She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [157]
Celeste’s only constant supporter in the courthouse was Marilou Gibbs, the elderly woman she’d befriended at the lake. Gibbs wasn’t allowed in the courtroom because she would later testify, so she sat in the hallway reading novels. “Celeste asked me to come,” she said. “It makes her feel better to know I’m here.”
Meanwhile, Wetzel brought Steve into the courtroom. As her first piece of evidence, she presented the 911 tape from the shooting. The jurors listened intently to the frightened, gravelly voice of a dead man:
“My—My—My guts are coming out.”
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“I need an ambulance, hurry.”
The prosecutor wanted Steve to become a presence for the jurors, and the tape accomplished that. As his voice filled the courtroom, it was easy to hear his pain and picture his bloody hands holding in his internal organs.
“My guts just jumped out of my stomach … my wife in the house… call her.”
One after the other, Cobb called to the stand those first on the scene: Deputy Alan Howard, Stephen Alexander, and Sergeant Greg Truitt. At three A.M., three years before, they responded to a call from an elderly man at a mansion in an exclusive residential neighborhood in the hills over Austin. Lights flashing behind him, Howard rang the bell. No response. With the others trailing, he picked his way around the side of the house and onto a patio. Through a window, he saw Steve, critically injured.
Howard broke the glass.
“Did you make a lot of noise?” Cobb asked Truitt.
“When Howard broke the door, we did,” he replied.
“No one came?”
“No.”
Truitt later encountered Celeste and Kristina in the living room.
“Don’t let my husband die,” she cried.
STAR Flight had already been called to the Beard residence when Deputy Russell Thompson noticed something yellow visible under the corner of an EMS bag: a spent shotgun shell. “This is a crime scene,” he announced. “Secure the area.”
The officers agreed on nearly every point, except one: Celeste Beard’s demeanor. One described her as very upset; others disagreed, saying she seemed intermittently concerned and calm. One said, “She cried, but there weren’t any tears.”
This was the prosecutors’ case, and they offered DeGuerin little to work with. Still, on cross examination, he pulled together what he could. He repeated every entry from every incident log that described Celeste as distraught. He drew the image of her as a hysterical wife, worried about her husband. “Kristina didn’t seem worried?” he asked.
No, they said. In fact, Kristina comforted her mother.
Again and again he asked about the handles to the bedroom door, the ones through which the officers and medics entered. Brass, they appeared to pull open, but instead slid. Why were the doors important? Later it would seem he wanted to establish that the doors were locked from the inside. If so, Tracey couldn’t have left as she said she did and locked the door behind her. If that was his hope, it never materialized.
With that night carefully drawn, Cobb led the jury into the investigation, and Knight, by then a lieutenant, and Detective Wines each took turns on the stand. They described the disarray of the master bedroom—drawers pulled out—saying it looked like a staged robbery. Knight implied Celeste offered an alibi too quickly and that her suggestion of a robbery seemed suspicious. Knight and Wines recounted their trip to Tracey’s house and how they followed Tracey into a back room, where she retrieved the shotgun.
In the courtroom, Cobb brought Wines the shotgun. He checked the serial number, the case number, and Tracey’s name etched in the metal. “This is it,” he said, displaying the weapon with its polished wood handle and long black metal barrel for the jury. Cobb also used Knight and