03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (10 page)

“We need to get Steve to sell the house,” Celeste told Kristina. “If he dies, the kids get it. If he builds or buys us a new one, it becomes community property.”

Days after he dropped the divorce, Steve put the house up for sale. The plan was that they’d live at the lake house while he built a new home. To friends, he said Celeste saw the house as Elise’s, not hers. He wanted her to have a home of her own.

In September, Richard Oppel relocated from D.C., where he’d been Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder newspapers, to take the editor’s job at the
Austin American Statesman,
the city’s daily. Oppel and his wife, Carol, drove by the house and jotted down the address. The following day they were waiting on the doorstep with their realtor when the door swung open and Celeste glared at them. After persuading Steve to sell, she didn’t want to give the house up.

“Go away. We don’t want to sell,” she snapped.

The realtor argued, “It’s listed on the market, and I made an appointment.”

Then, Steve pulled Celeste out of the doorway from behind and ushered the Oppels and their realtor inside. For the rest of their house tour, Celeste remained out of sight. Oppel found Steve, in his Sansabelt slacks and golf shirt, an affable host. Enthralled with the view of the city, the Oppels
made an offer, and negotiations produced an agreement. Before the closing, they stood in the study while Steve sat at his desk, ordering Celeste to retrieve items he needed. “He was clearly in charge,” says Oppel. “Very much the elderly gentleman.”

On another preclosing visit, Richard and Carol again found Steve, dressed in slacks and an open-collar plaid shirt, sitting at his desk in the library. This time he had a large checkbook in front of him. As they talked, Celeste shuffled in, wearing sandals, shorts, and a loose shirt. “Steve, Kristina and I are having so much fun on the jet ski up at the lake,” she said. “While you’re writing out checks, we really need another one.”

“Honey, those cost a lot of money,” Steve answered.

Celeste leaned over his shoulder, playfully wrapped her arms around his chest and said, “Oh, honey, you’ve got a lot of money.”

Without further comment, Steve laughed and wrote her a check.

As well as he appeared to be adapting to the move, Steve had a deep sadness about leaving a home that held so many happy memories. One day, after the Oppels moved in, Steve stopped by. Inside the house, he stood before a window in the bar that overlooked the orchid house, where Elise had spent many happy hours. Pointing at an orchid etched on the glass, he said, “That was a gift to my first wife.”

Years later, Oppel remembered the melancholy look on Steve’s face that day. “He was clearly very much in love with Elise,” he says. “He was still visibly sad at losing her.”

As Mrs. Steven Beard Jr., Celeste segmented her life into two distinct slices: time in Austin and at the lake house. While his friends remained cordial to Celeste, they never welcomed her into the group. It was with women more like
those she’d come of age with that Celeste bonded. At Tramps, an upscale salon frequented by many in Austin’s old guard, she befriended her hairdresser, Denise Renfeldt. A small woman with the figure and the enthusiasm of a teenager, Denise immediately liked Celeste. “We were a lot alike,” she says. “We both liked to have fun.”

Over the years, Denise became Celeste’s confidante. In a station in the center of the salon—a busy establishment that smelled of shampoo and nail polish—Celeste talked of her life. In her account, Steve met her at the club and fell head over heels in love with her. “He offered me two million dollars to marry him,” Celeste told her. Calling Steve fat and old, she complained about having sex with him. Others overheard her, and the stories spread. “Austin is a big city, but it’s like a small town. Talk travels,” says Denise.

If Austin had a fast-paced edge, life at the lake took a more leisurely turn. Celeste spent much of the day in sandals, T-shirts, and shorts. The house was small for Celeste, Steve, Kristina, and the two dogs—Steve’s Meagan and Celeste’s constant companion, a black and white cocker spaniel named Nikki.

At the lake, Celeste made friends with Dawn, the wife of Jim Madigan, the builder Steve hired to put up the house. A petite woman with thick dark amber hair, she lived in a house her husband had built nearby. Another friend was an elderly, stocky woman named Marilou Gibbs, the mother of the realtor who’d sold Steve the lot. From the beginning, Kristina thought little of her mother’s friends. “Celeste was always buying them things,” she says.

One friend would later say that Celeste turned shopping into an Olympic sport, spending up to $50,000 in a single day. When the stores were closed and she couldn’t sleep, she took Kristina to a Super Wal-Mart that was open twenty-four hours, where she bought albums and books. Celeste loved to
read mysteries and true crime books, working through the plots and figuring out what the bad guys did that got them caught.

