She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [3]
In years to come when her children asked about their biological mothers, Nancy offered few clues. Celeste once asked for her adoption papers, but Nancy refused. “They were mine, not hers,” she says. To Cole, Nancy said he was the offspring of a wife beater and a prostitute she’d given five dollars not to have an abortion. “Mom could be brutal,” says Cole. “She told me, ‘You’re with us because your real mother didn’t love you.’ I don’t know why she adopted us. She’d say, ‘I don’t love you, either.’”
Nancy and Edwin would later disagree about where the discord in the family originated. He described her as unstable, while she pointed an accusing finger at him. “In those years, Ed was clean-cut, every hair in place,” she says. “The shop was immaculate. But he kept me in the dark, at work, at home. He had secrets.”
Just what life was like inside the small ranch house on a cul-de-sac where the Johnson brood lived would also remain a source of dispute. Nancy would later paint a picture of suburban tranquility. “We baked cookies, went rock hunting. I took the children to Disneyland, twice,” she says. “We sang and danced.”
Yet, her children recounted few of those carefree days.
“Dad was strange and Mom was always troubled,” says Celeste’s younger sister, Caresse. “She had psychological problems. It wasn’t a happy place. Not ever.”
One of Cole’s earliest memories was terrifying. At five or six, he was in the bathtub with his brother and sisters when his mother held them underwater. “It was scary. It was like she was rinsing our hair, but she held us down too long,” he says.
Afterward, Nancy briefly went to a psychiatric hospital. “I’d suffered a breakdown,” she says. “I’d been taking diet pills, and I was under a lot of stress and had insomnia. At the time, I was thinking of a Bible passage, ‘To wash away sins.’ But I never hurt my children. I would never do that.”
After treatment, Nancy returned home to care for her brood. Edwin was gone much of the day at the shop. “We had four kids. It was a full-time commitment to keep beans on the table,” he says. When he talks of Celeste, it’s in glowing terms; she was “Daddy’s baby” and “a sweet child.”
Following their parents’ religious bent, the children attended West Valley Christian Academy. From the beginning, Celeste was a precocious child and in the program for the gifted. One year she drew greeting cards and sent them to patients in a nearby hospital. At the state fair, she and Cole entered their baked goods, cakes and cookies, and came home with ribbons. She had a wholesome, apple-cheeked look and bright, intelligent blue eyes. Everything—from her clothing to the room she shared with Caresse—was her favorite color, pink, making her the stereotypic, perfect, sweet little girl.
Cute and playful, Celeste charmed her parents. Even as a child she understood the power of a well-placed compliment. The year she turned twelve, Celeste told Edwin that a friend of hers had pointed at him and wanted to know who “that handsome guy is.”
“I told her, ‘He’s my dad,’” Celeste said. Decades later, Edwin’s voice grew emotional and proud at the memory.
In 1976, in honor of the country’s bicentennial, Edwin helped her write a speech, and Nancy made her a red, white, and blue shirt. During her performance, Eddy marveled at the way Celeste controlled the audience of parents, students, and teachers. “Celeste gave the most persuasive speeches,” he says. “She could convince people of absolutely anything.”
Yet, little Celeste Johnson had another side, one her brothers describe as frightening and calculating. “One minute she would do everything for you, bend over backward,” says Eddy. “Then she’d turn horrible, mean, positively psycho.”
When they were four small children competing for their busy parents’ attention, Cole describes Celeste as the family instigator, manipulating the others into acts that landed them