03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (30 page)

Celeste did as they asked, screeching out of the parking lot.

“You can’t go home,” Christopher said as soon as she pulled away.

“I know,” Jen replied.

They also couldn’t stay at Christopher’s; that would be the first place Celeste would look. Instead, they went to Anita’s office. It was closed, but Christopher, who worked there part-time, had a key. They sat in the office in the darkness, afraid Celeste would find them. When she was angry, Jennifer knew her mother was capable of anything.

Kristina didn’t follow her mother’s orders that night either. She stayed at the Grimms’ house with Justin. “We can’t go home, Kris,” Jen said to her on the telephone the next day. “I’ve never seen Mom so angry. She said she could actually kill you.”

“I know,” Kristina said. Yet she wasn’t ready to sever the ties permanently. “We have to let her cool down.”

It wasn’t what Jennifer wanted to hear, but she wasn’t pushing Kristina. She knew how important Celeste was to
her sister and how hard it would be for her to break away. Ever since Steve died, Kristina had worked hard to try to restore order to their lives. All to no avail, for with Celeste chaos always won.

The phone calls started that first night. At times Celeste pleaded; at other times she shrieked. The message was clear: She wanted the girls home.

When Kristina heard the voice mails, she felt ill. She’d never denied her mother anything, never blatantly disobeyed. But she knew she couldn’t go home, not yet, not until her mother changed how she treated her. When she pondered how to convince her mother that her screaming was abuse, Kristina came up with a plan. She and Justin would tape record the phone calls and messages; then Kristina could play them back for Celeste, letting her hear what Kristina heard on the telephone—emotional battery. From that point on, when Celeste called, Kristina and Justin turned on their tape recorders.

“Kristina, just because you’re nineteen doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do what I tell you to do. You want to move out, is that what you’re telling me?” Celeste screamed.

“I don’t know,” Kristina replied.

“That’s what you’re saying by deliberately disobeying me?”

“No.”

“If you want to continue going to college, if you want to continue to have your expenses paid without working, then you better get your ass home tonight, do you understand that?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I’m going to come over there tonight and get your car keys … I will change all the locks … I’m not playing games with you … are you willing to just say fuck it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know? Because I’m—I’m a worse person than my father, who molested me? Is that what you don’t know?”

Over the days following Jennifer’s and Kristina’s refusal to return home, the calls became increasingly desperate. Celeste ranted and raved. She called Justin, Justin’s parents, Christopher, Christopher’s family, the twins’ friends, Anita, and everyone she could for help, but no one would tell her where the girls had gone. One afternoon Celeste pounded on the Grimms’ front door, pleading with Justin’s father to let her in. He told Celeste to leave. Inside the house, Kristina cried. The ties that bound her to her mother were strong.

“I’m not going to have my life run by a nineteen-year-old who thinks she knows everything in the goddamned fucking world,” Celeste raged during her next call. “I am your mother. You are not going to tell me what to do … I’m telling you this. If you choose to stay at the Grimms’, you’ll be sorry. I will get a restraining order first thing in the morning. You will not be allowed at my house, ever.”

Celeste tried to elicit Kristina’s sympathy, talking about her abuse, ranting about the horrors of her life. When that didn’t work, she argued that Kristina wasn’t acting as an adult. “If you had a problem, you should’ve said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to do this,’ instead of holding all this resentment and hatred inside of you … That’s the adult way … All you want to do is hurt me,” Celeste cried.

“That’s not true,” Kristina said, her voice heavy with sadness.

Hour after hour Jennifer’s and Kristina’s cell phones rang. When they didn’t answer, Celeste left long messages on their voice mails, or Justin’s, his parents’, or Christopher’s.

“I like how everybody’s avoiding my phone calls, Kristina. You’re just making it worse on yourself.”

On Justin’s cell phone, Celeste left a message saying,
“Kristina stole Kaci, which is valued over five hundred dollars, so it’s a felony … I do not want to do this to my children, because I love them and Mother’s Day is coming up, but they’re leaving me no choice… The other thing to tell the girls is if—if, um, they don’t come here at five tonight, I’m not psycho or anything, I’m as calm as can be, but I will report them for stealing the keys to the house and everything else, since they don’t live here anymore. I will hire a private detective and track them down, because they were stupid enough to charge on the gas card. And I know, I know the area of town that they’re in, and I know where they go to school … If they don’t do it tonight at five, they will be sorry.

“I’ve disconnected both girls’ phones, and neither one have car insurance … please make sure you tell the girls that I love them, but I will have them arrested at school, because they’ve hurt me, and I think it’s only fair that they get humiliated.”