At night, Celeste continued to sprinkle Steve’s food with ground-up sleeping pills, but it was while they were living at the lake house that Kristina noticed her mother do something else: pour half a bottle of Steve’s Wolfschmidt vodka down the drain and refill it with Everclear—pure grain alcohol. “This will help him pass out early,” Celeste said, laughing. “Then I can do what I want to do for the rest of the night.”

From that day on, Steve would sip his ritual cocktails, never knowing that rather than 80 proof vodka he was drinking half 190 proof Everclear. While Celeste filled his glass with alcohol, Kristina noticed she filled her own with water. Yet the teenager said nothing, afraid of her mother’s volcanic wrath. “I just never crossed her,” she says.

Kristina maintained her silence even after she overheard Celeste laughing and bragging to a friend about the Everclear cocktails. “I’ve got a name for them,” she said with a giggle. “‘The Graveyard.’”

A
year into their marriage, Steve’s finances were be
coming ever more enmeshed with Celeste, much of it by his own hand. In early 1996 he brought in Brian Rahlfs, a vice president and portfolio manager with Bank of America, Dallas, to meet with them about investing his fortune. Over lunch at the country club, where Celeste ordered her usual chicken-fried steak and Coke in a can, they discussed his plans for the eventual disbursement of his money, the Steven F. Beard Jr. Trust. Without counting the lake house, his IRAs, and personal property, Steve’s fortune totaled more than $10 million. That same month, Steve had his lawyer, David Kuperman, draw up a new marital agreement. In the event of his death, Steve wanted to leave Celeste not only the $1 million, but half of both the lake house and a lot he purchased at 3900 Toro Canyon Road in Austin.

In the more than a decade since Steve and Elise moved into the house in Westlake Hills, Austin had grown westward. Million-dollar estates proliferated; so much so that by the time he married Celeste, the Terrace Mountain Drive
house had been surpassed by neighborhoods of stately homes in Georgian, English Tudor, and modern design.

After selling the house in 1995, Steve purchased the prime undeveloped acre lot little more than a mile from Terrace Mountain Drive, in an exclusive, gated enclave called the Gardens of Westlake. The slice of land was just down the street from thick metal gates that guarded the mega-million-dollar estate of Michael Dell. In Austin, Dell was royalty. As the founder of the highly successful Dell Computer Corporation, he was the poster boy for the city’s burgeoning hightech industry.

One day the phone rang in the office of Gus Voelzel, who specialized in high-end residential and commercial construction. “I hear you’re a great architect,” Steve said.

“Some people say I am,” Voelzel replied. “Who told you?”

“My builder. He tells me that I need to get you to design my new house.”

Two days later Gus pulled up in front of the Toro Canyon lot and Steve was already there, standing outside his Cadillac with his dog, Meagan. When Gus got out of his car, the lab growled and bared her teeth. “Now you stop that, girl,” Steve said, walking forward. “She just needs to know we’re friendly, and she’ll be okay.”

Steve took a good look at Voelzel, a tall man with shoulder length white hair and a beard. Around the waist, Voelzel was nearly as broad as Steve. “Looks like you’re about my size,” Steve said. “I think we might be able to do some business.”

Voelzel laughed. “Sounds good to me,” he agreed.

With that, the two men walked the property. Steve’s lot was wooded with gnarled oaks and rough cedar that appeared as ancient and rugged as the rocky hills. Eventually, five houses would be built behind the Gardens of Westlake gate, but as yet, only one was under construction, a rustic,
ranch-style house with a long front porch that recalled the Texas Hill Country. Although beautiful, it wasn’t what Steve had in mind.

“I’ve always loved Fallingwater, and I’d like something with that kind of feel,” Steve said, referring to Frank Lloyd Wright’s cantilevered design in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Perched over a rushing mountain spring, it epitomized Wright’s concept of organic architecture, design so well integrated with its setting that it appeared unified with nature.

“This site won’t work,” Volezel said. “We need a creek.”

“Hell, can’t we build one?” Steve said with a twinkle in his eye.

Voelzel laughed. “I guess we could.”

Steve told Voelzel how he envisioned the house. He wanted a sprawling one-story, with a separate master wing and a wing for Kristina and guests. “Does your wife have some ideas? Should we include her?” Voelzel asked.

“Nah, we made a deal. I build the house and she decorates it,” he said with a grin. “You’re going to be really surprised when you meet my wife.” He then went on to say that his first wife had died just three years earlier and he’d married a “younger woman. I dated older women, but they didn’t appreciate me for what I could provide: money.”

Voelzel laughed again.

