03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (41 page)

“We the jury find the defendant, Celeste Johnson, guilty on the charge of capital murder,” she read.

Tears flooded Celeste’s eyes. DeGuerin and Baen put their arms behind her, as if to hold her up. Steve’s children, including the twins, sobbed. Later, Jennifer and Kristina would say they felt a tremendous sadness, to think that their mother would be spending the rest of her life in jail. Justin smiled down at Kristina and kissed her.

As the judge calmed the chaos, Rosales continued.

“We the jury find the defendant guilty of injury to the elderly,” she read.

Amy and Christopher hugged and cried. In the excited courtroom, the judge ordered that the jury be taken to their room. She didn’t want them to witness the highly emotional
display. With the guilty ruling on capital murder, Celeste would automatically be given a life sentence and wouldn’t be eligible for parole for forty years. The jury, however, had another duty before them for the following day: to decide her punishment on the second charge.

As soon as they’d disappeared behind the back courtroom door, DeGuerin jumped up, arguing that the injury to the elderly charge was double jeopardy. If an appeals court overturned the capital murder charge, he didn’t want to have to fight the injury to the elderly charge as well. Judge Kocurek overruled him, saying it was too late to bring up that argument. That decided, DeGuerin asked that the Arizona fraud case not be put before the jury during sentencing. With that, Wetzel and all the defense attorneys converged on the judge’s bench. About that time, Cobb, who’d heard the verdict on his car radio, arrived and hurried to the bench to join the fray.

Finally, DeGuerin returned to the defense table, where he sat, arms crossed, face flushed, glaring at the judge and the prosecutors, beside his client, who sobbed.

The following morning the principals in the case all collected in the courtroom for what would be the final day of the trial. Beginning business, Kocurek ruled that the Arizona conviction would be put before the jurors. The jury was then led in and seated to hear testimony and arguments before sentencing. The options for the injury to the elderly sentence covered a wide span, from probation to life in prison. As the first item put before them, Judge Kocurek read the Arizona fraud conviction, letting the jurors know this wasn’t the first time Celeste had committed a crime.

Then prosecutors called their first witness, Kelly Beard Brand, Steve III’s daughter. “Steven Beard was my grandfather,” she said. On the stand, she tearfully recounted how he’d
loved his family, especially her daughter, Allison, his greatgrandchild. He was already dead when her second child, Claire, was born. She would never know her great-grandfather.

On the stand next, Paul Beard, the career navy man, stared at Celeste with hatred as he described how she’d segregated them from their father during the final years of Steve’s life. He sobbed, explaining how his father’s death had devastated the family. The hole his father’s murder had wrenched into his life was so great, he said, that it could never be repaired. When he retired from the service later that summer, he didn’t plan to attend the ceremonies. Without his father, who’d urged him to join the navy, everything had lost importance.

A lion throughout the trial, DeGuerin didn’t question the children or object. Instead he sat behind the defense table visibly angry. “We offer all the evidence in the trial for the jurors’ consideration in sentencing,” he said when it was his turn to put on a rebuttal. Perhaps it would have been too risky to put on witnesses. Anyone who testified on Celeste’s behalf could have been cross-examined by the prosecutors. Throughout the trial, those called to defend Celeste had ended up hurting her by adding to the sordid details of her life.

Testimony was concluded, and once again the attorneys began closing arguments. Cobb thanked the jurors, then argued for a life sentence. “A poet once wrote about people who die before their time,” he said. “What they expect from us is that we gently remove the stain of injustice from their death.” The jurors, he said, could do that for Steven Beard, give him justice and allow his soul to rest.

Next, DeGuerin stood before the jury, seething. “I’m not going to stand here asking for mercy,” he said. Instead he argued that their decision had been wrong. He charged that the
deliberations had taken three days because some on the panel didn’t agree with the verdict and the cause of death. “By God, I disagree with your verdict. I disagree strongly… The evidence before you shows that Celeste is innocent.”

Then he went down what he described as a timeline that proved she was innocent, something he’d forgotten during the trial closing, and he asked those on the jury who he suspected were uncomfortable with the verdict to stand up to the others, to hang the jury on the punishment phase. It was a desperate twist in a strange case, a tactic few in the courtroom had ever seen before, the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, a risky football play used by losing teams in the final moments of a game. “Those of you who have reasonable doubt … you can stand up and say, ‘I was wrong,’” he argued. “‘I shouldn’t have compromised. I shouldn’t have surrendered’ … Don’t give in.”

