03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (38 page)

“Celeste,” Tracey said.

As Wetzel drew out the testimony, the affair between the women developed, erratic but consensual. To the facts already before the jury, Tracey added Celeste’s attempts to poison Steve with botulism. “She laughed that he was so fat it didn’t even make him sick,” Tracey said.

Then Tracey recounted the night Celeste called her to Toro Canyon after Steve passed out. “She gave me the plastic bag and I held it around his neck,” she said. “But he moved and I couldn’t do it. I dropped it.”

If not for Steve’s children watching from the front rows, the tale of an old man whose young wife flittered from inept scheme to inept scheme in her quest to murder him might have seemed funny, as if it could have been the script for a Coen brothers’ movie. But this was real, and Steven Beard had suffered the consequences. In the gallery, Paul squirmed in his seat, furious at all his father had suffered.

When DeGuerin took over, he found no shortage of snatches of writings from Tracey’s cards, letters, and medical chart to suggest that the obsession had been one-sided and that Celeste had never wanted to be more than friends with her.

“It’s a fair statement that your notes to her were very expressive of sexual themes, and her notes to you were not expressive of sexual themes. Is that a fair statement?” he asked.

“That’s a fair statement,” she agreed.

From the pile of papers on the defense table, DeGuerin pulled out a journal that none of the prosecutors had ever seen before. “Is this yours?”

“Yes,” Tracey admitted.

“Didn’t know we had this, did you?”

“No,” she said.

For all Wetzel knew, her case had just blown wide open. She had no idea what was in the journal as DeGuerin placed it into evidence. She wondered, as he talked, if she should have objected. But instead she sat tight, not wanting the jurors to see how shaken she felt as DeGuerin read a quote from the journal in which Tracey mused, wondering why she wanted a relationship with a married woman she couldn’t always see.

“Wanting means you’re not having one,” he said.

“It means, I’m wanting this. I’m wanting myself to put on the brakes, but I’m not.”

At times DeGuerin shuffled through his legal pads, looking for his next quote. When he settled on one from Tracey’s Timberlawn chart he read from Milholland’s notes: “
‘Patient’s dream is to have an affair with peer.’
You had suicidal and romantic patterns. You had a history of convincing heterosexual women to try lesbianism. Haven’t you?”

“No sir,” Tracey said. “I’ve never recruited anybody.”

“Wasn’t Zan Ray a heterosexual woman before your relationship?”

Wetzel had warned Tracey that DeGuerin would do all he could to anger her. She was determined not to be rattled. “These women both came voluntarily to the relationships,” Tracey answered calmly. “They weren’t coerced.”

At times the defense attorney tried to draw a picture of Kristina as having been close to Tracey, perhaps even closer than Celeste. Kristina, he pointed out, went to her house the night she’d threatened suicide, to take the guns away from her. She’d had a key to Tracey’s house. Somehow, it never came off. Perhaps because he couldn’t show they spent time together other than at Celeste’s behest. When it came to the relationship counseling the two women attended with Barbara Grant, something Wetzel had put in earlier when Grant
was on the stand, he said, “Wasn’t that the reason you went to see Barbara Grant, because you were recruiting Celeste?”

“No,” Tracey said. “I didn’t bring her to recruit her. That’s not the reason.”

“You were hoping Barbara Grant would counsel Celeste to be more comfortable.”

This time Tracey agreed. She had wanted Celeste to become more comfortable with their sex life. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Pointing out that nowhere in Tracey’s journals did she ever recount a sexual experience with Celeste, he asked, “Is there a single journal entry in which you wrote Celeste stayed all night?”

“That wasn’t an issue for me.”

“Is there a single journal entry in which you say it finally happened, we finally had sex?”

“No,” Tracey admitted.

“It was all in your mind, wasn’t it?” he charged.

“No,” she replied.

Through it all, DeGuerin hammered at his themes. One was that Tracey had misrepresented the house and the way she’d walked through it on the night of the shooting. He contended that she couldn’t have parked where she said she did without jumping down a wall. All of this, he suggested, meant she was lying when she said that Celeste had walked through the house with her, laying out the route.

Behind the prosecutors’ table, Cobb and Wetzel objected when they could and watched as DeGuerin attacked the woman who formed the centerpiece of their case. Even at pretrial, Wetzel and the defense attorney had clashed. Yet she had to admit he was using everything he possibly could against the witnesses she called to the stand. He rarely left an opportunity unexplored.

