The Travis County D.A.’s staff had murmured for months about the Beard case. How could they not? A multimillionaire shot by his trophy wife’s lesbian lover. “It had all the makings of a soap opera,” says one prosecutor. It wasn’t just the sensational aspects that begged their attention. When Bill Mange said he was leaving, more than one prosecutor eyed the file boxes of Beard documents climbing his office walls. The case was set for trial in December, and he had months of work to get trial ready. And then there was the investigation. They all knew it was flawed. As strong as the circumstantial evidence was, the case rested on the testimony of one person: Tracey Tarlton. Few prosecutors want a case where the star witness is a confessed murderer.
Making matters worse, Celeste was angry at Charles Burton for not getting her bail lowered and replaced him with Houston’s Dick DeGuerin, one of Texas’s best known and most accomplished defense attorneys. Over the years, DeGuerin’s talents had taken on nearly mythical proportions in the state. Wealthy Texans in trouble flocked to him when trouble knocked, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. His phone rang again when four New York Mets were arrested in a spat in a Houston nightclub. The well-heeled paid into the high six-figure fees for his tenacious brand of defense, where he maximized every seed of evidence in his client’s interest. DeGuerin made no apologies for charging those who could afford to pay, yet he also took on cases where the only remuneration was a sense of self-satisfaction. In 1987 he championed the cause of a mentally ill and desperately poor Houston woman who tried to drown six of her seven children, killing two of them, and saved her from the death penalty.
Six years later DeGuerin was in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Outside, the FBI and ATF camped out in a standoff with David Koresh and his band of followers. As Koresh’s attorney, DeGuerin tried to negotiate a peaceful solution, one that would bring his client and his followers out alive. It wasn’t to be, and on the fifty-first day of the siege the compound exploded in a hail of bullets and tear gas into a furnace, incinerating all eighty-four men, women, and children.
“High profile, bad investigation, mountains of work, Dick DeGuerin, and the very real possibility that you’d lose, you’d have to be crazy to want the Beard case,” says Assistant District Attorney Allison Wetzel. So when an e-mail from her boss popped up on her computer in August, she opened it with trepidation. “We’d like you to take the Beard case,” it read.
Damn, she thought. Just what I need.
As the chief prosecutor in child abuse cases, Wetzel already had an overwhelming workload. But this wasn’t an instance where she got to pick and choose. “When you’re handed a case, you run with it,” she says. “It’s part of the job.”
In the District Attorney’s Office, Wetzel had a strong reputation and a colorful one. She’d grown up in Houston, the daughter of an Exxon engineer and a secretary, in a home where she was expected to achieve. She graduated from high school at sixteen, college at twenty, and only took the law school entrance exam, the LSAT, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. At the University of Houston, she made law review, then clerked for two of that city’s most prominent, high-dollar criminal attorneys, Racehorse Haynes and Jack Zimmerman. She found criminal law fascinating, learning the stories behind the headlines of their high-profile cases. Then, in the late eighties, any thought that she had about becoming a defense attorney faded.
At the time, she worked in the Dallas District Attorney’s Office, gathering experience before moving into private practice. One night an undercover officer she knew was gunned down during a drug bust. That changed things for her. “I saw the impact the murder had on people, including the family,” she says. “After that, I didn’t want to defend criminals anymore. I liked being one of the good guys, even if most of the prosecutors I knew were middle-age white guys in bad suits.”
In Austin she found a good match; Wetzel was a natural for a job where she prosecuted the murders and sexual assaults of children. With two young sons of her own, she identified with the victims and their families and fought hard to do her best for them. Nearly six feet tall with a tussle of chin-length, dark auburn hair, in a courtroom she bristled with nervous energy. She knew her evidence the way she’d once studied for law school exams, front to back, and always had it ready to pounce on a defense attorney’s misstep. Wetzel may have had a Sunday school bearing, but everyone who knew her well realized that was only one side. Scratch the surface and she became a feisty opponent with a vocabulary that could strike a cowboy pale.
