She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [167]
On the stand, Bayardo had detailed how he’d made his diagnosis, showing slides taken of Steve’s lungs. Reading from hospital charts, Cobb listed Steve’s symptoms.
“Is that consistent with infection?” he asked.
“No, it’s consistent with a blood clot in the lungs,” Bayardo said.
Yet, DeGuerin had come back hard, suggesting that his experts would disagree and testify that Steve died of an overwhelming infection not linked to the shooting. If so, Steve had died of natural causes, not homicide.
“Do you know a Dr. Charles Petty?” DeGuerin asked Bayardo.
“Yes, I admire him,” he said.
“It’s not unusual for physicians to disagree, is it?”
“If he disagrees with me, I’ll be very angry,” Bayardo said in his Latin accent, his tone highly skeptical. “Not in this case when the evidence is so clear-cut.”
The jury chuckled at the Latin doctor, who became huffy with insult. Yet, Wetzel couldn’t find it humorous. In the wings waited Dr. Petty and a second physician, both hired to blow a fatal hole through her well-crafted case.
Chapter
20
On the morning of Monday, March, 3, 2003, Dick DeGuerin began Celeste’s defense with four Dallas mental health professionals from Timberlawn: her psychologist, Dr. Bernard Gotway; her psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Miller; the art therapist, Melissa Caldwell; and Tracey’s therapist, Susan Milholland. Under Texas law, no privilege exists that exempts physicians from testifying in criminal cases, and all raised their hands before Judge Kocurek and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth.
Wearing a tweedy sport coat fit for a college professor, his gray hair curly, Gotway, the first on the stand, estimated he’d treated, if not thousands, at least hundreds of patients. Licensed for eighteen years at the time he first saw Celeste, he specialized in patients who’d suffered severe trauma. Concerning his client on trial for murder, he described her as a needy woman who had flashbacks, overwhelming anxieties, and the need to spend lavishly on others to buy their friendships. “This is the kind of thing we treat every day,” Gotway said, adjusting his glasses. “She was ripe for treatment when she got to Timberlawn.”
Much of the turmoil in her marriage to Steve, the therapist said, involved her spending. Yet, here, he suggested, Celeste was merely a pawn of her history. “Whenever she got to feeling bad, she’d buy something,” he said. “She’d hide her anxiety by trying to make things perfect, especially in the house.”
While Celeste was his primary focus, he worked on the marriage as well, through couple’s therapy. “Steve told me he wanted Celeste to be happy. I thought these were people who wanted to be together,” Gotway said. “Celeste is complex. She’s had a lot of trauma in her life, and she tends to be histrionic. She seeks attention.” Then he went on to say something that caught Wetzel’s undivided attention. “Celeste isn’t capable of making long-term plans. She’s too impulsive, jumping from one thing to the next. She’s not a strategic thinker able to plan over a long period of time.”
“Could she have planned for months to influence Tracey Tarlton to kill her husband? Could she do that?” DeGuerin asked.
Wetzel jumped up. “I object your honor. That’s a question the jury has to answer.”
“Sustained,” Judge Kocurek ruled. Yet DeGuerin had made his point: Celeste’s psychologist judged her incapable of the murder.
“Are there some people who say things to their therapists that aren’t true?” Wetzel asked during cross examination.
“Yes,” Gotway said.
“Would the failure of a patient to disclose make a therapist’s opinion less valid?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you she was having an affair with her ex-husband?”
“No,” Gotway said.
“Did the defendant tell you this was the first time she’d ever told anyone about her sexual abuse?”
“That’s what I wrote in my notes,” he said.
“Would it surprise you