She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [11]
Jeff took away the gun, and Craig was taken in for observation. Three days later he gave Craig his car keys and convinced him to move to Phoenix. “There was nothing good about Craig’s relationship with Celeste except the twins,” says Jeff. “I hoped Craig would never see her again. That didn’t happen. He wasn’t there for more than a few days when she called, begging him to take her back.”
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Soon after Craig moved Celeste and the twins to Arizona, she was pregnant again. “I thought maybe it would calm her down and we could try to make it work,” he’d later write. In November 1986, Celeste gave birth to a third baby girl and decided to put it up for adoption. The twins, then six, never saw their baby sister. “I remember Celeste being pregnant, then she wasn’t,” says Jennifer. “She never talked about it.”
It was the way she handled the adoption, what Celeste got in return for the child, that rankled Craig. “She told the adoptive parent we had to pay the hospital bills, when my insurance did,” he wrote. “She got ten thousand dollars cash for that baby.”
Soon after, Celeste had yet another man in her life. Devastated, Craig stood helplessly by as she took the twins, their income tax refund, the $10,000 from the adoption, and left. Weeks later he tried to cut his wrists. When he was well enough, Jeff put him on an airplane for Washington State to live near their mother.
That fall, Celeste left the six-year-olds home alone at night and someone reported her to authorities. They were taken away to yet another foster home. Looking back, the twins had mixed feelings about the families that took them in. With a mother whose attention was spotty at best, it was a foster couple that took them for their first school vaccinations and to their first dental appointment. Yet, many of the homes were frightening and heartless. When they arrived, they were stripped and inspected for bruises. At one, the parents ridiculed Jennifer for wetting the bed, then pushed her into the swimming pool. “I couldn’t understand why our mom did this to us,” she says. “Kristina and I schemed about running away. We dug holes in the yard, trying to dig our way to China. When our mom came, we begged to go home. She walked away. She didn’t even look sad.”
That fall, Harald Wolf, an Air Force, jet-engine mechanic who worked on F-15 fighter planes at Luke Air Force Base, was the new man in Celeste’s life. Six-foot-three, muscular, of German descent with prematurely gray hair, Wolf had eleven years in the service when they met. He’d grown up in a military family, traveled the world, and married once. Despite a divorce, he never considered that marriage a mistake. He’d feel vastly different about his connection to Celeste Johnson Bratcher.
“I felt drawn to her, but from the beginning, I never trusted her,” says Wolf. “Call it spidey-sense, that feeling that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.” After they dated for a few months, Harald tried to break up. Celeste announced she was pregnant. When he resisted marriage, she suggested they go for counseling. At the sessions, the counselor pegged his distrust as irrational.
“If she hasn’t given you reason not to, you should trust her,” the counselor argued.
Maybe she’s right, Harald thought.
In December 1988 they married. Not long after, Celeste called him at the base and said she’d lost the baby. “From that point on our lives went up and down like a drug addiction,” he says.
The twins were released back to Celeste’s custody, and they rented an apartment in Glendale, a bedroom community northwest of Phoenix near the base. Celeste was obsessed with keeping it clean, so much so that she and Harald argued about the pressure it put on the girls. “She insisted they pick up their rooms,” he says. “They were little kids. I told her, just shut the door. She couldn’t. She never left anything alone.”
Sex was intense, but as with Craig and Timm, Celeste pulled back. “She was so good, it felt like paying a hooker,” Harald says. “But she never seemed really interested.”