In the ensuing months, Gus worked closely with Steve, translating his ideas to paper. The two men formed a quick friendship, and the house, as it evolved, took on a contemporary look with expansive windows. The first time Voelzel met Celeste, as Steve had predicted, he was surprised. “I didn’t expect her to be quite that young. She didn’t say much,” he says. “She kind of looked over the plans and nodded.”

The one change Celeste did make was to her closet. The original plan called for cubbyholes to store three hundred
pairs of shoes. “She said that would never be enough. She needed room for five hundred,” says Voelzel.

As Gus designed it, visitors walked up three short flights of stairs to reach double stained-glass front doors set into a panel of glass. Squared columns held up a wide overhang, and, emanating from a backyard koi pond, a man-made stream bubbled out from beneath the house and ran along the front flower beds into two large ponds.

Inside, the house fanned out in a U from the entry to a full 5,800 square feet. Walking straight ahead, one entered a grand living room with a high coffered ceiling. Three steps up to the right brought visitors into an elaborate gourmet kitchen and dinette area that overlooked the koi pond. The fireplace, entrance, and walls leading into the dining room and kitchen were constructed of the same Golden Arkansas ledge stone as much of the exterior. The master wing, three steps up from the living room to the left, housed Steve’s office, a large bedroom, and a bathroom with a room-size glass shower and closets. If one walked from the entry to the right instead, there were two additional bedrooms with separate baths, one for Kristina, the other a guest room.

On the blueprint, Steve had concerns. “He wanted the living room bar as a command post,” says Gus. “He wanted to serve drinks and look out at a party. Steve was a people person, he liked seeing people happy, and he wanted to see them enjoying his house.”

When Voelzel estimated a seven-figure price tag to build the house, Steve sucked in a whistle. “I’m going to need a really big credit card for this,” he joked. A week later at lunch, Gus gifted him with the house floor plan shrunk down and laminated to look like a credit card. “He loved it, showed it to everyone,” Gus says.

Planning quickly gave way to construction. After the
groundbreaking, Steve, with Meagan at his side, became a constant presence, sitting in a lawn chair under an umbrella with a cooler of water, watching as the house grew out of the lot. He was there the day the masons laid out the stone. When it came to the fireplace mantel, Gus had the stone beaten with chains and coated with buttermilk to age it. Once installed, the mantel was held up by carved lions, a symbol from the Beard family crest.

His soon-to-be next door neighbors, Bob and Bess Dennison, a retired orthopedic surgeon and his wife, in the throes of building their own home, stopped over often to see Steve. It was obvious that he was immensely proud of the house. On more than one occasion Steve told Bob it would have the perfect living room: one with a big screen television and a wet bar. “Steve wasn’t overly impressed with his money. He had fun with it,” says Dennison, who quickly decided he liked his new neighbor.

When it came to Celeste, Dr. Dennison wasn’t as sure. Steve bragged about her, telling Dennison she had a degree from Pepperdine. “She’s beautiful,” Steve said, “and smart as a whip.” The Dennisons weren’t impressed. Around them, Celeste barely spoke. It was as if their money and genteel manners intimidated her.

That year, Steve brought Celeste and Kristina to Virginia to meet his youngest son, Paul, and his wife, Kim. A hospital corpsman, at the time of the wedding Paul had been aboard ship, unable to attend. When Paul entered the bar at the Williamsburg Country Club, it stung to see Celeste wearing his mother’s gold watch. Still, dinner went well. Celeste was affectionate toward Steve, bragging about him to his son and daughter-in-law. When Paul and Kim left to smoke cigarettes, Celeste joined them, but not before she bent over and kissed Steve on the cheek. “She seemed all right,” says Paul.
“I thought maybe things would be okay. Maybe she loved him and he’d be happy.”

Yet his misgivings quickly returned. From that point on, whenever he attempted to visit his father, Celeste rebuffed them. “She’d say it was never the right time. They were always going somewhere, something was happening,” he says. “She kept all of us kids away from our dad. There was always a reason we weren’t welcome.”

“Mom didn’t want the older Beard kids around,” says Kristina. “She didn’t want them poking their noses into her business.”

If Paul had been at the lake house that summer, he would have seen much to disturb him. Kristina did. She’d grown to care about Steve. In her young life, with the exception of her father, he was the first man who’d stayed long enough to become a presence. Yet, she loved her mother and felt responsible for her. She said nothing when she saw Celeste combing grocery store shelves for dented and bulging cans, then bringing them home and feeding the contents to Steve. She never connected it with a memory out of her own childhood. Years earlier, Kristina and Jen had faint recollections of being rushed to a hospital, where doctors pumped their stomachs. Steve never did get sick, convincing Kristina that Celeste wasn’t
really
hurting him.

