She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [41]
In April of that year, when the girls were fifteen, after just two years of marriage, Kathryn filed for divorce. Later, she’d say Craig was drinking and taking methamphetamines. He’d become sullen and angry. Hoping she’d come back to him, Craig joined AA, quit drinking, cut out the drugs, and went for counseling. With Jennifer, he moved into a small apartment. It was during that time that Celeste and Craig began talking. “I called Kristina a lot,” says Jennifer. “That’s how it got started.” Before long they were on the telephone nightly. When she heard, Cherie was concerned. Whenever Celeste entered her son’s life, something bad happened.
“They were even making plans to take the girls to Disney World that fall,” says Jeff. “Celeste was married to Steve, but she wanted to see Craig. It was the typical old stuff.”
Yet, Craig continued to be morose. At times he cried, telling Jennifer he missed Kathryn. To Jeff, he said he couldn’t survive another divorce. “I told him it wouldn’t be that way, that Kathryn wasn’t Celeste,” says Jeff. “But he didn’t believe me.”
Everyone around him knew Craig was deeply depressed in the summer of 1996. Cherie tried to talk to him, but to no avail. Jennifer panicked when her father missed one of her softball games. It was the first time Craig wasn’t in the stands. When she got home, he admitted he was thinking about suicide.
With the trip to her grandfather’s approaching, Jennifer refused to go, afraid of what might happen unless she was there to watch over her father. Craig insisted and promised he’d be all right. “I believed him,” she says.
The day after she arrived, Jennifer called home, but Craig didn’t answer. Cherie called, too, and got no response. For nearly two days Craig’s phone rang without an answer. Finally, on July 19, 1996, Cherie pounded on his door. When he didn’t open it, she went to the landlord and returned with a key. Her heart pounding, she walked in and saw blood splattered against a wall. “I didn’t go any farther. I knew,” she says.
Craig’s dad tried to break the horrible news to his granddaughters gently, but there was no way to soften the blow. Immediately, Jennifer screamed, “No,” over and over, while Kristina tried to comfort her. Later, Jennifer wouldn’t remember anything about that afternoon, except Kristina whispering in her ear, “Jen, I’m so sorry.”
On his death certificate, the cause was listed as a contact gunshot wound to the head; suicide. Craig had left behind letters to Cherie and Jennifer, saying he simply wasn’t strong enough to keep fighting. “He said God didn’t hear him, and he couldn’t handle it anymore,” says Jeff.
Cherie and Jeff, however, would never agree with the finding of suicide. “We always believed Celeste pushed him to do it,” says Jeff. “That she was the last person he talked to, and that she told him she was married to a rich man who could take care of the girls better than he could. Celeste may not have pulled the trigger, but she loaded the gun.”
Later, Celeste would tell her mother, Nancy, that she did talk to Craig the day he died, but insisted that “if she’d known, she would have stopped him.”
The day after the body was discovered, Celeste rushed to California to claim the girls. Jennifer was in shock. “When I was with my dad, everything was all right,” she says. Of her mother, she says, “She frightened me.”
In the small town of Stanwood, where he’d lived, Craig’s remains were cremated. The Bratchers so hated Celeste that Jeff went to the police and cautioned them to keep her away from the funeral. “I told them that if I saw her, I’d kill her,” he says.
Perhaps they relayed the message, for Celeste dropped the girls at the funeral but didn’t go inside. Something, however, did happen that day to