She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [176]
“The love of money is the root of all evil. People loved Celeste Beard, but all she loved was money,” Cobb said, picking up the white placard that held the defense’s exhibit of Celeste’s money with and without Steve. On the front, their expert had listed houses, jewelry, cash and investments, arguing Celeste was better off with Steve alive than dead. The trip to Europe was a test, to see if the marriage could be saved. If it couldn’t, “he would have divorced her skinny butt,” Cobb said, flipping the chart over to a blank, empty white. “And this is what she would have gotten, a big pocketful of nothing.
“Listen to the witnesses who do not have Celeste Beard’s money in their pockets,” he urged, “and come to a verdict: Celeste Beard Johnson is guilty of capital murder.”
Beginning the defense’s closing argument, Catherine Baen took over the courtroom floor. She set up a computer for a PowerPoint demonstration, and then her voice filled the courtroom for the first time since the trial began.
“Celeste Beard Johnson is not guilty,” she began. In the four weeks of evidence the prosecution presented, she maintained, they’d been unable to make their case. To make her point, she brought up the secret cell phone and the phone records. “The only person who put that cell phone in Celeste’s hands was Tracey Tarlton,” she said. And Tracey, she went on, was not to be believed.
Even if the jury believed Celeste was involved in the shooting, she said, it couldn’t be proven that she’d done it for money. Even Kuperman had testified that Steve didn’t want a divorce. If they did divorce, she argued, the state gave a wrong impression as to what Celeste would get— half the houses, and closets full of clothes and expensive jewelry. “That doesn’t sound like nothing to me, folks,” she said.
The jurors had to find Celeste was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “The prosecutors say this is the type of evidence on which you’d base a serious decision, like buying a home,” she went on. “You’re not deciding whether or not to buy a home. You’re deciding whether or not to put this woman in a cage for the rest of her life.”
Nearly all the evidence against Celeste, she said, came from questionable sources: Tracey, the twins, and Donna Goodson. “Everyone would agree this family is dysfunctional with a capital D,” she asserted. “The twins have two million reasons to lie against Celeste,” the money they’d inherit with Celeste out of the way.
“Tracey Tarlton killed Steve Beard on her own, for her own selfish reasons,” DeGuerin said, addressing the jury. “Her own sick reasons.”
Quickly, his passion built. Where Baen was analytical, DeGuerin packed a strong emotional punch. “You need to believe that Steve died without a reasonable doubt from the gunshot wound,” he said, saying that they couldn’t do that.
When it came to the two women, DeGuerin said it was “insulting to say that Celeste was the aggressor.” Holding up Tracey’s journal, Defense Exhibit 98, he said, “If you do nothing else, please read this journal. Please look at the medical records.”
Reading snatches in which Tracey pined for Celeste, DeGuerin, his face flushed with fervor, said, “Delusions, lies, or fantasies, but it’s not the truth … The truth is that Tracey Tarlton is an aggressive lesbian who pursued heterosexual women who were married.”
On the screen, Baen flipped up the chart with the terms DeGuerin had used to paint Tracey: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, psychotic. He lowered his voice from what had become a roar and read from Tracey’s Timberlawn chart. “That’s not normal. That’s a crazy woman… She had nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he said, as Baen flashed on the screen a photo of Tracey aiming the murder weapon.
Walking back toward the defense table, he said: “Tracey told you Celeste ordered her to shoot him in the stomach so it wouldn’t make a mess.”
With that, DeGuerin lay down on the defense table, a pillow across his midsection. He pulled a white sheet