Within hours of Steve’s death Celeste left a message on the home voice mail of C.W. Beard, his cousin and banker in Dallas. “Steve’s dead,” she said. “I want to be put on his bank accounts right away. I have bills to pay.”
When C.W. got the message, he called Becky. By then the bad news was filtering through the family. “We didn’t even know our dad was back in the hospital,” says Paul. “Celeste never told us.”
The loss hit all of them hard as they looked back at the final years of their father’s life. They’d had so little time with him since their mother’s death. With Celeste pushing them away, they’d felt like outsiders. When they tried to visit, she always had reasons why it wouldn’t work. “I knew she was behind the shooting,” says Paul. “She wanted him dead, and she found someone to kill him.”
That Saturday, after Steve was gone, Jennifer called Anita and told her the bad news. Anita did what she’d grown up doing when a friend had a death in the family; she bought two pies and went directly to the Toro Canyon house to console the family. She thought the house would be filled with friends and family; instead she found the twins and their boyfriends making phone calls to tell people about Steve’s death while Celeste, in her chenille robe, smoked on the patio. After the incident with the telephone, she was in a foul mood.
“Those kids better do what I tell them,” she snapped. “The money’s all mine now. If they don’t do what I want them to, I’ll leave it all to the dogs.”
“Celeste, you don’t mean that.”
“Sure, I do. And I’m going to spend every penny I can.”
When Anita asked about the plans for the funeral services, Celeste frowned. “I’m not going to do anything but a small funeral,” she said. “I don’t want Steve’s damn kids in my house.”
“You have to do something. People will be expecting it,” Anita argued. She suggested a small luncheon at the club following the funeral service, for family and close friends. “I’ll even take care of setting it up for you.”
Reluctantly, Celeste agreed.
That afternoon, Christopher put in a call for Brett Spicer, a deputy with the Sheriff’s Department who’d sometimes worked security for the Beards. The twins were worried, afraid that with Steve gone, Tracey might show up at the house. When Spicer talked to Celeste, she was unconcerned. “I’ve talked to my therapist about it,” she said. “Tracey’s more likely to kill herself than to come after us.”
Still, she told Spicer to bring in security, “so the girls feel safe.”
At the house that night, with their adoptive father dead only hours, Celeste put the twins to work. Along with Justin and Christopher, they cleaned Steve’s closet, taking everything he owned to a Goodwill bin except what she was burying him in and a few things she wanted to send to Steve III. The following night, when Spicer arrived, he found piles of boxes spread throughout the formal dining room with the names of family and friends on the outside. Inside were Steve’s personal possessions, the things he loved. When they had it all organized, Celeste chose who received what. Then Jennifer and Christopher hauled the boxes to the PakMail store to be shipped. Within forty-eight hours of Steve’s death, Celeste had removed nearly every trace of him from the house he’d so lovingly built.
“You need to figure out what part Celeste played in this,” Paul Beard urged Detective Wines on the phone the Monday morning following his father’s death.
“I can’t tell you about the investigation,” Wines said. “All I can say is we’re working the case.”
What he didn’t want to and couldn’t tell Paul was that the case was deeply in trouble. Early that morning he’d gone to the District Attorney’s Office to talk to Bill Mange, the prosecutor. With nearly four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, Mange explained that he’d wait for an autopsy to decide if Steve’s death was related to the homicide. If so, the charges against Tracey could be upgraded to murder. Then Mange, a thin man with sloping shoulders and a big-toothed grin, got very serious. “You did talk to Steve Beard, didn’t you? You interviewed him before he died?”
Bristling under Mange’s steady gaze, Wines admitted that he’d never gone back to the hospital to talk to him. He’d been waiting for Steve to be released. Wines had planned to attempt to talk to him when he was healthy.
“You never interviewed the victim?” Mange blustered. “You let that woman bully you into not doing what you had every right to do?”
“I guess I did,” Wines admitted, knowing immediately that he’d made a mistake he would never have the opportunity to repair. Mange simply shook his head in disgust. Later Wines would say that when it came to the Beard investigation, the cooperation between the D.A.’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department ended that day.
