03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (34 page)

Her credentials as an attorney spoke for themselves. She’d clerked at one of Houston’s biggest firms, Bracewell and Patterson, and had worked on such high-profile cases as the Oklahoma City bombing and the David Graham case, better known as the cadet murder, where Graham, an Air Force cadet, and his fiancée, Diane Zamora, a navy cadet attending Annapolis, were convicted of murdering a girl he’d had a fling with, Adrianne Jones. More recently, Baen had gone international, working on the Bosnian war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

From her first meeting with Celeste, Baen found her client funny, bright, and personable, with the vulnerability of a child; hardly the characteristics of a killer, she’d insist.

While DeGuerin concentrated on his other clients, Baen did the groundwork, readying the Beard case for the courtroom with the help of three law students from a criminal law
class DeGuerin taught at the University of Texas. They conducted interviews and combed through the formidable load of exhibits prosecutors had collected, including medical, telephone, and financial records. As she talked to Celeste, she formed a theory on what had happened. Celeste told Baen that Tracey and Kristina were close. Perhaps, Baen theorized, Kristina, not Celeste, conspired with Tracey. She also latched onto possible financial motives for the twins wanting their mother out of the way. “It was only after Kristina cashed those checks and took her mother’s money that she went to the District Attorney’s Office and said, ‘I think my mother killed Steve,’” says Baen. “These were greedy kids out to get rid of their mother to get the money for themselves.”

When it came to Tracey, Baen didn’t mince words. “This is a very defensible case,” she says. “The bottom line is that Tracey Tarlton is bat crazy. She’s insane. She was obsessed with Celeste, and she killed Steve because she wanted him out of the picture.”

The first major hearing on the Beard case in the 390th District Court, where Celeste was scheduled to be tried, took place that November 2002. The 390th was presided over by Judge Julie Kocurek, who could have been the prototype for TV’s
Judging Amy.
Trim, with large hazel eyes and straight, dark blond hair, Kocurek looked more like a soccer mom than a criminal court judge. Looks can be deceiving, however. As a prosecutor, Kocurek had tried rapists, child abusers, and murderers, including an eleven-year-old boy who stabbed a man ninety-nine times, then fed his ears to a dog.

Appointed by then-Governor George W. Bush, Kocurek came to the bench in 1999 as the first woman to head a Travis County felony court. At the time, she was pregnant
with twins, a boy and a girl. In the 2000 election she became the first Republican judge elected in Austin, a city so liberal that a Green Party candidate once totaled twenty-five percent of the vote. One reason: She bore a familiar name. Her grandfather-in-law, Willie Kocurek, was an appliance dealer turned civic leader, known for his humor, who’d worked to improve public schools. Beyond that, the courthouse scuttlebutt was that Judge Kocurek belonged on the bench; she knew the law and ran a fair courtroom.

That day in Kocurek’s courtroom, the issue was the admissibility of evidence—the journals, cards, and calendars the twins and their friends had collected from Celeste’s storage bins. Even the way DeGuerin titled the motion elicited strong emotions: “Motion to Suppress Evidence Stolen from the Defendant’s Home.”

That first day of pretrial testimony would be the hardest for the twins. The thought of seeing Celeste again, this time in her jail uniform, of having to testify in front of her, sent chills through both of them. Yet one thing had markedly changed for them both: They no longer felt alone. Months earlier, Ellen Halbert, director of the district attorney’s Victim Witness Division, called Mange, offering to help with the case by acting as an intermediary with the Beard children. Exhausted by calls from the twins and Justin, Mange eagerly turned that portion of the case over to her.

With short, highlighted brown hair and a maternal manner, Halbert understood the emotions the girls battled. She, too, had been through a horrific ordeal. Years earlier an eighteen-year-old drifter hid in her home and raped and stabbed her. She barely survived. Helping others victimized by violent crime brought her to the attention of then-Governor Ann Richards, who appointed her to the board that oversees prisons, probations, and paroles. Two years after Richards left office, District Attorney Ronnie Earle asked
her to join his office, supervising eight counselors and four staffers who work with more than four thousand victims and their families each year.

