BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — About once a year, Margaret Garetano-Castor visits the cemetery in Boynton Beach where her childhood friend, Karen Slattery, is laid to rest.
"It's hard to go back," Garetano-Castor said. "You try so hard, but you're still healing from the pain that it was, but it's kind of painful when you can't remember specific things."
On this particular visit to the cemetery in May, it was different. The memories came back to Garetano-Castor with ease.
"Driving over here to meet you today, I had so many visions of her," she said. "Today, I had some really vivid memories of her around the pool in her bathing suit and in her house and making sandwiches and just crazy memories that I don't know where they're coming from."
Slattery was Garetano-Castor's best friend.
"We were more like sisters, I feel. I was at their house often," she said. "We would laugh a lot together. We went shopping, and one great memory is we were shopping for her birthday and just laughing."
Garetano-Castor spoke to Slattery on the phone just hours before she died in 1984.
Slattery, then 14 years old, was raped and murdered by Duane Owen as she babysat two sisters in Delray Beach. The children were not hurt.
"It was brief, and it was, who knew?" Garetano-Castor said about the phone call. "You know, in hindsight, had I known, I would have kept her on the phone forever. But it was brief. She was kind of complaining about babysitting that night, to be honest, and we had plans coming up the next day. So, it was just a brief phone call. She actually was trying to get out of babysitting that night, ironically. But it was brief, and that's the biggest memory I have of that. We were going to a baseball game. We had tickets. My dad had got some tickets for me and a bunch of friends. And we were all going together, and that didn't happen."
Their circle of childhood friends has stayed close through the years. They planted a tree in front of their former high school in Boca Raton in Slattery's honor.
"It was something that we planted while we were there in her memory, and it was a tiny, tiny, little tree, and it's grown so big," Garetano-Castor said. "It's big and beautiful, and it is like her legacy. She left us way too soon. As small as she was — she was small, small and spunky — and that tree is rooted throughout the front of that school, and just like in us. She is rooted in our lives."
Their tight circle of friends has stayed close through the years. Some of their children now attend the same high school.
"She was a force," Garetano-Castor said. "I mean, she was just such a powerful, young girl. People need to know that. She was an amazing girl. She did so much, wanted so much left of life, had so much ahead of her, and it was taken away, and for me, it's more about bringing that beauty that she is and taking away the ugliness, that of the execution. So, she is just a beautiful spirit and soul, and that's what I want people to remember, is Karen that way."
Slattery's killer, who has been on death row for decades, is set to be executed Thursday at the Florida State Prison.