03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (35 page)

Wetzel began her presentation, explaining the process. Texas has a bifurcated trial system. First, the jury would judge guilt or innocence. Before trials began, defendants were given the option of who would decide their sentence if convicted. “Mrs. Beard has decided her punishment will be handled by the jury, not the judge,” she said.

DeGuerin jumped to his feet. “Your Honor, that doesn’t need to be talked about with the jury yet,” he said. “That gives the impression my client expects to be convicted.”

Wetzel agreed; of course that would depend on the jury’s
decision, but then she launched a second volley: “It isn’t until the punishment phase that the jury learns if the accused has committed other bad acts.” She wanted to implant in jurors’ minds that Celeste may have committed crimes they’d only learn later.

As Wetzel worked her way around the room, she asked questions to weed out jurors who had a grudge against the state and those who would not be able to make a decision. She also had the task of determining who would not be able to get past Celeste’s wholesome looks. “Juror number twenty-three,” she said. “You said on your questionnaire that you would not be able to find someone who looks like Mrs. Beard guilty of murder.”

“I couldn’t,” answered the man. “She just doesn’t look like a murderer to me.”

Cobb noted in his records that juror 23 was unacceptable. At the end of the process, jurors would be stricken for cause—those who admitted they were prejudiced either for or against the defendant, those who maintained they couldn’t make a decision. Then, each side would be given ten preemptory strikes, enabling them to weed out jurors they judged were not in their side’s best interests.

Wetzel went on, “We all know that people aren’t as they appear. How do we judge whether people are telling us the truth?”

From that, the jurors launched into a discussion that included the characteristics by which they judged others as liars: a lack of eye contact, body language, a tone of voice, whether their words were logical and credible based on other facts, whether or not they had personal gain at stake. Wetzel agreed those were all indications.

She then detailed the counts against Celeste. First: capital murder. For that charge the jurors would have to find Celeste caused her husband’s death for the promise of remuneration;
namely, his money. In liberal Travis County—unlike much of Texas—prosecutors rarely asked for the death penalty. In a case where the defendant hadn’t pulled the trigger, it would be especially difficult to get. So the prosecutor had taken the ultimate punishment off the table. A conviction on capital murder meant an automatic life sentence.

Second, Celeste was charged with murder. Unlike capital murder, here the jury didn’t need a financial motive. The punishment, too, differed. A murder conviction offered options from probation to life.

Last, Celeste was charged with injury of an elderly person, another third-class felony, with punishment ranging from probation to life.

All the charges required that to find her guilty, the jury had to decide Celeste acted knowingly and with intent to grievously harm Steve. That brought Wetzel to the role she charged Celeste had played—that of the planner and conspirator.

“Can someone be guilty of murder without pulling the trigger on the gun?” she asked.

Hands went up around the room. Before long nearly all the panel agreed that the planner was as guilty as the shooter in a murder—a simplification of what’s called the Law of Parties in criminal statutes.

The prosecutor didn’t fare as well when it came to her next concept: the proposition that some evidence would come from a coconspirator, a self-avowed murderer. Many in the jury pool found Wetzel’s suggestion that they give such testimony as much credibility as that of a police officer preposterous. DeGuerin agreed, jumping from his chair. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Judge, how can she ask the jury to overlook where the information comes from? The law doesn’t ask them to do that.”

Tracey Tarlton’s testimony, Wetzel said, could be judged
based on whether it was corroborated by other evidence. With that, many jurors agreed, but some staunchly insisted that they could never, under any circumstances, judge someone guilty based on the testimony of an admitted murderer. “That would be like looking at a guy in a dress and asking me to ignore the dress,” said one man, a tall, heavy-set business type in a starched white shirt, khakis, and a tie. “That’s not gonna happen.”

That afternoon it was DeGuerin’s turn. Where Wetzel had come off as strident, he approached the jurors softly, introducing himself and his fellow attorneys. He stood behind Celeste, placing his hands on her shoulders. “This is my client, the most important person in the courtroom,” he said. “As jurors, you’ll be deciding her fate.”

