03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (3 page)

At a friend’s house the following morning, Gail hoped the worst was over, but a friend phoned and told her Celeste had called, claiming police were looking for her. “Celeste had pressed charges, claiming I stole her purse with her welfare checks and food stamps,” says Gail.

Not knowing what to do, she called the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office. “Are you looking for me? Do I need to come in?” she asked.

“No,” the prosecutor said, explaining Celeste’s purse had been found along the side of a road. “She won’t bother you anymore. We’ll take care of it.”

“I don’t know why he said that, except they knew she was lying,” says Gail, who was so frightened of Celeste that she left the county and hid.

Later, Gail heard that after she moved out, Celeste abandoned the twins in a foster home. Over the years there would
be a string of such periods, times when Celeste turned the girls over to others to raise. She’d later claim she couldn’t afford to support them; others would charge she was distracted by her latest man. “My first memories are of her leaving us with strangers,” says her daughter Jennifer. “We never knew if or when she’d come back.”

Later, Celeste moved back in with Craig and regained custody of the twins. Living in an apartment, they must have looked to the outside world like the perfect young family, a handsome dad, beautiful mom, and two identical little toddlers. It was then that Celeste’s father, Edwin, came to live with them. As she had with Gail, Celeste became demanding, insisting he report where he was and with whom. A few months after Edwin moved in, he spent a night with friends. He and Celeste argued, but he didn’t realize how angry she was until he was picked up by police the next day. In the past, Celeste had claimed to others that she’d been sexually abused, but she’d never confronted him. Now, she made the accusation to the police. “I told them that it never happened,” Edwin says. “I didn’t abuse my daughter. I would never do that.”

The deciding bit of information for Celeste’s oldest brother Cole came from a detective. The day in 1985 when Edwin was taken in for questioning, one of the officers told Cole that Edwin had been given a lie detector test. In it he denied Celeste’s charges. “The detective said Dad passed with flying colors. The police never pressed charges,” says Cole. “Celeste was lying. Celeste was always lying. She was mad at our dad, and she was out to get him.”

Months later, Celeste and Craig split once again and she dated a guy she’d known since high school, Pete Timm. An electrician, he came from a well-respected Camarillo family.
“Celeste was one of those people you wanted to be around,” says Pete. “She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she was pretty, and she loved to laugh… She kind of drew you in.”

Attentive, Celeste said all the right things, including that she loved him. “Later, I wondered how I ended up with her, but I was only listening to my heart,” Timm says.

When Craig warned him to beware of Celeste, saying she’d “raked him over the coals,” Timm didn’t believe him. With the twins in foster care, Celeste worked in a deli and cleaned houses in Leisure Village, a well-to-do retirement community. She also went to school, first to be a hair stylist, then to Oxnard College, where she took a class in accounting. As she had with Craig, Celeste told sad stories about being abused by her father and having the twins so young she couldn’t afford them. Pete opened up his life to her. She became a part of his family, even living with his parents. In love, he even took her to the bank when he made deposits. That turned out to be a mistake, when he discovered $7,000 had disappeared from his account.

“Your wife withdrew all the money,” the teller told Pete. “She went through the drive-through taking out one to two thousand dollars at a time for a week.”

When he confronted her, Celeste cried and said she needed the money for an attorney to reclaim the twins. After she pledged her love, Pete forgave her. Yet, things gnawed at him. One was that she never enjoyed sex. “It was a chore for her,” he says. “She was really good at it, but it always felt like she wanted something in return. Celeste flipped the switch and acted upbeat, but there was never any real joy. She was beautiful and sad.”

Even with the girls, he saw little happiness and rarely motherly love. “She did all the right things, acting like she cared, but never showed real affection,” he says. On weekend visitations, a county caseworker dropped off the girls,
then came to pick them up. The girls pleaded with her not to take them away from their mother. “It didn’t faze Celeste,” says Timm, who wondered how someone as caring as Celeste could be so cold.

Still, he loved her, and they made plans to marry. Once they did, Celeste told him caseworkers would release the girls to her and they’d be a family. As the wedding approached, his excitement grew. Celeste even told Pete’s religious parents that she’d found God. Then, just months before the wedding, Celeste found an apartment she wanted. She asked Timm to lend her the money for the deposit. Remembering how she’d cleaned him out, he was apprehensive. But then Celeste surprised him by saying she’d get the money from her mother. While he listened, she phoned someone she called “Mom.” When she hung up, she bubbled with excitement, saying Nancy had agreed. There was one catch: She wouldn’t get the money for three days. “Pete, could you loan it to me?” Celeste pleaded. “I’ll pay you back when Mom sends the check.”

