03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (4 page)

Two months later Celeste left the girls with Lue and moved into an apartment with Jimmy, Lue’s son, and his male partner. At the time, Celeste was dating a middle-age lawyer she met hanging out at a Phoenix bar frequented by the big-money crowd. He gifted her with something she’d often talked of wanting: breast implants.

When not out with her wealthy beau, Celeste partied with Jimmy and his crowd at gay bars. Because of her giggle, they nicknamed her Silly. “Celeste can be sweet, but she can turn backstabbing,” he says. “There’s something about her that you go back to her.”

Still, their friendship soured. Jimmy complained to Lue that Celeste had come between him and his partner, pitting one against the other. As she had when anyone criticized Celeste,
Lue defended her, this time instead of believing her own son.

From Jimmy’s apartment, Celeste, who had a string of jobs from office work to waitressing, moved into an apartment with the girls. By then they’d become her shadows. Jennifer ached to play ball or spend time with friends, but that was out of the question. Celeste wouldn’t permit it. Often they weren’t even allowed to attend school, not when Celeste preferred to have them with her, to follow behind her as she shopped or ran errands. Through it all, Kristina kept silent, rarely complaining. She watched their mother with anxious eyes, afraid anything could send her over the suicidal edge.

Lue, too, was frightened, but for a different reason. Celeste drove at breakneck speeds and had one wreck after another. The nine-year-olds were terrified as their mother careened around corners. When a check-engine light came on in the yellow Taurus, Celeste screamed, “The car’s going to explode.”

The twins panicked as she shouted to hold onto the doors. “Be ready to jump,” Celeste ordered, but nothing ever happened. Years later Jennifer remembered holding so tight her knuckles turned white, terrified they would all die. “I think she did it so we’d be quiet,” she says. “We were so scared, and she laughed like it was all a joke.”

At night Celeste left the girls alone in the apartment and partied. Hour after hour they waited for her return. “From when I was little on, what I remember most about being with her was that I was always hungry,” says Jennifer. “She spent money on herself and never had any for food.”

Despite all she’d learned about Celeste, Lue still thought of her as a daughter, and there were things she could never imagine she was capable of. That winter, the girls seemed
afraid of their mother, and after much prodding, they told Lue why. Celeste, they said, ground something up and put it in their food, something that made them sleep. The girls begged Lue not to tell their mother. She agreed. While Lue found the conversation disturbing, she suspected it was nothing more than overactive childish imaginations.

Years later Kristina would have other memories of her mother: days an angry Celeste hit them with wooden spoons so hard they broke. And when Kristina suffered unexplained seizures, Celeste rarely visited her in the hospital. In the evenings, Kris called the apartment, but it was her sister, Jen, home alone, who answered. Those nights, Kris fell asleep watching the
Cosby Show
and wishing for a mother like Claire Huxtable, one who loved her children.

In 1990, Celeste reported the yellow Taurus stolen. When the insurance money came in, she purchased a brand new Thunderbird.

That summer, Celeste’s landlord called Lue complaining about unsanitary conditions in the apartment. More and more, Kristina and Jennifer were alone and burdened with cleaning and cooking. Kristina even ironed the white tuxedo shirts from Celeste’s waitress uniforms. In the mornings, waking Celeste was an unhappy task. She cursed and shouted. “I never woke her up when she didn’t make me feel bad,” says Kristina.

That fall, someone reported Celeste to Maricopa County’s Children’s Protective Services, and the girls were taken away. Despite the abysmal conditions they lived in, Kristina and Jennifer cried. “That was the last time I let myself care about her,” says Jennifer. “From then on I couldn’t love her, because she didn’t love Kristina and me.”

Not long after, police found the charred remnants of the Taurus in the desert outside Phoenix. Excited, Celeste
asked Lue to bring her video camera and drive to the site with her. Once there, she filmed the car’s blackened skeleton and giggled.

“What’s so funny?” Lue asked.

“I burned it,” Celeste answered with a wide grin. “I did it for the insurance.”

“You’re going to get caught, honey,” Lue said. “You can’t do things like that.”

“People do it all the time,” Celeste scoffed. “It was a piece of crap.”

