03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (2 page)

In Camarillo, Craig, his father, and brothers lived just blocks from the Johnsons’ home. Celeste skipped school and spent the days there with a batch of close friends, smoking pot and drinking. “We liked being with the older kids,” says one friend. “It made us feel cool.” By then Celeste’s dark blond hair was shoulder length and chopped into a layered Farah Fawcett hairdo. She was fun, with a quick wit and an easy laugh. Craig fell in love. Celeste seemed as taken, and spent every available moment with him. By sophomore year she rarely went to school. “All she wanted was Craig,” says Nancy.

From the onset their relationship was as troubled as Celeste’s family life. “She brought out the worst in him. She’d get him so riled up that he’d go crazy,” according to Craig’s younger brother, Jeff. “Craig believed the things she told him, and that was a mistake.”

After Celeste complained that her boss at a pizza restaurant sexually harassed her, Craig, Jeff, and their friends confronted
the man. “The guy hit Craig with a hammer and we all got in trouble,” says Jeff. “Later, Craig figured she wasn’t even telling the truth.” Another night, at a party, Celeste kissed Jeff, then screamed for Craig claiming Jeff had come on to her. “From that point on, I knew she was just no good,” says Jeff.

The tricks she played often came back to haunt Celeste. By high school some teens didn’t want her around. Gail Sharkey, one of her best friends, found Celeste full of life and exhilarating. She was perplexed by how others responded to her. On weekends when they circulated from house party to house party, they were often told to leave by teenagers who didn’t like Celeste. Gail grew angry, but Celeste laughed and shouted curses at those who’d kicked her out.

“Why doesn’t anyone like you?” Gail asked one evening, stating what she thought was the obvious. Celeste looked crestfallen. “Before, she never acted like she cared, but she looked as if she didn’t realize it, and that I’d hurt her feelings.”

Years later Gail would also remember her friend’s recklessness. One afternoon they drove in Craig’s Toyota truck, listening to Fleetwood Mac on the radio, when Craig and some friends came after them in a car. Laughing, Celeste gunned the engine and took off just as the passenger door flew open. Gail fell out. Her pant leg caught on the door and she was dragged for three hundred feet before Celeste pulled into a driveway. “I had a heavy jacket on, or I would have been hurt,” says Gail. “My whole body was shaking.”

Weeks later that same truck was a pile of scrap. Celeste chuckled telling Gail how she and Craig argued. She said she pulled on the steering wheel and drove it off the road, where the truck rolled. Uninsured, it was a total loss. For weeks after, Celeste wore a thick cervical collar and claimed her neck was broken.

Meanwhile, in the courts, the Johnson divorce ground painfully on, the proceedings progressively more bitter. On the stand, during testimony, Edwin was startled by one question in particular. Nancy’s attorney asked: “Mr. Johnson, did you ever stab Celeste?” Edwin insisted he hadn’t.

Later, testifying for her mother, Celeste insisted that her father had stabbed her. Edwin suggested his attorney ask where. Celeste pointed under her eye.

“Here,” she said. “But the scar disappeared.”

Not long after, Gail asked Celeste why she hadn’t been at school. “I had to go to testify against my father,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”

Gail wondered why her friend never mentioned the attack before. They were together nearly every day, and she had never seen bandages on Celeste, except the cervical collar. All that was forgotten just weeks later when Celeste had yet another crisis: She discovered she was pregnant and dropped out of school. As usual, when she told Gail, the story was far from ordinary. It wasn’t just a case of teenage pregnancy, it was a miracle. “I was told I could never get pregnant,” Celeste said.

“I couldn’t imagine why any doctor would say that to a healthy seventeen-year-old,” says Gail. “The whole thing just seemed really, really odd.”

On December 6, 1980, Celeste Johnson married Craig Bratcher. The seventeen-year-old bride was heavily pregnant with what by then doctors predicted would be twins. She wore a sleeveless red gingham maternity dress with a tuck-pointed front trimmed in white cotton lace that hung loosely across her rounded abdomen. The groom, by then nineteen, wore a blue and white shirt and jeans. It was a small affair, just family and close friends, and the cake had two tiers, with wedding bells and a brave little pouf of white netting at the top.

