I hired someone to kill Tracey. The words echoed in Kristina’s mind. Suddenly, so many things became clear. She’d spent a lifetime yearning for a storybook mother, loving and kind. Instead she’d been born to Celeste, who’d told Jennifer and Christopher, “I could physically kill Kristina.” She’d even bought them both caskets. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Celeste might have planned for them. For the first time, Kristina believed her mother was capable of anything, even murder. And if that were true, it wasn’t hard to conclude she was behind Steve’s death. Tracey Tarlton squeezed the trigger, but Kristina realized her mother must have put her up to it.
When Kris told Christopher about the tape and her mother’s words, he said, “You need to talk to Jen.”
“I think Mom murdered Steve,” she told her twin when they met.
Finally, Jennifer thought. Finally you understand.
“I do, too,” Jen said. “Kristina, we have to tell the police, and we can’t go home. We can never talk to Celeste, never see her again.”
Kristina nodded. “I know,” she said.
The two sisters held each other and cried, over their lost childhoods and a mother who’d never known how to love them.
The following day the twins told Anita what they now believed, that Celeste was behind Steve’s murder. At first Anita seemed doubtful. Her faith had been shaken in Celeste when she learned that rather than going to Timberlawn, as she’d told her, she had gone to New Orleans to party with Donna Goodson. Still, lying about where she went was a long way from murder. Yet, as the girls talked, things started to make sense. She’d noticed how Steve always got drunk when they visited him at home, and he didn’t when they were at a restaurant. When the girls told her about the Everclear and sleeping pills, she saw the explanation. Then they asked her what had happened to the $30,000 in Social Security money Celeste had invested with her for them.
“Mom said you lost all our money in the stock market,” Kristina said. “Did you?”
“No,” Anita said, pulling out the file from a drawer. There, they saw recorded the withdrawal their mother had made; at a time when she was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes and jewels for herself, Celeste had emptied their accounts.
If the money had been there, it might have served as a cushion, to help them hide. But it was gone. The girls were frightened. Where would they go? How would they live? Being on the run would take money, and they had none. It was then that Kristina decided to do something she’d later regret. Months earlier, Celeste had told them they could have the money from the sale of Steve’s Cadillac, to invest and use to pay tuition. Earlier that month, Kristina had sold the car for $21,000. Over the coming days, Kristina would write checks against a joint checking account she had with Celeste for that sum, money she and Jennifer could use to hide.
Just days later, at four-fifteen, on the afternoon of Friday, April 7, Bill Mange walked into the lobby at the D.A.’s Office to greet Christopher for the interview he had scheduled. Instead, he found not only Christopher and his attorney, but Justin with his attorney, and both Kristina and Jennifer with their attorney.
“We all want to tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “And I’d like to go first.”
“Let’s get started,” Mange said.
That day and the days that followed, the prosecutor let the teens tell their stories. Then he slowly questioned each about specific points. With Christopher, the interview took little over an hour. For the first time, Mange heard about Celeste’s bizarre behavior the night of the shooting, from sending them to the lake house, to dropping off Meagan and ordering them not to mention Tracey’s name. “I thought Celeste was involved from the beginning,” Christopher said. “Lots of things made her look guilty.”
When Justin began his statement, Mange listened carefully. While Christopher had been animated and forceful, Kristina’s boyfriend gave a deliberate recounting, point for point, of all that had happened since he’d first met Celeste, including her affair with Jimmy Martinez. Mange judged that Justin had been thinking long and hard about Celeste’s involvement and that the teenager felt like the dams were opening, all his suspicions finally free to spill out. Justin, it appeared, didn’t want to leave out anything potentially important. Before he left that afternoon, Mange had in his hands the evidence the boys had brought with them: Celeste’s journals, cards from Tracey, and even her secret personal calendar. After they left, Mange paged through the cards, including the one in which Tracey remarked on Celeste’s “long, slender body.”
Taking it all in, Mange felt sure Celeste was involved. Still, he wondered, was there enough evidence to seek an indictment? No, he thought. Not yet.
“We believe our mother was in on it,” Jennifer told him two days later, when she and Kristina returned for their interviews. “She put Tracey up to murdering our dad.”
As Mange listened, Jennifer described her mother’s ruthlessness and the callous way she’d treated Steve. To Celeste, Mange was learning, nothing was more important than money. “I saw her signing Steve’s name to checks,” Jennifer said. “We were all afraid to tell Steve anything, afraid she’d come after us if we did.”
When it was finally her turn, Kristina added other facts to the mix. Justin, Christopher, and Jennifer had all already told him about the Everclear and sleeping pills, but they didn’t understand the extent of Celeste’s actions. “She called the drinks the ‘Graveyard,’” Kristina said, frowning. “She laughed about it.”
Finally, Kristina handed over to Mange her stash of audio tapes of Celeste’s phone calls. The first she played—the conversation about Donna—sent chills through him. “I hired someone to kill Tracey,” Celeste said on the tape.
“Play that again,” Mange said.
Just like the first time, he heard Celeste say, “I hired someone to kill Tracey.”
It was there, recorded, Celeste’s admission that she’d solicited Tracey’s murder. Why did Celeste want Tracey dead? To shut her up, Mange thought.
