03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (37 page)

Years of worrying Celeste might find the twins had all led Justin to that day on the stand. As he testified in a somber dark suit, he looked old beyond his years, filling in for the jury more of Celeste’s bizarre world, where she jumped from man to man and treated the teens like they were her
servants and her entourage, confiding in them about her sex life, including the “Sunday suck.” Earlier, Dr. Handley had contradicted DeGuerin’s opening statement. No, Steve had never needed penile shots for erections, he testified. Rather, he, like millions of men, took Viagra. Justin testified that Celeste hated the encounters, complaining loudly and often.

“I need to go make some money,” she’d say, on her way into the master bedroom.

Celeste had a secret life, with secret parties and P.O. boxes she hid from her husband, Justin said. Then he told of the chaos at Toro Canyon: While Steve lay in the hospital fighting for his life, Celeste remodeled. She bought new furniture, three new televisions, the Cadillacs, shrubs; had the garage floor, crown moldings, and rain gutters all painted. She regrouted the pool, something that had been done a year earlier, sending the bills to the trust to pay. When Steve came home, she refused to hire help. “Did you ever talk to Celeste about bringing in an aide to take care of Mr. Beard?” Cobb asked.

“Yes,” Justin said. “She didn’t want that.”

Celeste told him and the twins that she cut off all communication with Tracey after the shooting, but when he found the secret cell phone, they suspected that wasn’t so. “She told us Tracey got fired from BookPeople,” Justin said. “I wondered how she knew.”

From Celeste laughing in the funeral limousine to her wild partying with Donna Goodson, Justin had seen it all. Then he told how Celeste had given Donna money, lots of money.

On cross exam, again DeGuerin attacked. “It’s true that Steve Beard didn’t like you at all,” he charged.

“No,” Justin said.

“He called you a loser.”

“No.”

After talking about the sleeping pills and the Everclear, the parties that Steve wasn’t to be told about, DeGuerin said, “In all the bad things you said Celeste was doing to Steve Beard, you participated, didn’t you?”

Grimacing, Justin admitted, “Yes.”

DeGuerin kept at him, suggesting he and the other teens had been the ones who bad-mouthed Steve, not Celeste, and that Kristina—even more than Celeste—had been close to Tracy. He slammed Justin for having been party to tape-recording Celeste’s calls and implied they’d been edited and changed. Justin, as DeGuerin described him, was a computer nerd easily capable of altering the phone calls. About Celeste’s juvenile behavior, like pilfering For Sale signs and sticking them in the lot at the lake, DeGuerin mocked, “Now that’s something that really shows Celeste to be a killer, doesn’t it?”

“I object, Your Honor,” Cobb said.

“No more sidebars or comments,” Judge Kocurek warned DeGuerin.

Over and over again DeGuerin suggested that Justin lied. He insisted that he couldn’t have seen the women in bed together at the lake house, maintaining that the line of sight from the doorway to the bed wouldn’t have allowed it. It was Tracey who acted like a couple with Celeste, not the other way around, he said. Although at times he appeared shaken, Justin held his own.

An avid photographer, Justin had photos of so much, from Celeste’s infected hands to marijuana brownie crumbs after the lake house party, that DeGuerin asserted, “If you’d actually seen Tracey and Celeste in bed you could have taken a picture, couldn’t you?”

“No,” said Justin.

At the end of the cross examination, DeGuerin charged, “You and Kristina are still together. You have a financial stake in this case.”

“You could say that my stake would be for justice,” Justin shot back.

“For justice or for Justin?” the defense attorney countered.

Jennifer felt her mother’s eyes on her when she took the stand. At twenty-three years old, she’d grown into a woman. Still, a chill ran through her. She, more than anyone, understood her mother’s wrath. The trial promised the end of their ordeal; yet Jennifer felt only dread. She and Kristina had discussed what they would do if their mother were acquitted— they’d run. Celeste, they felt certain, would hunt them down. And if she found them? “She’d kill us,” Jennifer says.

So that day on the stand, Jennifer concentrated on Ellen Halbert’s face in the gallery and on the attorneys’ questions. The one person she couldn’t bear to look at was Celeste. Throughout her testimony, as Jennifer talked about the horrors of her childhood, her mother took her stricken pose, tucking her chin against her shoulder, as if to shrink behind the defense table. Every so often, however, she looked up. When she did, Celeste’s eyes flashed rage.