Wetzel had been glad the Beard case was Bill Mange’s problem. “No fun to get your butt kicked with the world watching,” she says. But now it was hers.
That same afternoon, she met with her boss, who looked at her schedule and decided there’d be no time for the other cases crowding it, even a capital murder trial of a woman who’d killed her own child. Those were handed out to others on the staff. Moving the case files from Bill Mange’s office to hers—enough to have filled two pickup trucks—convinced her that had been a good decision.
Still, until she sat down with Jennifer and Kristina, the case felt foreign to Wetzel. In them, she saw the small victims she’d come to know so well, bowed by years of parental abuse. The girls didn’t want to testify against their mother. They were frightened. That was something Wetzel understood. She’d had young victims crawl under a witness stand to get away from an abusive parent’s gaze. “We’re going to take this one step at a time,” she told them. “There’s one big thing to remember here: You’re not trying to put your mother in jail. The state is doing that. You’re just telling the truth.”
Over the following days, Wetzel interviewed other witnesses, from Amy Cozart, the twins’ friend who’d been with Jennifer at the lake house the night of the shooting, to David Kuperman, Steve’s attorney. The interview that most concerned her was the one she had with Tracey Tarlton at the Del Valle jail. Wetzel had already read her statement. Much of it seemed hard to believe; yet the evidence suggested she was telling the truth. As Tracey talked, Wetzel sized her up. Cases based on accomplice testimony are difficult. Most often the accomplices are poorly educated and have records that undermine their credibility. Tracey didn’t fit that mold. Instead, Wetzel was impressed by her intelligence, and, despite her psychiatric history, Tracey didn’t appear the least bit crazy.
“Why are you testifying against Celeste?” Wetzel asked.
“I understand that I shot Steve and I deserve prison,” Tracey said. “But I’m not the only one who does. I want to explain why I did what I did.”
Wetzel left the jail that day relieved, and more hopeful than when she’d arrived. Maybe I can do this, she thought. It just might work.
At night, she cooked her family dinner, then curled up with Timberlawn records instead of a good novel. In the end, they were as fascinating, offering insight into what went on behind the institution’s locked doors. In the office, during the day, she combed through financial records. A pattern emerged. Celeste’s flagrant spending, she reasoned, showed motive. By the time Wetzel perused the phone records, she felt even more confident. It was easy to see that Celeste hadn’t cut off contact with Tracey after the shooting; the women had talked often even after Steve’s death.
“Why don’t we put those in a more usable format,” Sergeant Debra Smith, who with Sergeant Dawn McLean, transported Tracey to and from the jail for conferences, mentioned one day. “We can put the financials and phone records on spread sheets and draw up summaries.”
Wetzel had an undergraduate degree in business, but the thought had never occurred to her. Smith, a no-nonsense woman with short dark hair and glasses, however, was a former auditor who worked as an investigator in the D.A.’s White Collar Crime Unit. With a master’s degree in criminal justice management, she was an expert at honing complicated records into a form a jury would understand.
“Go for it,” Wetzel said, glad to have Smith take over the task. She had more pressing problems: DeGuerin had filed a motion asking an appellate court to lower Celeste’s bail. If he succeeded, Wetzel had no doubt Celeste would flee.
With the trial rescheduled for late January, just weeks away, DeGuerin and his staff took over the second floor of a gracious, old, brown brick house a block from the Travis County Criminal Justice Center. The owner, a lawyer with offices on the first floor, had offered the apartment as DeGuerin’s base through the trial. A porch overlooked the street, shaded by an ancient live oak, its thick trunk camouflaged by heavy broad-leafed vines.
Inside, it was a stark contrast to Wetzel’s modern beige office. The wood floors creaked, and the furniture mixed Salvation Army and vintage antiques. A sign over the kitchen door read, ABSOLUTELY NO CREDIT, and the dining room had the look of a war room. A battered table groaned under stacks of files, documents, and transcripts of prior testimony—from the protection hearings and the wrongful death suit—while on the walls, beside battered tin ads for Grapette soda, Cobb’s Creek Whisky, and Southern Select Beer, hung sheets of yellow legal paper suspended on strips of clear tape. Each bore a list of names under a heading: Need Subpoenas, Interview, and Find.
