She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [140]
There she was, admitting she’d talked to the woman accused of murdering her husband. Astonishingly, Celeste insisted she didn’t ask Tracey the one question it seemed would be on her mind more than any other: Did you kill Steve?
On August 31 the judge came down with his ruling. Citing insufficient evidence, he ruled against the Beard children and refused to stop Celeste from spending the money in the estate while they pursued other action against her.
In the newspaper article on the hearing, Steven III was quoted as saying that the criminal investigation into his father’s murder continued. But it was something else, something near the end of the article, that caught Tracey’s interest: The reason Celeste hadn’t been at the twins’ protective hearing in July was that she’d gone to Aspen, on her honeymoon.
Tracey had never heard of Celeste’s fifth husband, Spencer Cole Johnson. A thirty-eight-year-old bartender and carpenter, he’d been introduced to Celeste by Donna that spring while they bar-hopped Sixth Street. Friends say he had little more than his clothes—mostly jeans—and a motorcycle and a run-down truck when he started dating Celeste. “He’s a nice guy, sweet, worked hard,” says a friend. “He’s a little on the wild side, loved to party. And he was head over heels in love with Celeste.”
Tracey was devastated by the news. “She was married, just weeks after she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore,” she says. “Even I could figure out that they were together before we split.”
If Celeste had lied when she’d told her she wasn’t seeing anyone else, Tracey wondered, what else had her former lover misled her about? Her mind grazed over the past year, since they’d met in St. David’s. Was it all a lie? One thing had never stopped bothering her: On the night of the shooting, Tracey had wondered about Celeste’s story about why she’d removed Meagan—that she was protective of Steve— when all along she’d said Steve beat the dog. If the dog was faithful to him, didn’t that say something about who he was?
Maybe he wasn’t the way she portrayed him, Tracey thought. Maybe it was all a lie.
Soon Tracey came to the conclusion that she had never really known Celeste as she thought she did. “I wondered if Celeste broke me in gradually or just found a way to make me more malleable. She wanted Steve dead, and she knew I would do it for her,” she says. “I wondered if she just planted a seed within me and let it grow.”
What Tracey had been dreading happened the following February, when Mange took the evidence against her to a grand jury for a murder indictment. For more than a year, she’d been out on $25,000 bail, awaiting trial on a charge of injury to the elderly. Since Steve Beard’s death, Keith Hampton, Tracey’s attorney, had fought hard to keep the shotgun out of evidence, arguing that Wines and Knight had intimidated her into turning it over. Consistently, the judges had ruled against him.
As the grand jury met, Hampton called Tracey and told her that once the indictment came down, she could expect to be arrested. After a year of working only off and on, she didn’t have the money for bail. That week, Tracey stayed home and boxed up her possessions. She had no illusions about her future. From the beginning, she believed she’d one day enter jail and never emerge. Her dog, Wren, seemed to sense something was wrong. All weekend he stayed beside her, following her from room to room, nestling against her when she sat on the floor and cried.
On Friday, February 16, the grand jury added capital murder to the charges against her. Immediately her bail jumped to $500,000.
“We are still investigating the matter and still looking at Celeste Beard’s involvement,” Mange’s boss was quoted as saying in the Statesman the following day. “This is one of the most complicated cases I’ve ever seen.”
Days later officers showed up at the house on Wilson. One handcuffed Tracey and led her to a squad car. By then she’d taken Wren and her cats