“Who took you to the foster home in Arizona and left you there?” asked Wetzel.

“Celeste,” Jennifer replied. While the jury had already heard much about Celeste’s life with Steve, what Jennifer filled in was who her mother had been before she’d married him, the woman who flitted from marriage to marriage, dragging along two small daughters, unless they became inconvenient, at which times she shuttled them off to be cared for by whichever state she was currently in.

“What was the Sunday suck?”

“Celeste giving Steve a blow job,” Jennifer replied.

Through her testimony, the entire tawdry picture of Celeste’s life came into focus. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond this woman, not shocking her teenagers with talk of sex nor
bedding her ex-husband after drugging her current one. As Jennifer added to the texture of the prior testimony about events on the night of the shooting, one thing came through clearly. While they disagreed about small things, including who said Tracey’s name first, the teens were consistent about what had happened that night, including that Celeste had not been at Toro Canyon at midnight.

Another thing became clear as Jennifer talked: When Celeste told her to do something, she didn’t ask why.

“Did you ask Celeste why you weren’t to mention Tracey’s name?” Wetzel asked.

“No. I was afraid to. She would be upset.”

“And that would scare you?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you meet your mother alone?”

“I was afraid to. Little things kept adding up.” Before long Wetzel had artfully led Jennifer through what frightened her, including the pink-lined caskets.

During cross exam, DeGuerin grilled Jennifer. “When did you start calling your mother Celeste?” he charged. “Was it when you were suing her over Steve’s money?”

“No.”

“You refuse today to call your mother your mother?” he said, flushed with fury.

Wetzel jumped up and objected. Judge Kocurek sustained her objection, and DeGuerin fumed. After a pause, he said, “You didn’t like Steve, did you?”

“That’s not true.”

But then he said some things that struck home for Jennifer. “You laughed at him getting drunk, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said sadly.

“Not to his face but behind his back.”

“Yes,” she said again. Now, with Steve dead, she regretted
those actions. At the time, she had been a teenager making fun of an adult.

The prosecutors had laid it all before the jury. In fits and starts, they’d heard about hamburger night and the way Tracey kissed Celeste; the graduation party at Jimmy’s house and finding Tracey on top of Celeste. DeGuerin did what he could, objecting, flustering, accusing. Jennifer and Kristina were kept by the bank, he suggested. Earlier he’d accused the bankers of depriving Celeste of her own money, by not funding the trust. Now he asked how Jennifer and Kristina managed to not only live but buy cars and an Austin triplex.

“We work, and we got a loan,” Jennifer said.

Still, at times, she seemed shaken. On redirect, Wetzel returned to the main issues. “Was it all right with your mother if you told authorities what you knew?” she asked.

“No,” said Jennifer. “It wasn’t all right.”

“Celeste told me to tell the others not to mention Tracey’s name,” Kristina said when she took the stand. With her, Wetzel filled in more of Celeste’s past life, including the period when she moved into Steve’s house and his bedroom. She showed how Celeste began slowly, adding sleeping pills to Steve’s food. “I didn’t realize it could hurt him,” Kristina said. “I thought he was a nice man. Celeste was never married to anyone else for very long. I didn’t think he would last, either.” Instead, Steve had stuck with Celeste, and with Kristina and Jennifer. “He became our dad.”

Much of Kristina’s testimony mirrored that of her sister and friends. On the stand, neither she nor Jennifer bore any resemblance to the spoiled brats DeGuerin described. She talked about Steve and Celeste’s arguments, mostly over money, and her mother’s suicide attempts, usually when one
husband or another threatened to leave. When she saw Tracey at St. David’s, Kristina said, “She looked sad, and I felt bad for her.”

The jurors didn’t hear about Kristina’s sleepless nights as the trial approached. Even in a room full of deputies and a judge, she couldn’t look at her mother. If she met her mother’s gaze, she feared she wouldn’t be able to testify against her. She felt certain that somehow Celeste would get to her. To the twins, Celeste remained supremely powerful.

Wetzel had been looking forward to putting one item in particular before the jury. Approaching the witness stand, she handed Kristina a receipt from James Avery. When she’d discovered it in Celeste’s records, Wetzel had been delighted.

