She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [181]
Acknowledgments
As always with a project of this scope there are many to thank. First: my readers—Claire Cassidy, Christie Bourgeois, Andrea Ball, Barbara Tavernini, and Pam O’Brien, who helped me weed my way through mountains of research on a complicated and twisted tale; for her astute suggestions, to Sandy Sheehy, who not only wrote the book on women’s friendships but lives it; to Connie Choate for always being there; to Sarah Durand, my able editor at Avon Books, and Philip Spitzer, my agent.
Thank you to my legal heroes: David Weiser at Kator, Parks & Weiser in Austin, and Mark Pryor at Vinson & Elkins in Dallas. To Roger Wade at the Travis County Sheriff’s Department and Michelle Lyons, Warden Rebecca Adams, and Warden Audrey Lynn at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for their assistance in arranging interviews.
Thank you to Associate Psychology Professor Julia Babcock at the University of Houston and Nancy Parchois, MSW, for their insights into borderline personality disorder; to Leslie Spry, M.D., with the National Kidney Association, for explaining the effects of high doses of alcohol on the body.
A very big thank-you to my favorite investigator, the man who so ably helped pull together documents and track down sources, Jim Loosen of JAL Data Services in Seattle, Washington. Jim, you’re the best. Also to Eric Smits at ABC Legal Services in Seattle, Judy Owens of Owens Legal Service in Phoenix, Arizona, and Eleanor Richardson of Eleanor’s Legal Support in Los Angeles for tracking down legal records, some decades old. A special thank-you to my able transcribers: Katie Guillory, Rebecca Anderson, and Barbara Benson, for their long hours of work.
Finally, thank you to my family for putting up with me when I’m preoccupied with work and to the Friday night bunch: Sue and Jack, Sherry and Jerry, Evan and Yvonne, Sharlene and Larry, and Juanita and Lynn, for helping me retain my sanity throughout the arduous year it took to pull this book together.
Author’s Footnote
On a dreary day in early 2004, nearly a year after the trial’s end, I drove to Gatesville, Texas, to the prison where Celeste and Tracey were housed in separate units. I pulled into the parking lot of the Mountain View Unit as a thin rain misted from a cold, tented gray sky. By that summer, Donna Goodson would also be behind bars, serving a six-month sentence in a jail outside Austin for falsifying a Texas driver’s license. Celeste, on the other hand, wouldn’t be eligible for parole for forty years. Barring the success of an appeal Dick DeGuerin had filed, this complex of small red brick buildings would probably be her home for the rest of her life. All that recalled her previous world was the razor wire curled atop the cyclone fence that surrounded the unit’s perimeter, like that she’d installed at Toro Canyon after the shooting.
The inmates in Mountain View were the most serious female offenders in the Texas prison system, on death row or, like Celeste, serving long sentences. Darlie Routier, the Dallas mother prosecutors said killed her two beautiful young sons, was there, along with Clara Harris, the Houston dentist who ran over her philandering husband with the family Mercedes Benz. In prison, Harris and Celeste, both assigned to work typing books into Braille, had become friends. When Celeste emerged, she was markedly changed from her appearance at the trial. Her leg, which had required surgery, remained in a walking cast, and she shuffled into the visitors’ area on crutches. Her hair, pulled back into a too-tight ponytail, looked dirty, her skin had a prison pallor, and her eyes peered unblinking out of dark, tormented circles. Gone were the trial sweater sets, replaced by wrinkled, off-white scrubs, her official prison garb. In the visitors’ area we talked through a black wire mesh and cloudy Plexiglas cage.
“Did you have anything to do with Steve’s murder?” I asked.
“No,” she snapped. “Of course