“I didn’t want to believe our mom was involved,” Kristina told him, crying. “All my life she’s done bad things, but this was just too horrible. Are you going to arrest her?”
Mange wasn’t sure exactly what he had yet. Was there enough evidence for a murder charge, for solicitation of murder? It was something he’d have to take a close look at. “I’m not going to do anything until I’m sure I can take her into a courtroom and make the charges stick,” he said. “Let me look into this, and we’ll talk again.”
One thing had come through loud and clear during his interviews with all the teenagers: They were terrified of Celeste. Both girls cried when they talked about the caskets and Celeste’s admission: “I could physically kill Kristina.” Since that night, they’d been in hiding. Mange didn’t ask how he could reach them. He didn’t want to know. “I’ll call your attorneys to get messages to you,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
Then Kristina said something that brought home to him just how helpless she felt. “I’m afraid to see my mom on the street. If I do and she tells me to, I’ll get in the car and drive away with her,” she said, crying. “I do what she tells me to do. I always have.”
“Would you get in the car, too?” Mange asked Jennifer.
“No,” Jen said. “Not me.”
The prosecutor realized that although the twins were identical in appearance, they were very different people, especially when it came to their mother.
The possibility that Celeste would find them was a real one. For days she’d been searching, showing up at Jennifer’s orthodontist’s office and trying to get their schedules at Concordia, where they were both taking classes. The phone rang repeatedly at Anita’s house, and Kristina heard their mother screaming into the answering machine. She’d called Jimmy, asking him to help look for the girls, and she’d hired a private investigator. Justin, Christopher, and Amy had all noticed him shadowing them.
“I’m not strong enough to say no to her,” Kristina told Mange. “She’d tell me her side and I’d believe her. I can’t risk that.”
“Then hide,” he said. Writing down his home phone number on the back of his business card, he handed it to her. “And call me if you need help.”
After they left, Mange considered what he’d just learned: Celeste had a contract on Tracey’s life. He walked to the office of Rosemary Lehmberg, the first assistant district attorney. “You have to let Tracey know,” she said. “She has to be protected.”
Mange put in a call for Wines. After they talked, the phone rang in the office of Keith Hampton, Tracey’s attorney. “We have reason to believe your client’s life is in danger, that there may be a hit out on Ms. Tarlton,” Wines said. “We’ll have police drive by to check on her house, but you need to warn her to watch her back.”
When Tracey heard, she called Celeste.
“It’s the twins,” Celeste told her. “They’re mad at you for killing their father. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
The next day, Celeste and Tracey met at their bench in the park. Celeste was distraught and crying. “The girls have turned me in,” she said. Tracey had just learned someone wanted to kill her, yet she found herself comforting Celeste, who rambled on about the girls and the atrocities that were taking over her life. On top of everything, she claimed she had breast cancer. “I’m going to go to California to live with my sister, Caresse,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll come back.”
The months since the shooting had been a hell for Tracey. She was plagued by guilt and feared each time the phone rang that it would be more bad news. She missed Celeste and she worried about her. To Tracey, it appeared her lover was slowly crumbling under the weight of what they had done. And now cancer.
“I understand,” Tracey said.
“I should hire a hitman to kill Tracey Tarlton,” Celeste said to her therapist a few days later. “She’s ruined my life.”
“Celeste, don’t go there,” Hauser told her. “That’s not good judgment.”
Throughout the session, Celeste raged against what she described as the treachery of the twins. They’d stolen money and jewelry, she claimed. “I’m embarrassed that they’re lying and committing crimes. It reflects on me, as a mother.”
“I think you ought to go back to Timberlawn,” Hauser said. Celeste agreed, and left a few days later.
At Timberlawn, Gotway tried to disarm the hatred overflowing from Celeste toward the twins. At times she cried, saying she feared that they had fled from her life forever as she’d fled from her own mother. Other times, she succumbed to verbal rampages, blaming them, especially Kristina, for all of her problems.
She wrote the twins a letter: “I’m typing this letter to you because I can no longer write. I am falling a lot, too … I understand that you are growing up and want to be on your own. I can accept that. I can’t accept your hiding from me. You both are tearing me up inside … I verbally abused you and I am deeply sorry. I was hoping you would be an adult, accept my apology and realize that I was sick. It will never happen again … If I do not hear from you by Friday, I will know that the path you chose is to be out of my life. You will leave me no choice but to cancel your insurance, gas cards, phones, and OnStar … I love you more than anything and would do absolutely anything for you… I love you both,”
The signature was barely a scratch, “Mom.”
Twelve days after she checked back into Timberlawn, Celeste returned to Austin. By then nothing in her world was the same. While she was gone, Donna Goodson had packed her possessions into her Buick Regal and taken off for Florida. “I figured I was next,” she says. “I was scared shitless Celeste would hire someone to kill me.”
Her fears were no less real than the twins’.
“Your mother says she has the gun loaded and she’s going to kill herself tonight if you don’t go home,” Peggy Farley, Kristina’s former therapist, told her one day.
When Kristina explained to Farley that they couldn’t go home, that they were afraid of their mother, Farley offered to let them stay with her family on their ranch. Kristina agreed, and when the twins arrived, Justin and Christopher came with them.
