Only months later would Kristina allow herself to consider why Celeste ordered her not to mention the name of Tracey Tarlton to the police, even though many times throughout that strange summer she wondered about the odd relationship between her mother and the bright, funny woman who managed a large Austin bookstore. From experience, the teenager knew not to question her mother. To do so would be judged by Celeste as a betrayal, and the consequences could be bone-chilling. Throughout her life, she’d feared yet loved her mother as only a child can love a parent, with utter devotion. Only long after Steve Beard’s cold body lay entombed in a rose-granite crypt did Kristina allow herself to wonder how much she truly knew about the woman she called “Mother.”
Even if Kristina could see into the past, Celeste might have remained a mystery. For like the woman Celeste became, the household she grew up in was filled with contradiction. On the outside, Edwin and Nancy Johnson’s brood appeared a typical 1960s middle-class family. Only decades later would a very different picture emerge.
Edwin and Nancy were an odd couple. They met after he’d left the Air Force, in the mid-fifties. Their first encounter took place in Ohio, where she worked as a telephone operator. They struck up a conversation, and Edwin told her he’d just returned to the United States after being stationed in Japan. “He talked about how he’d met a missionary who changed his life,” says Nancy, a stern woman with hornrimmed glasses and a bouffant hairdo. “Edwin talked a lot about God. He talked about morals and ethics.”
A powerfully built man who’d been a mechanic in the service, Edwin bore the scars of a traumatic beginning; reared in Connecticut, he’d lost a brother to drowning. For a year and a half, Edwin’s father blamed himself for leaving his son’s stroller unattended. Finally, when Edwin was seven, his father shot himself. “When we’d go out east, he’d take us to the river where it happened,” says Cole, the oldest of the Johnson siblings. “He had a morbid fascination about it.”
The Johnsons followed the sunshine and settled in Camarillo, California, a small town straddling the 101 freeway in a valley between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. In the sixties, Camarillo offered a peaceful life, the epitome of middle-class America. At the time, the population hovered just under 20,000. If children walking home from school were caught in the rain, local police offered rides. In the summer, families drove to the nearby beaches. School sports filled the weekends, and at the local beauty parlor and post office, gossip swirled like up-dos on prom night.
Using his Air Force nickname, Edwin opened Johnny Johnson’s Vehicles of Wolfsburg, a Volkswagen repair shop, at a time when VW Beetles and buses swarmed the hip West Coast. He became a prominent businessman and joined the local Chamber of Commerce, while he and Nancy made plans to begin a family.
Six years into their marriage, after three miscarriages, however, the Johnsons were childless. “We decided it wasn’t going to happen, so I put out the word that we were interested in adopting,” says Nancy. In an era before legalized abortion and the pill, women needed homes for infants they couldn’t keep. “I could have had as many children as I wanted,” she says. The Johnsons adopted four babies in less than four years. The oldest, Cole, was a year when Celeste was born on February 13, 1963. Two days later, Edwin and Nancy claimed her. Nine months later, Caresse followed, then Eddy.
In years to come when her children asked about their biological mothers, Nancy offered few clues. Celeste once asked for her adoption papers, but Nancy refused. “They were mine, not hers,” she says. To Cole, Nancy said he was the offspring of a wife beater and a prostitute she’d given five dollars not to have an abortion. “Mom could be brutal,” says Cole. “She told me, ‘You’re with us because your real mother didn’t love you.’ I don’t know why she adopted us. She’d say, ‘I don’t love you, either.’”
Nancy and Edwin would later disagree about where the discord in the family originated. He described her as unstable, while she pointed an accusing finger at him. “In those years, Ed was clean-cut, every hair in place,” she says. “The shop was immaculate. But he kept me in the dark, at work, at home. He had secrets.”
Just what life was like inside the small ranch house on a cul-de-sac where the Johnson brood lived would also remain a source of dispute. Nancy would later paint a picture of suburban tranquility. “We baked cookies, went rock hunting. I took the children to Disneyland, twice,” she says. “We sang and danced.”