Hours later Mange was even angrier. After going through the materials Wines had left with him, he was appalled by the lack of care the investigation had been given. At first he thought there might be other crime scene photos, which weren’t included in the packet. He went so far as to call the crime scene officer on duty that day. “You must have a roll of film you didn’t develop,” he said. “Where are the photos of the crime scene?”
“You have everything,” the deputy said. “That’s all they told me to take.”
Mange was furious. Wines hadn’t made a diagram of the house and the crime scene. While he had access to the house, he hadn’t conducted a test to see if the sound of the gunshot carried to the guest wing, where Kristina awoke to find her mother standing at the door. Instead of photos of the bloody sheets and the blood spray against the wall—in an investigation like this he usually had dozens—he had one photo of blood on the bed and a stack of photos of Hummel figurines and the homes’ opulent furnishings. Mange blamed Wines. Although he’d worked with the detective on other cases and found him to be thorough, he judged that in this case he’d allowed himself to be distracted by the Beards’ wealth, losing his focus on the crime. Perhaps when Steve Beard seemed to be recovering he’d given the case a lower priority. And then there was Burton, the formidable criminal defense attorney. “He’d allowed his presence to intimidate the investigation. It never should have happened,” says Mange. “Rick was usually a good cop, and he was a good guy. I liked him. He just did a bad job on this case.”
The mistake couldn’t be undone. Steve was dead. Celeste had withdrawn the consent to search and disposed of the mattress, repainted the walls, and replaced the carpeting. Everything was gone. Mange didn’t think it could get much worse, but he was wrong. That afternoon an e-mail circulated from Ronnie Earle, Travis County’s district attorney, saying he wanted to meet with the prosecutor working the Beard case. Now Mange knew he not only had a botched investigation, but a high-profile one.
“Rich Oppel, the editor of the Statesman, called me about this case,” Earle said. “He knew Beard. How do we stand on this?”
Mange swallowed hard and then told him the truth. “We’ve got a mess,” he said, talking about the crime scene photos and Celeste’s bullying tactics. “We don’t even know what the victim had to say. We never asked him.”
Earle looked angry. “Work the case,” he told Mange. “And keep me informed.”
A snowstorm in Virginia kept Paul and his wife from flying out on Monday, and Celeste agreed to push the funeral back until that Wednesday, January 26. She was busy anyway. Early in the morning, she sent Kristina to the bank along with a signature card with Steve’s name on it to give Chuck Fuqua. When the teenager walked in and handed it to him, Fuqua was embarrassed for her. Later, a stack of checks would also pour into the bank dated January 22, the day Steve died, bearing his signature. It would seem that despite having spent much of the day unconscious, he’d somehow been able to sign the card and checks. Fuqua wasn’t buying it, but in truth it didn’t matter. With Steve dead, the trust kicked into effect, and he was no longer involved.
“I’ll accept the card but I can’t change anything,” he said. “Now that your father’s dead, it’s up to the trust department to administer the estate.”
When Kristina told Celeste, she was livid.
“That’s my money, not theirs,” she said. “We’ll see who controls it.”
When she called Fuqua to complain, he said only, “There’s nothing I can do.”
She was better off with Steve alive than with him dead, Fuqua thought after he hung up the telephone. Steve made decisions with his heart. The bank makes them by the book.
The business of death is a sad and often confusing one, with families rushing to make arrangements. Always a careful man, Steve had ensured that when he died that wouldn’t be the case. Years earlier, when he buried Elise, he planned his own funeral as well. Still, one unforeseen glitch appeared. Steve had chosen a beautiful mahogany casket, but in the years since, the policy at the funeral home had changed to only allow metal caskets in the mausoleum where he’d be interred in a crypt with his first wife. Bonita Thompson, a saleswoman from Cook Walden Funeral Home, asked Celeste to come in to pick out a new one. Monday afternoon Celeste drove to the funeral home with the twins.
At Cook Walden, Thompson led them into a showroom, where she pointed out the choices. Celeste walked through and chose a casket for Steve. Then she turned to the twins. “While we’re here, why don’t you pick out your coffins?” she said.
Jennifer looked at Kristina in alarm. “No, we don’t want to do that,” she said.