It was easy for Farley to see how frightened the teens were. On their first day there, Justin and Christopher disconnected the OnStar systems in the Cateras, afraid Celeste would use the signals to track them. But they still didn’t feel safe. With the money she’d brought, Kristina bought an old Jeep, one their mother wouldn’t recognize.
When Celeste left a message for Justin, they knew they’d done the right thing. “OnStar can’t find the girls, but I left a message with them for the girls,” she said. “Tell Kristina to push the OnStar button so they can get the message.”
Justin knew the minute the button was pushed, OnStar would have a fix on their location. “It would be like, gotcha,” he said.
As Farley talked to them about what happened, she sensed they’d all been through a terrible trauma. “The kids seemed overwhelmed,” she said later. “They talked about it all the time. They couldn’t seem to think of anything else.”
“Our mom was planning our deaths,” Kristina told her.
At night the twins were plagued by nightmares of their mother finding them and taking revenge. During the day, they were afraid to leave the ranch. While they were there, Christopher and Jennifer broke up. Jennifer would later say that she believed all the pressure was just too much for them.
Although Celeste had written in her letter from Timberlawn that she’d never again attempt to contact them, she enlisted the aid of the police in her search. In early May she left messages on Justin’s voice mail, threatening to turn the girls in to the police for taking Kaci and for stealing money. “Tell Kristina to call me today or I’m calling the police,” Celeste threatened. “This is the last warning.”
On May 5 she carried through on her threats, filing a report with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department that alleged Kristina and Jennifer had stolen from her—not only money, but jewelry worth tens of thousands of dollars. A deputy went out to the Toro Canyon house and took the complaint. When he got there, Celeste said she couldn’t open the safe but that she knew the jewelry was gone.
“They changed the combination,” she argued. “In effect, they robbed me of being able to get to it.” The deputy told her to contact a locksmith. When the safe was opened, three of the seven missing pieces were inside, and the deputy wrote up a complaint on the remaining four items.
“I can’t believe you’re falling for this,” Mange told the deputy when he heard. “She’s using you to get to the kids, to control them.”
“Maybe they took the stuff,” the deputy insisted.
“This woman is a suspect in a murder,” Mange told him. “Don’t help her find the kids. They’re terrified of her.”
Reluctantly, the deputy agreed.
Celeste wasn’t to be quieted. Days later the phone rang at Donna’s house. She’d just returned from Florida a week earlier, and wondered how Celeste knew.
“Come out to the house. I have a job for you,” Celeste said.
“Tell you what,” Donna countered. “Meet me at Baby Acapulco’s. You can buy lunch and we’ll talk.” Donna took one precaution; before she left the house, she told her mother who she was meeting and where, just in case she never came home.
In the busy, loud lunchtime crowd, Donna ate quesadillas and chips and listened to Celeste’s proposal. She was still afraid of her, but she was intrigued. Maybe there was a way to make more money. “I want you to find the girls,” Celeste said. “They’ve taken off with their cars, the dog, and some of my stuff.”
To find them, Celeste suggested Donna search through wedding announcements and make phone calls to their friends. The girls were standing up in a wedding that month, she wasn’t sure where. “Once you find them, call me and I’ll take over,” she said.
Donna wondered what Celeste had planned for the girls. To her, it didn’t sound good.
Celeste explained that she was willing to put Donna up in a hotel for a week, to let her use the telephone there to search. That way, she said, the calls wouldn’t be traceable to either of their homes. Donna, always looking for a little fun, agreed.
That day, Celeste checked Donna into the Red Lion Inn and left. As soon as she was out the door, Donna called a friend to join her. They watched pay-per-view movies, ordering champagne and dinner from room service.
She partied for a week, then called Celeste.
“I didn’t find them,” she said. “I’m going home.”
At the Farleys’ ranch, Jennifer and Justin watched Kristina, worried she might break down and call Celeste. When Justin played his voice mails with their mother ranting about missing them and wanting them home, Kristina cried. Sometimes Jennifer wondered how much more her sister could take before she picked up the telephone, dialed Celeste, and said, “Come get me.” They were so frightened that Justin took Kristina’s cell phone away from her.
“Kristina, this is it,” Jen said. “This is reality. Our mother is a murderer.”
The good days were the ones they spent working at the ranch. While there, they helped Peggy and her husband repair fences, lay down a floor, and remodel a bathroom. They’d never done such tasks before, but the work kept their minds off their mother and helped distract them from the very real possibility that at any moment Celeste could pull in the driveway and demand that they come home. Although legally adults, they were afraid she’d find a way to make them.
They called Bill Mange almost every day, hoping to hear that she’d been arrested. The news, however, was never good. After looking at the evidence, Mange feared that, despite everything the twins and their boyfriends had pulled together, the case he had against Celeste wouldn’t convince a jury. It was all circumstantial. What he needed was for Tracey Tarlton to implicate her. Then, he judged, he might have a case.
Tracey’s lawyer, Keith Hampton, hinted they had information to deal with. At one point he even asked for complete immunity for his client.
“What is this, Commit a Murder Free Week?” Mange scoffed. “Keith, that’s not on the table, and it never will be.”
