03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (39 page)

While DeGuerin appeared to gain nothing of importance from Frazier, Wetzel scored when she asked him to point out in his patient’s charts when and where he’d noted evidence that Tracey suffered from psychotic episodes. From June 1999 through the time frame of the shooting, Frazier had seen no sign of either hallucinations or delusions.

“If Tracey believed Steve was standing in the way of her relationship with Celeste, would that get in the way of reality?” DeGuerin asked on redirect.

“If there was no reality basis to that, I would consider that delusional,” Frazier said.

“Assume there was a friendship, nothing more, is that delusional?”

“If she’s getting clear information from Celeste,” Frazier said.

“Suppose there was actual sexual contact?” DeGuerin asked, and Wetzel looked up from her notes to listen carefully, as DeGuerin seemed to abandon his entire strategy mid-witness.

“Then Tracey would be getting mixed messages,” Frazier said. “The word that comes to mind is confusion.”

DeGuerin handed him Celeste’s birthday card to Tracey, reading, “To the One I Love,” and asked, “Would that be a mixed message?”

“It would fuel a hope Tracey had,” Frazier said. “It doesn’t sound like such a distortion in that context to think this person cares.”

“Could there then have been a delusional hope that with Steve out of the way she’d have what she wanted?”

“It certainly could,” Frazier said.

Clearly, in the sixth week of the trial the defense attorney had backed off his declaration that the affair had all been a figment of Tracey’s mind. With so much evidence against him, perhaps he’d simply decided it was time to move on.

From that point on, the defense witnesses taking the stand fell into groups: the lawyers, from Charles Burton to Philip Presse, whom Celeste had hired after the shooting; and the friends, from Ana Presse and Dawn Madigan to Terry Meyer, her manicurist. As Mange had planned if he’d taken Tracey Tarlton to trial, DeGuerin used Meyer to introduce Tracey’s words at Tramps: “If that old man hurts Celeste, I’ll kill him.” One of Celeste’s hairdresser friends, Denise, never made it from the hallway to the witness stand. Although she was prepared to testify, she’d later say the defense decided not to call her. She suspected it was because of what she might say that would bolster the prosecution, including that Celeste had told called Steve names and told her about putting the sleeping pills in his food.

On the stand, Celeste’s friend from the lake, Marilou Gibbs, a heavyset woman with a thick helmet of gray hair, at first charmed the courtroom. She laughed about Celeste and Steve, describing them as very much in love. Rather than add Everclear to his vodka, Gibbs said Celeste watered it down, to keep him sober. It was true that Celeste argued with him, “even flipping him the bird,” she said, but she did it to his face, and Steve loved her more for it. Rather than Celeste and Steve arguing, Gibbs suggested it was Kristina who clashed with her adoptive father. “She called him names behind his back,” Gibbs said. “She complained about having to sit down to dinner with him.”

The jurors warmed to Gibbs, laughing along with her. Perhaps they thought that if Celeste had such a good friend, she couldn’t be all bad. But during her second day on the stand, the mood in the courtroom turned dark when Gibbs insisted that Steve was the one who convinced Celeste to go to relationship counseling with Tracey. The picture before the courtroom of the old-fashioned businessman contrasted
sharply with the new-age notion of a husband sending his wife to relationship counseling with her gay lover. Gibbs even maintained that she’d found a bottle of sleeping pills at the lake house when she cleaned it up, and had taken the time to count them. None were missing. DeGuerin suggested this implied the teens were lying and that Celeste hadn’t put any in Steve’s food.

On the stand, Gibbs systematically addressed nearly every issue in the trial. Yes, she said, Tracey “bird-dogged” Celeste at the graduation party, stalking her, obsessed with her, giving her long, glaring looks when she talked to or danced with others. Celeste, on the other hand, was merely friendly. Before long the jury, which had been sitting up and smiling at the old woman, sat back in their chairs, frowning.

Listening to Gibbs, it seemed that she’d been friends to all in the family, especially Steve, who she said confided in her about personal matters, including his concerns about Tracey. Then DeGuerin used Gibbs to introduce Defendant’s Exhibit 15: the “Hey Dyke” letter, which read:
“No one believes anything you tell them. You are never going to ever have another friend ever again. No one will ever like you again. You need to prove to everyone that you really do love Steve and join him. It is the only way that anyone will like you. I promise.”

