She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [150]
The hearing went on with DeGuerin insisting that the twins and their boyfriends had stolen their mother’s possessions. As garbage, it was fair game, admissible in court. If stolen, the evidence would be tainted and inadmissible.
Seven days later, as the hearing drew to a close, Celeste hobbled up to the stand. In jail, she’d broken her leg. How it happened remained a mystery. The official story was that she’d fallen after fainting. The story circulating through the jail was very different—that she’d broken it herself by battering it against a bench, perhaps to illicit sympathy from the jury, perhaps to get out of the general population and into the hospital ward.
On the stand, Celeste denied ever asking the girls and their friends to clean the storage areas. Those were her things, things she never intended to throw away, she said.
Cobb had something else he wanted an answer to: “Why did you have your husband murdered?”
The question caught the courtroom off guard.
“I did not murder my husband. I’m not guilty,” she snapped.
DeGuerin jumped up and objected. Celeste, he said, was there to talk about the journals and cards, not to testify about the murder. The judge sustained the objection.
In his closing, DeGuerin claimed Mange had put the girls up to “stealing” from their mother. “He apparently played the part of the three monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” DeGuerin charged. “The authority to enter the house does not equate to the authority to take things without permission.”
“It may hurt Celeste Beard’s feelings to know that someone went through her trash, but it’s not against the law to do so,” Wetzel countered.
When Kocurek’s ruling came on Thanksgiving week, the prosecutors won. The evidence would be admissible. Yet Kocurek gave DeGuerin an olive branch by reducing Celeste’s bail to $2 million. By then an appeals court had lowered the $8 million bond on the capital murder case to $500,000. None of it did any good, DeGuerin argued, insisting Celeste had little more than a few thousand dollars in the bank and owed $750,000 for attorneys’ fees and the fees of experts he’d enlisted to testify on her behalf at the trial.
Yet Wetzel thought she’d gained much more than the use of the evidence from the pretrial hearing. She’d been able to see Jennifer, Kristina, Justin, and Christopher on the stand. No longer teenagers, they’d put out strong testimony, refusing to let DeGuerin rattle them. Justin had come off as a bit stiff, something she’d work on with him. She didn’t want him to hesitate, analyzing each question. The jury could interpret that as being evasive. But that was a minor issue. For the most part, Wetzel was pleased.
As the trial approached, both sides carefully groomed their cases. Wetzel got a court order to use the Toro Canyon house for a demonstration. She wanted Tracey to show them how she’d picked her way through the house the night of the shooting. Wetzel also ordered a sound test, to see if Celeste should have heard the shot. As Tracey walked through the house that day, a shotgun fired a blank in the master bedroom. Standing in the girls’ wing, she heard it clearly. Like everything else, she now believed Celeste had lied when she told her she’d slept through the gunshot. “It was complete bullshit,” she says. “The sound of that gun shook the house.”
As her case came together, Wetzel saw only one issue as truly worrisome: the cause of death. With four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, she knew DeGuerin would bring in medical experts to testify that he’d died of causes unrelated to the shooting. When she brought it up to Cobb, he did exactly what she counted on him to do—he told her not to worry. “This isn’t any different than any other trial we’ve done in the past,” he assured her. “We’ll take this step by step and prove our case.”
At the same time, DeGuerin