After that, Hampton’s allusions to a deal stopped.
Despite everything, Tracey hadn’t had any second thoughts about standing by Celeste and taking the entire wrap for the killing. The innuendos about the possibility of a deal were her attorney’s idea, not hers. “I was determined to go down for this and not take Celeste with me,” she says. “I told him that wasn’t on the table.”
Still, although Celeste had never gone to California, Tracey rarely saw her. One day when they met outside BookPeople, Celeste railed at her, telling her that she’d lost the twins over the murder and that her life was in shambles. A few days later Celeste called, shrieking, “You’re just like everyone else! You don’t love me!”
Fearing Celeste was suicidal, Tracey drove to Toro Canyon and arrived just as Celeste pulled in. When she saw Tracey, Celeste slammed on the brakes. “Oh, my God, that’s the woman who murdered my husband,” she shouted to Dr. Dennison, who was supervising two yardmen nearby.
“Drive up to the house,” he said. “Nothing will happen with me here.”
Celeste pulled forward and Tracey followed. In front of the house, both cars stopped and the two women argued. “Get out of here. They’ll see you,” Celeste said. “And don’t come back. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Fine!” Tracey shouted.
“You can tell people whatever you want,” Celeste cried. “I can’t do this anymore.”
By then Bob Dennison was walking toward them. Angry and hurt, Tracey got back in her car and screeched out of the driveway. Without even thanking her neighbor, Celeste ran in the house.
After that day, it seemed to Tracey that the horror of what they had done was consuming them both. Yet, even with Celeste telling her she never wanted to see her again, Tracey didn’t question if what she’d done was right or why she’d done it. What happened next would change that.
The article in the Austin American Statesman ran on June 23, eight days after Tracey and Celeste argued in the driveway. Worried that Bill Mange wouldn’t be able to arrest Celeste, the girls had filed a request for a restraining order to keep her away from them. According to their affidavit, Celeste had contact with Tracey after the shooting, and Celeste had become increasingly unstable. They believed she was behind their father’s murder. But it was the final line in the second paragraph that Tracey read and reread that morning: “Kristina said she taped her mother saying that she had hired a hit-man to kill Tarlton. The tape has been turned over to investigators.”
At her house on Wilson that night, Tracey downed pills and drank the bottle of vodka Celeste had left behind. Later that night an ambulance pulled in front of the house on Wilson and Tracey was rushed to the hospital for yet another suicide attempt.
The twins’ secret tape recording was the talk of Austin. For months the city had speculated on Celeste’s involvement in her husband’s murder. Now Celeste, with her millions, was being accused by her own daughters of hiring a hit man. The twins were frantic with worry, knowing how vindictive their mother could be. They’d not only left her, but were working with the prosecutors.
The hearing for the restraining order was coming up, and they didn’t know if Celeste would be seated across from them as they testified, with the cold, hateful stare they both knew well. As Jennifer and Kristina took the stand that day, they were flanked by four uniformed, armed deputies. The twins scanned the courtroom. Their mother wasn’t there.
The twins’ testimony was riveting. Reporters jotted pages of notes as they recounted how Celeste had bought them caskets and been involved in the murder of their father. “We’re afraid of our mother,” Jennifer said. “Celeste drugged our father. She gave Steve sleeping pills and spiked his vodka.”
“When we were babies we had seizures,” Kristina testified. “I believe our mother not only used to poison our father but us.”
“Celeste loves her daughters,” her attorney argued. Yet, she did not contest the order.
That day was a victory for the girls. Judge John Hathaway granted the restraining order and ordered Celeste to pay $13,500 toward the twins’ legal fees. “You’re strong and courageous,” he told them. “Not only can she not come within two hundred yards of you, she can’t throw a spitball at you. She can’t use a gun or a knife; she can’t come anywhere near you or touch you in any way.”
Despite their victory in the courtroom and the judge’s assurances, the girls felt anything but safe.
Not even generating a headline was what happened at Donna Goodson’s house. One morning the police arrived with a search warrant. They took her computer, her zip drive, and pawn tickets. Although the audiotape had been played in open court, it wasn’t about involvement in a murder-for-hire. It was about four pieces of jewelry.
Months earlier, Celeste had reported the jewelry stolen, blaming the twins. Although the investigation had been dropped, an alert went out to pawnshops describing the pieces. A call came in regarding one of the pieces, a stunning diamond cocktail ring worth thousands. When deputies investigated, they found Donna had pawned it for a few hundred dollars. Pawn tickets found in the search turned up the remaining three pieces, including a pendant with the Dallas skyline encrusted with jewels, all in pawnshops on her way to Florida. Later, Donna argued that the jewelry was a gift, not stolen. “Celeste wanted me to take care of Tracey so bad, all I had to do was say I liked something and she gave it to me,” she says. “I didn’t have to steal anything.”