Startled as well, Kristina protested, and both the girls turned to walk away. As teenagers, they didn’t want to ponder their own deaths. What they didn’t know was that their mother had been contemplating their deaths since their births. While at Timberlawn, she told a therapist that from the twins’ first years she kept special outfits in their closets, ones she considered their burial clothes.
“Come on,” Celeste said. “Pick them out.”
They refused.
“Then I’ll do it for you,” she said. With that, Celeste walked through until she stopped in front of a white casket with a lilac interior that shone pink.
“Pink’s my color,” she said to Thompson. “I’ll take one of these for myself and two for the girls.”
Steve’s obituary ran in the Statesman on Tuesday, January 25. After recounting the highlights of his life, from his military service to founding KBVO, it continued with a tribute from Celeste: “You were a truly gifted, generous, and strong man. You were my darling husband and you brought nothing but joy to my life, and I will love you and miss you forever.” Visitation began at two that afternoon and continued until nine that evening. Celeste didn’t attend.
“Don’t tell anyone, even Kristina, that I wasn’t there,” she told Jennifer. “They’ll just all think I left, that they missed me.”
Jennifer did as she was told, even taking Steve’s yellow rose boutonniere to the funeral home for Celeste. Jennifer rarely questioned her mother, and now she didn’t ask what was so important that she couldn’t go to her own husband’s wake.
At the funeral home, Jennifer looked down at Steve’s kind face in the casket. He looked so alive that she thought he must have been breathing. For a moment she waited, hoping he’d sit up and talk to her, or just open his eyes. Jen held the boutonniere in her hands but couldn’t bring herself to pin it on the sweater Celeste had chosen for him to wear, a gift they’d brought back from Australia. Instead, one of the funeral home attendants pinned it on while Jennifer sat by herself and cried over the second father she’d lost in three years.
As guests arrived, Kristina acted as hostess. The twins had rarely seen Amy since the shooting, but she came, as did Justin’s family. Many of Steve’s friends were there, including his employees from KBVO. Kristina handled the day like she’d handled much of her life with her mother: She tried not to think too carefully about any of it. Stunned, she talked to people and circulated through the crowd.
Making matters even more uncomfortable was the worry about what the people walking in were thinking. Along with the obituary, an article on Steve’s death had run in the Statesman that morning. In it, Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo announced the autopsy results: pulmonary embolism, a blood clot to the lungs, caused by months of inactivity. Bayardo ruled the blood clot a complication of the gunshot and listed the cause of death as homicide.
On the day of the funeral, Celeste went to Tramps to have her hair styled into a chic French twist. She brought Dawn Madigan with her. In the salon, her hairdresser, Denise, watched as Celeste pawed through the accessories and knickknacks. She carried them up to the counter by the handful. When they’d all been rung up, she signed a charge slip for $1,000 and handed the overflowing bag to Dawn as a gift. “I don’t know if Dawn wanted them or if Celeste just thought she should have them,” Denise said later.
On the way to the services, the limo was filled with Celeste, Dawn, the twins and their boyfriends. Celeste was animated and full of life, throwing her head back and laughing. “Pull over in Davenport Village,” she ordered the driver. “I want to stop at the pharmacy.”
At Northwest Hills Pharmacy, Celeste and the others left the car and ran inside. The twins assumed she had a last minute item to pick up. Instead she made her way to the pharmacist. “Now I own this place. It’s time for you people to kiss my ass like you kissed Steve’s,” she taunted. Then she turned and left.
In the limo again, she chuckled as if she’d just pulled off a great coup. “Did you see her face?” she said, laughing even harder.
They drove around Austin, then north to the funeral home. As if someone had turned a switch, when the limo pulled into the parking lot, Celeste stopped laughing. As she emerged from the limo for the 11:00 A.M. service, she had tears in her eyes. Two hundred people, most Steve’s friends, attended. Paul, still snowed in, couldn’t be there, but Steven III held up his cell phone so he could listen to the eulogy. During the sermon the minister—the same one who’d performed their wedding five years earlier—talked about Steve and his many talents as a businessman and a father. Then he turned the subject to his marriage to Celeste. “Yes, they had the differences all couples do, but they loved each other dearly. After he lost Elise, I saw Celeste bring Steve out of his depression,” he said. As he spoke those words, Celeste dabbed at tears while one of Steve’s closest friends walked out.