DeGuerin had family in Houston, including his first grandchild, a boy named Eli, after his father, Elias McDowell DeGuerin. Better known as Mack, the elder DeGuerin was an Austin civil lawyer, an LBJ Democrat who served on Johnson’s congressional staff and several times as assistant attorney general in the days before Texas turned conservative and Republican. Dick and his younger brother, Mike, followed their father into law but took the other side of the practice, representing criminal defendants. Although he’d grown up in Austin, DeGuerin had made his mark in Houston courtrooms. Fresh out of law school in the early sixties, he worked at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, where he quickly became a courthouse presence. A few years later the brothers became protégés of the legendary Percy Foreman, one of the most powerful defense attorneys to ever argue before a jury. Years later, in the tough cases, Dick DeGuerin still asked himself, “What would Percy do?”
Although slight and spare, DeGuerin cut an imposing figure in a courtroom, perched hawklike on the edge of his chair beside his client, his eyes intent. In his early sixties, he ran three miles a day and looked a decade younger. He always carried the same worn, golden brown leather briefcase made by a client who couldn’t pay any other way. That wasn’t the case with Celeste where his bill was $450,000. While DeGuerin was busy with her, his next defendant awaited trial in a Galveston jail: Robert Durst, the heir to a New York real estate fortune, accused of murdering and dismembering his next door neighbor.
On October 2, 2002, the third anniversary of Steve’s shooting, in one of his first tasks as Celeste’s attorney, DeGuerin went before a three-judge panel of the appeals court to argue for a reduction of her $8 million bond on the charge of capital murder. It was then that Wetzel pulled Donna Goodson out of her hat. Armed with a signed immunity agreement she’d crafted with Goodson and her attorney, Wetzel took the solicitation case before a grand jury. When the indictment came down, Celeste was charged with soliciting the murder of Tracey Tarlton with an additional $5 million bond.
In a November hearing, DeGuerin argued again that Celeste didn’t have the funds to post such high bail. An accountant’s report he produced suggested she had little left of the $3.5 million she’d gotten after Steve’s death. In Southlake, Cole had sold the house, but much of that money had gone to pay bills. In 2001, according to the records, Celeste paid $223,000 to American Express and $197,453 in improvements on a brand new house. Many of her jewels, furniture, and antiques, the treasures she’d paid so dearly for with Steve’s money, had been sold at a distress sale.
The decision went against DeGuerin, and the battle was over. Celeste wouldn’t leave jail unless acquitted in the trial. Now both sides prepared for the war.
With the Beard trial date set in stone for January 27, Wetzel had a problem. She needed a prosecutor to second-chair— act as cocounsel on the case. Considering the attorneys within the D.A.’s Office, she quickly settled on Gary Cobb.
Wetzel reasoned she and Cobb would be a good match. They had something in common: Before she’d arrived, he had held her slot as chief of the child abuse unit. Cobb had a reputation for having an unusual ability to connect with juries. In front of a courtroom, he appeared smooth and effortless, never anxious, worried, or rattled. Going up against DeGuerin, self-confidence was an important asset. And there was little Cobb liked better than trying a tough case.
“You should just see the evidence in this Beard case,” Wetzel said to him at the office. A little at a time, she talked about the challenges of the upcoming trial: the mental health issues, the accomplice testimony, the testimony of the daughters. None of it would be an easy sell to a jury, but she hoped the case’s complexity would lure Cobb.
“It all sounded unbelievable,” he’d say later. “I found it fascinating.”
That DeGuerin was involved didn’t frighten him. In fact, he relished a good fight. In his thirteen years as a prosecutor, Cobb, who grew up one of nine siblings in a small Mississippi town where black men weren’t expected to go to college, much less law school, had won more than his share of bizarre cases. One involved a husband who claimed his wife committed suicide during sex. Cobb tore down his version of the woman’s death by demonstrating a history of domestic violence. Another case yielded a life sentence without a body. The verdict relied on a single spec of DNA.
