She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [163]
“No,” said Jennifer. “It wasn’t all right.”
“Celeste told me to tell the others not to mention Tracey’s name,” Kristina said when she took the stand. With her, Wetzel filled in more of Celeste’s past life, including the period when she moved into Steve’s house and his bedroom. She showed how Celeste began slowly, adding sleeping pills to Steve’s food. “I didn’t realize it could hurt him,” Kristina said. “I thought he was a nice man. Celeste was never married to anyone else for very long. I didn’t think he would last, either.” Instead, Steve had stuck with Celeste, and with Kristina and Jennifer. “He became our dad.”
Much of Kristina’s testimony mirrored that of her sister and friends. On the stand, neither she nor Jennifer bore any resemblance to the spoiled brats DeGuerin described. She talked about Steve and Celeste’s arguments, mostly over money, and her mother’s suicide attempts, usually when one husband or another threatened to leave. When she saw Tracey at St. David’s, Kristina said, “She looked sad, and I felt bad for her.”
The jurors didn’t hear about Kristina’s sleepless nights as the trial approached. Even in a room full of deputies and a judge, she couldn’t look at her mother. If she met her mother’s gaze, she feared she wouldn’t be able to testify against her. She felt certain that somehow Celeste would get to her. To the twins, Celeste remained supremely powerful.
Wetzel had been looking forward to putting one item in particular before the jury. Approaching the witness stand, she handed Kristina a receipt from James Avery. When she’d discovered it in Celeste’s records, Wetzel had been delighted.
“What is this for?” Wetzel asked.
“My mother sent me to pick up an order she’d placed.”
“Is there a ring on there?”
“Yes, a wedding ring.”
“Is this the ring?” she asked, bringing to the stand a plastic bag that held the wedding ring Celeste had given Tracey, which had been placed in evidence.
“That looks like it,” Kristina said.
As Wetzel turned on the recorder to play the phone calls Kristina had taped after Celeste left Timberlawn, all present heard what the twins had heard throughout their lives: their mother emotionally manipulating and verbally abusing them. “Do you know what it feels like, do you?” Celeste screamed. “Do you know what it feels like when you’re four years old, you aren’t even in kindergarten, and some guy has a big dick sticking in you? Do you know what that does to you?… I don’t think I can ever forgive what you said to me tonight. Because as soon as I get home I feel like just fucking sticking a knife down my throat, you bitch.”
One sentence to the next Celeste’s mood changed. From talking calmly, she launched into terrible attacks, calling Kristina names and threatening to cut her off and leave her with nothing. On the witness stand, Kristina stared down at her lap, crying softly. Even years later it hurt her to listen to the tapes. It was, after all, her mother’s voice.
Next to her attorneys, Celeste cried, too. Her face red, she sobbed, with her head on the table. Looking back, it would seem Celeste’s tears nearly always came when someone said something nice about her or when her alleged abuse came up in testimony. Now, Celeste cried listening to her own voice on the tape, harder than she had at any other time during the trial.
Wetzel let the tape run out to the final sentence.
“I hired someone to kill Tracey,” Celeste said.
“Okay,” Kristina answered.
Then the tape went silent.
The courtroom became utterly quiet. As the judge ordered a break, Wetzel looked at the stunned jurors.
At 11:35 A.M. on the Tuesday of the third week of the trial, Tracey Tarlton walked into the courtroom wearing an orange V-neck jailhouse uniform over a yellow T-shirt. Heavier than in the photos the jury had seen, two years after entering jail, she was pale and somber. After being sworn in, the prosecutors’ star witness took the stand, clasped her hands in her lap,