Castria, who had two children, left the Baptist church in 1992 and became pastor of the nondenominational Faith Gospel Church in Clifton.

In 1988, at the Baptist church, Castria had married Lowell and Susan Engel, whose bodies were buried Thursday in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where they lived in a city-run senior citizen complex. He was 68, and she was 50.

Mrs. Engel had inherited $85,000 from her aunt and opened a joint bank account with Castria last summer, placing $45,000 in the account, said Wieslaw T. Niemoczynski, an assistant district attorney for Monroe County, Pa. Castria made most of the withdrawals, he said.

“The bottom line is, by late 1994, Mrs. Engel determined there was $1.62 left in it, and she was very much surprised,” Niemoczynski said.

The Engels accused Castria of draining the account, but his explanation seemed to mollify them.

They told friends and relatives that Castria was buying another home for his family and the Engels would have a separate apartment there, Niemoczynski said.

On Jan. 19, Castria bought a home in Clifton that was larger than the church-owned home his family was living in. By then, the Engels were missing. They had last been seen leaving their housing complex 10 days earlier.

A friend told police that Mrs. Engel said Castria was going to take them to Pennsylvania on Jan. 10, where he had a friend who was going to give them $1,000, according to court papers.

Their bodies were found March 23 in woods by a development in Coolbaugh Township, Pa. Investigators determined they were killed in the area, their heads smashed.