After the wedding, the young couple moved into a rented
flat in nearby Oxnard. Gail visited during the day when Craig was at work. On February 6, 1981, she drove up to find Celeste, who’d been ordered by her doctor to stay in bed until the births, walking down the street on her way home from a liquor store, where she’d bought junk food and candy. Gail parked the car and they went inside.

“I don’t do bed rest,” Celeste said. “But I’ve been feeling bad all day.”

That evening at 7:27
P.M
., two months early, Celeste gave birth to identical twins. Jennifer Lynn Bratcher was born first, followed by Kristina Ann Bratcher. The infants were tiny, weighting only two pounds seven ounces and two pounds eleven ounces. Doctors had hoped that on bed rest Celeste could have carried them longer, and now they feared the infants weren’t breathing well. An ambulance rushed them to a larger medical center, where they were put on respirators, but the girls were strong and recovered quickly.

Months later the twins sat for a family portrait, the kind taken at department stores in front of a marbled blue background. In it, they wore matching yellow terry-cloth sleepers, their identical little faces flushed and red, eyes wide and intense, hands reaching toward the camera.

That day, Craig looked young and happy. Next to him, Celeste, dressed all in black, smiled shyly. Her dark blond hair framing her pretty face, she appeared the prototype for a content young mother. Barely more than children themselves, they were embarking on what should have been an exciting adventure: building a family with two perfect baby girls. A hint of what lay ahead, however, was also in that photo. While Craig wrapped a protective hand tightly around Jennifer, Celeste’s grasp on Kristina looked reluctant. In the photo, Kristina frowns, her face red and her brow heavily furrowed. Perhaps she already sensed she would never be secure in her mother’s arms.

Less than a year after the wedding the marriage was troubled. Young, with no money and two small babies, they lived like nomads, moving seven times in six months, from Craig’s father’s house, to sharing apartments with friends, to a guest house next to Craig’s grandfather in Washington State, and back to California. When they were happy, friends say Celeste was all Craig could have asked for, vibrant and exciting, full of plans and launching schemes, sprinting through life. She had great dreams—to go to college, to get a good job and buy a house. Yet as quickly, she became distracted, usually by another man, the next door neighbor or somebody she met while waitressing. At times she ran off, leaving the twins behind, with only Craig to care for them.

When she wanted him to take her back, Celeste explained away her behavior by saying she had demons in her childhood, dark secrets that haunted her. “From the beginning when she did something awful, she blamed it on what happened to her as a kid,” says Craig’s mother, Cherie. “Celeste told us her father sexually abused her and that was why she acted like she did.”

Craig felt sorry for her and, despite everything, took her back.

Years later the Johnson family had conflicting theories on what happened between Edwin and Celeste and whether the abuse ever occurred. Edwin categorically denied ever sexually abusing either of his daughters. “It didn’t happen,” he says. Cole and Eddy agreed, insisting they saw no indication of anything improper. “It was a small house, and I saw nothing that even vaguely suggested it,” says Cole. “As nosy as our mom was, she would have known. If Dad did anything wrong, he catered to my sisters too much. Did my father molest Celeste? No.”

Nancy was less sure.

Recounting how she’d tried to get psychiatric help for Celeste, never understanding what was wrong with her, she would say, “I can’t confirm the abuse, but I don’t discount it.” She remembered once walking in to find Edwin in bed with Celeste, yet both were clothed and he was on top of the blanket and sheet with Celeste underneath. Her most troubling memory, perhaps, was waking to find Edwin watching television—in the early hours of the morning—with their youngest daughter, Caresse, on his lap. “He said he couldn’t sleep and got her up to keep him company,” says Nancy.

“It started when I was five or six and went on for a long time,” says Caresse. “Right up until he was thrown out of the house. He’d wake Celeste and me up and want us to watch television with him. Then he sent me to bed, and I heard Celeste crying. I don’t remember it happening to me. Celeste says I don’t want to. Maybe she’s right.”

If Celeste came to motherhood reluctantly, Craig’s world revolved around the twins, giving them baths, feeding them, becoming both mother and father. Years later, when he and Celeste fought over the girls in court, he’d write an account of his life with her for the judge. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have written her off and raised the girls by myself,” he wrote. “But I was young and ignorant, and I thought I was in love.”

