She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [170]
The animosity between the two sides was exemplified by one of the final witnesses in the fifth week. DeGuerin brought a Houston accountant named Jeff Compton to the stand to testify about Celeste’s finances. With colorful charts, Compton argued that Celeste hadn’t profited from Steve’s death, as the prosecutors maintained.
“Did expenditures increase after Steve’s death?” DeGuerin asked.
“It was stable to declining, as far as expenditures from those accounts,” Compton said.
“Was Celeste better off financially with Steve dead or alive?”
“She had access to more property with him alive,” Compton said.
On cross, Wetzel pointed out that the figures Compton quoted as spending from before Steve’s death included major onetime expenses, like the cost of building and decorating the two houses. Those skewed the figures, she argued. On the stand, Compton bristled, angrily insisting she was wrong, that the Beards had continued to spend. With that, Wetzel pulled out a chart she’d pulled together with Kuperman, when he was on the stand. In two vertical columns, she compared what Celeste got under the trust to what she would receive in a divorce. Under the divorce column, she was entitled to nothing other than the half interests in the two houses and her personal property. If he died, she received a hundred percent of the value of the houses plus the income from the trust for the rest of her life, a difference of millions of dollars.
Compton shot back, insisting the prenup might not hold up in a divorce. But then he conceded that, at least at face value, Celeste had more money of her own if Steve died.
“Would you agree with me that having access to something is not the same as owning it and being able to sell it for cash if you wish to?” Wetzel asked.
“Yes,” Compton agreed.
Throughout the trial, DeGuerin fought no issue as ferociously as his contention that the relationship with Celeste existed only in Tracey’s mind. If he could convince the jury that the affair was a figment of a diseased mind, he might persuade them that Celeste’s involvement in the murder was untrue as well. To do that, he’d put on a parade of mental health professionals.
With his furrowed brow and graying mustache, Dr. Randy Frazier, Tracey’s psychologist, made an affable witness. That fall, after the shooting, he said, Tracey was consumed by a lack of access to Celeste. It was all she talked about. “What did Celeste and Tracey do together?” DeGuerin asked.
“She alluded to sexual contact and social contact,” Frazier said.
While DeGuerin appeared to gain nothing of importance from Frazier, Wetzel scored when she asked him to point out in his patient’s charts when and where he’d noted evidence that Tracey suffered from psychotic episodes. From June 1999 through the time frame of the shooting, Frazier had seen no sign of either hallucinations or delusions.
“If Tracey believed Steve was standing in the way of her relationship with Celeste, would that get in the way of reality?” DeGuerin asked on redirect.
“If there was no reality basis to that, I would consider that delusional,” Frazier said.
“Assume there was a friendship, nothing more, is that delusional?”
“If she’s getting clear information from Celeste,” Frazier said.
“Suppose there was actual sexual contact?” DeGuerin asked, and Wetzel looked up from her notes to listen carefully, as DeGuerin seemed to abandon his entire strategy mid-witness.
“Then Tracey would be getting mixed messages,” Frazier said. “The word that comes to mind is confusion.”
DeGuerin handed him Celeste’s