The days were torment for the twins. They were afraid, of both staying away and going home. Celeste accused them of stealing money and jewelry. At times they talked with their mother and agreed to meet her, but they never showed up at the Toro Canyon house. And always, Celeste called again.

It was the last conversation she had with her mother that finally convinced Kristina that Celeste wasn’t just abusive, she was evil.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Celeste said.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Kristina answered.

“You don’t care about me at all?”

“Yes, I do care about you.”

“Then, why don’t you come home? Why? Why don’t you come down and talk to me?”

“‘Cause I don’t want you to throw a scene.”

“I wasn’t going to hurt myself, Kris. What the hell do you
think I went to the hospital for? I’m not gonna hurt myself anymore. I’m not gonna throw a scene anymore … Do you think that I’m worse than my father?”

“When you call me names, like ‘you little bitch,’ and you always say that I’m worthless and selfish. When all I ever do is do everything for you,” Kristina said.

“I just want you to know that I do not appreciate you butting into my business when I asked you not to,” Celeste warned. “And I was gonna, when you come home, I was gonna tell you exactly why, exactly what Donna has on me.”

“What does she have?” Kristina asked.

“I’m not telling you over the phone. ‘Cause you’ll just go and tell Justin and everybody else, right?”

“No,” Kristina said.

“What?”

“No.”

After a momentary pause, Celeste said, “I hired somebody to kill Tracey.”

I
hired someone to kill Tracey.
The words echoed in
Kristina’s mind. Suddenly, so many things became clear. She’d spent a lifetime yearning for a storybook mother, loving and kind. Instead she’d been born to Celeste, who’d told Jennifer and Christopher, “I could physically kill Kristina.” She’d even bought them both caskets. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Celeste might have planned for them. For the first time, Kristina believed her mother was capable of anything, even murder. And if that were true, it wasn’t hard to conclude she was behind Steve’s death. Tracey Tarlton squeezed the trigger, but Kristina realized her mother must have put her up to it.

When Kris told Christopher about the tape and her mother’s words, he said, “You need to talk to Jen.”

“I think Mom murdered Steve,” she told her twin when they met.

Finally,
Jennifer thought.
Finally you understand.

“I do, too,” Jen said. “Kristina, we have to tell the police,
and we can’t go home. We can never talk to Celeste, never see her again.”

Kristina nodded. “I know,” she said.

The two sisters held each other and cried, over their lost childhoods and a mother who’d never known how to love them.

The following day the twins told Anita what they now believed, that Celeste was behind Steve’s murder. At first Anita seemed doubtful. Her faith had been shaken in Celeste when she learned that rather than going to Timberlawn, as she’d told her, she had gone to New Orleans to party with Donna Goodson. Still, lying about where she went was a long way from murder. Yet, as the girls talked, things started to make sense. She’d noticed how Steve always got drunk when they visited him at home, and he didn’t when they were at a restaurant. When the girls told her about the Everclear and sleeping pills, she saw the explanation. Then they asked her what had happened to the $30,000 in Social Security money Celeste had invested with her for them.

“Mom said you lost all our money in the stock market,” Kristina said. “Did you?”

“No,” Anita said, pulling out the file from a drawer. There, they saw recorded the withdrawal their mother had made; at a time when she was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes and jewels for herself, Celeste had emptied their accounts.

If the money had been there, it might have served as a cushion, to help them hide. But it was gone. The girls were frightened. Where would they go? How would they live? Being on the run would take money, and they had none. It was then that Kristina decided to do something she’d later regret. Months earlier, Celeste had told them they could have the money from the sale of Steve’s Cadillac, to invest and use to
pay tuition. Earlier that month, Kristina had sold the car for $21,000. Over the coming days, Kristina would write checks against a joint checking account she had with Celeste for that sum, money she and Jennifer could use to hide.

Just days later, at four-fifteen, on the afternoon of Friday, April 7, Bill Mange walked into the lobby at the D.A.’s Office to greet Christopher for the interview he had scheduled. Instead, he found not only Christopher and his attorney, but Justin with his attorney, and both Kristina and Jennifer with their attorney.

“We all want to tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “And I’d like to go first.”

“Let’s get started,” Mange said.

That day and the days that followed, the prosecutor let the teens tell their stories. Then he slowly questioned each about specific points. With Christopher, the interview took little over an hour. For the first time, Mange heard about Celeste’s bizarre behavior the night of the shooting, from sending them to the lake house, to dropping off Meagan and ordering them not to mention Tracey’s name. “I thought Celeste was involved from the beginning,” Christopher said. “Lots of things made her look guilty.”

