She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [136]
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.
“They changed the combination,” she argued. “In effect, they robbed me of being able to get to it.” The deputy told her to contact a locksmith. When the safe was opened, three of the seven missing pieces were inside, and the deputy wrote up a complaint on the remaining four items.
“I can’t believe you’re falling for this,” Mange told the deputy when he heard. “She’s using you to get to the kids, to control them.”
“Maybe they took the stuff,” the deputy insisted.
“This woman is a suspect in a murder,” Mange told him. “Don’t help her find the kids. They’re terrified of her.”
Reluctantly, the deputy agreed.
Celeste wasn’t to be quieted. Days later the phone rang at Donna’s house. She’d just returned from Florida a week earlier, and wondered how Celeste knew.
“Come out to the house. I have a job for you,” Celeste said.
“Tell you what,” Donna countered. “Meet me at Baby Acapulco’s. You can buy lunch and we’ll talk.” Donna took one precaution; before she left the house, she told her mother who she was meeting and where, just in case she never came home.
In the busy, loud lunchtime crowd, Donna ate quesadillas and chips and listened to Celeste’s proposal. She was still afraid of her, but she was intrigued. Maybe there was a way to make more money. “I want you to find the girls,” Celeste said. “They’ve taken off with their cars, the dog, and some of my stuff.”
To find them, Celeste suggested Donna search through wedding announcements and make phone calls to their friends. The girls were standing up in a wedding that month, she wasn’t sure where. “Once you find them, call me and I’ll take over,” she said.
Donna wondered what Celeste had planned for the girls. To her, it didn’t sound good.
Celeste