03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (36 page)

This was the prosecutors’ case, and they offered DeGuerin little to work with. Still, on cross examination, he pulled together what he could. He repeated every entry from every incident log that described Celeste as distraught. He drew the image of her as a hysterical wife, worried about her husband. “Kristina didn’t seem worried?” he asked.

No, they said. In fact, Kristina comforted her mother.

Again and again he asked about the handles to the bedroom door, the ones through which the officers and medics entered. Brass, they appeared to pull open, but instead slid. Why were the doors important? Later it would seem he wanted to establish that the doors were locked from the inside. If so, Tracey couldn’t have left as she said she did and locked the door behind her. If that was his hope, it never materialized.

With that night carefully drawn, Cobb led the jury into the investigation, and Knight, by then a lieutenant, and Detective Wines each took turns on the stand. They described the disarray of the master bedroom—drawers pulled out—saying it looked like a staged robbery. Knight implied Celeste
offered an alibi too quickly and that her suggestion of a robbery seemed suspicious. Knight and Wines recounted their trip to Tracey’s house and how they followed Tracey into a back room, where she retrieved the shotgun.

In the courtroom, Cobb brought Wines the shotgun. He checked the serial number, the case number, and Tracey’s name etched in the metal. “This is it,” he said, displaying the weapon with its polished wood handle and long black metal barrel for the jury. Cobb also used Knight and Wines to introduce Celeste’s lack of cooperation with police. Even after Knight heard Tracey Tarlton’s name from the teens and asked Celeste pointedly if she had any relationship that could put Steve in jeopardy, Celeste said no. She refused to let them interview her husband and removed her consent to search her home.

“Was she a help or a hindrance?” asked Cobb.

“A hindrance,” said Wines.

When he took over, DeGuerin disputed the image of his client as uncooperative. Celeste, he pointed out, signed the consent to search and initially allowed them into her home. Then he questioned the integrity of the investigation, asking what had happened to items, including the cell phone Knight found that displayed Tarlton’s phone numbers.

“They went into evidence at the Sheriff’s Department,” Truitt said.

But the phone had disappeared, something for which no explanation was offered.

“Patients in ICU can only have visitors for so many minutes a day?” DeGuerin said, suggesting the officers’ visits ate into Celeste’s time with Steve. “Isn’t that true?”

Knight at first balked, then agreed, “That’s probably true.”

Through it all, the two attorneys went toe-to-toe, Cobb revealing suspicious details and DeGuerin offering alternative scenarios to lessen the implication of guilt. He also did what
he tells law students to do during his criminal defense law classes at UT: He “embraced the ugly baby,” the element in the trial that would stun the jury. While questioning Wines, he flashed photos on the overhead projector of Celeste and Tracey, arms around each other, dancing and sitting on each other’s laps. By doing so, he lessened the shock value of the photos, taking from prosecutors the opportunity to introduce them at a more dramatic moment. Yet again, he insisted the women were no more than friends.

With the gray-haired and goateed Wines on the witness stand, Cobb explained the long delay in the case. Steve Beard was shot in October 1999 and died the following January. Tracey at first denied the charges, fighting the admission of the evidence against her. Then, nearly two years later, she confessed and implicated Celeste.

On cross exam DeGuerin made the most of Tracey’s early statements. “She denied shooting Steven Beard?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Wines.

“It was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“It turned out to be. Yes, sir.”

When Wines searched Tracey’s house, he found her journal, including passages about her love of Celeste. “Did it seem to you that Tracey Tarlton had an obsession with Celeste Beard?” asked DeGuerin.

“Yes, sir,” said Wines.

One passage DeGuerin read from her journal said that with Celeste gone so much on family trips, it was “hard to pretend I have a girlfriend.”

“That means she’s making it up?” DeGuerin said.

“It could,” said Wines.

One photo from the party Celeste threw for Tracey, the “Fashion Victims” soiree, seemed to especially interest DeGuerin. Perhaps it offered an explanation for photos that
showed Celeste and Tracey looking very much like a couple. In it, Celeste munched a brownie. “Is that a marijuana brownie Celeste is eating?” he asked.

“It could be,” Wines said.

DeGuerin’s final words to Wines hung in the air. They were about the twins and their friends. “Did they seem to you to be spoiled little brats?”