“So, what do you think about trying this case with me?” Wetzel finally asked.
“I think it could be fun,” Cobb answered.
While the prosecution would rest with Wetzel and Cobb, DeGuerin had amassed a team for the trial. His partner, Matt Hennessy, thin, with a mop of dark hair, would play a small role, but Hennessy’s wife, Catherine Baen, would function as DeGuerin’s point person and second chair. Tall and lithe, Baen had been raised the daughter of a country doctor and had the ramrod straight bearing of a horsewoman. At Texas Tech University she’d participated in a Texas tradition—baton twirling.
Her credentials as an attorney spoke for themselves. She’d clerked at one of Houston’s biggest firms, Bracewell and Patterson, and had worked on such high-profile cases as the Oklahoma City bombing and the David Graham case, better known as the cadet murder, where Graham, an Air Force cadet, and his fiancée, Diane Zamora, a navy cadet attending Annapolis, were convicted of murdering a girl he’d had a fling with, Adrianne Jones. More recently, Baen had gone international, working on the Bosnian war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
From her first meeting with Celeste, Baen found her client funny, bright, and personable, with the vulnerability of a child; hardly the characteristics of a killer, she’d insist.
While DeGuerin concentrated on his other clients, Baen did the groundwork, readying the Beard case for the courtroom with the help of three law students from a criminal law class DeGuerin taught at the University of Texas. They conducted interviews and combed through the formidable load of exhibits prosecutors had collected, including medical, telephone, and financial records. As she talked to Celeste, she formed a theory on what had happened. Celeste told Baen that Tracey and Kristina were close. Perhaps, Baen theorized, Kristina, not Celeste, conspired with Tracey. She also latched onto possible financial motives for the twins wanting their mother out of the way. “It was only after Kristina cashed those checks and took her mother’s money that she went to the District Attorney’s Office and said, ‘I think my mother killed Steve,’” says Baen. “These were greedy kids out to get rid of their mother to get the money for themselves.”
When it came to Tracey, Baen didn’t mince words. “This is a very defensible case,” she says. “The bottom line is that Tracey Tarlton is bat crazy. She’s insane. She was obsessed with Celeste, and she killed Steve because she wanted him out of the picture.”
The first major hearing on the Beard case in the 390th District Court, where Celeste was scheduled to be tried, took place that November 2002. The 390th was presided over by Judge Julie Kocurek, who could have been the prototype for TV’s Judging Amy.Trim, with large hazel eyes and straight, dark blond hair, Kocurek looked more like a soccer mom than a criminal court judge. Looks can be deceiving, however. As a prosecutor, Kocurek had tried rapists, child abusers, and murderers, including an eleven-year-old boy who stabbed a man ninety-nine times, then fed his ears to a dog.
Appointed by then-Governor George W. Bush, Kocurek came to the bench in 1999 as the first woman to head a Travis County felony court. At the time, she was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. In the 2000 election she became the first Republican judge elected in Austin, a city so liberal that a Green Party candidate once totaled twenty-five percent of the vote. One reason: She bore a familiar name. Her grandfather-in-law, Willie Kocurek, was an appliance dealer turned civic leader, known for his humor, who’d worked to improve public schools. Beyond that, the courthouse scuttlebutt was that Judge Kocurek belonged on the bench; she knew the law and ran a fair courtroom.
That day in Kocurek’s courtroom, the issue was the admissibility of evidence—the journals, cards, and calendars the twins and their friends had collected from Celeste’s storage bins. Even the way DeGuerin titled the motion elicited strong emotions: “Motion to Suppress Evidence Stolen from the Defendant’s Home.”
