| abstract | - Damian Westlake was an old school friend of Richard Castle. When Castle was at boarding school for the first time, he submitted a story to the school literary magazine about his feelings of loneliness and isolation, prompting Damian - the editor of the magazine at the time - to comment that Richard had a genuine talent for writing, with Castle later attributing his subsequent writing career to Damian's words. Damian went on to 'officially' become a writer himself, but he never actually published anything, noting that he lacked Castle's passion for the written word. Although from an upper-class background, Damian faced the loss of his money as a child when his father threatened to cut him off, only for his father's subsequent death under suspicious circumstances in their Puerto Rican holiday home to leave him with all of his family's money. Damian was questioned about the death at the time, but he had an alibi as he was at school across the relevant period. Damian went on to marry the wealthy Victoria, but exhausted most of his inheritance wooing her away from her previous husband, living off his wife's money during their marriage. He even discreetly replaced the diamonds in her jewelry with fakes so that he could sell the real ones to support himself. He also began seeing a woman named Callie, who later claimed to Castle and Beckett that Damian wanted to leave Victoria so they could be together. When Victoria was murdered, Damian was Beckett's prime suspect, despite Castle's conviction that Damian couldn't be responsible for either Victoria's murder or his own father's death. Although Castle was able to track down a postal worker who confirmed that Damian had been seen leaving the house while Victoria was still alive - making it impossible for him to have killed her and the duo eventually figure out that Victoria's ex-husband's girlfriend was the true killer - Castle's independent investigation into Philip Westlake's death allowed him to identify Westlake Sr.'s killer, from a sketch that had been made at the time, as a sociopathic former classmate of his and Damian's named Michael Rutherford. This in turn led him to realize that Damian had hired the other boy to kill his father. Castle handed over his evidence to ensure that Damian was arrested for his role in the patricide.
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