She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [144]
An hour later Mange called Wines at his office. By then Wines had checked in with the Southlake police and alerted them to the impending arrest. “Forget about the warrant,” Mange said. “I’m taking this to a grand jury. I want the indictment sealed until we round her up.”
With all Celeste’s money, Wines understood Mange considered her a flight risk.
That afternoon Tracey told her story again, this time in front of a grand jury. The session lasted thirty minutes, and she was the only witness. Mange listened, looking for inconsistencies, anything that would indicate that despite the lie detector test, which she’d passed without a glitch, she was lying. As she had throughout the debriefing, Tracey stayed true to her story. When he walked out later that afternoon, he had an indictment charging Celeste with injury to an elderly individual, murder, and capital murder.
The following morning, March 29, Good Friday, Mange called Paul, who’d already packed to fly to Houston for Tracey’s trial. “We’ve struck a deal with Tracey,” Mange said. “We’re going to arrest Celeste.”
“Finally,” Paul said.
Mange reached Kristina and Justin in the car on their way to Port Aransas, on the Texas coast, for the Easter weekend. “We’re arresting your mother this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll notify you as soon as we have her in custody.”
When Kristina hung up, she began sobbing. “She cried for the rest of the trip,” Justin says.
“We’ve got her,” Wines said when he called Mange later that day. “Southlake police have picked up Celeste.”
At the jail, Tracey heard the news on television. “I knew she’d be coming,” she says. “Once they had her, she was on her way.” Inside, she felt no happiness, only resolve.
“It has taken two years to unravel the mystery surrounding the death of Steve Beard,” Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle told the press that day. “This indictment is the result of dogged persistence by Bill Mange and the Sheriff’s Office. They never gave up.”
The first time Mange saw the woman he’d pursued for more than two years was at the bond hearing. There, Celeste Beard Johnson, thin, blond, her designer suits replaced by an orange and green jailhouse uniform, looked subdued. She didn’t resemble the monster he’d heard so much about. At her side were six lawyers, including Charles Burton, the criminal defense attorney she’d hired the day of the shooting.
“She has ample funds to flee,” Mange argued. “She’s not involved with her family and has nothing to keep her from running.”
To bolster his claims, Mange brought Bank of America records that showed that in the year after Steve’s death, Celeste had collected $3.5 million from the estate.
“She doesn’t have that now,” Burton argued. “The money is gone, and Mrs. Johnson doesn’t have the resources to pay a high bail.”
With that, State District Judge Julie Kocurek set bail at $8 million, the highest in the history of Travis County, Texas.
Not long after Celeste arrived at the jail, Tracey saw her for the first time, across the exercise yard. Soon, messages began arriving, relayed through other inmates. “Celeste says it’s not too late,” one inmate told Tracey. “She still loves you. You can still be together.”
The messages continued until Tracey told the messenger, “Tell Celeste to put it in writing.”
Then something unexpected happened. The previous December, Mange had been transferred out of his position as chief of a court to head the motor fuels division, investigating white collar crimes. He hated the paper-heavy workload. A month after the judge set Celeste’s record bail, Mange announced he was leaving the prosecutor’s office, and the Beard murder case became the bastard stepchild no one wanted.
Chapter
18
The Travis County D.A.’s staff had murmured for months about the Beard case. How could they not? A multimillionaire shot by his trophy wife’s lesbian lover. “It had all the makings of a soap opera,” says one prosecutor. It wasn’t just the sensational aspects that begged their attention. When Bill Mange said he was leaving,