She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [18]
All the next day, Jen watched Kristina at school, assessing her face to see what she was thinking. Kris seemed quiet, with faraway thoughts. In final period, Jen lost track of her sister, and when she arrived at the bus stop, Kristina wasn’t there. At home, Craig called the police. When they found Kristina with her mother, Celeste had cards she said Kris had written her. In them, Kris described Craig as abusive, saying he’d hit her. The following day, Jen was pulled out of school and questioned. Police even asked the girls’ friends if they’d seen signs of abuse. The investigation came up empty. After seventy-two hours Kristina was released to Craig. On the way home she cried and told him that she was sorry. Later, she’d deny that her father ever hit her or Jen. “Kris was just doing what our mom told her to,” says Jen.
In Phoenix, on May 28, 1992, Gary and Lue Thompson stood before a judge and were sentenced to probation—Lue to three years and Gary to five—and they were ordered to pay $8,000 in restitution to their insurance company. For Lue, the sentence paled in comparison to who was there to witness it: a group of schoolchildren on a class trip. “I thought of all the troubled kids we’d taken in and all the good we’d tried to do,” she says. “I couldn’t look at those kids. It just tore me to pieces.”
Adding insult to injury, the Phoenix P.D. refused to prosecute Celeste for burglarizing their house. “We had no rights, because we lied on the insurance form,” says Lue.
Later that summer, Harald returned from Iceland. By then Celeste and his possessions had disappeared. When he tried to rent an apartment, his credit report came back with six pages of bad debts he didn’t know they had. Celeste’s legacy was $60,000 in unpaid bills. “My credit was toast,” he says. “She’d taken everything. My clothes, my books, my furniture, my photographs, even the stamp collection I started when I was a kid.”
In his truck—the one thing she’d left behind—he drove to the East Coast, eager to forget her. There, he filed for divorce, and on December 14, 1992, it became final. The process servers never found Celeste to serve the papers, and, as far as Harald knew, Celeste never learned of the divorce. Years later, married and happy, Harald saw a woman resembling Celeste at a mall. “My wife said my face was so full of hatred it scared her,” he says.
The following summer Jen was furious at her father and refused to even look at him when he took her and Kristina to the airport to fly to Arizona to spend two weeks with Celeste. In Tucson, Celeste put both the girls to work. The security company had transferred Jimmy to Austin, and he was already there. The furniture had been moved, but the apartment needed to be packed. Celeste didn’t plan to do it herself, not with the girls available. Besides, she was busy. She didn’t let being married infringe on her social life. The night before they were supposed to move, she had a date with a cop. “Finish packing,” she said. “I want it all done when I get home.”
After she left, the eleven-years-olds looked about them, not knowing how one went about packing an apartment. They started to put clothes in boxes while they watched television, but the food ads made them hungry. As usual, Celeste had left them nothing to eat. Not knowing what else to do, Jennifer searched and found change. Then the frightened little girls, holding hands walked through the dark streets to a convenience store where they bought TV dinners. Back at the apartment, they ate and fell asleep.
The following morning Celeste was livid to find the packing not completed. “You never do anything for me,” she screamed as she gathered their belongings. Months earlier the girls had watched a movie on TV based on the autobiography of screen siren Joan Crawford’s daughter. In it, Faye Dunaway, playing Crawford, shrieked at her children. That day, as on many others, Celeste