The day of the search, Donna was arrested and booked in the Travis County Jail on a probation violation. Since she’d pawned the items in Louisiana, they knew that she’d left Texas without permission. To her, the arrest was a relief. Ever since news of the audiotape had broken, she’d been looking over her back, watching faces, waiting for Celeste to strike. At times she thought it was imminent, like the week the windows on not only her car but her mother’s and her stepfather’s were smashed in their driveway. Another night she awoke to the crack of shotgun fire in front of her house. After that she moved her bed away from the window. “In jail I was safe,” she says. “For the first time in weeks, I knew she couldn’t get me.” Donna hated to leave jail ten days later, when a judge reinstated her probation. “From that point on, I watched my back,” she says.
Spurred by the twins’ testifying against their mother, that summer the older Beard children asked Kristina and Jennifer to join them in a wrongful death suit against Celeste, to keep her from squandering Steve’s fortune. They agreed. In August, seven months after Steve’s death, the girls came out of hiding long enough to take the witness stand in a hearing on the case. This time Celeste was in the courtroom. “We didn’t want to see her,” says Kristina. “We were scared.”
Newspaper, radio, and television reporters were all in the courtroom when Kristina took the stand. The testimony was grueling. As attorneys questioned them, the girls answered carefully, keeping their eyes averted from Celeste as they recounted the months leading up to and the night of the shooting. The following morning the lead sentence in the paper would recount the hamburger night at the Beard household, when Tracey slipped her arm over Celeste’s shoulder, then kissed her hard on her lips.
“Was it your impression that your mother and Tracey Tarlton were having an affair?”
“Yes,” Kristina said.
Unlike the protection hearing, this time Kristina also described the way Celeste threw away Steve’s money, testifying that she paid large sums to friends and to her ex-husband Jimmy Martinez for little work. In some cases the money came back to her, through refunds on overpayments. As it would every time she took the stand, on cross examination Kristina was questioned vigorously about the checks she’d cashed in the weeks following her decision to go into hiding.
“You violated your mother’s trust, didn’t you?” Celeste’s attorney challenged.
“I was doing what she said I should,” Kristina said. “And I had her power of attorney. She opened up a joint bank account and put me on it.”
Despite their fears, both the girls held up well, answering questions and not backing down. When they’d finished, however, it was evident how big a toll the testimony had taken on them. In a room behind the courtroom, they sat together, crying. Neither had looked her mother in the eye. That was something they weren’t yet ready to do. But they could feel her in the courtroom and knew how much she now hated them.
Over the next two days, the Beard children’s attorneys pulled in witnesses to show how Celeste was squandering Steve’s money.
“How much money did Mrs. Beard spend in the past seven months?” an attorney asked.
“Half a million dollars,” Janet Hudnall, a vice president of Bank of America, replied.
Celeste had gone through so much money, in fact, that she’d eaten up the $500,000 gift in Steve’s will.
“It’s gone?” asked the attorney.
“All of it,” said Hudnall.
Yet, Steve’s own actions served to undercut his children’s case. On the stand, David Kuperman testified not only that Steve approved many of the bills, but that he increased Celeste’s portion of the estate in the trust after the shooting, by adding Davenport Village II to the estate’s holdings. Still, the evidence was compelling, especially when Petra Mueller, the owner of Studio 29, took the stand and recounted how days before the shooting she overheard Celeste say that she wished Steve were dead.
Throughout the hearing, Celeste, carefully dressed and manicured, watched the proceedings from the chair beside her attorney. She showed little emotion, her eyes narrowing as so many spoke against her. Yet she never took the stand. Instead the twins’ attorney read part of a deposition Celeste had given earlier that summer. In it, one attorney questioned her about her meetings with Tracey. Celeste admitted that she’d met with Tracey once behind BookPeople, after Steve’s death. “I was distraught,” she said. “And I just wanted her to know I was losing my whole family.”
There she was, admitting she’d talked to the woman accused of murdering her husband. Astonishingly, Celeste insisted she didn’t ask Tracey the one question it seemed would be on her mind more than any other: Did you kill Steve?
On August 31 the judge came down with his ruling. Citing insufficient evidence, he ruled against the Beard children and refused to stop Celeste from spending the money in the estate while they pursued other action against her.
In the newspaper article on the hearing, Steven III was quoted as saying that the criminal investigation into his father’s murder continued. But it was something else, something near the end of the article, that caught Tracey’s interest: The reason Celeste hadn’t been at the twins’ protective hearing in July was that she’d gone to Aspen, on her honeymoon.
Tracey had never heard of Celeste’s fifth husband, Spencer Cole Johnson. A thirty-eight-year-old bartender and carpenter, he’d been introduced to Celeste by Donna that spring while they bar-hopped Sixth Street. Friends say he had little more than his clothes—mostly jeans—and a motorcycle and a run-down truck when he started dating Celeste. “He’s a nice guy, sweet, worked hard,” says a friend. “He’s a little on the wild side, loved to party. And he was head over heels in love with Celeste.”
Tracey was devastated by the news. “She was married, just weeks after she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore,” she says. “Even I could figure out that they were together before we split.”
If Celeste had lied when she’d told her she wasn’t seeing anyone else, Tracey wondered, what else had her former lover misled her about? Her mind grazed over the past year, since they’d met in St. David’s. Was it all a lie? One thing had never stopped bothering her: On the night of the shooting, Tracey had wondered about Celeste’s story about why she’d removed Meagan—that she was protective of Steve— when all along she’d said Steve beat the dog. If the dog was faithful to him, didn’t that say something about who he was?
