She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [182]
“Actually, you never took the stand, Celeste. You never really said anything.”
“Biggest mistake of my life,” she mused angrily. “I never should have listened when Dick DeGuerin told me not to.”
“Did you have a sexual relationship with Tracey?” I continued.
“No. My only mistake was not telling Tracey myself that I didn’t want anything to do with her. That’s why she killed Steve, because she was jealous.”
“That was your only mistake?”
“That and raising my daughters as I did, as a friend instead of a mother, teaching them to lie and to love money more than people,” she said. She then launched into a verbal assault of the twins. She said she loved them more than anything or anyone, that she’d tried to be a good mother, and for that she’d paid a price. Her eyes grew black and her hands shook as she accused them of manufacturing evidence against her and working with the District Attorney’s Office. Then she concentrated her venom at Kristina, the daughter who had catered to her every whim, who’d yearned for her love. “Kristina was in cahoots with Tracey,” she said. “I think of her and Jennifer like the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents. I want them to spend time in prison. They belong here, not me.”
“Tell me something that points to your innocence,” I challenged. “Anything.”
In response, she told me about a letter her attorneys received while the jury was sequestered, from a man she identified only as Robert. This stranger, she said, had written stating that he’d seen Tracey, Kristina, and Justin in a Sear’s store the month before the shooting. “Tracey shouted, ‘If you don’t help me, I’ll get someone who will.’”
When I pressed Celeste for his last name, she suddenly changed her story, saying Robert wasn’t sure the couple Tracey talked to was Kristina and Justin. “He said it was someone who looked like them.”
That morning, Celeste made statements I knew weren’t true. She misquoted trial testimony and personally attacked those who testified against her. When I called her on the lies, she shouted that I was in the pocket of the “evil twins.”
In contrast, at the Gatesville Unit, Tracey sauntered calmly into the visitor’s area to meet me. Her hair cropped close to her ears, and her uniform clean and neatly pressed, she smiled. Although she hadn’t been on medication for many months, she appeared bright-eyed and well. Looking back, she said, she thought it was the alcohol more than anything else that had led her to thoughts of suicide five years earlier, when she’d met Celeste in St. David’s. “It’s easy to say I was mentally ill. I was in a psychiatric hospital,” she said. “But that’s a label, and it was more than that. I’ve come to realize that there were lots of loopholes in my thought processes. I was willing to believe that there were situations when it was permissible to take another person’s life. I now know that’s not true.”
Although only seven years remained before she’d be eligible for parole, she insisted she thought little of that. Instead of planning a future, she said prison had taught her to live in the moment. In the laundry where she worked five days a week, just the folding of a shirt gave her a sense of satisfaction. She’d learned to enjoy the small moments in life and to cherish the few family and friends who’d stood by her.
When she talked of Celeste, her voice rang with sadness. “I think she’s numb. No one can make her feel. She sees only her own needs,” she said. “She kept throwing men, women, money, and things into herself to try to fill up, but she couldn’t feel any of it. No matter how much she had, she was still empty inside.” Often, she said, she thought of Steve Beard and the night she pulled the trigger of her shotgun while he slept. When the sadness came, she envisioned a cloud and let the pain float away.
“I can’t change this,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I did a horrible thing. I’m not angry about being in prison. I understand why I’m here. I walked into Steve Beard’s bedroom and shot him in his sleep.”
The twins, too, remembered Steve.
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