03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (33 page)

When they parted that day, Mange told the defense attorneys he believed they had a deal. “Now we just need to make sure your client isn’t lying.”

Mange hadn’t talked to Wines about the case in more than a year, but that afternoon he called the detective. As angry as he was about the way Wines had investigated the case, he was the lead detective and Mange felt stuck with him. “We’re taking Tracey to DPS for a polygraph tomorrow,” he told him. “I’d like you to be there.”

On March 28, four days before her trial date, Tracey was transported to the Texas Department of Public Safety office for a polygraph. Mange and Wines, with Maguire and Kinard, watched from behind smoked glass. She stared up at the window often.
She knows we’re here,
Mange thought.

For three hours the examiner shot her questions, at first those with verifiable answers—like what’s your name, your birthdate, what month is this? Then he honed in on Celeste and on Steve’s murder. Before he finished and tabulated the results, the examiner stuck his head into the room where Mange and Wines waited.

“This looks really good,” he said. “I think she’s telling the truth.”

Mange smiled at Wines. “Go get your warrant,” he said. “And find Celeste Beard.”

“I already know where she is,” Wines told him. “I’ve been keeping tabs on her.”

An hour later Mange called Wines at his office. By then Wines had checked in with the Southlake police and alerted them to the impending arrest. “Forget about the warrant,” Mange said. “I’m taking this to a grand jury. I want the indictment sealed until we round her up.”

With all Celeste’s money, Wines understood Mange considered her a flight risk.

That afternoon Tracey told her story again, this time in front of a grand jury. The session lasted thirty minutes, and she was the only witness. Mange listened, looking for inconsistencies, anything that would indicate that despite the lie detector test, which she’d passed without a glitch, she was lying. As she had throughout the debriefing, Tracey stayed true to her story. When he walked out later that afternoon, he had an indictment charging Celeste with injury to an elderly individual, murder, and capital murder.

The following morning, March 29, Good Friday, Mange
called Paul, who’d already packed to fly to Houston for Tracey’s trial. “We’ve struck a deal with Tracey,” Mange said. “We’re going to arrest Celeste.”

“Finally,” Paul said.

Mange reached Kristina and Justin in the car on their way to Port Aransas, on the Texas coast, for the Easter weekend. “We’re arresting your mother this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll notify you as soon as we have her in custody.”

When Kristina hung up, she began sobbing. “She cried for the rest of the trip,” Justin says.

“We’ve got her,” Wines said when he called Mange later that day. “Southlake police have picked up Celeste.”

At the jail, Tracey heard the news on television. “I knew she’d be coming,” she says. “Once they had her, she was on her way.” Inside, she felt no happiness, only resolve.

“It has taken two years to unravel the mystery surrounding the death of Steve Beard,” Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle told the press that day. “This indictment is the result of dogged persistence by Bill Mange and the Sheriff’s Office. They never gave up.”

The first time Mange saw the woman he’d pursued for more than two years was at the bond hearing. There, Celeste Beard Johnson, thin, blond, her designer suits replaced by an orange and green jailhouse uniform, looked subdued. She didn’t resemble the monster he’d heard so much about. At her side were six lawyers, including Charles Burton, the criminal defense attorney she’d hired the day of the shooting.

“She has ample funds to flee,” Mange argued. “She’s not involved with her family and has nothing to keep her from running.”

To bolster his claims, Mange brought Bank of America records that showed that in the year after Steve’s death, Celeste had collected $3.5 million from the estate.

“She doesn’t have that now,” Burton argued. “The money is gone, and Mrs. Johnson doesn’t have the resources to pay a high bail.”

With that, State District Judge Julie Kocurek set bail at $8 million, the highest in the history of Travis County, Texas.

Not long after Celeste arrived at the jail, Tracey saw her for the first time, across the exercise yard. Soon, messages began arriving, relayed through other inmates. “Celeste says it’s not too late,” one inmate told Tracey. “She still loves you. You can still be together.”

The messages continued until Tracey told the messenger, “Tell Celeste to put it in writing.”

Then something unexpected happened. The previous December, Mange had been transferred out of his position as chief of a court to head the motor fuels division, investigating white collar crimes. He hated the paper-heavy workload. A month after the judge set Celeste’s record bail, Mange announced he was leaving the prosecutor’s office, and the Beard murder case became the bastard stepchild no one wanted.