In Celeste’s version, Craig was an abusive man who stalked and even raped her. There was no doubt that he had a temper. He would later admit that, saying, “I did a lot of things that I regret.” When she took off with a new man, he fought to get her back. Once, he broke into a house where she and a boyfriend were staying. Another time he stood outside a window, pointing a gun at Celeste and a lover in bed. There were police reports, restraining orders, and Craig spent a four-month stint in jail for brandishing a firearm.
That time, he’d later claim, Celeste took his money and left with one of his fellow inmates, a man he introduced her to in the jail visiting room. When the affairs ended, Craig took her back. “I don’t know if I was lonely or naive,” he later wrote, “but I moved right back in with her… She stayed out all night. We had violent confrontations … She called the cops with wild stories and, because of my record, they believed her.”

At one point she claimed that Craig put cat feces in her mouth as she slept. Another time she charged that he broke her arm. Did it happen? Later, many would be skeptical. “She was always bragging about how she had a high pain tolerance,” says Kristina. “When I was little, I remember seeing her slam her arm in a car door on purpose, until it broke. I don’t know if that’s the time she said my dad did it. But I never saw him hit her.”

One thing stood out: Craig felt powerless with Celeste, sucked into her world of chaos. To explain why she didn’t enjoy sex with him, she talked of the sexual abuse she claimed she suffered at her father’s hand. At their apartment, Gail once saw a hole punched in the wall. Inside, Craig had scrawled:
No Sex!
Yet, at the same time she rebuffed her husband, Celeste seemed driven by lust, jumping in bed with man after man. The message for Craig must have been that she was interested in sex, just not with him.

His mother, Cherie, spent enough time with Celeste to understand what kind of woman her son had married. One day a friend called to say she saw Celeste in the registrar’s office of a business college she was attending, demanding a tuition refund past the cutoff date. When the clerk refused, Celeste cried and said she had a good reason for not attending classes. “One of my twin daughters died,” she said.

The friend was distraught, calling Cherie with condolences over the death of her grandchild. Cherie knew it
wasn’t true. “I wasn’t surprised,” she says. “Money meant more to Celeste than anything, even her own children.”

Eighteen months after they married, on May 18, 1982, Craig and Celeste divorced. Celeste was granted custody of the year-old twins, with Craig having a share of holidays, vacations, and weekends. He was ordered to pay $300 a month in child support, and Celeste was given their 1962 VW, a share of the furniture, her personal items and clothing. A $1,400 tax refund and money from the sale of Craig’s 1974 Honda motorcycle were to be used to pay off bills, including $28 for a diaper service and three doctor bills. Both parties were ordered to restrain from harassing the other.

But rather than an ending, the divorce represented little more than an intermission.

“I hooked up with Celeste again after she left Craig,” says Gail. “She was living with a woman with a bunch of kids on welfare. Celeste was on welfare, too, and working as a waitress at a pizza place. She asked if I wanted to live with her, and we got an apartment together. At first, it was fun. Then things got crazy. When I left, I fled for my life.”

Years later Gail would remember Celeste being ill-equipped for motherhood. When Gail returned home from waitressing, Celeste was dressed and ready for work, leaving the babies with Gail, crying and dirty. Making their lives more chaotic, Craig often arrived at the apartment uninvited. To Gail, it seemed Celeste enjoyed manipulating him. Once, she found a love letter Celeste wrote him, which she’d signed with another woman’s name. “One minute they’d be fine,” says Gail. “The next, pots were flying. But I never saw Craig get physical. She’d throw things, but he’d just turn and leave.”

Since the apartment had only two bedrooms, the girls’ cribs took up one room, and Gail shared a bed with Celeste
in the second bedroom. “There was nothing going on. It just worked better that way,” says Gail.

Yet one morning she awoke to see Craig glaring down at them. “You’re a lesbian,” he said to Celeste. “That’s why you never want sex with me.”

Gail was horrified, but Celeste just laughed.

Soon Gail worried their friendship had taken an odd turn. Gradually, Celeste had become possessive, insisting Gail tell her where she went every moment of every day. “She got really strange. She treated me like a daughter or a boyfriend,” she says. “I felt smothered.” Seven months after she moved in with her, Gail wanted out. Hoping to avoid a confrontation, she packed her things in her car while Celeste worked. When Celeste arrived, Gail said she was going out. Celeste badgered her, insisting she say where. Gail refused. In a rage, Celeste cursed. As Gail walked to the door, something whizzed past her. When she looked, she saw a butcher knife embedded in the wall. Terrified, Gail ran.