“Your verdict was the right decision,” Wetzel told the jury, as the last one to address them. “Beginning many years ago, this woman has hurt people fraudulently… She’s not the victim … Steve Beard is the victim … he has a greatgrandchild he’ll never see.”

As angry as DeGuerin had been, Wetzel was calm. It was by far the best argument she’d put on during the case, eloquent and measured. “It strikes me how vulnerable Steve Beard was, asleep in his own bed… asking the operator to call his wife … don’t you know he was reaching out to her for help. How ironic that he didn’t know she was the one behind it … We trust that you will reach a verdict. What Celeste Beard did to her husband has earned her a life sentence. We trust you’ll give her what she deserves.”

At 11:25 that morning the jury again began deliberations. One hour and twenty minutes later they had a decision.

As Celeste stood before them, she stared at the jurors as if
she hated all of them, looking every bit the monster her own children had labeled her. The jurors would later say DeGuerin had read them wrong and that there’d been no dissent in their ranks. “We wanted to make sure everyone felt comfortable with it,” says the foreman, Rosales. “We just took our time.”

As before, they dealt out the maximum penalty, a second life sentence, and, to send a message that they had no doubt about their verdict, a $10,000 fine.

“I’d like the jury polled,” DeGuerin challenged. Later that year, in Galveston, he’d mount a masterful defense and win an acquittal for Robert Durst, the New York heir who admitted killing his neighbor, then dismembering and disposing of his body. That victory would make worldwide headlines. But this day, in an Austin courtroom, the man who was arguably Texas’s most famous living defense attorney had lost to two talented prosecutors and it tasted bitter.

The judge did as he asked and polled the twelve jurors, but to no avail. They all agreed that, for what she’d done to Steve, Celeste should spend the rest of her life in jail.

As a final matter of business, Kristina walked to the witness stand one more time, wearing a skirt and a serious blue blazer. In her hand, she held a white spiral notebook. For weeks she and Ellen Halbert had talked about whether she would deliver an allocution, a victim’s statement, in which she would finally address her mother. Ellen had told her of the one she’d done at the trial of her own assailant and said it had given her a feeling of strength and a sense of peace.

“I have a lot of things I want to say to you,” Kristina began, looking straight into her mother’s eyes. “What did I ever do to you? What did Jen ever do to you but love you?…You don’t deserve us. You never deserved us. You said we turned on you, but you turned on us. Steve gave you
his love. He took you into his family, and you violated him. You murdered him, and you are guilty.”

As Kristina left the witness stand, she walked past her mother. Celeste’s hands shook, but no tears filled her eyes. Instead of sadness, her eyes were fixated on the face of her favorite daughter with utter rage.

A
s always with a project of this scope there are
many to thank. First: my readers—Claire Cassidy, Christie Bourgeois, Andrea Ball, Barbara Tavernini, and Pam O’Brien, who helped me weed my way through mountains of research on a complicated and twisted tale; for her astute suggestions, to Sandy Sheehy, who not only wrote the book on women’s friendships but lives it; to Connie Choate for always being there; to Sarah Durand, my able editor at Avon Books, and Philip Spitzer, my agent.

Thank you to my legal heroes: David Weiser at Kator, Parks & Weiser in Austin, and Mark Pryor at Vinson & Elkins in Dallas. To Roger Wade at the Travis County Sheriff’s Department and Michelle Lyons, Warden Rebecca Adams, and Warden Audrey Lynn at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for their assistance in arranging interviews.

Thank you to Associate Psychology Professor Julia Babcock at the University of Houston and Nancy Parchois, MSW, for their insights into borderline personality disorder;
to Leslie Spry, M.D., with the National Kidney Association, for explaining the effects of high doses of alcohol on the body.

A very big thank-you to my favorite investigator, the man who so ably helped pull together documents and track down sources, Jim Loosen of JAL Data Services in Seattle, Washington. Jim, you’re the best. Also to Eric Smits at ABC Legal Services in Seattle, Judy Owens of Owens Legal Service in Phoenix, Arizona, and Eleanor Richardson of Eleanor’s Legal Support in Los Angeles for tracking down legal records, some decades old. A special thank-you to my able transcribers: Katie Guillory, Rebecca Anderson, and Barbara Benson, for their long hours of work.

Finally, thank you to my family for putting up with me when I’m preoccupied with work and to the Friday night bunch: Sue and Jack, Sherry and Jerry, Evan and Yvonne, Sharlene and Larry, and Juanita and Lynn, for helping me retain my sanity throughout the arduous year it took to pull this book together.