That first day of pretrial testimony would be the hardest for the twins. The thought of seeing Celeste again, this time in her jail uniform, of having to testify in front of her, sent chills through both of them. Yet one thing had markedly changed for them both: They no longer felt alone. Months earlier, Ellen Halbert, director of the district attorney’s Victim Witness Division, called Mange, offering to help with the case by acting as an intermediary with the Beard children. Exhausted by calls from the twins and Justin, Mange eagerly turned that portion of the case over to her.
With short, highlighted brown hair and a maternal manner, Halbert understood the emotions the girls battled. She, too, had been through a horrific ordeal. Years earlier an eighteen-year-old drifter hid in her home and raped and stabbed her. She barely survived. Helping others victimized by violent crime brought her to the attention of then-Governor Ann Richards, who appointed her to the board that oversees prisons, probations, and paroles. Two years after Richards left office, District Attorney Ronnie Earle asked her to join his office, supervising eight counselors and four staffers who work with more than four thousand victims and their families each year.
Halbert had heard people talking about the Beard case around the office for months before she met the girls for the first time. At that first meeting, she knew they were frightened. She thought they looked like scared children, and her heart went out to them. Yet, before long the girls opened up, glad to have her to confide in. On the day of the pretrial, Halbert accompanied them to the courtroom and sat in a front row seat, where they could look at her instead of their mother while they testified.
“You stole those things from your mother’s storage, didn’t you?” DeGuerin accused.
“Some of it looked like it didn’t need to be thrown away,” Jennifer countered. “It looked interesting, so we kept it.”
Calling the twins “spoiled brats,” DeGuerin railed against them.
At one point, when Celeste looked away, Jennifer shot her a quick glance. There sat her mother, laughing with the attorneys clustered about her. She must think the whole thing’s a joke, Jennifer thought.
In the back hallway, after Jennifer finished testifying, Wetzel put her arm around her as she sobbed, her shoulders heaving at the emotional turmoil of testifying against her own mother. Later, Jennifer would remember being grateful Kristina had taped their mother saying she’d hired someone to kill Tracey Tarlton. If she hadn’t, Jennifer thought, no one would have believed us.
The hearing went on with DeGuerin insisting that the twins and their boyfriends had stolen their mother’s possessions. As garbage, it was fair game, admissible in court. If stolen, the evidence would be tainted and inadmissible.
Seven days later, as the hearing drew to a close, Celeste hobbled up to the stand. In jail, she’d broken her leg. How it happened remained a mystery. The official story was that she’d fallen after fainting. The story circulating through the jail was very different—that she’d broken it herself by battering it against a bench, perhaps to illicit sympathy from the jury, perhaps to get out of the general population and into the hospital ward.
On the stand, Celeste denied ever asking the girls and their friends to clean the storage areas. Those were her things, things she never intended to throw away, she said.
Cobb had something else he wanted an answer to: “Why did you have your husband murdered?”
The question caught the courtroom off guard.
“I did not murder my husband. I’m not guilty,” she snapped.
DeGuerin jumped up and objected. Celeste, he said, was there to talk about the journals and cards, not to testify about the murder. The judge sustained the objection.
In his closing, DeGuerin claimed Mange had put the girls up to “stealing” from their mother. “He apparently played the part of the three monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” DeGuerin charged. “The authority to enter the house does not equate to the authority to take things without permission.”
“It may hurt Celeste Beard’s feelings to know that someone went through her trash, but it’s not against the law to do so,” Wetzel countered.
When Kocurek’s ruling came on Thanksgiving week, the prosecutors won. The evidence would be admissible. Yet Kocurek gave DeGuerin an olive branch by reducing Celeste’s bail to $2 million. By then an appeals court had lowered the $8 million bond on the capital murder case to $500,000. None of it did any good, DeGuerin argued, insisting Celeste had little more than a few thousand dollars in the bank and owed $750,000 for attorneys’ fees and the fees of experts he’d enlisted to testify on her behalf at the trial.
