Dan Middleberry is a character portrayed by William Francis McGuire in the ABC crime series Castle. Dan Middleberry was a man who did not seem remotely to deserve what life did to him. A widower whose wife had died a good decade earlier, he was the father of aspiring beauty pageant Miss Illinois, Amber Middleberry. When Amber's body stopped the show, Dan was the first interview Beckett and Castle conducted, and it was clear that the meaning of his life came to him vicariously, through the daughter he adored, perhaps more so because she was all he had left.