When he introduced his three law students in the courtroom, he said, “They’re here because they want to help.” DeGuerin talked of his teaching at the University of Texas, an institution that permeates Austin. And he talked of David Koresh, saying he was proud of what he’d done in Waco, “trying to bring a peaceful solution. I’m proud of what I do, proud of being a defense attorney.

“Now I’m going to do what one of you suggested earlier,” he said with a warm smile. “I’m going to get on with it.”

To begin, DeGuerin went row by row, allowing those who’d already formed opinions on Celeste’s guilt to disqualify themselves. A dozen jurors said they’d already judged Celeste, even before the first word of testimony.

From there he talked of the law that allowed a defendant to decide whether she would take the stand. Many people, he said, felt they had to hear from the accused. If a defendant didn’t testify, they judged, it was an admission of guilt. Again hands rose from a sampling of jurors who said they could not ignore the failure of a person accused of a crime
to take the witness stand. These jurors, too, were disqualified.

DeGuerin then tried to defuse a hot button issue: the Beards’ May-December marriage. “I’m seventeen years older than my wife,” said one juror. “I know she didn’t marry me for my money.”

DeGuerin chuckled. “How many of you do have a problem with it?”

Four women and three men raised their hands. “‘Money hungry gold digger’ comes to mind,” said one of the men.

Hirschhorn noted strikes against more potential jurors.

In the end the jury that would judge Celeste Beard consisted of eight men and four women, with two male alternates. Nine were white, one Asian American, one black, and one Hispanic. One was a software engineer who’d gotten a laugh when he said that if his team waited to release software until it was a hundred percent, “we’d never get anything out.”

Another was a woman in her fifties, whose twenty-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and murdered thirteen years earlier. “I have serious issues with the Austin P.D.,” she’d admitted. “But they wouldn’t impact my decision in this case.”

Also on the final jury was a white-haired, bearded man, the one who’d laughed about being married to a woman seventeen years his junior. Would that influence his decision? No one could truly know, for despite the eight hours they’d spent choosing the jury, despite Hirschhorn’s analysis, no one could predict how any of the fourteen people seated in the jury box would react to the testimony they would hear. Would they believe that the woman seated so demurely before them could orchestrate murder?

As she scanned their faces, Wetzel felt good about the jurors who’d decide Celeste Beard’s fate. They were bright,
well-educated, and looked interested. Yet, she was worried. That DeGuerin and Hirschhorn also seemed pleased bothered her. What did they see in these same fourteen people that led them to believe the opposite, that this jury would find their client not guilty?

T
he flags flew at half-mast at the Texas State Capitol
the following Monday, February 3, 2003, on the first day of testimony in the Celeste Beard case. Over the weekend, the U.S. had suffered a tragedy; the space shuttle
Columbia
had exploded in the Texas skies as it descended toward earth. Austin and the country mourned.

Two hundred fifty miles northeast in Nacogdoches, searchers retrieved shuttle debris, while at Woolridge Park, a green, public square with a gracious white-pillared gazebo across from the Travis County courthouse, the gnarled branches of graceful oaks reached out across the sloping grounds like arms offering shelter. Under them, the city’s homeless rearranged shopping cart estates. The winter had been a difficult one, at times bitterly cold, but this day was a balmy respite, 60 degrees by the nine o’clock start time. It was expected to be near 80 by afternoon.

Even on quiet days courthouses are unsettling places. Those who work there try to make them homey, bringing family photos, their children’s grade school art, and doughnuts
to share. Opening day of a big case, the anxiety is so powerful it seems nearly palpable. It bristles in the faces in the hallways, sparks from the fluorescent lights overhead, and sends a static tension through those who file into the courtroom. The Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center was no exception that morning, as it buzzed with anticipation. Half a block away, on Tenth Street, TV-news satellite trucks waited for sound bites. Inside, lines formed at the first-floor metal detectors and elevators filled with the curious.

