She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [17]
In 1991, while the insurance fraud case ground on, a new man, Jimmy Martinez, entered Celeste’s life. It was he who would bring her to Texas and into Steve Beard’s world.
Swarthy and handsome, Martinez was thirty—nearly three years older than Celeste—had a stable job planning and managing security systems, and had never been married. Like Celeste, he exuded a palpable sexual tension and a flirtatious manner. Someone who knew them both would later say, “I don’t think it was ever love between them. To me, it always looked more like lust.”
They met at Mr. Lucky’s, a legendary Phoenix country bar, famous for its mechanical bulls. With a mischievous grin and a cowboy’s swagger, Jimmy had just left a country western concert when he saw Celeste with a woman he’d once dated. They were quickly attracted. “I’m a leg man,” he says. “And Celeste looked great in a miniskirt.”
On August 24, 1991, Celeste was twenty-eight and marrying for the third time. At least one matter remained unresolved the day she promised to love Jimmy Martinez until death they did part: She was still legally married to Harald Wolf. In her busy life, she’d never gotten around to filing for divorce.
In Washington State, Jennifer and Kristina learned about the marriage on a postcard. The girls must have been on Celeste’s mind often that fall. She didn’t like having anyone out of her reach, and just months after voluntarily giving them up, she called Craig, demanding he send them to her. He refused. Many who knew him gave the credit for his ability to stand up to Celeste to the new woman in his life, Kathryn Morton, a bright, determined woman who worked at the Snohomish County Attorney’s Office. They met at a park, while he was camping with Jennifer and Kristina, and it was his dedication to them that attracted Kathryn, who had two young children of her own. “Craig described Celeste as a Coyote Bitch,” says Morton. “He was exhausted from battling her.”
The battle became a war as Celeste began a court fight to reclaim the twins.
That summer, Jen and Kristina were ten and about to enter fourth grade; they lost a year when they had to repeat second grade, after Celeste kept them out of school so often that they couldn’t keep up. A thousand miles away, Celeste called often and pulled the strings that attached Kristina to her. The youngster sobbed as Celeste put the weight of the world on her thin, young shoulders, telling her she couldn’t live without her, at times threatening suicide. “It was awful. She was my mother. I loved her,” says Kristina.
Her identical twin couldn’t have been more different in her reaction to their mother. Even the thought of seeing Celeste gave Jen terrible nightmares. “She’d be killing us,” says Jennifer. At times she saw herself firing a gun at her mother. The bullet ricocheted, then struck her instead, as if embodying an unspoken fear that anything she did to hurt Celeste would come back to injure her.
In Arizona, Celeste moved to Tucson with Jimmy, but soon this marriage, too, was troubled. When they argued, she raged, then explained away her erratic behavior by saying she forgot to take the hormone supplements given to her after her hysterectomy. “That’s why the girls are so important,” she said. “I can never have other children.”
As far as Jimmy was concerned, Celeste had so much else to offer that he overlooked her tantrums. He loved watching her at a party, proud of the way she talked to anyone, not relying on him for support. “She made people laugh,” he says. Where Celeste held back with others, their sex life couldn’t have been better. In the end he would wonder if he was swept up in the passion and the lure of finding someone who needed him. “I was there to protect Celeste,” he says.
Meanwhile, in May 1992, Celeste arrived at Craig’s, demanding to see Kristina. When they dropped her twin off, Jennifer didn’t even look at her mother’s car.