Yet Wetzel thought she’d gained much more than the use of the evidence from the pretrial hearing. She’d been able to see Jennifer, Kristina, Justin, and Christopher on the stand. No longer teenagers, they’d put out strong testimony, refusing to let DeGuerin rattle them. Justin had come off as a bit stiff, something she’d work on with him. She didn’t want him to hesitate, analyzing each question. The jury could interpret that as being evasive. But that was a minor issue. For the most part, Wetzel was pleased.
As the trial approached, both sides carefully groomed their cases. Wetzel got a court order to use the Toro Canyon house for a demonstration. She wanted Tracey to show them how she’d picked her way through the house the night of the shooting. Wetzel also ordered a sound test, to see if Celeste should have heard the shot. As Tracey walked through the house that day, a shotgun fired a blank in the master bedroom. Standing in the girls’ wing, she heard it clearly. Like everything else, she now believed Celeste had lied when she told her she’d slept through the gunshot. “It was complete bullshit,” she says. “The sound of that gun shook the house.”
As her case came together, Wetzel saw only one issue as truly worrisome: the cause of death. With four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, she knew DeGuerin would bring in medical experts to testify that he’d died of causes unrelated to the shooting. When she brought it up to Cobb, he did exactly what she counted on him to do—he told her not to worry. “This isn’t any different than any other trial we’ve done in the past,” he assured her. “We’ll take this step by step and prove our case.”
At the same time, DeGuerin had no trouble summing up how he saw his case. Celeste—or “Les,” as he called her— was innocent. Tracey Tarlton was “a sick, mentally ill woman, who was obsessed with her,” and Donna Goodson “a hanger-on who only wanted money.” Celeste’s sin, he would argue, was nothing more than being “overly generous and trusting.” As for the twins, DeGuerin called them “devil children” and felt sure the jury would see them as he did— “spoiled brats.”
As the trial neared, the defense settled on their trial haiku, the three points they would drill into jurors’ minds:
1. Celeste’s lifestyle was not evidence of guilt.
2. She was better off with Steve alive.
3. Celeste didn’t kill Steve.
Yet, DeGuerin admitted he had obstacles ahead. First, the jury had to see Celeste as a woman who loved her husband, not as a gold digger. And they had to be able to “see through” the prosecution’s case. “I don’t think Allison Wetzel is all that convinced her case is solid,” said DeGuerin, his face hard, and thoughtful. “I think she’s worried.”
Through the courthouse grapevine, Wetzel heard that DeGuerin thought he was getting to her. She was determined not to let that happen. Still, she’d griped enough about him at home that one night when he called her house, one of her sons answered. “It’s your archenemy,” he said, handing her the phone.
Deciding to make a joke of a potentially embarrassing situation, Wetzel picked up the phone and said, “Well, hello, archenemy.”
DeGuerin didn’t laugh.
On the morning of Wednesday, January 29, a panel of ninety-four potential jurors gathered in numbered seats in Kocurek’s courtroom. Behind the bench, the judge sat flanked by the Stars and Stripes and the Texas Lone Star flag. By the end of the day she was determined to whittle the panel down to twelve jurors and two alternates willing to devote the coming two months to the trial of Celeste Beard Johnson.
Celeste sat between DeGuerin and Baen. Gone was her jailhouse attire, replaced by a charcoal gray sweater set and a long gray skirt, both shades darker than the gray cloth paneling on the courtroom’s walls. The cast still cocooned her leg, and her crutches were stowed under the table. Her blond hair had grown out, leaving it long and brown at the roots. She had it pulled sternly back and, although the twins never remembered her wearing glasses, she wore oval wire-rimmed ones that made her look like an injured schoolteacher, far from the sultry femme fatale who had married five times.
Yet it wasn’t the defendant, but a figure at the far end of the defense table, who caught Wetzel’s attention: Robert Hirschhorn, a well-known jury consultant who worked many of the state’s highest profile cases. While DeGuerin asked questions, attempting to bond with the jurors, Hirschhorn would analyze the answers and look for clues in body language and facial expressions. Behind them sat the rest of the team: Matt Hennessy and DeGuerin’s law students who’d volunteered to help with the case.