Pete agreed, and when she asked him to, he signed the apartment lease.

The next day Pete’s money and Celeste were both gone. Compounding the blow, Celeste had turned in the lease, leaving him responsible for a full year’s rent. Spinning from the betrayal, he searched but couldn’t find her. In the end he didn’t care about the money, only that the woman he loved had left him. “Maybe it was never love,” he says. “But she broke my heart, and for three years I thought about her every day and wondered what I did to make her leave. In her own way, Celeste was intoxicating.”

Craig hadn’t been able to rid himself of his desire for Celeste, either, despite leaving California to flee her. It happened a few days after he was discovered sitting in a Camarillo hotel stairwell. He was drunk, morose, and had a
shotgun poised under his chin. “I love her and she just does shit to me,” Craig said to Jeff, who’d been called by the police. “Why does Celeste do these things? Why does she hurt me?”

Jeff took away the gun, and Craig was taken in for observation. Three days later he gave Craig his car keys and convinced him to move to Phoenix. “There was nothing good about Craig’s relationship with Celeste except the twins,” says Jeff. “I hoped Craig would never see her again. That didn’t happen. He wasn’t there for more than a few days when she called, begging him to take her back.”

S
oon after Craig moved Celeste and the twins to
Arizona, she was pregnant again. “I thought maybe it would calm her down and we could try to make it work,” he’d later write. In November 1986, Celeste gave birth to a third baby girl and decided to put it up for adoption. The twins, then six, never saw their baby sister. “I remember Celeste being pregnant, then she wasn’t,” says Jennifer. “She never talked about it.”

It was the way she handled the adoption, what Celeste got in return for the child, that rankled Craig. “She told the adoptive parent we had to pay the hospital bills, when my insurance did,” he wrote. “She got ten thousand dollars cash for that baby.”

Soon after, Celeste had yet another man in her life. Devastated, Craig stood helplessly by as she took the twins, their income tax refund, the $10,000 from the adoption, and left. Weeks later he tried to cut his wrists. When he was well enough, Jeff put him on an airplane for Washington State to live near their mother.

That fall, Celeste left the six-year-olds home alone at night and someone reported her to authorities. They were taken away to yet another foster home. Looking back, the twins had mixed feelings about the families that took them in. With a mother whose attention was spotty at best, it was a foster couple that took them for their first school vaccinations and to their first dental appointment. Yet, many of the homes were frightening and heartless. When they arrived, they were stripped and inspected for bruises. At one, the parents ridiculed Jennifer for wetting the bed, then pushed her into the swimming pool. “I couldn’t understand why our mom did this to us,” she says. “Kristina and I schemed about running away. We dug holes in the yard, trying to dig our way to China. When our mom came, we begged to go home. She walked away. She didn’t even look sad.”

That fall, Harald Wolf, an Air Force, jet-engine mechanic who worked on F-15 fighter planes at Luke Air Force Base, was the new man in Celeste’s life. Six-foot-three, muscular, of German descent with prematurely gray hair, Wolf had eleven years in the service when they met. He’d grown up in a military family, traveled the world, and married once. Despite a divorce, he never considered that marriage a mistake. He’d feel vastly different about his connection to Celeste Johnson Bratcher.

“I felt drawn to her, but from the beginning, I never trusted her,” says Wolf. “Call it spidey-sense, that feeling that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.” After they dated for a few months, Harald tried to break up. Celeste announced she was pregnant. When he resisted marriage, she suggested they go for counseling. At the sessions, the counselor pegged his distrust as irrational.

“If she hasn’t given you reason not to, you should trust her,” the counselor argued.

Maybe she’s right,
Harald thought.

In December 1988 they married. Not long after, Celeste called him at the base and said she’d lost the baby. “From that point on our lives went up and down like a drug addiction,” he says.

The twins were released back to Celeste’s custody, and they rented an apartment in Glendale, a bedroom community northwest of Phoenix near the base. Celeste was obsessed with keeping it clean, so much so that she and Harald argued about the pressure it put on the girls. “She insisted they pick up their rooms,” he says. “They were little kids. I told her, just shut the door. She couldn’t. She never left anything alone.”

Sex was intense, but as with Craig and Timm, Celeste pulled back. “She was so good, it felt like paying a hooker,” Harald says. “But she never seemed really interested.”

When he wanted to know why, she cried. Only after he pushed did she whisper her claim that she’d been molested by her father. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?” she asked.

“I did,” says Harald.

After that, when they fought she reminded him of her past and sobbed. Harald felt his anger fade. “I’m not so bad, am I?” she asked, nuzzling against him.