Perhaps Lue should have thought of that day when, weeks later, on October 14, Celeste called, crying. The Thompsons were in California, where they’d just returned to Gary’s mother’s house after a funeral. “Someone robbed your house!” Celeste screamed into the telephone. “They took a bunch of your stuff and my things.”

When they arrived the next day, Lue realized how much was gone. They’d lost the television and VCR, as well as family heirlooms, including silver candlesticks and Lue’s late mother’s jewelry, Gary’s class ring, even silver dollars commemorating their children’s births. The point of entry was a single, small, neat cut in the back door screen.

“This was done by someone you know,” an officer who stopped by told them. “They didn’t mess up the place to look for things, and they knew what to take.”

Days later Lue and Celeste filled out insurance forms. By then the Thompsons had more bad news: They weren’t insured for replacement value and would collect nowhere near enough to restore all they’d lost.

“Why don’t you add some things to your list?” Celeste urged.

“It’s wrong, and I’ll get caught,” Lue told her.

“My attorney says everyone does it,” she said. “That’s what he told me to do.”

Lue thought it over, and then, despite knowing that she was doing something wrong, padded the list of stolen valuables.

As always, Celeste’s world changed quickly and without warning. At the end of 1990 she called Craig and announced that she wanted to join the army. She was willing to sign papers giving him custody of the twins. The girls, finally out of the foster home, left for Washington. But an odd thing happened that year while they lived with their father—they received a postcard in the mail, signed “Grandma.”

“Who is this?” Jennifer asked her father. “This isn’t from your mom.”

“Your mother’s mother, your grandmother,” Craig explained. “She lives in California.”

Jennifer and Kristina never asked their mother about the postcard or whose body they’d looked at in a coffin years earlier. They heard from Celeste rarely that year. When she did call, it was never good news. “She screamed at Craig, threatening to take the girls back,” says his sister-in-law, Denise. “She never left him alone.”

That spring, 1991, Celeste had her first serious brush with the law. Like all of her plots, her plan to join the army quickly dissipated. Instead she’d decided to stay in Phoenix. It was there, on May 6, that she became furious with the Thompsons. Celeste demanded they return a dog she’d given their youngest son. They refused, and she called the police. When Celeste claimed to the officer who responded that the Thompsons had staged the previous fall’s robbery, Detective R. T. Phillips was put on the case.

In his nearly two decades on the force, Phillips, a lean man with a well-groomed mustache, specialized in uncovering insurance fraud. He was so good at it that he’d been written up in an insurance industry publication. “I felt like they
[insurance frauds] were ripping me off,” he says. “I had to pay my insurance, and they were driving up the rates.”

When Phillips questioned her, Celeste told him she’d seen many of the items the Thompsons reported stolen in their house months after the robbery. She said she believed they’d staged the robbery, then inflated their losses. Based on her information, Phillips went to the Thompsons’ house.

“Celeste loves me. She’d never hurt me,” Lue told Phillips that day.

Yet, Phillips assured her, Celeste had made serious allegations against her and Gary. Quickly, the Thompsons admitted their guilt; they had inflated their insurance claim by $13,000. But they insisted they hadn’t staged the robbery. In fact, Lue gave Phillips one more bit of information, recounting the story of the incinerated Taurus.

Phillips’s gut told him the Thompsons were telling the truth, and he brought Celeste in for questioning. Each time he pointed out inconsistencies with the evidence, her story changed. When he found the stolen items in her two rented storage units, he felt certain she was the one behind the robbery. When he asked about the incinerated Taurus, Celeste just laughed. “Sure, I took it out in the desert and torched it,” she said. “The damn thing didn’t work half the time.”

“She was cool the whole time,” says Phillips, who wrote in his report: “Based on the inconsistencies in what Celeste Wolf has told me and her insurance company, it appears no burglary ever occurred at the Thompsons’… in fact, Celeste Wolf took property belonging to the Thompsons to make it look like a burglary occurred, then made false reports to her insurance company.”

Despite all the evidence Phillips had, when he called Craig in Washington State to ask about Celeste’s past for her pretrial report, Celeste’s first husband laughed at the notion that she’d be punished. “Celeste gets away with everything,”
he said. “I’ll bet my hard-earned money—every penny I’ve got—that she’ll talk that judge into letting her go.”