Wetzel objected, and DeGuerin said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

“She would say, ‘Oh, God, I wish he would just die already,’” Amy Cozart testified. “Celeste made it clear she married Steve for his money.”

By then a University of Texas student, Cozart was the first of the teens to take the stand. She’d changed over the three years since Steve’s death. Heavier, she looked world-weary and reluctant to be there. Yet she answered questions calmly. With Cozart, Wetzel gave jurors their first glimpse of Celeste’s world, filled with greed and sex. Celeste hated her husband, Cozart testified, and she hid things from him. “If Steve found out she had sex with Jimmy Martinez it would nullify their marital agreement. She wouldn’t get any money,” Cozart said. “She said when Steve died, she’d act like she was mourning. Based on her reaction, no one would know she never loved him.”

Wetzel and Cobb had carefully laid out their trial plan. Since the trial would be a long one, they wanted to keep the jury from losing interest. Interspersed among the financial and medical testimony, which could become tiresome, they planted the more interesting witnesses, including the teens. Every day, they wanted the jury to have something to spark their attention. They’d also made a decision not to begin with any of the Beard children. With their court battle over Steve’s
estate, DeGuerin could suggest their interest was money not justice. Cozart and Jennifer’s old boyfriend, Christopher Doose, had no such exposure and no reason to lie.

At the same time, DeGuerin tried hard to bend each of the prosecution witnesses’ testimony to his view of the case. “You’re only recalling the bad times, aren’t you?” he asked Cozart, after which she admitted there were times when Celeste was affectionate toward Steve. From Tracey’s journals, he read her ramblings about her love for Celeste. That Celeste planned extended trips left Tracey feeling “short of breath and anxious,” adding details to back up his theory of a fatal attraction.

The trial continued with the prosecutors shoring up their case, laying the groundwork for the twins and Tracey to take the stand. Without a thick layer of corroboration to bolster the coming testimony, they worried that what their star witnesses had to say would be judged as just too strange to be true.

For days, they put those on the stand who’d crossed paths with Tracey and Celeste the summer before the shooting. Eight who’d attended the lake house party testified. Yes, they’d seen the women openly acting like a couple. More than one had walked in on them kissing. Some had seen them wander off to bed together. Yes, they believed the women were lovers. Cindy Light told how Celeste called her days after the shooting, wanting the photos from the party, including one in which she and Tracey kissed.

When it came to his cross exam, DeGuerin’s tactics began to suggest someone caught in the era of
Leave It to Beaver
when the rest of the world had moved on to
Will & Grace.
Though one of the jurors had answered on the pretrial questionnaire that he was gay, DeGuerin still talked of “predatory lesbians.” At times his questions seemed archaic, as when he suggested that in lesbian relationships one of the
women played a masculine role. “That went out in the fifties,” scoffed a witness.

Rather than a romance, DeGuerin suggested the physical touching seen by witnesses and in the photographs of the Fashion Victim party was a product of impaired reasoning. On the overhead, he again displayed the photo of Celeste seated on Tracey’s lap with a brownie poised near her lips. DeGuerin insisted Tracey had used the marijuana it contained to break down Celeste’s defenses, despite the fact that Celeste, not Tracey, held the brownie and that the women were kissing before the drugged desserts arrived.

From the Studio 29 employees, the jurors heard about Celeste’s bizarre behavior, how she bragged about her disdain for Steve. As DeGuerin fought to make Celeste appear a victim, the prosecutors refined their portrait of the woman on trial. They wanted jurors to see her as cold and ruthless, a woman who cared for nothing more than money. The testimony of Kuperman and Steve’s other advisers backed them up as they detailed how she grabbed every cent she could— even taking Elise’s jewelry from Steve’s safety deposit box—and how quickly she spent it. The message came through clear: If Steve divorced Celeste, she got nothing beyond her half-interest in the houses and her personal possessions. If he died, she got millions more.

As it had been at the hearings on the civil case, Steve’s own actions raised doubt. “Didn’t Steve increase the amount of money Celeste was entitled to under the trust while he was in the hospital?” DeGuerin asked.

“Yes,” Kuperman answered.

“Did Steve want to divorce Celeste?”

“No. Steve didn’t want a divorce.”