“What is this for?” Wetzel asked.

“My mother sent me to pick up an order she’d placed.”

“Is there a ring on there?”

“Yes, a wedding ring.”

“Is this the ring?” she asked, bringing to the stand a plastic bag that held the wedding ring Celeste had given Tracey, which had been placed in evidence.

“That looks like it,” Kristina said.

As Wetzel turned on the recorder to play the phone calls Kristina had taped after Celeste left Timberlawn, all present heard what the twins had heard throughout their lives: their mother emotionally manipulating and verbally abusing them. “Do you know what it feels like, do you?” Celeste screamed. “Do you know what it feels like when you’re four years old, you aren’t even in kindergarten, and some guy has a big dick sticking in you? Do you know what that does to you?… I don’t think I can ever forgive what you said to me tonight. Because as soon as I get home I feel like just fucking sticking a knife down my throat, you bitch.”

One sentence to the next Celeste’s mood changed. From talking calmly, she launched into terrible attacks, calling
Kristina names and threatening to cut her off and leave her with nothing. On the witness stand, Kristina stared down at her lap, crying softly. Even years later it hurt her to listen to the tapes. It was, after all, her mother’s voice.

Next to her attorneys, Celeste cried, too. Her face red, she sobbed, with her head on the table. Looking back, it would seem Celeste’s tears nearly always came when someone said something nice about her or when her alleged abuse came up in testimony. Now, Celeste cried listening to her own voice on the tape, harder than she had at any other time during the trial.

Wetzel let the tape run out to the final sentence.

“I hired someone to kill Tracey,” Celeste said.

“Okay,” Kristina answered.

Then the tape went silent.

The courtroom became utterly quiet. As the judge ordered a break, Wetzel looked at the stunned jurors.

At 11:35
A.M
. on the Tuesday of the third week of the trial, Tracey Tarlton walked into the courtroom wearing an orange V-neck jailhouse uniform over a yellow T-shirt. Heavier than in the photos the jury had seen, two years after entering jail, she was pale and somber. After being sworn in, the prosecutors’ star witness took the stand, clasped her hands in her lap, and braced for what she knew would come. At times she looked over at Celeste. Unlike the twins, she showed no fear. More than once, she smiled. When she did, Celeste averted her gaze. No one on either side doubted how important the coming testimony would be. “Tracey was crucial,” says Cobb. “For the defense to win, they had to destroy her.”

Slowly Wetzel led her star witness through her life, from her childhood in Fort Worth, through her jobs at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, to BookPeople, where she managed a staff of 150. Then she talked about the nights Tracey
drank and played Russian roulette, and how friends brought her to St. David’s.

“Did you meet someone named Celeste Beard there?”

“Yes, I did.”

Wetzel developed the relationship carefully with Tracey, showing how she and Celeste began spending more and more time together, Tracey talking about the first times they were sexual. “Your hands on her?” Wetzel asked.

“Our hands on each other,” she replied.

Soon the jurors had before them testimony about a relationship that built quickly, one in which Tracey cared for Celeste, worrying about her and taking care of her. Through it all she saw Steve as the enemy. “I only knew him through what Celeste told me,” she said. Tears in her eyes, Tracey talked of the night of the shooting, steeling her resolve to walk into the house, stand at the foot of the bed, and pull the trigger.

With Steve wheelchair bound and in terrible pain, Celeste met Tracey in the park and gave her the wedding band.

“This ring?” Wetzel asked, handing her the bag.

“Yes,” Tracey said. After she’d identified it, Wetzel handed it to the first juror to look at and pass to the others. She wanted them to satisfy their curiosity firsthand, that it was, in fact, a wedding ring.

For two days Tracey remained on the stand, and the prosecutors and defense attorneys warred, with her as the battleground. Wetzel wanted jurors to see an intelligent yet troubled woman drawn into Celeste’s web of lies. DeGuerin needed to drill his vision of Tarlton into their minds: that of an obsessed mentally ill woman. During cross exam, on a large tablet of paper beside her he wrote words he wanted jurors to identify her with: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, and psychotic. Soon it became a war of medical charts, journals, and cards. Wetzel read snatches out of the materials before
her. In the journal, she asked, who’d written that they needed to go to the day program, quick?