When Justin began his statement, Mange listened carefully. While Christopher had been animated and forceful, Kristina’s boyfriend gave a deliberate recounting, point for point, of all that had happened since he’d first met Celeste, including her affair with Jimmy Martinez. Mange judged that Justin had been thinking long and hard about Celeste’s involvement and that the teenager felt like the dams were opening, all his suspicions finally free to spill out. Justin, it appeared, didn’t want to leave out anything potentially important. Before he left that afternoon, Mange had in his hands the evidence the boys had brought with them: Celeste’s journals, cards from Tracey, and even her secret personal
calendar. After they left, Mange paged through the cards, including the one in which Tracey remarked on Celeste’s “long, slender body.”

Taking it all in, Mange felt sure Celeste was involved. Still, he wondered, was there enough evidence to seek an indictment?
No,
he thought.
Not yet.

“We believe our mother was in on it,” Jennifer told him two days later, when she and Kristina returned for their interviews. “She put Tracey up to murdering our dad.”

As Mange listened, Jennifer described her mother’s ruthlessness and the callous way she’d treated Steve. To Celeste, Mange was learning, nothing was more important than money. “I saw her signing Steve’s name to checks,” Jennifer said. “We were all afraid to tell Steve anything, afraid she’d come after us if we did.”

When it was finally her turn, Kristina added other facts to the mix. Justin, Christopher, and Jennifer had all already told him about the Everclear and sleeping pills, but they didn’t understand the extent of Celeste’s actions. “She called the drinks the ‘Graveyard,’” Kristina said, frowning. “She laughed about it.”

Finally, Kristina handed over to Mange her stash of audio tapes of Celeste’s phone calls. The first she played—the conversation about Donna—sent chills through him. “I hired someone to kill Tracey,” Celeste said on the tape.

“Play that again,” Mange said.

Just like the first time, he heard Celeste say, “I hired someone to kill Tracey.”

It was there, recorded, Celeste’s admission that she’d solicited Tracey’s murder. Why did Celeste want Tracey dead? To shut her up, Mange thought.

“I didn’t want to believe our mom was involved,” Kristina told him, crying. “All my life she’s done bad things, but this was just too horrible. Are you going to arrest her?”

Mange wasn’t sure exactly what he had yet. Was there enough evidence for a murder charge, for solicitation of murder? It was something he’d have to take a close look at. “I’m not going to do anything until I’m sure I can take her into a courtroom and make the charges stick,” he said. “Let me look into this, and we’ll talk again.”

One thing had come through loud and clear during his interviews with all the teenagers: They were terrified of Celeste. Both girls cried when they talked about the caskets and Celeste’s admission: “I could physically kill Kristina.” Since that night, they’d been in hiding. Mange didn’t ask how he could reach them. He didn’t want to know. “I’ll call your attorneys to get messages to you,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Then Kristina said something that brought home to him just how helpless she felt. “I’m afraid to see my mom on the street. If I do and she tells me to, I’ll get in the car and drive away with her,” she said, crying. “I do what she tells me to do. I always have.”

“Would you get in the car, too?” Mange asked Jennifer.

“No,” Jen said. “Not me.”

The prosecutor realized that although the twins were identical in appearance, they were very different people, especially when it came to their mother.

The possibility that Celeste would find them was a real one. For days she’d been searching, showing up at Jennifer’s orthodontist’s office and trying to get their schedules at Concordia, where they were both taking classes. The phone rang repeatedly at Anita’s house, and Kristina heard their mother screaming into the answering machine. She’d called Jimmy, asking him to help look for the girls, and she’d hired a private investigator. Justin, Christopher, and Amy had all noticed him shadowing them.

“I’m not strong enough to say no to her,” Kristina told
Mange. “She’d tell me her side and I’d believe her. I can’t risk that.”

“Then hide,” he said. Writing down his home phone number on the back of his business card, he handed it to her. “And call me if you need help.”

After they left, Mange considered what he’d just learned: Celeste had a contract on Tracey’s life. He walked to the office of Rosemary Lehmberg, the first assistant district attorney. “You have to let Tracey know,” she said. “She has to be protected.”

Mange put in a call for Wines. After they talked, the phone rang in the office of Keith Hampton, Tracey’s attorney. “We have reason to believe your client’s life is in danger, that there may be a hit out on Ms. Tarlton,” Wines said. “We’ll have police drive by to check on her house, but you need to warn her to watch her back.”

When Tracey heard, she called Celeste.