It was when the minister said, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” that Kristina finally cried. The last week had been a hell for her, losing Steve and worrying about her safety and that of her mother and sister. She couldn’t take any more. Justin wrapped his arm around her to comfort her.
After the service the twins and Celeste were alone with Steve’s body before they closed the casket. Jennifer and Kristina walked up to say their last good-byes. Then they tucked two small gifts into the casket, a small photo album of all of them together during happy times and a teddy bear they’d given him in the hospital. When it was Celeste’s turn, she, too, had brought something for Steve to carry into eternity. From her bag she pulled a small bottle of Wolfschmidt vodka.
“For the trip,” she said, slipping it in beside him and smiling.
In the limo as they followed the hearse to the mausoleum, Celeste laughed again. “Did you see what I put in his coffin?” she said. Then she bragged about buying the trip insurance. “I knew we’d never go.”
Steve’s adult children kept their distance at the funeral, hanging back and watching their stepmother. That night they were on Celeste’s mind. “The attorneys are such chickens they haven’t told Steve’s kids they aren’t getting anything,” she snickered to Brett Spicer, when he was on security duty at the house. “Under Steve’s will, I get every penny.”
Later Spicer would return to his office and tell Wines about the evening. “She didn’t appear at all sad,” he said.
Boxes from Celeste began arriving the day after the funeral at the homes of many of Steve’s friends. When Gus Voelzel unpacked his, he found Steve’s stuffed and mounted jackalope, a jackrabbit head with antlers attached. He and Steve had laughed about it together when they’d first met. McEachern’s box held Steve’s beloved KBVO license plates. Others received crystal snifters and martini glasses. It was a grand gesture many found thoughtful. Yet, they wondered why Celeste was doing it. Did she simply want them to have something to remember him by? Or did she want them to think well of her, to discount all the rumors about her involvement in Steve’s murder?
Days after the funeral, Celeste arrived at Studio 29 early, before the shop opened, in her bathrobe and lamb’s wool slippers, to have her hair done. She hoisted her black-and-white cocker spaniel, Nikki, onto the counter while she talked to Donna. The dog urinated, and Celeste laughed. “Oh, well,” she giggled.
As Joseph cut Celeste’s hair, Donna listened in. “People are being so mean. They all think I was involved,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t.”
“Yes they do,” she whined, saying she’d just gotten back from a meeting with her bankers in Dallas. “They’re trying to put me on a budget. They think I don’t need five telephone lines and that I ought to be able to live on ten thousand dollars a month. I told them next time I go to Dallas I want them to put all my money in a room, every bit of it, so I can sit there and look at it.”
Donna smiled, envisioning Celeste doing just that in her Chanel suit with her Gucci sunglasses and dripping in diamonds.
At Charles Burton’s office, Celeste called often, worried that she was a suspect. She called so often, she told friends Burton had threatened to drop her as a client.
“I don’t know why the police department would think I was involved,” she told Brett Spicer, the deputy she had working off-duty as security at the house. “I hate Tracey for what she did. I hate her so much I have dreams where I’m running over her with my car.”
What she didn’t mention was that she was still meeting Tracey at the park two to three days a week. Somehow, despite changing the phone numbers three times, Tracey always seemed able to get the new unlisted numbers.
“Put your mother on the telephone,” Tracey told Jennifer one day.
Jennifer hung up. When she asked her mother about it, Celeste just shrugged.
“I know she’s still talking to Tracey,” Jen told Christopher. “I see her number on the caller ID.”
In Dallas, the bankers questioned Celeste’s household expenses and refused to pay the way they had before Steve died. Once, she called one of the bank officers and claimed to have breast cancer. “I need money,” she said. When the woman refused, she screamed. “I’m going to cut off my fucking breast and mail it to you.”
Trying to mediate, David Kuperman came out to the Toro Canyon house to explain to Celeste the way the trust worked. She was entitled to disbursements from the trust’s income. With the stock market down and Davenport Village not yet fully leased, that would be between $10,000 and $15,000 a month. Under the terms of the estate, the bank, he said, would pay off the mortgages on both the house and the lake house, so her monthly stipend would only need to cover her living expenses.