Halbert had heard people talking about the Beard case around the office for months before she met the girls for the first time. At that first meeting, she knew they were frightened. She thought they looked like scared children, and her heart went out to them. Yet, before long the girls opened up, glad to have her to confide in. On the day of the pretrial, Halbert accompanied them to the courtroom and sat in a front row seat, where they could look at her instead of their mother while they testified.

“You stole those things from your mother’s storage, didn’t you?” DeGuerin accused.

“Some of it looked like it didn’t need to be thrown away,” Jennifer countered. “It looked interesting, so we kept it.”

Calling the twins “spoiled brats,” DeGuerin railed against them.

At one point, when Celeste looked away, Jennifer shot her a quick glance. There sat her mother, laughing with the attorneys clustered about her.
She must think the whole thing’s a joke,
Jennifer thought.

In the back hallway, after Jennifer finished testifying, Wetzel put her arm around her as she sobbed, her shoulders heaving at the emotional turmoil of testifying against her own mother. Later, Jennifer would remember being grateful Kristina had taped their mother saying she’d hired someone to kill Tracey Tarlton.
If she hadn’t,
Jennifer thought,
no one would have believed us.

The hearing went on with DeGuerin insisting that the twins and their boyfriends had stolen their mother’s possessions. As garbage, it was fair game, admissible in court. If stolen, the evidence would be tainted and inadmissible.

Seven days later, as the hearing drew to a close, Celeste
hobbled up to the stand. In jail, she’d broken her leg. How it happened remained a mystery. The official story was that she’d fallen after fainting. The story circulating through the jail was very different—that she’d broken it herself by battering it against a bench, perhaps to illicit sympathy from the jury, perhaps to get out of the general population and into the hospital ward.

On the stand, Celeste denied ever asking the girls and their friends to clean the storage areas. Those were her things, things she never intended to throw away, she said.

Cobb had something else he wanted an answer to: “Why did you have your husband murdered?”

The question caught the courtroom off guard.

“I did not murder my husband. I’m not guilty,” she snapped.

DeGuerin jumped up and objected. Celeste, he said, was there to talk about the journals and cards, not to testify about the murder. The judge sustained the objection.

In his closing, DeGuerin claimed Mange had put the girls up to “stealing” from their mother. “He apparently played the part of the three monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” DeGuerin charged. “The authority to enter the house does not equate to the authority to take things without permission.”

“It may hurt Celeste Beard’s feelings to know that someone went through her trash, but it’s not against the law to do so,” Wetzel countered.

When Kocurek’s ruling came on Thanksgiving week, the prosecutors won. The evidence would be admissible. Yet Kocurek gave DeGuerin an olive branch by reducing Celeste’s bail to $2 million. By then an appeals court had lowered the $8 million bond on the capital murder case to $500,000. None of it did any good, DeGuerin argued, insisting Celeste had little more than a few thousand dollars in the bank and
owed $750,000 for attorneys’ fees and the fees of experts he’d enlisted to testify on her behalf at the trial.

Yet Wetzel thought she’d gained much more than the use of the evidence from the pretrial hearing. She’d been able to see Jennifer, Kristina, Justin, and Christopher on the stand. No longer teenagers, they’d put out strong testimony, refusing to let DeGuerin rattle them. Justin had come off as a bit stiff, something she’d work on with him. She didn’t want him to hesitate, analyzing each question. The jury could interpret that as being evasive. But that was a minor issue. For the most part, Wetzel was pleased.

As the trial approached, both sides carefully groomed their cases. Wetzel got a court order to use the Toro Canyon house for a demonstration. She wanted Tracey to show them how she’d picked her way through the house the night of the shooting. Wetzel also ordered a sound test, to see if Celeste should have heard the shot. As Tracey walked through the house that day, a shotgun fired a blank in the master bedroom. Standing in the girls’ wing, she heard it clearly. Like everything else, she now believed Celeste had lied when she told her she’d slept through the gunshot. “It was complete bullshit,” she says. “The sound of that gun shook the house.”

As her case came together, Wetzel saw only one issue as truly worrisome: the cause of death. With four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, she knew DeGuerin would bring in medical experts to testify that he’d died of causes unrelated to the shooting. When she brought it up to Cobb, he did exactly what she counted on him to do—he told her not to worry. “This isn’t any different than any other trial we’ve done in the past,” he assured her. “We’ll take this step by step and prove our case.”

