03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (31 page)

“They changed the combination,” she argued. “In effect, they robbed me of being able to get to it.” The deputy told her to contact a locksmith. When the safe was opened, three of the seven missing pieces were inside, and the deputy wrote up a complaint on the remaining four items.

“I can’t believe you’re falling for this,” Mange told the deputy when he heard. “She’s using you to get to the kids, to control them.”

“Maybe they took the stuff,” the deputy insisted.

“This woman is a suspect in a murder,” Mange told him. “Don’t help her find the kids. They’re terrified of her.”

Reluctantly, the deputy agreed.

Celeste wasn’t to be quieted. Days later the phone rang at Donna’s house. She’d just returned from Florida a week earlier, and wondered how Celeste knew.

“Come out to the house. I have a job for you,” Celeste said.

“Tell you what,” Donna countered. “Meet me at Baby
Acapulco’s. You can buy lunch and we’ll talk.” Donna took one precaution; before she left the house, she told her mother who she was meeting and where, just in case she never came home.

In the busy, loud lunchtime crowd, Donna ate quesadillas and chips and listened to Celeste’s proposal. She was still afraid of her, but she was intrigued. Maybe there was a way to make more money. “I want you to find the girls,” Celeste said. “They’ve taken off with their cars, the dog, and some of my stuff.”

To find them, Celeste suggested Donna search through wedding announcements and make phone calls to their friends. The girls were standing up in a wedding that month, she wasn’t sure where. “Once you find them, call me and I’ll take over,” she said.

Donna wondered what Celeste had planned for the girls. To her, it didn’t sound good.

Celeste explained that she was willing to put Donna up in a hotel for a week, to let her use the telephone there to search. That way, she said, the calls wouldn’t be traceable to either of their homes. Donna, always looking for a little fun, agreed.

That day, Celeste checked Donna into the Red Lion Inn and left. As soon as she was out the door, Donna called a friend to join her. They watched pay-per-view movies, ordering champagne and dinner from room service.

She partied for a week, then called Celeste.

“I didn’t find them,” she said. “I’m going home.”

At the Farleys’ ranch, Jennifer and Justin watched Kristina, worried she might break down and call Celeste. When Justin played his voice mails with their mother ranting about missing them and wanting them home, Kristina cried. Sometimes Jennifer wondered how much more her sister could
take before she picked up the telephone, dialed Celeste, and said, “Come get me.” They were so frightened that Justin took Kristina’s cell phone away from her.

“Kristina, this is it,” Jen said. “This is reality. Our mother is a murderer.”

The good days were the ones they spent working at the ranch. While there, they helped Peggy and her husband repair fences, lay down a floor, and remodel a bathroom. They’d never done such tasks before, but the work kept their minds off their mother and helped distract them from the very real possibility that at any moment Celeste could pull in the driveway and demand that they come home. Although legally adults, they were afraid she’d find a way to make them.

They called Bill Mange almost every day, hoping to hear that she’d been arrested. The news, however, was never good. After looking at the evidence, Mange feared that, despite everything the twins and their boyfriends had pulled together, the case he had against Celeste wouldn’t convince a jury. It was all circumstantial. What he needed was for Tracey Tarlton to implicate her. Then, he judged, he might have a case.

Tracey’s lawyer, Keith Hampton, hinted they had information to deal with. At one point he even asked for complete immunity for his client.

“What is this, Commit a Murder Free Week?” Mange scoffed. “Keith, that’s not on the table, and it never will be.”

After that, Hampton’s allusions to a deal stopped.

Despite everything, Tracey hadn’t had any second thoughts about standing by Celeste and taking the entire wrap for the killing. The innuendos about the possibility of a deal were her attorney’s idea, not hers. “I was determined to go down for this and not take Celeste with me,” she says. “I told him that wasn’t on the table.”

Still, although Celeste had never gone to California, Tracey rarely saw her. One day when they met outside BookPeople, Celeste railed at her, telling her that she’d lost the twins over the murder and that her life was in shambles. A few days later Celeste called, shrieking, “You’re just like everyone else! You don’t love me!”