Unsigned, Celeste maintained she’d received it in the mail after Kristina and Jennifer went into hiding. Gibbs said she’d been the one to notice an indentation of a signature in the note. “It was Kristina’s,” she said. “I advised Celeste to take it to her attorney.”

On cross exam, Gary Cobb pointed out that Gibbs had been right outside the courtroom door for most of the trial, often with her daughter, Dana, the realtor who had sold
Steve the lake house lot, circulating in and out. “Every issue in this case, you’ve come up here and given testimony on,” he said. He then asked if Celeste had done things for Gibbs, from allowing her to live rent free in the lake house to loaning her $4,000 when her car broke down.

Gibbs said she’d repaid the loan and denied that the other instances were true: “I did not live at the lake house rent free.”

“You’ve said Celeste wasn’t a person who kept secrets. Did she ever tell you she had a sexual relationship with Jimmy Martinez?”

“No,” Gibbs said.

“Nothing would make you believe she had a sexual relationship with Tracey?”

“Not unless I saw it with my own eyes,” Gibbs said.

“Were you given some bedroom furniture by the defendant?”

“No,” Gibbs insisted, leading Cobb to ask again.

“She gave me a mattress and a box spring,” Gibbs said.

“Your answer is that I was not specific enough to name individual bed parts?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “You put yourself out to be a good friend of Steve Beard’s. How often did you visit him in the hospital?”

“I didn’t,” she admitted.

“Did you visit him in rehab?”

“No,” she said.

Throughout the defense, threads emerged that went nowhere. DeGuerin convinced Judge Kocurek to have Kristina— who denied writing the letter—fingerprinted, but her prints failed to match the one on the “Hey Dyke” letter. The indentation, an expert said, matched her signature, but on cross she admitted it could have been traced. A defense audio expert suggested the tape on which Celeste was heard saying she’d hired a hit man to kill Tracey might have been edited,
but under cross examination he described editing as including turning the tape recorder on and off.

Yet, no testimony was as bizarre as that of Katina Lofton.

The issue with Lofton—a repeat felon serving a six-year sentence for theft and forgery—had cropped up late in 2002, as Wetzel and DeGuerin readied for trial, when Celeste wrote to DeGuerin telling him that Lofton had information about the case. On the stand, Lofton described having bunked in the same cell with Tracey for a period of a month, from March to April 2002.

“Did Tracey ever say if Celeste knew she was going to kill Steve?” DeGuerin asked.

“She didn’t,” Lofton said. “Tracey said she shot him. She never said that Celeste knew she was going to shoot her husband.”

“Did Tracey Tarlton say what she was going to say on the stand?”

“She was going to say Celeste did it to get out of jail quicker,” Lofton said. “She said she wasn’t going to rot in jail while Celeste lived the good life.”

“Did Tracey say they were lovers?” DeGuerin asked.

“She said they were friends, that Celeste helped her out.”

“Do you have anything to gain by testifying before this jury?”

“No,” she said. Yet she did admit that Celeste had once given her $200, stationery, and envelopes.

DeGuerin then led Lofton through a series of questions about a meeting she’d had with Wetzel and Sergeant Debra Smith, her investigator. Lofton claimed that Wetzel told her not to testify, that she’d get torn up on the stand.

A short, heavyset black woman, Lofton wore her green jail uniform. DeGuerin described her as taking the stand reluctantly, fearful for her own life for testifying. Wetzel countered that by calling her a liar, willing to say anything for money.

It wasn’t the first time the prosecutor’s path had crossed with the witness. Lofton was the mother in the “spiked baby case,” a horrific case of child abuse that had stunned Austin just a year earlier, when her husband, Jermaine Lofton Sr., dangled their infant son out of the window of a moving car, then carried him on a long foot chase with police. While officers begged him not to, he laughed and spiked the baby against the ground like a football. The child was left brain damaged. Wetzel had been the prosecutor, and she’d wanted Katina Lofton to testify against her husband. Even to help punish the man who’d nearly killed her baby, Lofton refused to take the stand. Without her help, Wetzel got a guilty verdict and a seventy-five-year sentence for Jermaine. She wouldn’t testify for her own child, but now Lofton was on the stand defending Celeste.

“Is it hard for you to remember all the different things you have told different people?” Wetzel asked when she took over.