In Phoenix in 1987, Celeste was hired on at Crystal Ice, an ice wholesaler. Claiming to have a junior college degree, she was made head of accounts payable; Lue Thompson was in charge of accounts receivable. Years later, Lue—twenty-two years older than Celeste and married with grown sons— believed she understood how Celeste insinuated herself into her life. “She saw something in me even I didn’t understand,” she says. “Celeste knew I’d spent my life wishing for a daughter.”

First at work then during their off hours, the women became inseparable. “I wish I had a mom like you,” Celeste said that Mother’s Day, when she gave Lue a brightly wrapped box with a dress inside. She remarked on Lue’s acceptance of her gay son, Jimmy, complaining that her own mother would never accept such news. Lue grew sad thinking about all Celeste had been through. Soon she was buying her presents and doing the things a mother does for a daughter, even brushing her long, curly blond hair.

“Mom, I wish you could adopt me. I wish I could really be your daughter,” Celeste told her, and Lue dreamed it, too, that Celeste would truly be hers.

When Celeste and Harald fought, she ran to the Thompsons’. One night she cried in Lue’s arms while Lue’s husband, Gary, listened to Harald’s complaints then ordered him to go home. By morning both their tempers had cooled. Harald, however, still felt ill at ease. Just too much about Celeste seemed suspicious. At times she arrived home hours late. She said she was having her hair done, but it looked the same as when she’d left for work. “Can’t you see it’s different?” she’d say.

On the other hand, Lue believed everything Celeste told her. She worried about her new “daughter,” whose life was constantly in turmoil. Celeste complained often of being ill, once telling Lue she had a virus that went to her heart and could have killed her. She cried about Harald, claiming he abused her. When she said Harald didn’t want the girls, Lue and Gary, who’d often helped children in trouble, offered to take them weekdays.

From the first, the Thompsons fell in love with Jen and Kris. At six, they were miniature versions of their mother, with dark blond hair and large blue eyes. Lue signed up the girls, natural athletes, for baseball, and she and Gary went to
the games. Evenings, they gabbed as she cooked dinner. After the years with Celeste, it was a welcome break for the girls. Off and on, for nearly two years, the girls lived with the Thompsons, who grew to think of them as their own.

Financially, Celeste was better off with Harald than she’d been with Craig. They lived in a good neighborhood, and he bought her a car, a yellow Ford Taurus. But from the beginning she hated the car, so much so that she ordered a vanity plate that read: Lemon. One morning she left for work and ran back in the house, shouting that someone had attacked the car. When Harald got outside, the fenders were scratched and the seats slashed. “It was weird,” he says. “The cuts were perfect lines at the seams.”

When police arrived, the officer, too, thought the damage suspicious. “It’s funny they didn’t slash the tires,” he said, mentioning that Celeste could still drive it to work.

“Deep down, I knew Celeste did it,” Harald says. “I couldn’t admit it, even to myself.”

Something else happened that year, something the twins would remember vividly. Sobbing, Celeste told them that their grandmother, Nancy, had died. At the California funeral, the twins stretched on tiptoe to see into the coffin. They hadn’t seen their maternal grandmother since infancy and didn’t recognize the white-haired woman inside.

Along with the stability they found at the Thompsons,’ summers in Washington with their father brought solidity to the twins’ lives, playing sports and spending time with Craig’s mom, Cherie, and their circle of relatives. Coaching the teams, Craig never looked happier. Weekends they camped in mountain parks, where the trees towered. On Sundays, Cherie brought doughnuts for Craig and her eight-year-old granddaughters and found them fishing in a stream, their baseball hats turned backward.

Those were happy times, and Jennifer cried at the thought of leaving her father to return to the chaos of her mother. In contrast, for Kristina every minute apart from Celeste filled her with pain. She was their mother’s favorite. Celeste whispered in her ear that she was special, that she was the daughter she truly loved. She called her in Washington State, urging her to hurry home. “Kristina was a little girl who wanted a mother,” says Lue. “Jennifer began pulling away, but Kristina couldn’t. When Celeste screamed, Jennifer was angry, but Kristina was devastated.”

At home, Kristina panicked every time Celeste seemed blue. She didn’t complain when Celeste kept them out of school, hauling them on shopping trips or running errands. “I knew she hated being alone,” says Kristina. “She just couldn’t stand it.”

From an early age, Kristina understood her mother had a sadness about her that never totally went away. As manic and happy as Celeste acted, it seemed a hollow ruse, as she quickly flipped back to depression and anger. She had children, a home, and a husband, but it wasn’t enough. Celeste filled every minute, planning weeks in advance: doctor appointments, movies, going out with friends. She shopped without regard, filling her closet with clothes she never wore.