That year as the house construction continued and summer beckoned, Kristina’s school counselor asked her what she’d like to be when she grew up. She answered, “A vet, because I like animals.” She listed her hobbies as volleyball, basketball, and watching television, and her teacher commented that she was conscientious. Yet the counselor’s note reflected something else, something about how Kristina had closed off her emotions in order to live with her mother: “Kristina’s affect is flat. She seems distant from her feelings.
She was unable to generate three wishes when asked.” Her teacher added, “Kristina is friendly, easygoing, likable, responsible, and willing to work.” But she displayed “a significant amount of emotional distress as related to family issues.”

In July 1996, Kristina left to see Jennifer at their paternal grandfather’s ranch in California. The two-week vacation had been an annual event since the girls were very young, and she was eager to go, even more so that year because she’d missed Jennifer. In Washington State, however, Jennifer hesitated, unsure she should leave their father. She worried about Craig, whose life had taken a dangerous turn.

In April of that year, when the girls were fifteen, after just two years of marriage, Kathryn filed for divorce. Later, she’d say Craig was drinking and taking methamphetamines. He’d become sullen and angry. Hoping she’d come back to him, Craig joined AA, quit drinking, cut out the drugs, and went for counseling. With Jennifer, he moved into a small apartment. It was during that time that Celeste and Craig began talking. “I called Kristina a lot,” says Jennifer. “That’s how it got started.” Before long they were on the telephone nightly. When she heard, Cherie was concerned. Whenever Celeste entered her son’s life, something bad happened.

“They were even making plans to take the girls to Disney World that fall,” says Jeff. “Celeste was married to Steve, but she wanted to see Craig. It was the typical old stuff.”

Yet, Craig continued to be morose. At times he cried, telling Jennifer he missed Kathryn. To Jeff, he said he couldn’t survive another divorce. “I told him it wouldn’t be that way, that Kathryn wasn’t Celeste,” says Jeff. “But he didn’t believe me.”

Everyone around him knew Craig was deeply depressed in the summer of 1996. Cherie tried to talk to him, but to no avail. Jennifer panicked when her father missed one of her
softball games. It was the first time Craig wasn’t in the stands. When she got home, he admitted he was thinking about suicide.

With the trip to her grandfather’s approaching, Jennifer refused to go, afraid of what might happen unless she was there to watch over her father. Craig insisted and promised he’d be all right. “I believed him,” she says.

The day after she arrived, Jennifer called home, but Craig didn’t answer. Cherie called, too, and got no response. For nearly two days Craig’s phone rang without an answer. Finally, on July 19, 1996, Cherie pounded on his door. When he didn’t open it, she went to the landlord and returned with a key. Her heart pounding, she walked in and saw blood splattered against a wall. “I didn’t go any farther. I knew,” she says.

Craig’s dad tried to break the horrible news to his granddaughters gently, but there was no way to soften the blow. Immediately, Jennifer screamed, “No,” over and over, while Kristina tried to comfort her. Later, Jennifer wouldn’t remember anything about that afternoon, except Kristina whispering in her ear, “Jen, I’m so sorry.”

On his death certificate, the cause was listed as a contact gunshot wound to the head; suicide. Craig had left behind letters to Cherie and Jennifer, saying he simply wasn’t strong enough to keep fighting. “He said God didn’t hear him, and he couldn’t handle it anymore,” says Jeff.

Cherie and Jeff, however, would never agree with the finding of suicide. “We always believed Celeste pushed him to do it,” says Jeff. “That she was the last person he talked to, and that she told him she was married to a rich man who could take care of the girls better than he could. Celeste may not have pulled the trigger, but she loaded the gun.”

Later, Celeste would tell her mother, Nancy, that she did talk to Craig the day he died, but insisted that “if she’d known, she would have stopped him.”

The day after the body was discovered, Celeste rushed to California to claim the girls. Jennifer was in shock. “When I was with my dad, everything was all right,” she says. Of her mother, she says, “She frightened me.”

In the small town of Stanwood, where he’d lived, Craig’s remains were cremated. The Bratchers so hated Celeste that Jeff went to the police and cautioned them to keep her away from the funeral. “I told them that if I saw her, I’d kill her,” he says.

Perhaps they relayed the message, for Celeste dropped the girls at the funeral but didn’t go inside. Something, however, did happen that day to rupture the family. After the funeral, Jennifer begged her grandmother to let her move in with her. Cherie refused. “I’d just lost my son, and I had to let go of my granddaughters,” she says. “I wasn’t strong enough to handle the interference that I knew Celeste would bring into my life.”