She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [180]
Next, DeGuerin stood before the jury, seething. “I’m not going to stand here asking for mercy,” he said. Instead he argued that their decision had been wrong. He charged that the deliberations had taken three days because some on the panel didn’t agree with the verdict and the cause of death. “By God, I disagree with your verdict. I disagree strongly… The evidence before you shows that Celeste is innocent.”
Then he went down what he described as a timeline that proved she was innocent, something he’d forgotten during the trial closing, and he asked those on the jury who he suspected were uncomfortable with the verdict to stand up to the others, to hang the jury on the punishment phase. It was a desperate twist in a strange case, a tactic few in the courtroom had ever seen before, the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, a risky football play used by losing teams in the final moments of a game. “Those of you who have reasonable doubt … you can stand up and say, ‘I was wrong,’” he argued. “‘I shouldn’t have compromised. I shouldn’t have surrendered’ … Don’t give in.”
“Your verdict was the right decision,” Wetzel told the jury, as the last one to address them. “Beginning many years ago, this woman has hurt people fraudulently… She’s not the victim … Steve Beard is the victim … he has a greatgrandchild he’ll never see.”
As angry as DeGuerin had been, Wetzel was calm. It was by far the best argument she’d put on during the case, eloquent and measured. “It strikes me how vulnerable Steve Beard was, asleep in his own bed… asking the operator to call his wife … don’t you know he was reaching out to her for help. How ironic that he didn’t know she was the one behind it … We trust that you will reach a verdict. What Celeste Beard did to her husband has earned her a life sentence. We trust you’ll give her what she deserves.”
At 11:25 that morning the jury again began deliberations. One hour and twenty minutes later they had a decision.
As Celeste stood before them, she stared at the jurors as if she hated all of them, looking every bit the monster her own children had labeled her. The jurors would later say DeGuerin had read them wrong and that there’d been no dissent in their ranks. “We wanted to make sure everyone felt comfortable with it,” says the foreman, Rosales. “We just took our time.”
As before, they dealt out the maximum penalty, a second life sentence, and, to send a message that they had no doubt about their verdict, a $10,000 fine.
“I’d like the jury polled,” DeGuerin challenged. Later that year, in Galveston, he’d mount a masterful defense and win an acquittal for Robert Durst, the New York heir who admitted killing his neighbor, then dismembering and disposing of his body. That victory would make worldwide headlines. But this day, in an Austin courtroom, the man who was arguably Texas’s most famous living defense attorney had lost to two talented prosecutors and it tasted bitter.
The judge did as he asked and polled the twelve jurors, but to no avail. They all agreed that, for what she’d done to Steve, Celeste should spend the rest of her life in jail.
As a final matter of business, Kristina walked to the witness stand one more time, wearing a skirt and a serious blue blazer. In her hand, she held a white spiral notebook. For weeks she and Ellen Halbert had talked about whether she would deliver an allocution, a victim’s statement, in which she would finally address her mother. Ellen had told her of the one she’d done at the trial of her own assailant and said it had given her a feeling of strength and a sense of peace.
“I have a lot of things I want to say to you,” Kristina began, looking straight into her mother’s eyes. “What did I ever do to you? What did Jen ever do to you but love you?…You don’t deserve us. You never deserved us. You said we turned on you, but you turned on us. Steve gave you his love. He took you into his family, and you violated him. You murdered him, and you are guilty.”
As Kristina left the witness stand, she walked past her mother. Celeste’s hands shook,