T
he Travis County D.A.’s staff had murmured for
months about the Beard case. How could they not? A multimillionaire shot by his trophy wife’s lesbian lover. “It had all the makings of a soap opera,” says one prosecutor. It wasn’t just the sensational aspects that begged their attention. When Bill Mange said he was leaving, more than one prosecutor eyed the file boxes of Beard documents climbing his office walls. The case was set for trial in December, and he had months of work to get trial ready. And then there was the investigation. They all knew it was flawed. As strong as the circumstantial evidence was, the case rested on the testimony of one person: Tracey Tarlton. Few prosecutors want a case where the star witness is a confessed murderer.

Making matters worse, Celeste was angry at Charles Burton for not getting her bail lowered and replaced him with Houston’s Dick DeGuerin, one of Texas’s best known and most accomplished defense attorneys. Over the years, DeGuerin’s talents had taken on nearly mythical proportions in the state. Wealthy Texans in trouble flocked to him
when trouble knocked, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. His phone rang again when four New York Mets were arrested in a spat in a Houston nightclub. The well-heeled paid into the high six-figure fees for his tenacious brand of defense, where he maximized every seed of evidence in his client’s interest. DeGuerin made no apologies for charging those who could afford to pay, yet he also took on cases where the only remuneration was a sense of self-satisfaction. In 1987 he championed the cause of a mentally ill and desperately poor Houston woman who tried to drown six of her seven children, killing two of them, and saved her from the death penalty.

Six years later DeGuerin was in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Outside, the FBI and ATF camped out in a standoff with David Koresh and his band of followers. As Koresh’s attorney, DeGuerin tried to negotiate a peaceful solution, one that would bring his client and his followers out alive. It wasn’t to be, and on the fifty-first day of the siege the compound exploded in a hail of bullets and tear gas into a furnace, incinerating all eighty-four men, women, and children.

“High profile, bad investigation, mountains of work, Dick DeGuerin, and the very real possibility that you’d lose, you’d have to be crazy to want the Beard case,” says Assistant District Attorney Allison Wetzel. So when an e-mail from her boss popped up on her computer in August, she opened it with trepidation.
“We’d like you to take the Beard case,”
it read.

Damn,
she thought.
Just what I need.

As the chief prosecutor in child abuse cases, Wetzel already had an overwhelming workload. But this wasn’t an instance where she got to pick and choose. “When you’re handed a case, you run with it,” she says. “It’s part of the job.”

In the District Attorney’s Office, Wetzel had a strong reputation and a colorful one. She’d grown up in Houston, the daughter of an Exxon engineer and a secretary, in a home where she was expected to achieve. She graduated from high school at sixteen, college at twenty, and only took the law school entrance exam, the LSAT, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. At the University of Houston, she made law review, then clerked for two of that city’s most prominent, high-dollar criminal attorneys, Racehorse Haynes and Jack Zimmerman. She found criminal law fascinating, learning the stories behind the headlines of their high-profile cases. Then, in the late eighties, any thought that she had about becoming a defense attorney faded.

At the time, she worked in the Dallas District Attorney’s Office, gathering experience before moving into private practice. One night an undercover officer she knew was gunned down during a drug bust. That changed things for her. “I saw the impact the murder had on people, including the family,” she says. “After that, I didn’t want to defend criminals anymore. I liked being one of the good guys, even if most of the prosecutors I knew were middle-age white guys in bad suits.”

In Austin she found a good match; Wetzel was a natural for a job where she prosecuted the murders and sexual assaults of children. With two young sons of her own, she identified with the victims and their families and fought hard to do her best for them. Nearly six feet tall with a tussle of chin-length, dark auburn hair, in a courtroom she bristled with nervous energy. She knew her evidence the way she’d once studied for law school exams, front to back, and always had it ready to pounce on a defense attorney’s misstep. Wetzel may have had a Sunday school bearing, but everyone who knew her well realized that was only one side. Scratch
the surface and she became a feisty opponent with a vocabulary that could strike a cowboy pale.

Wetzel had been glad the Beard case was Bill Mange’s problem. “No fun to get your butt kicked with the world watching,” she says. But now it was hers.

