The Villain(ess) of The Castle Story

Since I started training as a docent back in September, I’ve been reading whatever I could find about the Carraros, the Tovreas, the Warners and in particular, Della Gillespie Tovrea Stuart.  To do this I’ve been through almost all the 18 boxes of the "Stuart Family Papers" at ASU, done some research at the AZ State Archives, and at the City of Phoenix’s Historic Preservation Office, and I need to spend more time at all of them to continue filling in the details of the story that we docents tell to our visitors each week.

The source that has turned out to be most reliable is “Della Tovrea Stuart, 1888-1969,” a paper written by Karen Erickson for a history course at ASU in 1973.  I’ve been able to find some of the written documentation that Erickson cites, including the probate documents for E.A. Tovrea and Della Tovrea Stuart, and have so far found no errors.  The longest document is Jason Gart’s “El Castillo,” which was a report commissioned by the City of Phoenix.  It also contains much interesting information, but is not always completely accurate.

In this post, I’ll talk about what I learned from Erickson’s paper, and from reading the probate documents, that has convinced me that the Castle’s story does have a villain, but it isn’t the Tovreas, as the video that we show in the Visitors Center implies, but rather Della’s sister, Ima Rutherford.

Ima lived in Texas, in a house owned by Della, and after Ima’s divorce, she was completely supported by Della, who paid all her bills, and sent her a $250 monthly allowance for whatever else Ima wanted to buy.   We know all this because Della claimed Ima as a dependent for income tax purposes, and the IRS questioned that deduction, so there’s a letter in the documents at ASU in which all this supporting information is detailed.  In the letters between the sisters, Ima also mentions receiving a fur from Della, among other gifts.  And Ima wasn’t the only recipient of Della’s largesse—the letters at ASU contain many letters thanking Della for her generosity, often from her relatives, but also from other friends, and even from one of the elderly Tovreas—I think maybe one of EA’s sisters-in-law—who says that Della is the only one who remembers her, and without Della’s help, she’d be destitute.

But back to Ima. Ima often visited Della, and would stay with her, even when Della’s second husband was still alive.  After he died, she would stay with Della for months at a time, and she came to the castle for a visit the day after the robbery.  As a result, she was Della’s caretaker during Della's decline those last two months in the castle.  According to the Erickson paper, the caretaker, Mrs. Lansberry, was so concerned (suspicious?) about what was going on that she kept a red notebook where she wrote down what happened at the castle every day during those two months.  (What I wouldn’t give to have a look at that notebook.)  Anyhow, turns out that during that two month period, whatever caretaking Ima was doing of her sister, she was also taking care of herself.  She had all of Ima’s cash accounts at the bank changed into her name and appropriated some Della's jewelry that the robbers didn't get.  When Della died, she left half her estate to her sister Ima, and half to the three daughters of another sister who had predeceased her.  Neither the bank that administered the estate nor Della’s nieces believed that the transfer of those accounts—around $170,000 cash—was legitimate, and the bank and the other heirs filed a suit against Ima to get that money back for the estate.  The case was finally settled when Ima agreed that the cash would count toward her half of the estate, and that she would pay 6% interest on that amount back to the estate until the estate was settled.

So, just from reading the documents, seems to me that yes, there is “power, manipulation” and greed in the story of the people associated with the castle, just as the video states, and that it is the most distressing kind of manipulation: the manipulation of an ill person during the final months of her life, when she was entirely dependent on the person doing the manipulating.