Still, the image of Celeste as a gold digger never faded. C.W. Beard and Chuck Fuqua testified that with her husband gravely ill, she called them, demanding access to
Steve’s bank accounts. While Steve loved Celeste, any doubt about the way she felt about him was answered by Amy MacLeod, the nurse who testified about his September hospitalization. The day he was discharged, Celeste refused to pick him up for five hours.

With MacLeod and the medical professionals who’d treated Steve, DeGuerin picked away at the gentlemanly image of Steve the prosecutors were building. While he might have been kind and generous when he was sober, he maintained, Steve was an alcoholic. “He denied dependence on alcohol, didn’t he?” the defense attorney railed.

“Yes,” MacLeod said.

Of course, another explanation was offered by the prosecutors’ witnesses: Steve had never known how much alcohol he was ingesting, unaware he drank Everclear instead of vodka. Christopher Doose backed up Amy Cozart’s testimony, but further exposed Celeste’s bizarre actions. On the trip West, he testified, he and Justin had to help Steve to the car, because Celeste fed him ground-up sleeping pills in his cottage cheese.

Then Wetzel turned her attention to the night of the shooting.

“Had she ever brought Meagan to the lake house late at night before?” she asked.

“No,” Christopher said, looking directly at the jury. “It was definitely out of the ordinary.”

“How did she look that night?”

“Frantic,” he said.

“Did you bring up a name of who you thought might have shot Steve?”

“Yes, Tracey,” Christopher said. “Celeste had been crying. She stopped. She got really serious and said, ‘No, it wasn’t and don’t say that. That’s not true.’”

“Her demeanor changed?”

“One hundred and eighty degrees,” he said.

During cross exam DeGuerin went on the attack. “You never told Steve that Celeste called him names behind his back?”

“No,” Christopher admitted.

“You never told him about the Everclear or the sleeping pills?”

“No.”

“I thought you liked Steve.”

“I did,” Christopher said.

DeGuerin came down hard on the somber-looking young man on the stand, dressed in a suit, his sandy brown hair closely cropped. As hard as he pushed, Christopher didn’t back off, even when the defense attorney accused him and the other teens of stealing the evidence they’d given prosecutors. The only time he resembled DeGuerin’s spoiled-brat theme was when he decribed ten million dollars as “a modest amount.”

For a moment the entire courtroom gasped.

“Didn’t Celeste fall apart after Steve’s death, have to go to Timberlawn?” DeGuerin asked, implying she had loved her husband.

“She went to appease the bank,” Christopher answered.

“I didn’t ask you that,” DeGuerin said, furious.

At the end, Wetzel had Christopher on redirect. “Why didn’t you tell Steve Beard the bad things his wife was doing?” she asked.

His face flushed and his eyes filled with tears. “I was young, but that’s no excuse,” he said. “I didn’t understand what was really going on, the implications.”

“Knowing what you know now, if you could go back and tell Steve Beard these things, would you?” Wetzel asked.

“Absolutely,” he said, crying harder. “Every day, I wish I could change what happened.”

In the gallery, Steve Beard’s grown children wept softly, and in the jury box some of those who would decide Celeste’s fate wiped their eyes.

“Did Celeste talk about her husband?” Cobb asked Justin when he took the stand.

“She called him, old, evil, fat, mean, and controlling… Prior to meeting him I believed he was an evil person.”

“Did your opinion change?”

“Yes. He would joke with me, tell stories, and talk to me about how I was doing in school… I liked him.”

“Was there a point where it was assumed without asking [that you would stay over in Kristina’s bedroom]?” Cobb asked.

“Yes.”

“Was there a night you were told you couldn’t stay there?”

Justin stared straight ahead, never looking toward the defense table. “Yes. The night Mr. Beard was shot.”

“Who told you that you couldn’t stay that night?”

“Celeste.”

On the stand, Justin hesitated at times, yet his answers came more quickly than at the pretrial, where he’d paused, analyzing each question before answering. With Justin, Cobb laid out the night of the shooting, including the orders not to mention Tracey’s name, and the days after, when Celeste barred the police from Steve’s hospital room. He then wove back to that summer, to the times Justin saw Tracey and Celeste together, including the time at the lake house, where they shared the same bed.