That same afternoon, she met with her boss, who looked at her schedule and decided there’d be no time for the other cases crowding it, even a capital murder trial of a woman who’d killed her own child. Those were handed out to others on the staff. Moving the case files from Bill Mange’s office to hers—enough to have filled two pickup trucks—convinced her that had been a good decision.

Still, until she sat down with Jennifer and Kristina, the case felt foreign to Wetzel. In them, she saw the small victims she’d come to know so well, bowed by years of parental abuse. The girls didn’t want to testify against their mother. They were frightened. That was something Wetzel understood. She’d had young victims crawl under a witness stand to get away from an abusive parent’s gaze. “We’re going to take this one step at a time,” she told them. “There’s one big thing to remember here: You’re not trying to put your mother in jail. The state is doing that. You’re just telling the truth.”

Over the following days, Wetzel interviewed other witnesses, from Amy Cozart, the twins’ friend who’d been with Jennifer at the lake house the night of the shooting, to David Kuperman, Steve’s attorney. The interview that most concerned her was the one she had with Tracey Tarlton at the Del Valle jail. Wetzel had already read her statement. Much of it seemed hard to believe; yet the evidence suggested she was telling the truth. As Tracey talked, Wetzel sized her up. Cases based on accomplice testimony are difficult. Most often the accomplices are poorly educated and have records
that undermine their credibility. Tracey didn’t fit that mold. Instead, Wetzel was impressed by her intelligence, and, despite her psychiatric history, Tracey didn’t appear the least bit crazy.

“Why are you testifying against Celeste?” Wetzel asked.

“I understand that I shot Steve and I deserve prison,” Tracey said. “But I’m not the only one who does. I want to explain why I did what I did.”

Wetzel left the jail that day relieved, and more hopeful than when she’d arrived.
Maybe I can do this,
she thought.
It just might work.

At night, she cooked her family dinner, then curled up with Timberlawn records instead of a good novel. In the end, they were as fascinating, offering insight into what went on behind the institution’s locked doors. In the office, during the day, she combed through financial records. A pattern emerged. Celeste’s flagrant spending, she reasoned, showed motive. By the time Wetzel perused the phone records, she felt even more confident. It was easy to see that Celeste hadn’t cut off contact with Tracey after the shooting; the women had talked often even after Steve’s death.

“Why don’t we put those in a more usable format,” Sergeant Debra Smith, who with Sergeant Dawn McLean, transported Tracey to and from the jail for conferences, mentioned one day. “We can put the financials and phone records on spread sheets and draw up summaries.”

Wetzel had an undergraduate degree in business, but the thought had never occurred to her. Smith, a no-nonsense woman with short dark hair and glasses, however, was a former auditor who worked as an investigator in the D.A.’s White Collar Crime Unit. With a master’s degree in criminal justice management, she was an expert at honing complicated records into a form a jury would understand.

“Go for it,” Wetzel said, glad to have Smith take over the
task. She had more pressing problems: DeGuerin had filed a motion asking an appellate court to lower Celeste’s bail. If he succeeded, Wetzel had no doubt Celeste would flee.

With the trial rescheduled for late January, just weeks away, DeGuerin and his staff took over the second floor of a gracious, old, brown brick house a block from the Travis County Criminal Justice Center. The owner, a lawyer with offices on the first floor, had offered the apartment as DeGuerin’s base through the trial. A porch overlooked the street, shaded by an ancient live oak, its thick trunk camouflaged by heavy broad-leafed vines.

Inside, it was a stark contrast to Wetzel’s modern beige office. The wood floors creaked, and the furniture mixed Salvation Army and vintage antiques. A sign over the kitchen door read,
ABSOLUTELY NO CREDIT
, and the dining room had the look of a war room. A battered table groaned under stacks of files, documents, and transcripts of prior testimony—from the protection hearings and the wrongful death suit—while on the walls, beside battered tin ads for Grapette soda, Cobb’s Creek Whisky, and Southern Select Beer, hung sheets of yellow legal paper suspended on strips of clear tape. Each bore a list of names under a heading: Need Subpoenas, Interview, and Find.