It was Hirschhorn’s job to predict how each juror would react to testimony and vote once deliberations began. He needed to have twelve impaneled who could be persuaded to view Celeste as a victim, not a murderer. A bonus would be a juror who would have difficulty, under any circumstances, judging another human guilty, to hang the jury if they were leaning toward a conviction.
As voir dire—the process of truth telling—began, Wetzel introduced herself and the other attorneys to the panel, standing before an easel with a poster-size blowup of the indictment: State of Texas v. Celeste Beard. “I thank you all for coming,” she began. “This may be the most important part of the trial. We need to make sure we have a jury that will be fair to both Mrs. Beard and the state of Texas.”
Even before the questioning started, much was already known. The week before, the potential jurors had met in the courtroom and been given questionnaires. The lawyers had plumbed the most important issues of the case: How did the jurors feel about young women who married older men? Would they find it difficult to convict a young, attractive woman? Did they have experiences with law enforcement or mental illness that would color their verdict? Both sides had carefully considered and tabulated their answers.
With Steve Beard’s millions and the twisted details of the alleged plot involving the young wife and her lesbian lover, the Beard case hadn’t needed any more of a draw to bring in publicity, but DeGuerin tended to help make any trial an event. In this case, drawn by the sensationalism and what promised to be a hard fought trial, PrimeTime Live, Court TV, and 48 Hours had cameras throughout the courtroom.
Wetzel began her presentation, explaining the process. Texas has a bifurcated trial system. First, the jury would judge guilt or innocence. Before trials began, defendants were given the option of who would decide their sentence if convicted. “Mrs. Beard has decided her punishment will be handled by the jury, not the judge,” she said.
DeGuerin jumped to his feet. “Your Honor, that doesn’t need to be talked about with the jury yet,” he said. “That gives the impression my client expects to be convicted.”
Wetzel agreed; of course that would depend on the jury’s decision, but then she launched a second volley: “It isn’t until the punishment phase that the jury learns if the accused has committed other bad acts.” She wanted to implant in jurors’ minds that Celeste may have committed crimes they’d only learn later.
As Wetzel worked her way around the room, she asked questions to weed out jurors who had a grudge against the state and those who would not be able to make a decision. She also had the task of determining who would not be able to get past Celeste’s wholesome looks. “Juror number twenty-three,” she said. “You said on your questionnaire that you would not be able to find someone who looks like Mrs. Beard guilty of murder.”
“I couldn’t,” answered the man. “She just doesn’t look like a murderer to me.”
Cobb noted in his records that juror 23 was unacceptable. At the end of the process, jurors would be stricken for cause—those who admitted they were prejudiced either for or against the defendant, those who maintained they couldn’t make a decision. Then, each side would be given ten preemptory strikes, enabling them to weed out jurors they judged were not in their side’s best interests.
Wetzel went on, “We all know that people aren’t as they appear. How do we judge whether people are telling us the truth?”
From that, the jurors launched into a discussion that included the characteristics by which they judged others as liars: a lack of eye contact, body language, a tone of voice, whether their words were logical and credible based on other facts, whether or not they had personal gain at stake. Wetzel agreed those were all indications.
She then detailed the counts against Celeste. First: capital murder. For that charge the jurors would have to find Celeste caused her husband’s death for the promise of remuneration; namely, his money. In liberal Travis County—unlike much of Texas—prosecutors rarely asked for the death penalty. In a case where the defendant hadn’t pulled the trigger, it would be especially difficult to get. So the prosecutor had taken the ultimate punishment off the table. A conviction on capital murder meant an automatic life sentence.
Second, Celeste was charged with murder. Unlike capital murder, here the jury didn’t need a financial motive. The punishment, too, differed. A murder conviction offered options from probation to life.
Last, Celeste was charged with injury of an elderly person, another third-class felony, with punishment ranging from probation to life.
All the charges required that to find her guilty, the jury had to decide Celeste acted knowingly and with intent to grievously harm Steve. That brought Wetzel to the role she charged Celeste had played—that of the planner and conspirator.
