MANATEE — A box full of letters from Thomas Fast, all with the return address of the Manatee County jail, is hard for Gary Daughtrey to ignore, but he says he does.
Daughtrey used to read the writings from the man accused of killing and dismembering his stepmother. But the letters, Daughtrey says, never change, filled with the delusions of his former employee of nearly two decades.
Delusions, says Daughtrey, that Fast is the victim of a conspiracy that has framed him for killing Susan Fast in June 2007, stuffing her body parts in garbage bags and dumping the bags in a storm drain behind a Lakewood Ranch shopping plaza.
Fast’s many letters from jail beg Daughtrey to contact federal authorities and prove his conspiracy theory to officials at the highest level in order to avoid a first-degree murder trial.
That’s not going to happen. Fast’s trial begins Monday with jury selection at the Manatee County Courthouse.
Daughtrey has considered attending the trial to see what might happen to Fast, who worked as a mortician at Daughtrey’s funeral home and completed dozens of jobs for the Orlando funeral director over two decades. Fast often slept in Daughtrey’s home as he worked on a job for an employer who still calls him “talented and reliable.”
But Daughtrey has decided to stay away from Fast’s murder trial, which officials expect will draw intense media coverage, possibly including gavel-to-gavel coverage by truTV, formally known as CourtTV. He expects the trial will only bring him to the same conclusion as Fast’s letters have: that Fast is a tortured man whose unchecked insanity, authorities say, led to him to unimaginable violence.
“I don’t suspect in the end they’ll get much further than that he needs to be institutionalized,” Daughtrey predicted. “At first, I read all of his letters. But when I get them it is all the same ramblings, and I just can’t read them anymore. But I still keep them, they just go right in the box.”
‘He was different’
In the early 1990s, Daughtrey was in the market to hire a mortician to work at his Orlando funeral home. He went to Gupton-Jones College of Funeral Service for a recommendation of one of its students. The school provided Thomas Fast.
Daughtrey interviewed Fast and liked him, hiring the man he would turn to as employee for many years to come.
“He was different, but extremely talented at everything he set out to do, and a very hard worker,” Daughtrey said.
Fast worked as a mortician at Dove Funeral Home for two years, then moved on to start his own business as a contractor, a handyman of sorts, Daughtrey says. And he was good with his hands, just as easily doing home repairs as building a boat.
“He worked on my offices and homes for years. He did the best work I have ever seen,” Daughtrey said.
But another side to Fast always came out, and it got worse over the years, Daughtrey recalls. Fast constantly talked to himself while he worked, often letting go with loud rumbling laughs.
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