She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [16]
Days later Lue and Celeste filled out insurance forms. By then the Thompsons had more bad news: They weren’t insured for replacement value and would collect nowhere near enough to restore all they’d lost.
“Why don’t you add some things to your list?” Celeste urged.
“It’s wrong, and I’ll get caught,” Lue told her.
“My attorney says everyone does it,” she said. “That’s what he told me to do.”
Lue thought it over, and then, despite knowing that she was doing something wrong, padded the list of stolen valuables.
As always, Celeste’s world changed quickly and without warning. At the end of 1990 she called Craig and announced that she wanted to join the army. She was willing to sign papers giving him custody of the twins. The girls, finally out of the foster home, left for Washington. But an odd thing happened that year while they lived with their father—they received a postcard in the mail, signed “Grandma.”
“Who is this?” Jennifer asked her father. “This isn’t from your mom.”
“Your mother’s mother, your grandmother,” Craig explained. “She lives in California.”
Jennifer and Kristina never asked their mother about the postcard or whose body they’d looked at in a coffin years earlier. They heard from Celeste rarely that year. When she did call, it was never good news. “She screamed at Craig, threatening to take the girls back,” says his sister-in-law, Denise. “She never left him alone.”
That spring, 1991, Celeste had her first serious brush with the law. Like all of her plots, her plan to join the army quickly dissipated. Instead she’d decided to stay in Phoenix. It was there, on May 6, that she became furious with the Thompsons. Celeste demanded they return a dog she’d given their youngest son. They refused, and she called the police. When Celeste claimed to the officer who responded that the Thompsons had staged the previous fall’s robbery, Detective R. T. Phillips was put on the case.
In his nearly two decades on the force, Phillips, a lean man with a well-groomed mustache, specialized in uncovering insurance fraud. He was so good at it that he’d been written up in an insurance industry publication. “I felt like they [insurance frauds] were ripping me off,” he says. “I had to pay my insurance, and they were driving up the rates.”
When Phillips questioned her, Celeste told him she’d seen many of the items the Thompsons reported stolen in their house months after the robbery. She said she believed they’d staged the robbery, then inflated their losses. Based on her information, Phillips went to the Thompsons’ house.
“Celeste loves me. She’d never hurt me,” Lue told Phillips that day.
Yet, Phillips assured her, Celeste had made serious allegations against her and Gary. Quickly, the Thompsons admitted their guilt; they had inflated their insurance claim by $13,000. But they insisted they hadn’t staged the robbery. In fact, Lue gave Phillips one more bit of information, recounting the story of the incinerated Taurus.
Phillips’s gut told him the Thompsons were telling the truth, and he brought Celeste in for questioning. Each time he pointed out inconsistencies with the evidence, her story changed. When he found the stolen items in her two rented storage units, he felt certain she was the one behind the robbery. When he asked about the incinerated Taurus, Celeste just laughed. “Sure, I took it out in the desert and torched it,” she said. “The damn thing didn’t work half the time.”
“She was cool the whole time,” says Phillips, who wrote in his report: “Based on the inconsistencies in what Celeste Wolf has told me and her insurance company, it appears no burglary ever occurred at the Thompsons’… in fact, Celeste Wolf took property belonging to the Thompsons to make it look like a burglary occurred, then made false reports to her insurance company.”
Despite all the evidence Phillips had, when he called Craig in Washington State to ask about Celeste’s past for her pretrial report, Celeste’s first husband laughed