She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [20]
For the first time in their young lives, the girls were separated, and they missed each other dearly. Still, Celeste wasn’t satisfied. While Craig fought for Kristina, she wanted Jennifer. “The phone rang at the house, and it would be her,” says Jen. “She’d laugh and say she was going to take me away from my dad, that she’d get even with us for what we did to her. Once she told me that she had cancer and tried to make me feel sorry for her.”
After she had Kristina, Celeste changed her phone number. For months Craig was unable to call. When he finally got through, Kristina told him she loved him and missed him, but then he heard Celeste in the background, ordering Kristina to tell him she didn’t love him. At first Kristina said nothing; then she mumbled something into the telephone.
“You don’t ever want to live with your dad again, do you?” Craig heard Celeste prod.
Eventually he stopped calling.
Six months after the Thompsons’ sentencing, on November 27, 1992, Celeste returned to Phoenix on the insurance fraud charges. In the courtroom, Kristina sat beside her mother as the Thompsons watched from the gallery. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew Celeste had done something to cause them trouble,” says Kristina. “I couldn’t talk to them with Celeste there. So I didn’t even look at them.”
In his report to the court, Detective Phillips painted a damning picture of a woman who cared for no one but herself. He’d discovered Celeste had devastated lives wherever she’d gone and had a record of twelve insurance claims, each for an escalating amount. Nothing—not even her children, it appeared—mattered to Celeste as much as money.
As always, Celeste told a very different story that day to the judge, one in which she was a victim, not a predator. After her sad account of abuse at the hands of her parents and Craig, Celeste deflected responsibility for the offense by blaming a nameless attorney she said had advised her to inflate her report. Finally, she argued that she had a young daughter to support and—the key issue—she’d left Arizona. “She basically said, ‘I won’t bother you anymore. I’m Texas’s problem now,’” says Phillips. “And the judge bought it.”
As Craig predicted, Celeste received no jail time. Instead, the judge gave her two hundred hours of community service, four years’ probation, and ordered her to pay $20,000 to the insurance companies, then set her free to “proceed to the state of Texas.”
That day in the courtroom, Phillips shook his head in disgust. “I knew that woman wasn’t any good and that she’d only get worse,” he says. “I never kept files on old cases. I made an exception with Celeste. I kept those files until I retired, because I had no doubt I’d hear her name again, and the next time it would be for something truly bad.”
A month later Jimmy took Celeste and Kristina to spend the holidays with his family in El Paso. Kristina enjoyed the warmth of his large extended family. One night as they watched the news, a reporter warned the public to beware of con artists, people who weren’t what they seemed. That’s what my mom is, Kristina thought. She hurts everyone.
In Austin, Celeste first waitressed at the Springhill Restaurant, north of the city in a suburb called Pflugerville. A red clapboard structure with a saloon-shaped facade, it had a menu featuring chicken-fried steak, fried catfish, and burgers. Then, in early 1993, she applied at the exclusive Austin Country Club, where the city’s wealthy played tennis, golfed, dined, and mingled. Her first day working the main dining room opened up a new world for Celeste, one of money and prestige, a world she’d soon make her own.
Founded in 1899, the club was the first of its kind in