“No,” Lofton said. But when Wetzel gave her the opportunity to amend her testimony, Lofton admitted she’d also gotten fifty dollars from one of Celeste’s friends, in her commissary fund.

With that, Wetzel pulled out Lofton’s jailhouse correspondence. After Celeste’s arrest, Mange had the jail copy everything coming in and out for her. “I’m here to support you,” Lofton wrote to Celeste in one letter. “You know, I’ll be looking out for you.”

In the letters, Lofton called Celeste “Dimples,” and asked her for many things, from school tuition, to full-body contouring, to support letters from Celeste’s friends for her parole. In a letter from July of the previous year, Wetzel asked, “Do you tell the defendant, ‘There’s no limit to what I would do for you?’”

“Yes,” Lofton said.

Lofton wrote Celeste fractured poems, extolling her platonic
love, describing her as a good woman, then said, “I got some shit your attorney need to know.”

“Did you tell the defendant not to write you back until she’s had time to do these things and to remind her friend to do the support letters?”

“Yes.”

From one of Lofton’s letters, in which she told Celeste she wasn’t gay, Wetzel read, “I like Dick too much.”

“You’re not talking about Mr. DeGuerin here, are you?” Wetzel asked, straight-faced.

Above his suit collar, the defense attorney’s neck turned scarlet as Lofton said, “No.”

In the end, it would seem that Lofton would sum up her own testimony, saying, “Ain’t nobody here ever going to fess up to what’s really going on.”

The two witnesses DeGuerin fought the hardest to get on the stand would never be allowed to testify before the jury. The first was Tracey’s old girlfriend, Zan Ray. Tracey had been with Ray when she found her husband’s body, after he committed suicide. It would have been an enticing morsel to place before the jury to show Tracey had another girlfriend whose husband turned up dead, even if he had left a note and died of an overdose. The second: Reginald Breaux, the man Tracey had shared beers with then brushed against with her car. She’d been jailed overnight, but never charged with anything from the incident. DeGuerin argued the incident showed Tracey had attempted to kill someone before Steve Beard. Judge Kocurek ruled that neither witness was relevant.

As the defense rested, Wetzel worried the most about the impact of two of DeGuerin’s expert witnesses: Drs. Terry Satterwhite and Charles Petty.

A UT professor in infectious diseases, Satterwhite was an
elderly, pale man with trembling hands, who seemed fascinated by the courtroom. DeGuerin had asked him to review the Brackenridge Hospital records for Steve’s final stay there, in the days leading up to and including his death.

“Did you review them?” he asked.

“Yes,” Satterwhite said.

“What did you conclude was the cause of death?”

“Group A strep, a blood infection, the same strain that causes a sore throat and acute rheumatic fever,” he said. Satterwhite went on to say Steve’s age, heart condition, asthma, alcohol abuse, and diabetes made him more vulnerable.

“What relation did his death have to the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked.

“I don’t think it had any relationship,” Satterwhite said. As evidence of the infection, DeGuerin led the physician through Steve’s chart, citing the notations as his temperature climbed. The groin rash, he said, may have been the point of entry.

“Could this Group A strep have been caused by changing his ileostomy bag with dirty hands?”

“No.”

“Did this infection have anything to do with the gunshot wound or the recovery from the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked again.

“No, in my opinion, it did not,” Satterwhite said.

On cross exam, Gary Cobb asked Satterwhite, “Did you look at the autopsy?”

“Yes,” he said. “Just a few days ago.”

“Did you look at the photos?”

“I’m not qualified to interpret the photos,” Satterwhite said. “I’m not trained in it.”

“Pulmonary embolisms are common with trauma surgery when a patient has not been ambulatory?”

“Yes,” Satterwhite said. “I haven’t seen the slides. There
weren’t any microscopic findings in the autopsy report.”

“Wasn’t the rash a complication of the gunshot wound?”

“Not in my opinion,” Satterwhite said.

“But if he got it in HealthSouth, the reason he was there is because of the gunshot?”

“Yes,” Satterwhite said.

After Satterwhite, Dr. Charles Petty took the stand. An elderly, balding, 1950 Harvard Medical School graduate, Petty had established the Medical Examiner’s Office in Dallas and resembled a favorite uncle. In his career, he’d done more than 13,000 autopsies and testified in court 1,300 times. Unlike Dr. Satterwhite, Dr. Petty had reviewed not only the records, but the autopsy and slides.