Celeste was incensed. She wasn’t to be calmed, even when Kuperman explained she could easily sell the lake house and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to cover extra expenses.
“That’s my money!” she screamed. “My money! Not the bank’s!”
A second Dallas meeting with Bank of America didn’t leave her in any better a mood. “The bank has the sole discretion on the distribution of the funds,” Janet Hudnall, the officer in charge of the trust, informed her. “With the house paid off, you can expect about fifteen thousand dollars a month.”
While she had Celeste there, Hudnall questioned her about the expenses incurred while Steve was in the hospital, including the $74,000 check to Jimmy. Confronted, Celeste admitted it had been inflated. On a sheet of paper, Hudnall then added up the expenses that were out of line, including an $80,000 eight-carat diamond Celeste bought for herself, claiming the stone had been ordered by Steve before the shooting. Hudnall didn’t know that the Christmas before, Celeste had asked for such a diamond and Steve had refused to buy it, but the banker had her suspicions. By the time she was done, the banker had a chart that showed that in four months Celeste had spent $717,610 of Steve’s estate. At that rate she’d work her way through his fortune in five years.
Days later Hudnall called with more bad news for Celeste. After reviewing the checks she’d written over the previous months, the bank was charging many of the items—including the check she’d written to Jimmy Martinez—against the $500,000 onetime payment she was entitled to under Steve’s will. Celeste had unwittingly used up her security cushion, thrown it away on needless house repairs.
With the bank coming down hard on her, money was all Celeste talked about. To raise funds, she sent Jennifer to return racks of her clothes hanging in the master closet, things she’d bought that still had the tags affixed, to Talbots, Dillard’s, and Foley’s. In all, Jen returned so many of Celeste’s unworn clothes that they totaled $20,000. Yet the clothes had been bought so long ago, she was given only store credits.
She also began talking about suing HealthSouth for malpractice, claiming unsanitary conditions there caused Steve’s death. When her hands broke out in a nasty infection just days after his death, Celeste had Justin photograph the ugly sores, saying the photo proved Steve died of an infection, because she’d contracted it from him. Justin had no way of knowing that the photo could one day be used as evidence of something vastly different: not that Steve infected Celeste, but that she might have done as she threatened, purposely infecting him.
Little about Celeste’s behavior seemed to make sense that February. While she threw away money with abandon, she schemed to find ways not to have to pay bills. In early February she went up to Studio 29 and called the police. “I don’t want the cops in my house,” she told Donna. “Last time they were there they tore the place up.”
When they arrived, she told them that the maid had stolen from her, that her white gold Baume & Mercier watch with the diamonds was missing. The officer took the report and said he’d talk to the woman. After he left, Celeste turned to Donna and laughed. “Now I won’t have to pay the lazy bitch unemployment.”
With the girls’ nineteenth birthday approaching, at first Celeste said she’d take them to New Orleans, then backed out. “The bank won’t give me money,” she said. That year, Celeste failed to even give the girls birthday cards.
Perhaps Celeste was beginning to realize what Chuck Fuqua had known all along—that she had been better off with Steve alive than with him dead. Without him, she was at the mercy of a faceless bank, one that didn’t succumb to ravings or sad stories. That, coupled with the constant stares from those who believed she was responsible for Steve’s death, must have seemed overwhelming. She talked often about the newspaper article that questioned her involvement, and her name came up often on the radio talk shows, usually followed by the word murder.
On February 9, little more than two weeks after Steve’s death, Celeste called the twins from the lobby of Studio 29, ordering them to meet her there. When they arrived, she sat on a bench, glassy-eyed. Worried, Kristina and Justin sat beside her, while Jennifer and Christopher knelt at her feet.
“Tracey and I made a pact that when things got too tough, we’d kill ourselves together,” she told them. “I don’t want to die alone. Will all of you die with me?”
None of the kids answered. Weeks earlier she’d bought the girls and herself coffins. Now she wanted them to agree to kill themselves. While Jennifer fought back the terror building inside her, Christopher simply changed the subject. They left the salon that day acting as if nothing had just happened.
A week later Celeste wasn’t talking about suicide anymore. By then she had a new plan, and a new friend she’d enlisted to erase all her problems.