At the same time, DeGuerin had no trouble summing up how he saw his case. Celeste—or “Les,” as he called her— was innocent. Tracey Tarlton was “a sick, mentally ill woman, who was obsessed with her,” and Donna Goodson “a hanger-on who only wanted money.” Celeste’s sin, he would argue, was nothing more than being “overly generous and trusting.” As for the twins, DeGuerin called them “devil children” and felt sure the jury would see them as he did— “spoiled brats.”

As the trial neared, the defense settled on their trial haiku, the three points they would drill into jurors’ minds:

1. Celeste’s lifestyle was not evidence of guilt.
   

2. She was better off with Steve alive.
   

3. Celeste didn’t kill Steve.
   

Yet, DeGuerin admitted he had obstacles ahead. First, the jury had to see Celeste as a woman who loved her husband, not as a gold digger. And they had to be able to “see through” the prosecution’s case. “I don’t think Allison Wetzel is all that convinced her case is solid,” said DeGuerin, his face hard, and thoughtful. “I think she’s worried.”

Through the courthouse grapevine, Wetzel heard that DeGuerin thought he was getting to her. She was determined not to let that happen. Still, she’d griped enough about him at home that one night when he called her house, one of her sons answered. “It’s your archenemy,” he said, handing her the phone.

Deciding to make a joke of a potentially embarrassing situation, Wetzel picked up the phone and said, “Well, hello, archenemy.”

DeGuerin didn’t laugh.

On the morning of Wednesday, January 29, a panel of ninety-four potential jurors gathered in numbered seats in Kocurek’s courtroom. Behind the bench, the judge sat flanked by the Stars and Stripes and the Texas Lone Star flag. By the end of the day she was determined to whittle the panel down to twelve jurors and two alternates willing to devote the coming two months to the trial of Celeste Beard Johnson.

Celeste sat between DeGuerin and Baen. Gone was her jailhouse attire, replaced by a charcoal gray sweater set and a long gray skirt, both shades darker than the gray cloth paneling on the courtroom’s walls. The cast still cocooned her leg, and her crutches were stowed under the table. Her blond hair had grown out, leaving it long and brown at the roots. She had it pulled sternly back and, although the twins never remembered her wearing glasses, she wore oval wire-rimmed ones that made her look like an injured schoolteacher, far from the sultry femme fatale who had married five times.

Yet it wasn’t the defendant, but a figure at the far end of the defense table, who caught Wetzel’s attention: Robert Hirschhorn, a well-known jury consultant who worked many of the state’s highest profile cases. While DeGuerin asked questions, attempting to bond with the jurors, Hirschhorn would analyze the answers and look for clues in body language and facial expressions. Behind them sat the rest of the team: Matt Hennessy and DeGuerin’s law students who’d volunteered to help with the case.

It was Hirschhorn’s job to predict how each juror would react to testimony and vote once deliberations began. He needed to have twelve impaneled who could be persuaded to view Celeste as a victim, not a murderer. A bonus would be a juror who would have difficulty, under any circumstances, judging another human guilty, to hang the jury if they were leaning toward a conviction.

As voir dire—the process of truth telling—began, Wetzel introduced herself and the other attorneys to the panel, standing before an easel with a poster-size blowup of the indictment:
State of Texas v. Celeste Beard.
“I thank you all for coming,” she began. “This may be the most important part of the trial. We need to make sure we have a jury that will be fair to both Mrs. Beard and the state of Texas.”

Even before the questioning started, much was already known. The week before, the potential jurors had met in the courtroom and been given questionnaires. The lawyers had plumbed the most important issues of the case: How did the jurors feel about young women who married older men? Would they find it difficult to convict a young, attractive woman? Did they have experiences with law enforcement or mental illness that would color their verdict? Both sides had carefully considered and tabulated their answers.

With Steve Beard’s millions and the twisted details of the alleged plot involving the young wife and her lesbian lover, the Beard case hadn’t needed any more of a draw to bring in publicity, but DeGuerin tended to help make any trial an event. In this case, drawn by the sensationalism and what promised to be a hard fought trial,
PrimeTime
Live, Court TV, and
48 Hours
had cameras throughout the courtroom.