Finally, the defense attorney pulled an old prosecutor’s
trick out of his portfolio; he got Tracey’s shotgun. Calling her out of the witness box, he put it in her hands. It was empty, but still threatening. “Show us how you shot Steven Beard,” he ordered.

Tracey looked toward the prosecutors and the judge, but neither interceded. Instead, looking tired and deflated, she aimed at a wall. “I aimed at him and squeezed the trigger,” she said, poising the shotgun on her shoulder, like a hunter in the field. Quickly, she put the gun down.

“Show us again,” DeGuerin ordered. Again she complied, and again she immediately lowered the gun and put it on a counter. As she walked back to the stand, instead of dangerous, Tracey Tarlton appeared beaten and regretful. She’d shot and killed Steve Beard. She admitted that. But the demonstration made her look more victim than killer.

“Aren’t you testifying here today because the prosecutors gave you a sweetheart deal?” DeGuerin charged. “Isn’t that the truth?”

“No,” Tracey said, but the implication hung in the air.

At the end, before Tracey left the stand, Wetzel asked, “Why are you testifying?

“I owe it to Steve Beard,” she said. “We were both fooled by the same woman.”

As Tracey left the courtroom, Wetzel felt confident she’d done well. Despite DeGuerin’s attacks, Tracey had never lost her temper or appeared “a crazy woman,” as he attempted to paint her.

It wouldn’t be the end of the bad news for the defense, as Wetzel introduced summaries of financial and phone records. By the time the expert witnesses left the stand, the state’s case had two more linchpins: Celeste had cashed in after Steve’s death, spending wildly and using every tactic she could to pull money from his estate, and she hadn’t cut off the relationship with Tracey. Rather, they talked often
and for long periods on the secret cell phone, well after the shooting. More often than not, Celeste had initiated the calls. If she felt she was being stalked by Tracey, as DeGuerin implied, why would she do that?

After the emotional roller coaster of Tracey’s testimony, Donna Goodson’s afternoon on the stand seemed a needed break. The day of Steve’s death came into even sharper focus as Goodson quoted Celeste as saying she “took him to the hospital because she didn’t want him to die in the house.” After the funeral, Celeste recovered quickly, Donna said, describing their wild forays to Houston, Lake Charles, and New Orleans. Back in Austin, Celeste bedded one man after another, talking about marriage with all of them. One day Donna found two of Steve’s robes in a closet.

“I thought I got rid of all his shit,” Celeste said, throwing them in the garbage.

While Kristina was on the stand, the jurors had heard the tape in which Celeste admitted hiring a hit man. At times it was comical, as Goodson described how she’d reeled in more and more money from Celeste.

“Did you try to find anyone to kill Tracey Tarlton?” Cobb asked.

“No. I never did.”

“Did you steal any items from Celeste Beard?” Cobb asked.

“No,” Goodson replied.

“You had pawn tickets for the jewelry you pawned, didn’t you?” DeGuerin countered. On the overhead projector he put up slides of the jewelry Celeste had reported stolen, the same items Goodson pawned. She insisted they were gifts.

“For two years you had information that Celeste had asked you to find someone to kill Tracey, and you didn’t tell anyone?” DeGuerin said.

“That’s right,” Goodson answered.

“Fourteen days in jail, and you weren’t worried at all,” DeGuerin said, referring to the time she’d spent there after the police had raided her house.

It would prove to have been one question too many, as Goodson answered, “I was safe in jail. I feared for my life. I thought Celeste had found someone to do away with me because I knew too much.”

The last witness before the state rested was Becky Beard. On the stand, she cried, describing her father as a good man. Her tears reminded everyone in the courtroom that someone very real had been brutally murdered. Steve had suffered for months and then died a horrible death. After weeks of sensational testimony, the prosecutors wanted to bring the jurors back to basics.

A full month after the trial began, Allison Wetzel rose in the courtroom and said, “The state of Texas rests.”

As she gathered her files, she thought about the forty-six witnesses she’d put on the stand. All had done well, she thought; yet she worried. More than any other issue, the cause of death gnawed at her. During the course of the case, she’d put Steve’s surgeon, Dr. Coscia, on the stand, who’d testified that the damage from the gunshot had been extensive and that he’d never been able to fully repair Steve’s colon. The physician said such a wound bred infection. Yet Dr. Coscia maintained infection hadn’t killed his patient. He agreed with Dr. Roberto Bayardo, the Travis County medical examiner, who’d conducted the autopsy: The cause of death was pulmonary embolism, blood clots to the lungs caused by the months of inactivity, a direct result of the shooting.