Maybe he wasn’t the way she portrayed him, Tracey thought. Maybe it was all a lie.
Soon Tracey came to the conclusion that she had never really known Celeste as she thought she did. “I wondered if Celeste broke me in gradually or just found a way to make me more malleable. She wanted Steve dead, and she knew I would do it for her,” she says. “I wondered if she just planted a seed within me and let it grow.”
What Tracey had been dreading happened the following February, when Mange took the evidence against her to a grand jury for a murder indictment. For more than a year, she’d been out on $25,000 bail, awaiting trial on a charge of injury to the elderly. Since Steve Beard’s death, Keith Hampton, Tracey’s attorney, had fought hard to keep the shotgun out of evidence, arguing that Wines and Knight had intimidated her into turning it over. Consistently, the judges had ruled against him.
As the grand jury met, Hampton called Tracey and told her that once the indictment came down, she could expect to be arrested. After a year of working only off and on, she didn’t have the money for bail. That week, Tracey stayed home and boxed up her possessions. She had no illusions about her future. From the beginning, she believed she’d one day enter jail and never emerge. Her dog, Wren, seemed to sense something was wrong. All weekend he stayed beside her, following her from room to room, nestling against her when she sat on the floor and cried.
On Friday, February 16, the grand jury added capital murder to the charges against her. Immediately her bail jumped to $500,000.
“We are still investigating the matter and still looking at Celeste Beard’s involvement,” Mange’s boss was quoted as saying in the Statesman the following day. “This is one of the most complicated cases I’ve ever seen.”
Days later officers showed up at the house on Wilson. One handcuffed Tracey and led her to a squad car. By then she’d taken Wren and her cats to a friend’s house, and made arrangements for her things to be stored and her home sold. Still, as she entered the Travis County Jail, it all seemed surreal. “It was like it was happening to someone else,” she says. “It felt like everything was over and Celeste had gotten away with it.”
Meanwhile, Celeste cashed in, and Steve Beard’s children were helpless to stop her. The week after Tracey entered jail, Celeste and Cole signed a contract to buy a brand new home, a stately edifice on Yeargin Court in the town of Southlake, Texas. An exclusive enclave where the average house cost more than $400,000, Southlake lay halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas, a suburban refuge with a charming town square and a Fourth of July celebration that included fireworks sprayed across the sky.
By April she’d sold the Austin homes—the lake house for $280,000, of which $120,000 went toward paying her attorneys on the civil matter; and Steve’s dream house on Toro Canyon, for $1,890,000. The mortgages paid up by the trust, after expenses she pocketed more than $2 million.
The day of the Toro Canyon closing, Celeste gave the title company a list of cashier’s checks she wanted drawn from the proceeds: more than $50,000 to American Express, $10,000 to Louis Shanks Furniture stores, and a string of checks for banks, from $15,000 to Bank of America to $250,000 to Wells Fargo. Just under half a million went into her trust fund, and $516,892 went to First Fidelity Title Company to pay cash for their grand new home. She asked for the rest, $227,000, in a check made out to her.
Steven Beard’s death had made Celeste, the former waitress, a very wealthy woman.
By then Jennifer was living with Anita’s aged mother in Midland, but Kristina and Justin moved back to Austin and in with his parents, where they hired on at a Best Buy store. Always, they were on alert, watching for Celeste, knowing that at any moment she or someone she’d sent to look for them could walk through the door.
One day Jimmy did just that. Kristina had been out on a lunch break. When she returned, Justin played the security tape for her, showing Jimmy walking the aisles, looking about but buying nothing. He finally stood in the computer department, staring at Justin, watching. Finally he turned and left. Kristina thought he was there for her.
Even separated from them, Celeste continued to haunt their lives. The twins were reminded of her every time they tried to get a cell phone or a credit card. Over the years, they discovered, she’d used their Social Security numbers, beginning when they were just twelve. The bills were paid late or not at all. When Kristina tried to get a Sprint cell phone, the company turned her down, saying that someone named Celeste had been in there with her Social Security number and that she’d screamed at the clerks. When they contacted the credit reporting agencies and tried to clear up their credit reports, they were told there was nothing they could do. Although the twins were just children when the charges were made, they were unable to prove they hadn’t been the ones who made them.
When Paul Beard called Mange that summer, the prosecutor was blunt. He’d been over the evidence again and again and found no way to convict Celeste on what he had. “The only way we get Celeste is if Tracey testifies against her,” Mange said.
“We all want Celeste,” Paul said.
“Well, then the best thing we can do is put pressure on Tracey. Let her sit in jail and stew, knowing Celeste is out enjoying the good life.”
Throughout 2001, Bill Mange continued to build his case against Tracey, always keeping in mind that he also wanted Celeste. His office was filled with boxes of subpoenaed phone, medical, and financial records. Tracey’s bank records were carefully searched, and Mange found no indication that money had passed between the two women. That didn’t surprise him. He’d never thought the murder was about money, not on Tracey’s part. He’d had no doubt that was precisely what it was about for Celeste.
