She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [164]
Slowly Wetzel led her star witness through her life, from her childhood in Fort Worth, through her jobs at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, to BookPeople, where she managed a staff of 150. Then she talked about the nights Tracey drank and played Russian roulette, and how friends brought her to St. David’s.
“Did you meet someone named Celeste Beard there?”
“Yes, I did.”
Wetzel developed the relationship carefully with Tracey, showing how she and Celeste began spending more and more time together, Tracey talking about the first times they were sexual. “Your hands on her?” Wetzel asked.
“Our hands on each other,” she replied.
Soon the jurors had before them testimony about a relationship that built quickly, one in which Tracey cared for Celeste, worrying about her and taking care of her. Through it all she saw Steve as the enemy. “I only knew him through what Celeste told me,” she said. Tears in her eyes, Tracey talked of the night of the shooting, steeling her resolve to walk into the house, stand at the foot of the bed, and pull the trigger.
With Steve wheelchair bound and in terrible pain, Celeste met Tracey in the park and gave her the wedding band.
“This ring?” Wetzel asked, handing her the bag.
“Yes,” Tracey said. After she’d identified it, Wetzel handed it to the first juror to look at and pass to the others. She wanted them to satisfy their curiosity firsthand, that it was, in fact, a wedding ring.
For two days Tracey remained on the stand, and the prosecutors and defense attorneys warred, with her as the battleground. Wetzel wanted jurors to see an intelligent yet troubled woman drawn into Celeste’s web of lies. DeGuerin needed to drill his vision of Tarlton into their minds: that of an obsessed mentally ill woman. During cross exam, on a large tablet of paper beside her he wrote words he wanted jurors to identify her with: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, and psychotic. Soon it became a war of medical charts, journals, and cards. Wetzel read snatches out of the materials before her. In the journal, she asked, who’d written that they needed to go to the day program, quick?
“Celeste,” Tracey said.
As Wetzel drew out the testimony, the affair between the women developed, erratic but consensual. To the facts already before the jury, Tracey added Celeste’s attempts to poison Steve with botulism. “She laughed that he was so fat it didn’t even make him sick,” Tracey said.
Then Tracey recounted the night Celeste called her to Toro Canyon after Steve passed out. “She gave me the plastic bag and I held it around his neck,” she said. “But he moved and I couldn’t do it. I dropped it.”
If not for Steve’s children watching from the front rows, the tale of an old man whose young wife flittered from inept scheme to inept scheme in her quest to murder him might have seemed funny, as if it could have been the script for a Coen brothers’ movie. But this was real, and Steven Beard had suffered the consequences. In the gallery, Paul squirmed in his seat, furious at all his father had suffered.
When DeGuerin took over, he found no shortage of snatches of writings from Tracey’s cards, letters, and medical chart to suggest that the obsession had been one-sided and that Celeste had never wanted to be more than friends with her.
“It’s a fair statement that your notes to her were very expressive of sexual themes, and her notes to you were not expressive of sexual themes. Is that a fair statement?” he asked.
“That’s a fair statement,” she agreed.
From the pile of papers on the defense table, DeGuerin pulled out a journal that none of the prosecutors had ever seen before. “Is this yours?”
“Yes,” Tracey admitted.
“Didn’t know we had this, did you?”
“No,” she said.
For all Wetzel knew,