“Can someone be guilty of murder without pulling the trigger on the gun?” she asked.
Hands went up around the room. Before long nearly all the panel agreed that the planner was as guilty as the shooter in a murder—a simplification of what’s called the Law of Parties in criminal statutes.
The prosecutor didn’t fare as well when it came to her next concept: the proposition that some evidence would come from a coconspirator, a self-avowed murderer. Many in the jury pool found Wetzel’s suggestion that they give such testimony as much credibility as that of a police officer preposterous. DeGuerin agreed, jumping from his chair. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Judge, how can she ask the jury to overlook where the information comes from? The law doesn’t ask them to do that.”
Tracey Tarlton’s testimony, Wetzel said, could be judged based on whether it was corroborated by other evidence. With that, many jurors agreed, but some staunchly insisted that they could never, under any circumstances, judge someone guilty based on the testimony of an admitted murderer. “That would be like looking at a guy in a dress and asking me to ignore the dress,” said one man, a tall, heavy-set business type in a starched white shirt, khakis, and a tie. “That’s not gonna happen.”
That afternoon it was DeGuerin’s turn. Where Wetzel had come off as strident, he approached the jurors softly, introducing himself and his fellow attorneys. He stood behind Celeste, placing his hands on her shoulders. “This is my client, the most important person in the courtroom,” he said. “As jurors, you’ll be deciding her fate.”
When he introduced his three law students in the courtroom, he said, “They’re here because they want to help.” DeGuerin talked of his teaching at the University of Texas, an institution that permeates Austin. And he talked of David Koresh, saying he was proud of what he’d done in Waco, “trying to bring a peaceful solution. I’m proud of what I do, proud of being a defense attorney.
“Now I’m going to do what one of you suggested earlier,” he said with a warm smile. “I’m going to get on with it.”
To begin, DeGuerin went row by row, allowing those who’d already formed opinions on Celeste’s guilt to disqualify themselves. A dozen jurors said they’d already judged Celeste, even before the first word of testimony.
From there he talked of the law that allowed a defendant to decide whether she would take the stand. Many people, he said, felt they had to hear from the accused. If a defendant didn’t testify, they judged, it was an admission of guilt. Again hands rose from a sampling of jurors who said they could not ignore the failure of a person accused of a crime to take the witness stand. These jurors, too, were disqualified.
DeGuerin then tried to defuse a hot button issue: the Beards’ May-December marriage. “I’m seventeen years older than my wife,” said one juror. “I know she didn’t marry me for my money.”
DeGuerin chuckled. “How many of you do have a problem with it?”
Four women and three men raised their hands. “‘Money hungry gold digger’ comes to mind,” said one of the men.
Hirschhorn noted strikes against more potential jurors.
In the end the jury that would judge Celeste Beard consisted of eight men and four women, with two male alternates. Nine were white, one Asian American, one black, and one Hispanic. One was a software engineer who’d gotten a laugh when he said that if his team waited to release software until it was a hundred percent, “we’d never get anything out.”
Another was a woman in her fifties, whose twenty-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and murdered thirteen years earlier. “I have serious issues with the Austin P.D.,” she’d admitted. “But they wouldn’t impact my decision in this case.”
Also on the final jury was a white-haired, bearded man, the one who’d laughed about being married to a woman seventeen years his junior. Would that influence his decision? No one could truly know, for despite the eight hours they’d spent choosing the jury, despite Hirschhorn’s analysis, no one could predict how any of the fourteen people seated in the jury box would react to the testimony they would hear. Would they believe that the woman seated so demurely before them could orchestrate murder?
As she scanned their faces, Wetzel felt good about the jurors who’d decide Celeste Beard’s fate. They were bright, well-educated, and looked interested. Yet, she was worried. That DeGuerin and Hirschhorn also seemed pleased bothered her. What did they see in these same fourteen people that led them to believe the opposite, that this jury would find their client not guilty?