She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [158]
“Was she a help or a hindrance?” asked Cobb.
“A hindrance,” said Wines.
When he took over, DeGuerin disputed the image of his client as uncooperative. Celeste, he pointed out, signed the consent to search and initially allowed them into her home. Then he questioned the integrity of the investigation, asking what had happened to items, including the cell phone Knight found that displayed Tarlton’s phone numbers.
“They went into evidence at the Sheriff’s Department,” Truitt said.
But the phone had disappeared, something for which no explanation was offered.
“Patients in ICU can only have visitors for so many minutes a day?” DeGuerin said, suggesting the officers’ visits ate into Celeste’s time with Steve. “Isn’t that true?”
Knight at first balked, then agreed, “That’s probably true.”
Through it all, the two attorneys went toe-to-toe, Cobb revealing suspicious details and DeGuerin offering alternative scenarios to lessen the implication of guilt. He also did what he tells law students to do during his criminal defense law classes at UT: He “embraced the ugly baby,” the element in the trial that would stun the jury. While questioning Wines, he flashed photos on the overhead projector of Celeste and Tracey, arms around each other, dancing and sitting on each other’s laps. By doing so, he lessened the shock value of the photos, taking from prosecutors the opportunity to introduce them at a more dramatic moment. Yet again, he insisted the women were no more than friends.
With the gray-haired and goateed Wines on the witness stand, Cobb explained the long delay in the case. Steve Beard was shot in October 1999 and died the following January. Tracey at first denied the charges, fighting the admission of the evidence against her. Then, nearly two years later, she confessed and implicated Celeste.
On cross exam DeGuerin made the most of Tracey’s early statements. “She denied shooting Steven Beard?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Wines.
“It was a lie, wasn’t it?”
“It turned out to be. Yes, sir.”
When Wines searched Tracey’s house, he found her journal, including passages about her love of Celeste. “Did it seem to you that Tracey Tarlton had an obsession with Celeste Beard?” asked DeGuerin.
“Yes, sir,” said Wines.
One passage DeGuerin read from her journal said that with Celeste gone so much on family trips, it was “hard to pretend I have a girlfriend.”
“That means she’s making it up?” DeGuerin said.
“It could,” said Wines.
One photo from the party Celeste threw for Tracey, the “Fashion Victims” soiree, seemed to especially interest DeGuerin. Perhaps it offered an explanation for photos that showed Celeste and Tracey looking very much like a couple. In it, Celeste munched a brownie. “Is that a marijuana brownie Celeste is eating?” he asked.
“It could be,” Wines said.
DeGuerin’s final words to Wines hung in the air. They were about the twins and their friends. “Did they seem to you to be spoiled little brats?”
Wetzel objected, and DeGuerin said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”
“She would say, ‘Oh, God, I wish he would just die already,’” Amy Cozart testified. “Celeste made it clear she married Steve for his money.”
By then a University of Texas student, Cozart was the first of the teens to take the stand. She’d changed over the three years since Steve’s death. Heavier, she looked world-weary and reluctant to be there. Yet she answered questions calmly. With Cozart, Wetzel gave jurors their first glimpse of Celeste’s world, filled with greed and sex. Celeste hated her husband, Cozart testified, and she hid things from him. “If Steve found out she had sex with Jimmy Martinez it would nullify their marital agreement. She wouldn’t get any money,” Cozart said. “She said when Steve died, she’d act like