She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [173]
“Is it hard for you to remember all the different things you have told different people?” Wetzel asked when she took over.
“No,” Lofton said. But when Wetzel gave her the opportunity to amend her testimony, Lofton admitted she’d also gotten fifty dollars from one of Celeste’s friends, in her commissary fund.
With that, Wetzel pulled out Lofton’s jailhouse correspondence. After Celeste’s arrest, Mange had the jail copy everything coming in and out for her. “I’m here to support you,” Lofton wrote to Celeste in one letter. “You know, I’ll be looking out for you.”
In the letters, Lofton called Celeste “Dimples,” and asked her for many things, from school tuition, to full-body contouring, to support letters from Celeste’s friends for her parole. In a letter from July of the previous year, Wetzel asked, “Do you tell the defendant, ‘There’s no limit to what I would do for you?’”
“Yes,” Lofton said.
Lofton wrote Celeste fractured poems, extolling her platonic love, describing her as a good woman, then said, “I got some shit your attorney need to know.”
“Did you tell the defendant not to write you back until she’s had time to do these things and to remind her friend to do the support letters?”
“Yes.”
From one of Lofton’s letters, in which she told Celeste she wasn’t gay, Wetzel read, “I like Dick too much.”
“You’re not talking about Mr. DeGuerin here, are you?” Wetzel asked, straight-faced.
Above his suit collar, the defense attorney’s neck turned scarlet as Lofton said, “No.”
In the end, it would seem that Lofton would sum up her own testimony, saying, “Ain’t nobody here ever going to fess up to what’s really going on.”
The two witnesses DeGuerin fought the hardest to get on the stand would never be allowed to testify before the jury. The first was Tracey’s old girlfriend, Zan Ray. Tracey had been with Ray when she found her husband’s body, after he committed suicide. It would have been an enticing morsel to place before the jury to show Tracey had another girlfriend whose husband turned up dead, even if he had left a note and died of an overdose. The second: Reginald Breaux, the man Tracey had shared beers with then brushed against with her car. She’d been jailed overnight, but never charged with anything from the incident. DeGuerin argued the incident showed Tracey had attempted to kill someone before Steve Beard. Judge Kocurek ruled that neither witness was relevant.
As the defense rested, Wetzel worried the most about the impact of two of DeGuerin’s expert witnesses: Drs. Terry Satterwhite and Charles Petty.
A UT professor in infectious diseases, Satterwhite was an elderly, pale man with trembling hands, who seemed fascinated by the courtroom. DeGuerin had asked him to review the Brackenridge Hospital records for Steve’s final stay there, in the days leading up to and including his death.
“Did you review them?” he asked.
“Yes,” Satterwhite said.
“What did you conclude was the cause of death?”
“Group A strep, a blood infection, the same strain that causes a sore throat and acute rheumatic fever,” he said. Satterwhite went on to say Steve’s age, heart condition, asthma, alcohol abuse, and diabetes made him more vulnerable.
“What relation did his death have to the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked.
“I don’t think it had any relationship,” Satterwhite said. As evidence of the infection, DeGuerin led the physician through Steve’s chart, citing the notations as his temperature climbed. The groin rash, he said, may have been the point of entry.
“Could this Group A strep have been caused by changing his ileostomy bag with dirty hands?”
“No.”
“Did this infection have anything to do with the gunshot wound or the recovery from the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked again.
“No, in my opinion, it did not,” Satterwhite said.
On cross exam, Gary Cobb