DeGuerin had family in Houston, including his first grandchild, a boy named Eli, after his father, Elias McDowell DeGuerin. Better known as Mack, the elder DeGuerin was an Austin civil lawyer, an LBJ Democrat who served on Johnson’s congressional staff and several times as assistant attorney general in the days before Texas turned conservative and Republican. Dick and his younger brother, Mike, followed their father into law but took the other side of the practice, representing criminal defendants. Although he’d grown up in Austin, DeGuerin had made his mark in Houston courtrooms. Fresh out of law school in the early sixties,
he worked at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, where he quickly became a courthouse presence. A few years later the brothers became protégés of the legendary Percy Foreman, one of the most powerful defense attorneys to ever argue before a jury. Years later, in the tough cases, Dick DeGuerin still asked himself, “What would Percy do?”

Although slight and spare, DeGuerin cut an imposing figure in a courtroom, perched hawklike on the edge of his chair beside his client, his eyes intent. In his early sixties, he ran three miles a day and looked a decade younger. He always carried the same worn, golden brown leather briefcase made by a client who couldn’t pay any other way. That wasn’t the case with Celeste where his bill was $450,000. While DeGuerin was busy with her, his next defendant awaited trial in a Galveston jail: Robert Durst, the heir to a New York real estate fortune, accused of murdering and dismembering his next door neighbor.

On October 2, 2002, the third anniversary of Steve’s shooting, in one of his first tasks as Celeste’s attorney, DeGuerin went before a three-judge panel of the appeals court to argue for a reduction of her $8 million bond on the charge of capital murder. It was then that Wetzel pulled Donna Goodson out of her hat. Armed with a signed immunity agreement she’d crafted with Goodson and her attorney, Wetzel took the solicitation case before a grand jury. When the indictment came down, Celeste was charged with soliciting the murder of Tracey Tarlton with an additional $5 million bond.

In a November hearing, DeGuerin argued again that Celeste didn’t have the funds to post such high bail. An accountant’s report he produced suggested she had little left of the $3.5 million she’d gotten after Steve’s death. In Southlake, Cole had sold the house, but much of that money had
gone to pay bills. In 2001, according to the records, Celeste paid $223,000 to American Express and $197,453 in improvements on a brand new house. Many of her jewels, furniture, and antiques, the treasures she’d paid so dearly for with Steve’s money, had been sold at a distress sale.

The decision went against DeGuerin, and the battle was over. Celeste wouldn’t leave jail unless acquitted in the trial. Now both sides prepared for the war.

With the Beard trial date set in stone for January 27, Wetzel had a problem. She needed a prosecutor to second-chair— act as cocounsel on the case. Considering the attorneys within the D.A.’s Office, she quickly settled on Gary Cobb.

Wetzel reasoned she and Cobb would be a good match. They had something in common: Before she’d arrived, he had held her slot as chief of the child abuse unit. Cobb had a reputation for having an unusual ability to connect with juries. In front of a courtroom, he appeared smooth and effortless, never anxious, worried, or rattled. Going up against DeGuerin, self-confidence was an important asset. And there was little Cobb liked better than trying a tough case.

“You should just see the evidence in this Beard case,” Wetzel said to him at the office. A little at a time, she talked about the challenges of the upcoming trial: the mental health issues, the accomplice testimony, the testimony of the daughters. None of it would be an easy sell to a jury, but she hoped the case’s complexity would lure Cobb.

“It all sounded unbelievable,” he’d say later. “I found it fascinating.”

That DeGuerin was involved didn’t frighten him. In fact, he relished a good fight. In his thirteen years as a prosecutor, Cobb, who grew up one of nine siblings in a small Mississippi town where black men weren’t expected to go to college,
much less law school, had won more than his share of bizarre cases. One involved a husband who claimed his wife committed suicide during sex. Cobb tore down his version of the woman’s death by demonstrating a history of domestic violence. Another case yielded a life sentence without a body. The verdict relied on a single spec of DNA.

“So, what do you think about trying this case with me?” Wetzel finally asked.

“I think it could be fun,” Cobb answered.

While the prosecution would rest with Wetzel and Cobb, DeGuerin had amassed a team for the trial. His partner, Matt Hennessy, thin, with a mop of dark hair, would play a small role, but Hennessy’s wife, Catherine Baen, would function as DeGuerin’s point person and second chair. Tall and lithe, Baen had been raised the daughter of a country doctor and had the ramrod straight bearing of a horsewoman. At Texas Tech University she’d participated in a Texas tradition—baton twirling.