In October another motion came before the court. Stuart Kinard and Mike Maguire, two white-haired, well-respected criminal attorneys, had taken over Tracey’s case. Like Hampton before them, they argued to keep the gun out. Like Hampton, they failed. Tracey had not been intimidated, the judge ruled. Her .20 gauge shotgun would be evidence against her at her trial, scheduled for March of the coming year.
After the hearing, Kinard and Maguire approached Mange about the possibility of a deal. If Tracey could build the case against Celeste, was there a chance for a deal? Mange balked. First, they were asking for transactional immunity, meaning that Tracey would walk out the jail door and serve no more time for murder. Second, neither Kinard nor Maguire would say exactly what Tracey had. Instead of one hypothetical outline of the evidence they had to bargain with, as defense attorneys often do, they floated four possible scenarios. When they wouldn’t be more specific, Mange refused to bargain. “I wasn’t letting her walk, and I wasn’t buying a pig in a poke,” he says. “I wanted to know exactly what they had to offer.”
Off and on when their paths crossed at the courthouse, the defense attorneys tested the waters. Mange stood firm.
“I thought you wanted Celeste Beard,” Maguire said.
“I want the person I’ve got enough evidence to put away,” Mange replied. “Right now, that’s your client. That’s the case I’m taking to trial.”
In Del Valle, the sprawling Travis County Jail annex southeast of the city, Tracey was silent. She said little to anyone, quietly staying in her cell thinking about the past. “I realized Celeste had played me. All along for her it was a game,” she says. “But I still agreed to do it, and I wasn’t going to pull her into the mess I was in.”
Then she met someone. On the courtyard one day, during exercise period, Jeannie Jenkins, who’d been in and out of jails and prisons all her life on charges from prostitution to burglary, saw Tracey walking quietly in circles and crying. She thought she’d never seen anyone who looked so totally alone. Jeannie went up to her and began to draw her into a conversation. Before long Tracey spilled out her story, telling her everything that had led to Steve’s murder.
“Did that woman just leave you here to rot?” Jeannie asked.
“I guess you could say she did,” Tracey admitted, thinking back on all the promises Celeste had made and not kept, everything from paying for her attorney to putting money into her commissary fund. She hadn’t even taken care of her animals.
“That’s not right,” Jeannie said. “You shouldn’t be doing all the time. That woman’s as guilty or guiltier than you are.”
After that day, Tracey thought often of Jeannie’s words.
In March 2002, a year after Tracey entered jail, Mange had his case against her lined up. He had traveled to Timberlawn and interviewed Susan Milholland. He knew about Tracey’s obsession with Celeste and her threat aimed at Steve: “All my problems would be solved if someone met an untimely death.”
On top of that, he had the shotgun shell tying her to the murder, and he had Terry, the Tramps manicurist who’d heard Tracey say that if Steve ever hurt Celeste, she’d kill him. Still, the case was a difficult one. Early on, Tracey had told the detectives that Celeste had a key to her house. At trial, Mange figured Maguire and Kinard would argue Celeste had the opportunity to get Tracey’s shotgun and kill Steve herself. It wasn’t as open-and-shut a case as he would have liked. Still, he wasn’t too worried. Everyone at the D.A.’s Office knew the investigation was flawed. If he lost, he lost. They’d pat him on the back and say he’d put up a good fight. The upside was that if he won, he’d be a hero.
“You’re really going to go ahead against Tracey and leave Celeste hanging out there?” Kinard said to him one day at the courthouse.
“You bet I am,” Mange said. “And I’m going to win.”
In his office, Mange had a list of facts he’d pulled together on the Beard case, indicators that pointed to Celeste’s involvement, everything from dropping Meagan at the lake house to the birthday card she’d sent Tracey, which read, “To the one I love.” Still, he didn’t have the thing he needed most: Tracey’s testimony. He wanted Celeste, and he was willing to deal to get her; but he couldn’t give Kinard and Maguire what they asked for—immunity that would free Tracey. Mange wasn’t buying it now any more than he had when Hampton brought it up nearly two years earlier. “No way I’ll let someone who shot a helpless old man in the middle of the night walk,” he said. “Forget it.”
In February, as Tracey’s trial approached, Maguire and Kinard met with Mange again. This time they were ready to deal. In Del Valle, Tracey had told them she was willing to talk. In fact, she said whether or not they worked out a deal, she wanted to tell Mange everything, including Celeste’s role in the murder. With an eager client, they didn’t dance around the issue. This time they floated only one hypothetical scenario for Tracey’s testimony. Mange was interested. From what he heard, it fit the evidence. With something concrete, the bargaining began. Still, they were worlds apart. Mange wanted Tracey to serve forty years, while Maguire pushed for probation. Gradually, they came to a compromise: Tracey would plead guilty to Steve Beard’s murder and serve twenty years. But before it was set in stone, Mange needed to hear from her what she had to say.
“We’ll talk to our client and get back with you,” Maguire told him.
That afternoon Mange called Paul Beard in Virginia. “Are you willing to plea out Tracey Tarlton on a reduced sentence to get Celeste?” he asked.
“Yes,” Paul said. “Tracey was a pawn. We want Celeste.”
“Okay,” Mange said.
The following day Kinard called Mange. “You’ve got a deal,” he said.