Fearing Celeste was suicidal, Tracey drove to Toro Canyon and arrived just as Celeste pulled in. When she saw Tracey, Celeste slammed on the brakes. “Oh, my God, that’s the woman who murdered my husband,” she shouted to Dr. Dennison, who was supervising two yardmen nearby.

“Drive up to the house,” he said. “Nothing will happen with me here.”

Celeste pulled forward and Tracey followed. In front of the house, both cars stopped and the two women argued. “Get out of here. They’ll see you,” Celeste said. “And don’t come back. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“Fine!” Tracey shouted.

“You can tell people whatever you want,” Celeste cried. “I can’t do this anymore.”

By then Bob Dennison was walking toward them. Angry and hurt, Tracey got back in her car and screeched out of the driveway. Without even thanking her neighbor, Celeste ran in the house.

After that day, it seemed to Tracey that the horror of what they had done was consuming them both. Yet, even with Celeste telling her she never wanted to see her again, Tracey didn’t question if what she’d done was right or why she’d done it. What happened next would change that.

The article in the
Austin American Statesman
ran on June 23, eight days after Tracey and Celeste argued in the driveway. Worried that Bill Mange wouldn’t be able to arrest Celeste, the girls had filed a request for a restraining order to keep her away from them. According to their affidavit, Celeste
had contact with Tracey after the shooting, and Celeste had become increasingly unstable. They believed she was behind their father’s murder. But it was the final line in the second paragraph that Tracey read and reread that morning:
“Kristina said she taped her mother saying that she had hired a hit-man to kill Tarlton. The tape has been turned over to investigators.”

At her house on Wilson that night, Tracey downed pills and drank the bottle of vodka Celeste had left behind. Later that night an ambulance pulled in front of the house on Wilson and Tracey was rushed to the hospital for yet another suicide attempt.

The twins’ secret tape recording was the talk of Austin. For months the city had speculated on Celeste’s involvement in her husband’s murder. Now Celeste, with her millions, was being accused by her own daughters of hiring a hit man. The twins were frantic with worry, knowing how vindictive their mother could be. They’d not only left her, but were working with the prosecutors.

The hearing for the restraining order was coming up, and they didn’t know if Celeste would be seated across from them as they testified, with the cold, hateful stare they both knew well. As Jennifer and Kristina took the stand that day, they were flanked by four uniformed, armed deputies. The twins scanned the courtroom. Their mother wasn’t there.

The twins’ testimony was riveting. Reporters jotted pages of notes as they recounted how Celeste had bought them caskets and been involved in the murder of their father. “We’re afraid of our mother,” Jennifer said. “Celeste drugged our father. She gave Steve sleeping pills and spiked his vodka.”

“When we were babies we had seizures,” Kristina testified. “I believe our mother not only used to poison our father but us.”

“Celeste loves her daughters,” her attorney argued. Yet, she did not contest the order.

That day was a victory for the girls. Judge John Hathaway granted the restraining order and ordered Celeste to pay $13,500 toward the twins’ legal fees. “You’re strong and courageous,” he told them. “Not only can she not come within two hundred yards of you, she can’t throw a spitball at you. She can’t use a gun or a knife; she can’t come anywhere near you or touch you in any way.”

Despite their victory in the courtroom and the judge’s assurances, the girls felt anything but safe.

Not even generating a headline was what happened at Donna Goodson’s house. One morning the police arrived with a search warrant. They took her computer, her zip drive, and pawn tickets. Although the audiotape had been played in open court, it wasn’t about involvement in a murder-for-hire. It was about four pieces of jewelry.

Months earlier, Celeste had reported the jewelry stolen, blaming the twins. Although the investigation had been dropped, an alert went out to pawnshops describing the pieces. A call came in regarding one of the pieces, a stunning diamond cocktail ring worth thousands. When deputies investigated, they found Donna had pawned it for a few hundred dollars. Pawn tickets found in the search turned up the remaining three pieces, including a pendant with the Dallas skyline encrusted with jewels, all in pawnshops on her way to Florida. Later, Donna argued that the jewelry was a gift, not stolen. “Celeste wanted me to take care of Tracey so bad, all I had to do was say I liked something and she gave it to me,” she says. “I didn’t have to steal anything.”