Just after nine, Judge Kocurek announced the beginning of the case styled
State of Texas v. Celeste Beard Johnson.
The 390th District Court was standing room only as Celeste, looking reserved in a pink sweater set and beige skirt, stood with her crutches beside her attorneys as Assistant D.A. Gary Cobb read the indictment: one charge each of capital murder, murder, and injury to the elderly.

“How do you plead?” Kocurek asked.

“I am not guilty,” Celeste said firmly.

“Is the state ready?” asked the judge.

“The state is ready,” replied Allison Wetzel.

“Is the defense ready?”

“The defense is ready,” said Dick DeGuerin.

“Ms. Wetzel, you may begin your opening statement,” said the judge.

With that, Allison Wetzel stood before the jury. “On October 9, 1999, just before 3:00
A.M
., Steven Beard woke up suddenly, in excruciating pain,” she said. “His intestines were spilling out of the front of his body. He didn’t know what had happened to him. Police found a spent shotgun shell at the foot of his bed. He was rushed to Brackenridge Hospital. The doctors didn’t know if he’d make it… ”

Nervous, perhaps intimidated by the cameras stationed throughout the courtroom or the reputation of the attorney who glowered at her from the defense table, Wetzel began
tentatively, reading her statement. But soon she gathered momentum, her voice growing secure and her eyes flashing as she commenced where Steven Beard’s troubles had begun, the day he met an “opportunistic country club waitress.”

As the story developed, Wetzel told of Beard’s vulnerability, after nursing his beloved Elise through cancer. She recounted his first months with Celeste, when she entered his life as a housekeeper, then divorced Jimmy Martinez and set her sights on Steve and his millions. They married, yet Celeste quickly showed her true nature, emptying his safety deposit box. Steve initiated divorce proceedings, which would have left Celeste with nothing. “That divorce filing taught Celeste Beard a lesson,” Wetzel said, explaining that if Steve divorced Celeste, she got nothing. If he died, she got it all.

Celeste sat between DeGuerin and Catherine Baen, shoulders rounded, arms wrapped about her, with her head draped to the side, her chin pinned to her left shoulder. She looked pitiful, like a beaten dog or a cowering child. At times she teared up. Over the coming weeks, the reporters would dub her frequent tears as the “daily cry.” Often, she glared at witnesses and prosecutors, her blue eyes flashing pure hate.

The portrait Wetzel painted of Celeste was a damning one, a woman who married for money, then abhorred her husband, ridiculed him, and drugged him. She recounted Tracey Tarlton’s version of her romance with Celeste, asserting Celeste “worked on Tracey to convince her Steven Beard was a terrible man.”

To the world, she said, Tracey and Celeste held themselves out to be a couple. They attended a wedding together, sent each other cards, talked on the telephone “all the time.” Then Tracey came to hamburger night and kissed Celeste in front of Kristina. It was Tracey who went to the girls’ graduation party at Jimmy Martinez’s house, not Steve. He wasn’t invited. That August, Steve told his wife to rid herself of
Tarlton, and Celeste, Wetzel said, “stepped up her campaign to do harm to Steven Beard…

“A few days before they were to depart for Europe, Celeste asked Tracey Tarlton to shoot Steven Beard. She promised if Tracey got caught she’d take care of her pets, pay for her lawyer, and support her.”

Wetzel recounted that night in October, detailing the plans Celeste made, claiming she’d told Tracey to shoot Steve in the stomach, not the head or chest, because that would make a mess. Afterward, Celeste attempted to wipe all remnants of Tracey from the house, anything that could tie her to the killing. When Steve died the following January 22, “Celeste’s mourning was short.”

With her final words, Wetzel delivered a punch: “This is a simple case of a greedy, manipulative defendant who took advantage of a mentally ill woman who loved her.”