In 1991, while the insurance fraud case ground on, a new man, Jimmy Martinez, entered Celeste’s life. It was he who would bring her to Texas and into Steve Beard’s world.

Swarthy and handsome, Martinez was thirty—nearly three years older than Celeste—had a stable job planning and managing security systems, and had never been married. Like Celeste, he exuded a palpable sexual tension and a flirtatious manner. Someone who knew them both would later say, “I don’t think it was ever love between them. To me, it always looked more like lust.”

They met at Mr. Lucky’s, a legendary Phoenix country bar, famous for its mechanical bulls. With a mischievous grin and a cowboy’s swagger, Jimmy had just left a country western concert when he saw Celeste with a woman he’d once dated. They were quickly attracted. “I’m a leg man,” he says. “And Celeste looked great in a miniskirt.”

On August 24, 1991, Celeste was twenty-eight and marrying for the third time. At least one matter remained unresolved the day she promised to love Jimmy Martinez until death they did part: She was still legally married to Harald Wolf. In her busy life, she’d never gotten around to filing for divorce.

In Washington State, Jennifer and Kristina learned about the marriage on a postcard. The girls must have been on Celeste’s mind often that fall. She didn’t like having anyone out of her reach, and just months after voluntarily giving them up, she called Craig, demanding he send them to her. He refused. Many who knew him gave the credit for his ability to stand up to Celeste to the new woman in his life, Kathryn Morton, a bright, determined woman who worked at the Snohomish County Attorney’s Office. They met at a park,
while he was camping with Jennifer and Kristina, and it was his dedication to them that attracted Kathryn, who had two young children of her own. “Craig described Celeste as a Coyote Bitch,” says Morton. “He was exhausted from battling her.”

The battle became a war as Celeste began a court fight to reclaim the twins.

That summer, Jen and Kristina were ten and about to enter fourth grade; they lost a year when they had to repeat second grade, after Celeste kept them out of school so often that they couldn’t keep up. A thousand miles away, Celeste called often and pulled the strings that attached Kristina to her. The youngster sobbed as Celeste put the weight of the world on her thin, young shoulders, telling her she couldn’t live without her, at times threatening suicide. “It was awful. She was my mother. I loved her,” says Kristina.

Her identical twin couldn’t have been more different in her reaction to their mother. Even the thought of seeing Celeste gave Jen terrible nightmares. “She’d be killing us,” says Jennifer. At times she saw herself firing a gun at her mother. The bullet ricocheted, then struck her instead, as if embodying an unspoken fear that anything she did to hurt Celeste would come back to injure her.

In Arizona, Celeste moved to Tucson with Jimmy, but soon this marriage, too, was troubled. When they argued, she raged, then explained away her erratic behavior by saying she forgot to take the hormone supplements given to her after her hysterectomy. “That’s why the girls are so important,” she said. “I can never have other children.”

As far as Jimmy was concerned, Celeste had so much else to offer that he overlooked her tantrums. He loved watching her at a party, proud of the way she talked to anyone, not relying on him for support. “She made people laugh,” he says. Where Celeste held back with others, their sex life couldn’t
have been better. In the end he would wonder if he was swept up in the passion and the lure of finding someone who needed him. “I was there to protect Celeste,” he says.

Meanwhile, in May 1992, Celeste arrived at Craig’s, demanding to see Kristina. When they dropped her twin off, Jennifer didn’t even look at her mother’s car. With tears in her eyes, she watched Kristina walk away, wondering if she’d return. She came home later that night, but Jennifer instinctively knew Celeste wasn’t finished with them.

All the next day, Jen watched Kristina at school, assessing her face to see what she was thinking. Kris seemed quiet, with faraway thoughts. In final period, Jen lost track of her sister, and when she arrived at the bus stop, Kristina wasn’t there. At home, Craig called the police. When they found Kristina with her mother, Celeste had cards she said Kris had written her. In them, Kris described Craig as abusive, saying he’d hit her. The following day, Jen was pulled out of school and questioned. Police even asked the girls’ friends if they’d seen signs of abuse. The investigation came up empty. After seventy-two hours Kristina was released to Craig. On the way home she cried and told him that she was sorry. Later, she’d deny that her father ever hit her or Jen. “Kris was just doing what our mom told her to,” says Jen.