The longer she and Harald lived together, the more erratic her behavior became. One weekend he arrived home to find a note saying she was visiting a friend. That night, two men from his unit came to the apartment to drink beer. An hour later Celeste burst in, angry that he wasn’t missing her. Harald and his friends sprinted for the door as beer bottles flew. “I stayed away for the night,” he says. “I knew the marriage was a mistake, but every time I tried to leave, Celeste went crazy.”

One time, she took a handful of pills; another, she stood
next to a full bathtub with a hair dryer, threatening to step in and drop the hair dryer in the water. Their eyes wide with terror, the twins pleaded with her not to, and Harald agreed to stay if they saw a counselor. From that point on, while other little girls pondered friends and homework, Kristina worried about keeping her mother alive.

The sessions began as couples counseling, but within a few visits the therapist zeroed in on Celeste, suggesting her suicide threats needed intense treatment and checking her into the base hospital’s psychiatric unit. “I thought she was trying to get better,” says Harald. “At times, she could be loving, wonderful.”

By then Celeste had become a regular in the Phoenix court system. When Jennifer fell off of a swing set at school and broke her arm, she sued. She tried to sue again after she quit her job at Crystal Ice, saying one of the men in charge sexually harassed her. “The attorney refused the case,” says Lue. “The man she complained about seemed like a nice guy. But I believed Celeste.”

Lue always believed Celeste, even when her niece told her she shouldn’t; that she’d seen Celeste being manipulative and mean and that she wasn’t the woman Lue believed. Craig, too, warned Lue that Celeste could be dangerous, but Lue scoffed, “You don’t know the real Celeste.”

“I do, and someday you’ll meet her, too,” Craig countered. “Please, be careful.”

In 1989 the Air Force notified Harald he was being transferred to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan. Word came down that due to her hospitalization in the psychiatric unit, Celeste wouldn’t be allowed to go. Furious, she mounted a campaign, calling his superiors and arguing that they were being treated unfairly. She complained so vociferously
that the transfer was eventually cancelled. “Tell your wife to stop calling,” Harald’s sergeant told him.

At home, their arguments escalated. One night, in bed, Celeste screamed at him. He turned his back, and she kicked him. Harald hit her with a pillow and then went outside to cool off. As he stood in the darkness, the police drove up. Celeste had called in a domestic violence report. When the officers questioned her, Celeste pulled up her shirt to display an angry red bruise on her back and claimed Harald had punched her. He suspected she’d done it to herself, by ramming into a doorknob. “I never saw a pillow leave a mark,” he says. That night, Harald had time in jail to think. The next day she bailed him out, but he refused to go home and moved in with a friend.

Looking back, it would seem Celeste was incapable of letting go of anyone. As soon as they pulled away, she became frantic to win them back. One night she showed up at a bar where Harald played pool. When he refused to take her back, she dug her long nails into his arm until it bled. Later, he stood on the outside balcony at the apartment. When he looked down, Celeste glowered up at him. Smiling, she popped the lid on a can and poured a Coke over his Camaro. When he turned to go inside the apartment, the door wouldn’t open. “She’d gotten inside and bolted it,” he says.

A little over a year into their marriage, his career in the Air Force was in shambles. Before he’d married Celeste, his reviews had been high. After two years with her, he was barely satisfactory. Why he’d take her back was something he could never explain, even to himself. But he did, weeks later, at the pool at the apartment complex. His roommate said, “She’s here,” and he looked up and saw Celeste.

When he approached her, she held out a box. Inside was a ring she’d bought for him. “I love you,” she said. “I want us to be together.”

They argued, she pleaded, and Harald relented. “I got so deep in a rut with her I couldn’t see above the rut to find a way out,” he says. “I was like a beaten dog. I didn’t want to be confrontational anymore. Looking back, the orders to Iceland saved my life.”

He’d been told to report to Keflavik Air Force Base for a one-year tour of duty a few weeks after they reconciled. On the plane, he felt the sting of separation. “I missed her,” he says. “Even after everything, I still missed her.”

In Phoenix, Celeste moved in with Lue, Gary, and the twins. She quickly had an affair with a bartender and became pregnant. After she lost the baby, she had a hysterectomy. The reason was not clear. Years later she claimed she had ovarian cancer, an insidious disease with few symptoms that is often deadly. Lue Thompson remembers it differently: “Celeste told me she had the hysterectomy because she never wanted to worry about getting pregnant. I never remember her having any type of cancer.”