For a few moments the courtroom remained silent. Then Dick DeGuerin stood. It was his opportunity to address the jury, to convince them to see the case his way. Unlike Wetzel, he showed little nervousness. For the first moments, however, he did seem overwhelmed. He knew jurors would find many of his client’s actions reprehensible. “This is a case of fatal attraction,” he said. “This is a case of a fatal obsession.”

While Celeste had barely looked up from her chin-to-shoulder pose during Wetzel’s opening, as DeGuerin spoke she sat up, listening intently. DeGuerin agreed with Wetzel that Tarlton was mentally ill. In fact, he went even further, labeling her psychotic and saying she heard voices and experienced auditory and visual hallucinations. “She is a lesbian,” he said, spitting out the words, “predatory and aggressive.”

A self-satisfied smile flashed across Celeste’s face as he spoke. Branding Tarlton that way was risky in liberal Austin, yet DeGuerin had reasoned it through. While the jurors
might not condemn Tracey’s sexuality, he intended to draw her as a sexual predator, obsessed with Celeste. DeGuerin felt certain the jury wouldn’t condone that.

Tarlton killed Steve to get him out of Celeste’s life, DeGuerin charged, because she wanted her for herself. She then turned on Celeste, fingering her as the planner, to escape the death penalty or a life sentence. To defuse later testimony, he admitted parts of what Wetzel had charged. Yes, he said, Celeste married Steven Beard for his money, for security, for his promise that he would support her. Steve knew that. He was a kind, generous, outgoing and friendly man. He was bighearted with Celeste and gave her everything she wanted. “He was generous,” said DeGuerin, “to a fault.”

The twins were “spoiled brats,” he said, who turned against their own mother to get their adoptive father’s money.

Yes, Celeste was unfaithful, had a relationship with her ex-husband. But, he implied, Steve knew and didn’t object. He was sexually impotent, DeGuerin said, requiring a shot in his penis to get an erection. He drank too much, had heart problems, breathing problems. He knew Celeste married him for his support and money and didn’t care. And Steve was happy with her, happier than he’d ever been.

On the overhead projector, he displayed photos of Steve and Celeste at their wedding, on rafting trips to Colorado, in Hong Kong and San Francisco, and at the lake on their matching wave runners. Then Celeste had a breakdown, caused by post-traumatic stress from years of sexual abuse when she was a child. She tried to kill herself, and met Tracey Tarlton in the psychiatric unit at St. David’s.

There, he said, they became friends. He showed pictures of the two women at the wedding in Atlanta and at the lake house party Celeste threw for Tracey. He described it not as a lover’s gift but a favor for a friend, because “Tracey’s
house wasn’t big enough.” On the screen he projected a snapshot of Celeste and Tracey dancing.

Yet, in the world DeGuerin portrayed, the relationship on Celeste’s part was never more than platonic. The two women had never been lovers.

Perhaps DeGuerin didn’t know how openly the women had courted. Or he may have felt hamstrung by his client, who insisted to him as she had to Steve, “I don’t eat at the Y.” Of course, proving Tracey had lied about the nature of the relationship offered an intriguing upside for DeGuerin. The question before the jury wasn’t if Celeste and Tracey were lovers or friends, only if they conspired to kill Steve. Yet disproving Tracey’s story of the love affair would brand her a liar. It then wouldn’t be difficult for him to persuade the jurors to view her entire testimony as a lie.

DeGuerin then brought out the written evidence, bits he’d pulled from the journals and cards to bolster his version. First: a note from Timberlawn, where Celeste wrote to Tracey, “I just want to be your friend. Nothing more.” Second: a snatch of Tracey’s voluminous psychiatric reports, the day she’d said all her problems would be solved “if a certain person met with an untimely death.”

Where Wetzel’s conclusion had been that Celeste loaded Tracey with anger toward Steve and then pointed her, as one might a gun, at her husband, DeGuerin took the opposite stance. The relationship, everything Tracey said about Celeste’s involvement, was all a fabrication of Tarlton’s sickness.