“It’s the twins,” Celeste told her. “They’re mad at you for killing their father. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

The next day, Celeste and Tracey met at their bench in the park. Celeste was distraught and crying. “The girls have turned me in,” she said. Tracey had just learned someone wanted to kill her, yet she found herself comforting Celeste, who rambled on about the girls and the atrocities that were taking over her life. On top of everything, she claimed she had breast cancer. “I’m going to go to California to live with my sister, Caresse,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll come back.”

The months since the shooting had been a hell for Tracey. She was plagued by guilt and feared each time the phone rang that it would be more bad news. She missed Celeste and she worried about her. To Tracey, it appeared her lover was slowly crumbling under the weight of what they had done. And now cancer.

“I understand,” Tracey said.

“I should hire a hitman to kill Tracey Tarlton,” Celeste said to her therapist a few days later. “She’s ruined my life.”

“Celeste, don’t go there,” Hauser told her. “That’s not good judgment.”

Throughout the session, Celeste raged against what she described as the treachery of the twins. They’d stolen money and jewelry, she claimed. “I’m embarrassed that they’re lying and committing crimes. It reflects on me, as a mother.”

“I think you ought to go back to Timberlawn,” Hauser said. Celeste agreed, and left a few days later.

At Timberlawn, Gotway tried to disarm the hatred overflowing from Celeste toward the twins. At times she cried, saying she feared that they had fled from her life forever as she’d fled from her own mother. Other times, she succumbed to verbal rampages, blaming them, especially Kristina, for all of her problems.

She wrote the twins a letter:
“I’m typing this letter to you because I can no longer write. I am falling a lot, too … I understand that you are growing up and want to be on your own. I can accept that. I can’t accept your hiding from me. You both are tearing me up inside … I verbally abused you and I am deeply sorry. I was hoping you would be an adult, accept my apology and realize that I was sick. It will never happen again … If I do not hear from you by Friday, I will know that the path you chose is to be out of my life. You will leave me no choice but to cancel your insurance, gas cards, phones, and OnStar … I love you more than anything and would do absolutely anything for you… I love you both,”

The signature was barely a scratch,
“Mom.”

Twelve days after she checked back into Timberlawn, Celeste returned to Austin. By then nothing in her world was the same. While she was gone, Donna Goodson had packed
her possessions into her Buick Regal and taken off for Florida. “I figured I was next,” she says. “I was scared shitless Celeste would hire someone to kill me.”

Her fears were no less real than the twins’.

“Your mother says she has the gun loaded and she’s going to kill herself tonight if you don’t go home,” Peggy Farley, Kristina’s former therapist, told her one day.

When Kristina explained to Farley that they couldn’t go home, that they were afraid of their mother, Farley offered to let them stay with her family on their ranch. Kristina agreed, and when the twins arrived, Justin and Christopher came with them.

It was easy for Farley to see how frightened the teens were. On their first day there, Justin and Christopher disconnected the OnStar systems in the Cateras, afraid Celeste would use the signals to track them. But they still didn’t feel safe. With the money she’d brought, Kristina bought an old Jeep, one their mother wouldn’t recognize.

When Celeste left a message for Justin, they knew they’d done the right thing. “OnStar can’t find the girls, but I left a message with them for the girls,” she said. “Tell Kristina to push the OnStar button so they can get the message.”

Justin knew the minute the button was pushed, OnStar would have a fix on their location. “It would be like, gotcha,” he said.

As Farley talked to them about what happened, she sensed they’d all been through a terrible trauma. “The kids seemed overwhelmed,” she said later. “They talked about it all the time. They couldn’t seem to think of anything else.”

“Our mom was planning our deaths,” Kristina told her.

At night the twins were plagued by nightmares of their mother finding them and taking revenge. During the day, they were afraid to leave the ranch. While they were there, Christopher and Jennifer broke up. Jennifer would later say
that she believed all the pressure was just too much for them.

Although Celeste had written in her letter from Timberlawn that she’d never again attempt to contact them, she enlisted the aid of the police in her search. In early May she left messages on Justin’s voice mail, threatening to turn the girls in to the police for taking Kaci and for stealing money. “Tell Kristina to call me today or I’m calling the police,” Celeste threatened. “This is the last warning.”

On May 5 she carried through on her threats, filing a report with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department that alleged Kristina and Jennifer had stolen from her—not only money, but jewelry worth tens of thousands of dollars. A deputy went out to the Toro Canyon house and took the complaint. When he got there, Celeste said she couldn’t open the safe but that she knew the jewelry was gone.