Yet, her children recounted few of those carefree days.
“Dad was strange and Mom was always troubled,” says Celeste’s younger sister, Caresse. “She had psychological problems. It wasn’t a happy place. Not ever.”
One of Cole’s earliest memories was terrifying. At five or six, he was in the bathtub with his brother and sisters when his mother held them underwater. “It was scary. It was like she was rinsing our hair, but she held us down too long,” he says.
Afterward, Nancy briefly went to a psychiatric hospital. “I’d suffered a breakdown,” she says. “I’d been taking diet pills, and I was under a lot of stress and had insomnia. At the time, I was thinking of a Bible passage, ‘To wash away sins.’ But I never hurt my children. I would never do that.”
After treatment, Nancy returned home to care for her brood. Edwin was gone much of the day at the shop. “We had four kids. It was a full-time commitment to keep beans on the table,” he says. When he talks of Celeste, it’s in glowing terms; she was “Daddy’s baby” and “a sweet child.”
Following their parents’ religious bent, the children attended West Valley Christian Academy. From the beginning, Celeste was a precocious child and in the program for the gifted. One year she drew greeting cards and sent them to patients in a nearby hospital. At the state fair, she and Cole entered their baked goods, cakes and cookies, and came home with ribbons. She had a wholesome, apple-cheeked look and bright, intelligent blue eyes. Everything—from her clothing to the room she shared with Caresse—was her favorite color, pink, making her the stereotypic, perfect, sweet little girl.
Cute and playful, Celeste charmed her parents. Even as a child she understood the power of a well-placed compliment. The year she turned twelve, Celeste told Edwin that a friend of hers had pointed at him and wanted to know who “that handsome guy is.”
“I told her, ‘He’s my dad,’” Celeste said. Decades later, Edwin’s voice grew emotional and proud at the memory.
In 1976, in honor of the country’s bicentennial, Edwin helped her write a speech, and Nancy made her a red, white, and blue shirt. During her performance, Eddy marveled at the way Celeste controlled the audience of parents, students, and teachers. “Celeste gave the most persuasive speeches,” he says. “She could convince people of absolutely anything.”
Yet, little Celeste Johnson had another side, one her brothers describe as frightening and calculating. “One minute she would do everything for you, bend over backward,” says Eddy. “Then she’d turn horrible, mean, positively psycho.”
When they were four small children competing for their busy parents’ attention, Cole describes Celeste as the family instigator, manipulating the others into acts that landed them in trouble. When Nancy fumed, Celeste ran to get the board used for spankings. Later, Nancy dismissed the tumult with a single sentence: “The whole family was dysfunctional.”
As the years passed, signs that the Johnsons’ second child was troubled mounted. Nancy would later describe taking Celeste to UCLA dental school for braces at the age of nine, only to have doctors remove them because she violently clenched her teeth. From an early age, she had horrific nightmares. When Nancy tried to awaken her, Celeste thrashed at her. “It was terrible,” says Nancy. “I didn’t know what was wrong.”
At first the Johnsons were able to hide the turmoil within their home; that ended in the early seventies, when a financial setback sent the family reeling. When Celeste was eleven, Edwin’s business failed. Rather than work, he went to college on the GI bill, attending Moorpark College then Pepperdine University, where he majored in speech. “Things changed,” says Eddy. “Mom went to work as a cake decorator, and Dad put on airs, used big words, tried to impress people. Everything seemed strange.”
With Edwin not working, the problem of finances escalated. The Johnson siblings later recalled violent arguments and their father’s actions turning increasingly odd. At times he chased Cole, threatening to beat him. A neighbor saw Edwin, boiling over with anger, push a lawn mower into the front steps and scream, “There, take that.”