“It’s just in Tracey’s mind,” he said.

He admitted Celeste’s actions in the months following her husband’s death would raise eyebrows. “She drank, partied, spent money, she mutilated herself,” he said. “She threatened Tracey.” Yet, no matter what, it was all unimportant, because Steve, he insisted, hadn’t died of a complication
from the gunshot wound but an unrelated infection. It was the argument that worried Wetzel the most, that he’d be able to rewrite the autopsy and change Steve Beard’s cause of death.

“The state’s evidence will make Celeste look bad,” he admitted. “It will make her look like a gold digger.”

But he wanted the jurors to remember: To believe a confessed killer like Tracey Tarlton, the state had to have corroborative evidence. DeGuerin said the evidence they would present was tainted. The sources, particularly the twins, were clouded with suspicion. They were after Steve’s money, he said. And the only way they could get their hands on it was to get rid of their mother. “Corroborative evidence must show Celeste was involved in the commission of the crime,” DeGuerin concluded. “It is not enough to just make her look bad.”

Before he sat down, DeGuerin looked at the jurors and made one last statement: “Celeste Beard is not guilty.”

In the front two rows behind the prosecutors sat the elder Beard children, Becky, Paul and his wife Kim, and Steve III. They’d waited three years for this day in court. Paul glanced at Celeste, remembering the one time he’d seen her before, with his father on their visit in Virginia. That day, she’d catered to Steve and acted as if she loved him. Now, Paul judged, like so much else in Celeste’s life, it had all been a sham.

Next to the Beard children sat Ellen Halbert, the prosecutor’s head of victim assistance. Steve’s friends filed in, including the Baumans, eager to see justice done. The rest of the seats filled with the media and those who were drawn by the sensational headlines. Noticeably absent was anyone supporting Celeste. Neither her mother nor her sister attended. Even her husband, Cole, wasn’t there. Catherine
Baen dismissed questions about his absence by saying simply, “He has to work.”

Celeste’s only constant supporter in the courthouse was Marilou Gibbs, the elderly woman she’d befriended at the lake. Gibbs wasn’t allowed in the courtroom because she would later testify, so she sat in the hallway reading novels. “Celeste asked me to come,” she said. “It makes her feel better to know I’m here.”

Meanwhile, Wetzel brought Steve into the courtroom. As her first piece of evidence, she presented the 911 tape from the shooting. The jurors listened intently to the frightened, gravelly voice of a dead man:

“My—My—My guts are coming out.”

“Do you need an ambulance?”

“I need an ambulance, hurry.”

The prosecutor wanted Steve to become a presence for the jurors, and the tape accomplished that. As his voice filled the courtroom, it was easy to hear his pain and picture his bloody hands holding in his internal organs.

“My guts just jumped out of my stomach … my wife in the house… call her.”

One after the other, Cobb called to the stand those first on the scene: Deputy Alan Howard, Stephen Alexander, and Sergeant Greg Truitt. At three
A.M
., three years before, they responded to a call from an elderly man at a mansion in an exclusive residential neighborhood in the hills over Austin. Lights flashing behind him, Howard rang the bell. No response. With the others trailing, he picked his way around the side of the house and onto a patio. Through a window, he saw Steve, critically injured.

Howard broke the glass.

“Did you make a lot of noise?” Cobb asked Truitt.

“When Howard broke the door, we did,” he replied.

“No one came?”

“No.”

Truitt later encountered Celeste and Kristina in the living room.

“Don’t let my husband die,” she cried.

STAR Flight had already been called to the Beard residence when Deputy Russell Thompson noticed something yellow visible under the corner of an EMS bag: a spent shotgun shell. “This is a crime scene,” he announced. “Secure the area.”

The officers agreed on nearly every point, except one: Celeste Beard’s demeanor. One described her as very upset; others disagreed, saying she seemed intermittently concerned and calm. One said, “She cried, but there weren’t any tears.”