She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [172]
On cross exam, Gary Cobb pointed out that Gibbs had been right outside the courtroom door for most of the trial, often with her daughter, Dana, the realtor who had sold Steve the lake house lot, circulating in and out. “Every issue in this case, you’ve come up here and given testimony on,” he said. He then asked if Celeste had done things for Gibbs, from allowing her to live rent free in the lake house to loaning her $4,000 when her car broke down.
Gibbs said she’d repaid the loan and denied that the other instances were true: “I did not live at the lake house rent free.”
“You’ve said Celeste wasn’t a person who kept secrets. Did she ever tell you she had a sexual relationship with Jimmy Martinez?”
“No,” Gibbs said.
“Nothing would make you believe she had a sexual relationship with Tracey?”
“Not unless I saw it with my own eyes,” Gibbs said.
“Were you given some bedroom furniture by the defendant?”
“No,” Gibbs insisted, leading Cobb to ask again.
“She gave me a mattress and a box spring,” Gibbs said.
“Your answer is that I was not specific enough to name individual bed parts?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “You put yourself out to be a good friend of Steve Beard’s. How often did you visit him in the hospital?”
“I didn’t,” she admitted.
“Did you visit him in rehab?”
“No,” she said.
Throughout the defense, threads emerged that went nowhere. DeGuerin convinced Judge Kocurek to have Kristina— who denied writing the letter—fingerprinted, but her prints failed to match the one on the “Hey Dyke” letter. The indentation, an expert said, matched her signature, but on cross she admitted it could have been traced. A defense audio expert suggested the tape on which Celeste was heard saying she’d hired a hit man to kill Tracey might have been edited, but under cross examination he described editing as including turning the tape recorder on and off.
Yet, no testimony was as bizarre as that of Katina Lofton.
The issue with Lofton—a repeat felon serving a six-year sentence for theft and forgery—had cropped up late in 2002, as Wetzel and DeGuerin readied for trial, when Celeste wrote to DeGuerin telling him that Lofton had information about the case. On the stand, Lofton described having bunked in the same cell with Tracey for a period of a month, from March to April 2002.
“Did Tracey ever say if Celeste knew she was going to kill Steve?” DeGuerin asked.
“She didn’t,” Lofton said. “Tracey said she shot him. She never said that Celeste knew she was going to shoot her husband.”
“Did Tracey Tarlton say what she was going to say on the stand?”
“She was going to say Celeste did it to get out of jail quicker,” Lofton said. “She said she wasn’t going to rot in jail while Celeste lived the good life.”
“Did Tracey say they were lovers?” DeGuerin asked.
“She said they were friends, that Celeste helped her out.”
“Do you have anything to gain by testifying before this jury?”
“No,” she said. Yet she did admit that Celeste had once given her $200, stationery, and envelopes.
DeGuerin then led Lofton through a series of questions about a meeting she’d had with Wetzel and Sergeant Debra Smith, her investigator. Lofton claimed that Wetzel told her not to testify, that she’d get torn up on the stand.
A short, heavyset black woman, Lofton wore her green jail uniform. DeGuerin described her as taking the stand reluctantly, fearful for her own life for testifying. Wetzel countered that by calling her a liar, willing to say anything for money.
It wasn’t the first time the prosecutor’s path had crossed with the witness. Lofton was the mother in the “spiked baby case,” a horrific case of child abuse that had stunned Austin just a year earlier, when her husband, Jermaine Lofton Sr., dangled their infant son out of the window of a moving car, then carried him on a long foot chase with police. While officers begged him not to, he laughed and spiked the baby against the ground like a football. The child was left brain damaged. Wetzel had been the prosecutor, and she’d wanted Katina Lofton to testify against her husband.