The day of the search, Donna was arrested and booked in the Travis County Jail on a probation violation. Since she’d pawned the items in Louisiana, they knew that she’d left
Texas without permission. To her, the arrest was a relief. Ever since news of the audiotape had broken, she’d been looking over her back, watching faces, waiting for Celeste to strike. At times she thought it was imminent, like the week the windows on not only her car but her mother’s and her stepfather’s were smashed in their driveway. Another night she awoke to the crack of shotgun fire in front of her house. After that she moved her bed away from the window. “In jail I was safe,” she says. “For the first time in weeks, I knew she couldn’t get me.” Donna hated to leave jail ten days later, when a judge reinstated her probation. “From that point on, I watched my back,” she says.

Spurred by the twins’ testifying against their mother, that summer the older Beard children asked Kristina and Jennifer to join them in a wrongful death suit against Celeste, to keep her from squandering Steve’s fortune. They agreed. In August, seven months after Steve’s death, the girls came out of hiding long enough to take the witness stand in a hearing on the case. This time Celeste was in the courtroom. “We didn’t want to see her,” says Kristina. “We were scared.”

Newspaper, radio, and television reporters were all in the courtroom when Kristina took the stand. The testimony was grueling. As attorneys questioned them, the girls answered carefully, keeping their eyes averted from Celeste as they recounted the months leading up to and the night of the shooting. The following morning the lead sentence in the paper would recount the hamburger night at the Beard household, when Tracey slipped her arm over Celeste’s shoulder, then kissed her hard on her lips.

“Was it your impression that your mother and Tracey Tarlton were having an affair?”

“Yes,” Kristina said.

Unlike the protection hearing, this time Kristina also described
the way Celeste threw away Steve’s money, testifying that she paid large sums to friends and to her ex-husband Jimmy Martinez for little work. In some cases the money came back to her, through refunds on overpayments. As it would every time she took the stand, on cross examination Kristina was questioned vigorously about the checks she’d cashed in the weeks following her decision to go into hiding.

“You violated your mother’s trust, didn’t you?” Celeste’s attorney challenged.

“I was doing what she said I should,” Kristina said. “And I had her power of attorney. She opened up a joint bank account and put me on it.”

Despite their fears, both the girls held up well, answering questions and not backing down. When they’d finished, however, it was evident how big a toll the testimony had taken on them. In a room behind the courtroom, they sat together, crying. Neither had looked her mother in the eye. That was something they weren’t yet ready to do. But they could feel her in the courtroom and knew how much she now hated them.

Over the next two days, the Beard children’s attorneys pulled in witnesses to show how Celeste was squandering Steve’s money.

“How much money did Mrs. Beard spend in the past seven months?” an attorney asked.

“Half a million dollars,” Janet Hudnall, a vice president of Bank of America, replied.

Celeste had gone through so much money, in fact, that she’d eaten up the $500,000 gift in Steve’s will.

“It’s gone?” asked the attorney.

“All of it,” said Hudnall.

Yet, Steve’s own actions served to undercut his children’s case. On the stand, David Kuperman testified not only that Steve approved many of the bills, but that he increased Celeste’s
portion of the estate in the trust after the shooting, by adding Davenport Village II to the estate’s holdings. Still, the evidence was compelling, especially when Petra Mueller, the owner of Studio 29, took the stand and recounted how days before the shooting she overheard Celeste say that she wished Steve were dead.

Throughout the hearing, Celeste, carefully dressed and manicured, watched the proceedings from the chair beside her attorney. She showed little emotion, her eyes narrowing as so many spoke against her. Yet she never took the stand. Instead the twins’ attorney read part of a deposition Celeste had given earlier that summer. In it, one attorney questioned her about her meetings with Tracey. Celeste admitted that she’d met with Tracey once behind BookPeople, after Steve’s death. “I was distraught,” she said. “And I just wanted her to know I was losing my whole family.”

There she was, admitting she’d talked to the woman accused of murdering her husband. Astonishingly, Celeste insisted she didn’t ask Tracey the one question it seemed would be on her mind more than any other: Did you kill Steve?