On the stand, Bayardo had detailed how he’d made his diagnosis, showing slides taken of Steve’s lungs. Reading from hospital charts, Cobb listed Steve’s symptoms.

“Is that consistent with infection?” he asked.

“No, it’s consistent with a blood clot in the lungs,” Bayardo said.

Yet, DeGuerin had come back hard, suggesting that his experts would disagree and testify that Steve died of an overwhelming infection not linked to the shooting. If so, Steve had died of natural causes, not homicide.

“Do you know a Dr. Charles Petty?” DeGuerin asked Bayardo.

“Yes, I admire him,” he said.

“It’s not unusual for physicians to disagree, is it?”

“If he disagrees with me, I’ll be very angry,” Bayardo said in his Latin accent, his tone highly skeptical. “Not in this case when the evidence is so clear-cut.”

The jury chuckled at the Latin doctor, who became huffy with insult. Yet, Wetzel couldn’t find it humorous. In the wings waited Dr. Petty and a second physician, both hired to blow a fatal hole through her well-crafted case.

O
n the morning of Monday, March, 3, 2003, Dick
DeGuerin began Celeste’s defense with four Dallas mental health professionals from Timberlawn: her psychologist, Dr. Bernard Gotway; her psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Miller; the art therapist, Melissa Caldwell; and Tracey’s therapist, Susan Milholland. Under Texas law, no privilege exists that exempts physicians from testifying in criminal cases, and all raised their hands before Judge Kocurek and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth.

Wearing a tweedy sport coat fit for a college professor, his gray hair curly, Gotway, the first on the stand, estimated he’d treated, if not thousands, at least hundreds of patients. Licensed for eighteen years at the time he first saw Celeste, he specialized in patients who’d suffered severe trauma. Concerning his client on trial for murder, he described her as a needy woman who had flashbacks, overwhelming anxieties, and the need to spend lavishly on others to buy their friendships. “This is the kind of thing we treat every day,” Gotway
said, adjusting his glasses. “She was ripe for treatment when she got to Timberlawn.”

Much of the turmoil in her marriage to Steve, the therapist said, involved her spending. Yet, here, he suggested, Celeste was merely a pawn of her history. “Whenever she got to feeling bad, she’d buy something,” he said. “She’d hide her anxiety by trying to make things perfect, especially in the house.”

While Celeste was his primary focus, he worked on the marriage as well, through couple’s therapy. “Steve told me he wanted Celeste to be happy. I thought these were people who wanted to be together,” Gotway said. “Celeste is complex. She’s had a lot of trauma in her life, and she tends to be histrionic. She seeks attention.” Then he went on to say something that caught Wetzel’s undivided attention. “Celeste isn’t capable of making long-term plans. She’s too impulsive, jumping from one thing to the next. She’s not a strategic thinker able to plan over a long period of time.”

“Could she have planned for months to influence Tracey Tarlton to kill her husband? Could she do that?” DeGuerin asked.

Wetzel jumped up. “I object your honor. That’s a question the jury has to answer.”

“Sustained,” Judge Kocurek ruled. Yet DeGuerin had made his point: Celeste’s psychologist judged her incapable of the murder.

“Are there some people who say things to their therapists that aren’t true?” Wetzel asked during cross examination.

“Yes,” Gotway said.

“Would the failure of a patient to disclose make a therapist’s opinion less valid?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you she was having an affair with her ex-husband?”

“No,” Gotway said.

“Did the defendant tell you this was the first time she’d ever told anyone about her sexual abuse?”

“That’s what I wrote in my notes,” he said.

“Would it surprise you that she told a therapist in 1995 about the abuse?”

“No,” he said.

Yes, he agreed, the nurses described Celeste as demanding and manipulative.

“Did she manipulate you?” Wetzel asked.

“In little ways, yes,” he said.

As Wetzel asked questions, a very different image of the sessions with Gotway emerged than his answers to the defense attorney revealed. Yes, she’d called Steve names and said that she hated him. While Gotway suggested under direct testimony that the relationship with Tracey had been one-sided, he admitted not knowing many things, including that the women slept in the same bed and that Celeste had given Tracey a wedding ring. Before long there seemed to be much about his patient that Gotway didn’t know.

Then Wetzel got a surprise. “Did she mention to you that she’d hired someone to kill Tracey Tarlton?” she asked.

“She said she’d discussed that with someone,” Gotway said.

Wetzel looked startled, then pointed out, “That’s not in your notes.”

