She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [148]
Wetzel reasoned she and Cobb would be a good match. They had something in common: Before she’d arrived, he had held her slot as chief of the child abuse unit. Cobb had a reputation for having an unusual ability to connect with juries. In front of a courtroom, he appeared smooth and effortless, never anxious, worried, or rattled. Going up against DeGuerin, self-confidence was an important asset. And there was little Cobb liked better than trying a tough case.
“You should just see the evidence in this Beard case,” Wetzel said to him at the office. A little at a time, she talked about the challenges of the upcoming trial: the mental health issues, the accomplice testimony, the testimony of the daughters. None of it would be an easy sell to a jury, but she hoped the case’s complexity would lure Cobb.
“It all sounded unbelievable,” he’d say later. “I found it fascinating.”
That DeGuerin was involved didn’t frighten him. In fact, he relished a good fight. In his thirteen years as a prosecutor, Cobb, who grew up one of nine siblings in a small Mississippi town where black men weren’t expected to go to college, much less law school, had won more than his share of bizarre cases. One involved a husband who claimed his wife committed suicide during sex. Cobb tore down his version of the woman’s death by demonstrating a history of domestic violence. Another case yielded a life sentence without a body. The verdict relied on a single spec of DNA.
“So, what do you think about trying this case with me?” Wetzel finally asked.
“I think it could be fun,” Cobb answered.
While the prosecution would rest with Wetzel and Cobb, DeGuerin had amassed a team for the trial. His partner, Matt Hennessy, thin, with a mop of dark hair, would play a small role, but Hennessy’s wife, Catherine Baen, would function as DeGuerin’s point person and second chair. Tall and lithe, Baen had been raised the daughter of a country doctor and had the ramrod straight bearing of a horsewoman. At Texas Tech University she’d participated in a Texas tradition—baton twirling.
Her credentials as an attorney spoke for themselves. She’d clerked at one of Houston’s biggest firms, Bracewell and Patterson, and had worked on such high-profile cases as the Oklahoma City bombing and the David Graham case, better known as the cadet murder, where Graham, an Air Force cadet, and his fiancée, Diane Zamora, a navy cadet attending Annapolis, were convicted of murdering a girl he’d had a fling with, Adrianne Jones. More recently, Baen had gone international, working on the Bosnian war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
From her first meeting with Celeste, Baen found her client funny, bright, and personable, with the vulnerability of a child; hardly the characteristics of a killer, she’d insist.
While DeGuerin concentrated on his other clients, Baen did the groundwork, readying the Beard case for the courtroom with the help of three law students from a criminal law class DeGuerin taught at the University of Texas. They conducted interviews and combed through the formidable load of exhibits prosecutors had collected, including medical, telephone, and financial records. As she talked to Celeste, she formed a theory on what had happened. Celeste told Baen that Tracey and Kristina were close. Perhaps, Baen theorized, Kristina, not Celeste, conspired with Tracey. She also latched onto possible financial motives for the twins wanting their mother out of the way. “It was only after Kristina cashed those checks and took her mother’s money that she went to the District Attorney’s Office and said, ‘I think my mother killed Steve,’” says Baen. “These were greedy kids out to get rid of their mother to get the money for themselves.”
When it came to Tracey, Baen didn’t mince words. “This is a very defensible case,” she says. “The bottom line is that Tracey Tarlton