She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [139]
Spurred by the twins’ testifying against their mother, that summer the older Beard children asked Kristina and Jennifer to join them in a wrongful death suit against Celeste, to keep her from squandering Steve’s fortune. They agreed. In August, seven months after Steve’s death, the girls came out of hiding long enough to take the witness stand in a hearing on the case. This time Celeste was in the courtroom. “We didn’t want to see her,” says Kristina. “We were scared.”
Newspaper, radio, and television reporters were all in the courtroom when Kristina took the stand. The testimony was grueling. As attorneys questioned them, the girls answered carefully, keeping their eyes averted from Celeste as they recounted the months leading up to and the night of the shooting. The following morning the lead sentence in the paper would recount the hamburger night at the Beard household, when Tracey slipped her arm over Celeste’s shoulder, then kissed her hard on her lips.
“Was it your impression that your mother and Tracey Tarlton were having an affair?”
“Yes,” Kristina said.
Unlike the protection hearing, this time Kristina also described the way Celeste threw away Steve’s money, testifying that she paid large sums to friends and to her ex-husband Jimmy Martinez for little work. In some cases the money came back to her, through refunds on overpayments. As it would every time she took the stand, on cross examination Kristina was questioned vigorously about the checks she’d cashed in the weeks following her decision to go into hiding.
“You violated your mother’s trust, didn’t you?” Celeste’s attorney challenged.
“I was doing what she said I should,” Kristina said. “And I had her power of attorney. She opened up a joint bank account and put me on it.”
Despite their fears, both the girls held up well, answering questions and not backing down. When they’d finished, however, it was evident how big a toll the testimony had taken on them. In a room behind the courtroom, they sat together, crying. Neither had looked her mother in the eye. That was something they weren’t yet ready to do. But they could feel her in the courtroom and knew how much she now hated them.
Over the next two days, the Beard children’s attorneys pulled in witnesses to show how Celeste was squandering Steve’s money.
“How much money did Mrs. Beard spend in the past seven months?” an attorney asked.
“Half a million dollars,” Janet Hudnall, a vice president of Bank of America, replied.
Celeste had gone through so much money, in fact, that she’d eaten up the $500,000 gift in Steve’s will.
“It’s gone?” asked the attorney.
“All of it,” said Hudnall.
Yet, Steve’s own actions served to undercut his children’s case. On the stand, David Kuperman testified not only that Steve approved many of the bills, but that he increased Celeste’s portion of the estate in the trust after the shooting, by adding Davenport Village II to the estate’s holdings. Still, the evidence was compelling, especially when Petra Mueller, the owner of Studio 29, took the stand and recounted how days before the shooting she overheard Celeste say that she wished Steve were dead.
Throughout the hearing, Celeste, carefully dressed and manicured, watched the proceedings from the chair beside her attorney. She showed little emotion, her eyes narrowing as so many spoke against her. Yet she never took the stand. Instead the twins’ attorney read part of a deposition Celeste had given earlier that summer. In it, one attorney questioned her about her meetings with Tracey. Celeste admitted that she’d met with Tracey once behind BookPeople,