She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [168]
“No,” he said.
Yes, he agreed, the nurses described Celeste as demanding and manipulative.
“Did she manipulate you?” Wetzel asked.
“In little ways, yes,” he said.
As Wetzel asked questions, a very different image of the sessions with Gotway emerged than his answers to the defense attorney revealed. Yes, she’d called Steve names and said that she hated him. While Gotway suggested under direct testimony that the relationship with Tracey had been one-sided, he admitted not knowing many things, including that the women slept in the same bed and that Celeste had given Tracey a wedding ring. Before long there seemed to be much about his patient that Gotway didn’t know.
Then Wetzel got a surprise. “Did she mention to you that she’d hired someone to kill Tracey Tarlton?” she asked.
“She said she’d discussed that with someone,” Gotway said.
Wetzel looked startled, then pointed out, “That’s not in your notes.”
“I didn’t write it down.”
“Why?” Wetzel asked, staring at Gotway. “Were you trying to protect her?”
“Probably,” Gotway answered. “Yes.”
When Susan Milholland took the stand, it was clear that she had reacted very differently when Tracey told her, “All my problems would be over if a certain person met an untimely death.” Though a less blatant threat than the one Gotway had testified to hearing, it was enough for Milholland to call a meeting and for Tracey to be transferred out of Celeste’s unit.
Next, Dr. Howard Miller, Celeste’s psychiatrist, a thick-necked man with a quiet voice, wearing a quiet suit, took the stand. “Tracey may have been delusional about her relationship with Celeste,” he said, well into his testimony. “She was certainly delusional about other things. She has a strong need to believe that the relationship was what she wanted it to be.”
Wetzel and Cobb assumed that Celeste’s therapist would testify only about his patient. Instead, DeGuerin had asked about Tracey. Although Miller never treated her, he voiced his opinions.
“We’d like to take Dr. Miller on a sidebar,” Wetzel said, wanting to stop the testimony and argue outside the jury’s presence that he shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the mental state of a woman who wasn’t his patient.
“Not timely,” the judge ruled, saying the objection came too late.
With that, DeGuerin dug out the chart he’d branded Tracey with, the one that read: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, and psychotic. The defense attorney placed it beside Miller, asking him if those words fit Tracey Tarlton. Yes, Miller said, they did, “Tracey’s illness makes her likely to give in to her feelings and act on them in violence.”
When it came to the relationship between the two women, Miller said that he urged his patient to distance herself from Tracey. “I believe Tracey sustains a delusional belief system,” he said. “She believes the relationship with Celeste was more than it was.”
On the stand, Miller came across as sincere and believable. The first day of his case and five weeks into the trial, DeGuerin was making headway. Then he turned the witness over to Wetzel for cross examination.
“Isn’t it true that in August, September, and October of 1999, Tracey Tarlton reported no auditory hallucinations of any kind?” Wetzel asked.
“In July of 1999 the notes indicate some auditory hallucinations,” Miller answered.
“My question was later in 1999, say in October?” Wetzel replied pointedly.
“The notes I have don’t indicate any,” he said.
“When Tracey hears these voices, does she know they’re not real?”
“Yes,” he said. “I believe she does.”
With Wetzel prompting him, Miller discussed the rules at Timberlawn, including those that barred sexual contact. Yes, if Tracey had admitted a sexual affair with Celeste, they would have been separated, so there were reasons for her not to flaunt a relationship with Celeste or write about it in a journal that could be read by others.
“If Tracey had told you about a sexual relationship, you’d shut it down?” she asked.
“We’d try to interrupt it,” he said.
“You were Celeste’s therapist, not