She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [10]
Months later, Celeste and Craig split once again and she dated a guy she’d known since high school, Pete Timm. An electrician, he came from a well-respected Camarillo family. “Celeste was one of those people you wanted to be around,” says Pete. “She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she was pretty, and she loved to laugh… She kind of drew you in.”
Attentive, Celeste said all the right things, including that she loved him. “Later, I wondered how I ended up with her, but I was only listening to my heart,” Timm says.
When Craig warned him to beware of Celeste, saying she’d “raked him over the coals,” Timm didn’t believe him. With the twins in foster care, Celeste worked in a deli and cleaned houses in Leisure Village, a well-to-do retirement community. She also went to school, first to be a hair stylist, then to Oxnard College, where she took a class in accounting. As she had with Craig, Celeste told sad stories about being abused by her father and having the twins so young she couldn’t afford them. Pete opened up his life to her. She became a part of his family, even living with his parents. In love, he even took her to the bank when he made deposits. That turned out to be a mistake, when he discovered $7,000 had disappeared from his account.
“Your wife withdrew all the money,” the teller told Pete. “She went through the drive-through taking out one to two thousand dollars at a time for a week.”
When he confronted her, Celeste cried and said she needed the money for an attorney to reclaim the twins. After she pledged her love, Pete forgave her. Yet, things gnawed at him. One was that she never enjoyed sex. “It was a chore for her,” he says. “She was really good at it, but it always felt like she wanted something in return. Celeste flipped the switch and acted upbeat, but there was never any real joy. She was beautiful and sad.”
Even with the girls, he saw little happiness and rarely motherly love. “She did all the right things, acting like she cared, but never showed real affection,” he says. On weekend visitations, a county caseworker dropped off the girls, then came to pick them up. The girls pleaded with her not to take them away from their mother. “It didn’t faze Celeste,” says Timm, who wondered how someone as caring as Celeste could be so cold.
Still, he loved her, and they made plans to marry. Once they did, Celeste told him caseworkers would release the girls to her and they’d be a family. As the wedding approached, his excitement grew. Celeste even told Pete’s religious parents that she’d found God. Then, just months before the wedding, Celeste found an apartment she wanted. She asked Timm to lend her the money for the deposit. Remembering how she’d cleaned him out, he was apprehensive. But then Celeste surprised him by saying she’d get the money from her mother. While he listened, she phoned someone she called “Mom.” When she hung up, she bubbled with excitement, saying Nancy had agreed. There was one catch: She wouldn’t get the money for three days. “Pete, could you loan it to me?” Celeste pleaded. “I’ll pay you back when Mom sends the check.”
Pete agreed, and when she asked him to, he signed the apartment lease.
The next day Pete’s money and Celeste were both gone. Compounding the blow, Celeste had turned in the lease, leaving him responsible for a full year’s rent. Spinning from the betrayal, he searched but couldn’t find her. In the end he didn’t care about the money, only that the woman he loved had left him. “Maybe it was never love,” he says. “But she broke my heart, and for three years I thought about her every day and wondered what I did to make her leave. In her own way, Celeste was intoxicating.”
Craig hadn’t been able to rid himself of his desire for Celeste, either, despite leaving California to flee her. It happened a few days after he was discovered sitting in a Camarillo hotel stairwell. He was drunk, morose, and had a shotgun poised under his chin. “I love her and she just does shit to me,” Craig said to Jeff, who’d been called by the police. “Why does Celeste do these things? Why