In late March, a week before her trial date, Mange, Kinard, and Maguire all traveled to Del Valle for the debriefing. There, in one of the rooms reserved for attorneys and their clients, over a period of four hours, Tracey talked. She started with the first day she met Celeste at St. David’s and went through to the night of the shooting and their confrontation in Celeste’s driveway the June after Steve died, when Celeste had told her she wanted nothing more to do with her. Then Mange brought out photos of the crime scene and an architect’s diagram of the house he’d gotten from Gus Voelzel.
“Show me how you entered and left the house,” he asked.
Using her finger to trace her path, she talked him through that night, telling how Celeste had done a walk-through with her, then changed it, having her drive up to the back of the house and enter through a door off the pool. While she talked, Mange assessed her. Her intelligence surprised him. It was rare that he’d run across a defendant so bright and articulate. On the witness stand, she’d be powerful. More important, everything she told him matched the physical evidence. It all rang true.
When they parted that day, Mange told the defense attorneys he believed they had a deal. “Now we just need to make sure your client isn’t lying.”
Mange hadn’t talked to Wines about the case in more than a year, but that afternoon he called the detective. As angry as he was about the way Wines had investigated the case, he was the lead detective and Mange felt stuck with him. “We’re taking Tracey to DPS for a polygraph tomorrow,” he told him. “I’d like you to be there.”
On March 28, four days before her trial date, Tracey was transported to the Texas Department of Public Safety office for a polygraph. Mange and Wines, with Maguire and Kinard, watched from behind smoked glass. She stared up at the window often. She knows we’re here, Mange thought.
For three hours the examiner shot her questions, at first those with verifiable answers—like what’s your name, your birthdate, what month is this? Then he honed in on Celeste and on Steve’s murder. Before he finished and tabulated the results, the examiner stuck his head into the room where Mange and Wines waited.
“This looks really good,” he said. “I think she’s telling the truth.”
Mange smiled at Wines. “Go get your warrant,” he said. “And find Celeste Beard.”
“I already know where she is,” Wines told him. “I’ve been keeping tabs on her.”
An hour later Mange called Wines at his office. By then Wines had checked in with the Southlake police and alerted them to the impending arrest. “Forget about the warrant,” Mange said. “I’m taking this to a grand jury. I want the indictment sealed until we round her up.”
With all Celeste’s money, Wines understood Mange considered her a flight risk.
That afternoon Tracey told her story again, this time in front of a grand jury. The session lasted thirty minutes, and she was the only witness. Mange listened, looking for inconsistencies, anything that would indicate that despite the lie detector test, which she’d passed without a glitch, she was lying. As she had throughout the debriefing, Tracey stayed true to her story. When he walked out later that afternoon, he had an indictment charging Celeste with injury to an elderly individual, murder, and capital murder.
The following morning, March 29, Good Friday, Mange called Paul, who’d already packed to fly to Houston for Tracey’s trial. “We’ve struck a deal with Tracey,” Mange said. “We’re going to arrest Celeste.”
“Finally,” Paul said.
Mange reached Kristina and Justin in the car on their way to Port Aransas, on the Texas coast, for the Easter weekend. “We’re arresting your mother this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll notify you as soon as we have her in custody.”
When Kristina hung up, she began sobbing. “She cried for the rest of the trip,” Justin says.
“We’ve got her,” Wines said when he called Mange later that day. “Southlake police have picked up Celeste.”
At the jail, Tracey heard the news on television. “I knew she’d be coming,” she says. “Once they had her, she was on her way.” Inside, she felt no happiness, only resolve.
“It has taken two years to unravel the mystery surrounding the death of Steve Beard,” Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle told the press that day. “This indictment is the result of dogged persistence by Bill Mange and the Sheriff’s Office. They never gave up.”
The first time Mange saw the woman he’d pursued for more than two years was at the bond hearing. There, Celeste Beard Johnson, thin, blond, her designer suits replaced by an orange and green jailhouse uniform, looked subdued. She didn’t resemble the monster he’d heard so much about. At her side were six lawyers, including Charles Burton, the criminal defense attorney she’d hired the day of the shooting.
“She has ample funds to flee,” Mange argued. “She’s not involved with her family and has nothing to keep her from running.”
To bolster his claims, Mange brought Bank of America records that showed that in the year after Steve’s death, Celeste had collected $3.5 million from the estate.
“She doesn’t have that now,” Burton argued. “The money is gone, and Mrs. Johnson doesn’t have the resources to pay a high bail.”
With that, State District Judge Julie Kocurek set bail at $8 million, the highest in the history of Travis County, Texas.
Not long after Celeste arrived at the jail, Tracey saw her for the first time, across the exercise yard. Soon, messages began arriving, relayed through other inmates. “Celeste says it’s not too late,” one inmate told Tracey. “She still loves you. You can still be together.”
The messages continued until Tracey told the messenger, “Tell Celeste to put it in writing.”
Then something unexpected happened. The previous December, Mange had been transferred out of his position as chief of a court to head the motor fuels division, investigating white collar crimes. He hated the paper-heavy workload. A month after the judge set Celeste’s record bail, Mange announced he was leaving the prosecutor’s office, and the Beard murder case became the bastard stepchild no one wanted.