“I didn’t write it down.”

“Why?” Wetzel asked, staring at Gotway. “Were you trying to protect her?”

“Probably,” Gotway answered. “Yes.”

When Susan Milholland took the stand, it was clear that she had reacted very differently when Tracey told her, “All my problems would be over if a certain person met an untimely death.” Though a less blatant threat than the one Gotway
had testified to hearing, it was enough for Milholland to call a meeting and for Tracey to be transferred out of Celeste’s unit.

Next, Dr. Howard Miller, Celeste’s psychiatrist, a thick-necked man with a quiet voice, wearing a quiet suit, took the stand. “Tracey may have been delusional about her relationship with Celeste,” he said, well into his testimony. “She was certainly delusional about other things. She has a strong need to believe that the relationship was what she wanted it to be.”

Wetzel and Cobb assumed that Celeste’s therapist would testify only about his patient. Instead, DeGuerin had asked about Tracey. Although Miller never treated her, he voiced his opinions.

“We’d like to take Dr. Miller on a sidebar,” Wetzel said, wanting to stop the testimony and argue outside the jury’s presence that he shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the mental state of a woman who wasn’t his patient.

“Not timely,” the judge ruled, saying the objection came too late.

With that, DeGuerin dug out the chart he’d branded Tracey with, the one that read: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, and psychotic. The defense attorney placed it beside Miller, asking him if those words fit Tracey Tarlton. Yes, Miller said, they did, “Tracey’s illness makes her likely to give in to her feelings and act on them in violence.”

When it came to the relationship between the two women, Miller said that he urged his patient to distance herself from Tracey. “I believe Tracey sustains a delusional belief system,” he said. “She believes the relationship with Celeste was more than it was.”

On the stand, Miller came across as sincere and believable. The first day of his case and five weeks into the trial, DeGuerin was making headway. Then he turned the witness over to Wetzel for cross examination.

“Isn’t it true that in August, September, and October of 1999, Tracey Tarlton reported no auditory hallucinations of any kind?” Wetzel asked.

“In July of 1999 the notes indicate some auditory hallucinations,” Miller answered.

“My question was later in 1999, say in October?” Wetzel replied pointedly.

“The notes I have don’t indicate any,” he said.

“When Tracey hears these voices, does she know they’re not real?”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe she does.”

With Wetzel prompting him, Miller discussed the rules at Timberlawn, including those that barred sexual contact. Yes, if Tracey had admitted a sexual affair with Celeste, they would have been separated, so there were reasons for her not to flaunt a relationship with Celeste or write about it in a journal that could be read by others.

“If Tracey had told you about a sexual relationship, you’d shut it down?” she asked.

“We’d try to interrupt it,” he said.

“You were Celeste’s therapist, not Tracey’s,” Wetzel pointed out.

“Yes,” Miller agreed. At the defense table, DeGuerin frowned. Wetzel then began what would become a routine tactic throughout the trial: to prove Miller knew little about the real Celeste. She showed photos of Tracey and Celeste together on the overhead projector and listed many of the things the women had done together, from parties to kissing on the lips at social events, ending with the wedding ring. “If ten people saw them together [acting as a couple], would they be delusional?” she said.

“Tracey was delusional at the time she was at Timberlawn,” Miller said.

“Is it possible that their relationship changed after Timberlawn?”

“It may have,” Miller conceded.

“Dr. Miller, do people in relationships, whether mentally ill or not, want to believe the person they love?” asked Wetzel.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is it possible that the defendant encouraged Tracey to believe their relationship was closer than it was?”

“Yes.”

Over the weeks of the defense, DeGuerin had fought to tear apart the evidence the prosecutors had put before the jury, but made little progress. The prosecutors, meanwhile, insinuated doubt into the testimony of one defense witness after another. An attendant from St. David’s who insisted the women couldn’t have kissed while there found himself staring at photos taken on the hospital grounds, a place where cameras were forbidden. If the women broke one rule, what kept them from flouting others? When Dr. Michele Hauser, Celeste’s Austin psychiatrist, took the stand, DeGuerin worked on the twins’ remarks that Celeste went to St. David’s to prevent Steve from divorcing her, not because she was truly ill.

