She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [147]
With the trial rescheduled for late January, just weeks away, DeGuerin and his staff took over the second floor of a gracious, old, brown brick house a block from the Travis County Criminal Justice Center. The owner, a lawyer with offices on the first floor, had offered the apartment as DeGuerin’s base through the trial. A porch overlooked the street, shaded by an ancient live oak, its thick trunk camouflaged by heavy broad-leafed vines.
Inside, it was a stark contrast to Wetzel’s modern beige office. The wood floors creaked, and the furniture mixed Salvation Army and vintage antiques. A sign over the kitchen door read, ABSOLUTELY NO CREDIT, and the dining room had the look of a war room. A battered table groaned under stacks of files, documents, and transcripts of prior testimony—from the protection hearings and the wrongful death suit—while on the walls, beside battered tin ads for Grapette soda, Cobb’s Creek Whisky, and Southern Select Beer, hung sheets of yellow legal paper suspended on strips of clear tape. Each bore a list of names under a heading: Need Subpoenas, Interview, and Find.
DeGuerin had family in Houston, including his first grandchild, a boy named Eli, after his father, Elias McDowell DeGuerin. Better known as Mack, the elder DeGuerin was an Austin civil lawyer, an LBJ Democrat who served on Johnson’s congressional staff and several times as assistant attorney general in the days before Texas turned conservative and Republican. Dick and his younger brother, Mike, followed their father into law but took the other side of the practice, representing criminal defendants. Although he’d grown up in Austin, DeGuerin had made his mark in Houston courtrooms. Fresh out of law school in the early sixties, he worked at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, where he quickly became a courthouse presence. A few years later the brothers became protégés of the legendary Percy Foreman, one of the most powerful defense attorneys to ever argue before a jury. Years later, in the tough cases, Dick DeGuerin still asked himself, “What would Percy do?”
Although slight and spare, DeGuerin cut an imposing figure in a courtroom, perched hawklike on the edge of his chair beside his client, his eyes intent. In his early sixties, he ran three miles a day and looked a decade younger. He always carried the same worn, golden brown leather briefcase made by a client who couldn’t pay any other way. That wasn’t the case with Celeste where his bill was $450,000. While DeGuerin was busy with her, his next defendant awaited trial in a Galveston jail: Robert Durst, the heir to a New York real estate fortune, accused of murdering and dismembering his next door neighbor.
On October 2, 2002, the third anniversary of Steve’s shooting, in one of his first tasks as Celeste’s attorney, DeGuerin went before a three-judge panel of the appeals court to argue for a reduction of her $8 million bond on the charge of capital murder. It was then that Wetzel pulled Donna Goodson out of her hat. Armed with a signed immunity agreement she’d crafted with Goodson and her attorney, Wetzel took the solicitation case before a grand jury. When the indictment came down, Celeste was charged with soliciting the murder of Tracey Tarlton with an additional $5 million bond.
In a November hearing, DeGuerin argued again that Celeste didn’t have the funds to post such high bail. An accountant’s report he produced suggested she had little left of the $3.5 million she’d gotten after Steve’s death. In Southlake, Cole had sold the house, but much of that money had gone to pay bills. In 2001, according to the records, Celeste paid $223,000 to American Express and $197,453 in improvements on a brand new house. Many of her jewels, furniture, and antiques, the treasures she’d paid so dearly for with Steve’s money, had been sold at a distress sale.
The decision went against DeGuerin, and the battle was over. Celeste wouldn’t leave jail unless acquitted in the trial. Now both sides prepared for the war.
With the