She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [145]
Making matters worse, Celeste was angry at Charles Burton for not getting her bail lowered and replaced him with Houston’s Dick DeGuerin, one of Texas’s best known and most accomplished defense attorneys. Over the years, DeGuerin’s talents had taken on nearly mythical proportions in the state. Wealthy Texans in trouble flocked to him when trouble knocked, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. His phone rang again when four New York Mets were arrested in a spat in a Houston nightclub. The well-heeled paid into the high six-figure fees for his tenacious brand of defense, where he maximized every seed of evidence in his client’s interest. DeGuerin made no apologies for charging those who could afford to pay, yet he also took on cases where the only remuneration was a sense of self-satisfaction. In 1987 he championed the cause of a mentally ill and desperately poor Houston woman who tried to drown six of her seven children, killing two of them, and saved her from the death penalty.
Six years later DeGuerin was in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Outside, the FBI and ATF camped out in a standoff with David Koresh and his band of followers. As Koresh’s attorney, DeGuerin tried to negotiate a peaceful solution, one that would bring his client and his followers out alive. It wasn’t to be, and on the fifty-first day of the siege the compound exploded in a hail of bullets and tear gas into a furnace, incinerating all eighty-four men, women, and children.
“High profile, bad investigation, mountains of work, Dick DeGuerin, and the very real possibility that you’d lose, you’d have to be crazy to want the Beard case,” says Assistant District Attorney Allison Wetzel. So when an e-mail from her boss popped up on her computer in August, she opened it with trepidation. “We’d like you to take the Beard case,” it read.
Damn, she thought. Just what I need.
As the chief prosecutor in child abuse cases, Wetzel already had an overwhelming workload. But this wasn’t an instance where she got to pick and choose. “When you’re handed a case, you run with it,” she says. “It’s part of the job.”
In the District Attorney’s Office, Wetzel had a strong reputation and a colorful one. She’d grown up in Houston, the daughter of an Exxon engineer and a secretary, in a home where she was expected to achieve. She graduated from high school at sixteen, college at twenty, and only took the law school entrance exam, the LSAT, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. At the University of Houston, she made law review, then clerked for two of that city’s most prominent, high-dollar criminal attorneys, Racehorse Haynes and Jack Zimmerman. She found criminal law fascinating, learning the stories behind the headlines of their high-profile cases. Then, in the late eighties, any thought that she had about becoming a defense attorney faded.
At the time, she worked in the Dallas District Attorney’s Office, gathering experience before moving into private practice. One night an undercover officer she knew was gunned down during a drug bust. That changed things for her. “I saw the impact the murder had on people, including the family,” she says. “After that, I didn’t want to defend criminals anymore. I liked being one of the good guys, even if most of the prosecutors I knew were middle-age white guys in bad suits.”
In Austin she found a good match; Wetzel was a natural for a job where she prosecuted the murders and sexual assaults of children. With two young sons of her own, she identified with the victims and their families and fought hard to do her best for them. Nearly six feet tall with a tussle of chin-length, dark auburn