“Was she depressed?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

In some ways, Hauser’s testimony helped Celeste. She painted her patient not as a leader, but a follower, someone easily manipulated. Still, other points in her testimony hurt DeGuerin’s case. Yes, Steve was angry late that September, aware that Celeste was not including him in her plans. He discovered she’d used aliases to get credit cards. As she had with the others, on cross exam, Wetzel turned Hauser’s testimony to her advantage. Again, Celeste had hid much from Hauser. One thing came through loud and clear—an indication
of Celeste’s personality. When Tracey overdosed before Celeste’s trip to Australia, Celeste told the therapist she was worried. “Celeste had concerns that Tracey would try to kill herself and that this would interrupt her vacation,” Hauser said.

More than one juror stared at Celeste, who glared at the therapist on the stand.

To Hauser, like Gotway, Celeste had said she “should hire a hit man to kill Tracey.”

“What did you tell her?” Wetzel asked.

“I told her that wasn’t good judgment, not a good way to handle things.”

On the stand, Jimmy Martinez smiled at the spectators and swiveled nervously from side to side in the chair. For two days he’d waited in the hall to be called. Now it appeared he’d rather be anywhere but testifying at his former wife’s capital murder trial. Seated next to DeGuerin, Celeste beamed. Later, one spectator would say she “lit up like a Roman candle with Martinez on the stand.” Another thought he actually detected flirting between the defendant and the witness.

Yes, Martinez testified, the alarm system in the Toro Canyon home was faulty, and he’d fixed it. He testified that Celeste loved the twins and would have done anything for them, and that his sexual liaison with her was more of a close friendship than an affair. Yes, he agreed with DeGuerin, Tracey “bird-dogged” Celeste at the graduation party. “Celeste told me to tell Tracey that she wasn’t a lesbian,” Martinez testified.

When Cobb took over, he concentrated on the money, mainly the check Celeste had written for Martinez’s work, inflated by tens of thousands of dollars, money Celeste pocketed.

“She gave you a lot, didn’t she?” Cobb asked.

“Yes,” said Martinez.

“You’d do anything for her?”

“Yes,” he said again.

Those first days of the defense, with DeGuerin and the prosecutors squaring off in front of the judge with opposing objections, tempers flared. DeGuerin called Cobb and Wetzel unprofessional for talking while he asked questions, and Cobb countered that DeGuerin objected simply to interrupt his cross exams. At the bench, Baen and Wetzel towered over their male counterparts. When witnesses like the executives from Bank of America brought in their own attorneys, the judge was swarmed by business suits. At one point nine lawyers clustered about her, each listening to every word, waiting to argue for his or her client’s best interest.

The animosity between the two sides was exemplified by one of the final witnesses in the fifth week. DeGuerin brought a Houston accountant named Jeff Compton to the stand to testify about Celeste’s finances. With colorful charts, Compton argued that Celeste hadn’t profited from Steve’s death, as the prosecutors maintained.

“Did expenditures increase after Steve’s death?” DeGuerin asked.

“It was stable to declining, as far as expenditures from those accounts,” Compton said.

“Was Celeste better off financially with Steve dead or alive?”

“She had access to more property with him alive,” Compton said.

On cross, Wetzel pointed out that the figures Compton quoted as spending from before Steve’s death included major onetime expenses, like the cost of building and decorating the two houses. Those skewed the figures, she argued.
On the stand, Compton bristled, angrily insisting she was wrong, that the Beards had continued to spend. With that, Wetzel pulled out a chart she’d pulled together with Kuperman, when he was on the stand. In two vertical columns, she compared what Celeste got under the trust to what she would receive in a divorce. Under the divorce column, she was entitled to nothing other than the half interests in the two houses and her personal property. If he died, she received a hundred percent of the value of the houses plus the income from the trust for the rest of her life, a difference of millions of dollars.

Compton shot back, insisting the prenup might not hold up in a divorce. But then he conceded that, at least at face value, Celeste had more money of her own if Steve died.

“Would you agree with me that having access to something is not the same as owning it and being able to sell it for cash if you wish to?” Wetzel asked.

“Yes,” Compton agreed.

Throughout the trial, DeGuerin fought no issue as ferociously as his contention that the relationship with Celeste existed only in Tracey’s mind. If he could convince the jury that the affair was a figment of a diseased mind, he might persuade them that Celeste’s involvement in the murder was untrue as well. To do that, he’d put on a parade of mental health professionals.

With his furrowed brow and graying mustache, Dr. Randy Frazier, Tracey’s psychologist, made an affable witness. That fall, after the shooting, he said, Tracey was consumed by a lack of access to Celeste. It was all she talked about. “What did Celeste and Tracey do together?” DeGuerin asked.

“She alluded to sexual contact and social contact,” Frazier said.