“Edwin just got bizarre,” says a neighbor, “while Nancy worked harder and harder to support the kids. Nobody could understand what was going on in that house.”
Without money for tuition, the children were enrolled in public schools. At home, Celeste acted out. “She was hell on wheels when she turned thirteen,” says Nancy. “I didn’t know why. I was struggling just to keep food on the table. I left early in the morning and came home late at night.”
Perhaps making the situation even more painful for Celeste than the changes in her father and the absence of both her parents was the contrast between her family and that of Nancy’s wealthy friend Louise, who went to the same church as the Johnsons. Celeste and Louise’s daughter were friends, and Louise’s parents bought Celeste expensive presents and took her on trips. “Celeste liked the money,” says Cole. “She saw what it could buy.”
The tension at the Johnson house escalated. Edwin was a different man than the one Nancy married, scruffy, unshaven, and he called himself by a biblical name, Jedediah.
On Christmas Eve 1977, Nancy ordered him from the house.
For the next three years they waged a divorce that had such venom no one escaped its poison. They fought over money, Edwin’s shop tools, and the children. “Dad was crazy,” says Cole. “But Mom was vindictive. She brainwashed the girls to hate our dad.”
“Celeste changed in junior high school,” says Caresse. “She got in trouble, and she was angry all the time. She was a different person after my mom kicked my dad out.”
By the time Celeste turned fourteen, everyone within the Johnson household agreed that she was out of control. She had fights with siblings that her youngest brother, Eddy, compares in violence to a Mike Tyson match. “We couldn’t be together. She’d beat me up, and someone in the neighborhood would call the police,” he says. “The cops were always there, making her stop.”
One day, Cole arrived home to find Celeste pounding on their mother’s back, screaming at her. “She had so much anger,” he says. “It was awful.”
Another day, Nancy woke her for school and a screaming match ensued that ended with Celeste putting her fist through a front-door window. Someone called the police, and the house was surrounded. “They took Celeste in, and the judge ordered her to do community service and go to counseling,” says Nancy. “But by then I was already taking her to psychiatrists. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.”
Once, when Nancy asked Celeste why she was so angry, the teenager simply said, “I’m just trying to get your attention.”
At Camarillo High School, where the teams are known as the Scorpions, Celeste lettered freshman year on the varsity swim team and was a member of the debate team. She appeared a studious girl—always carrying a satchel of books—tall, with long legs, thick blond hair, and deep blue eyes. She had high cheekbones in a slightly elongated face, a carefree manner, and the body of a swimmer, lean and athletic, the very picture of the California girl the Beach Boys celebrated in song. She hung with other kids like herself, those from broken homes. Some remembered her big smile and a laugh that verged on a girlish giggle. She also had a way about her that friends later struggled to explain. “It was like Celeste could see inside of you,” says one. “She sized people up, knew how to get what she wanted. She did it with teachers, even the rest of us kids.”
In many ways, Celeste was an odd mix. She never dressed overtly sexually, instead preferring modest clothes. One friend teased her, saying that she looked like she’d raided her mother’s closet. But she seemed to know without question what men were looking for. “She flirted, in a taunting way,” says a classmate. “Then she’d come across as sweet and innocent. It was an amazing combination. It drove the guys in town crazy.”
Along with her beauty, Celeste had an untamed, wild streak that some found fascinating. When she got her driver’s license, she screamed down the streets in the family’s VW Beetle. At night she teased the neighborhood boys, parading down the street in her nightgown, often with nothing underneath. Cole chased away the clique of boys who catcalled at her. “Celeste laughed, having a good old time with it,” says Eddy.
One incident resonated for Cole; in high school, he had his first sexual experience. The girl then said something that shocked him: “I’ve already done it with Celeste.”
“I always thought Celeste hated men and leaned toward being a lesbian,” he says.
Still, men were attracted to Celeste and, from all appearances, she to them.
Decades later, Craig Bratcher told his family he met Celeste in a bar, when she nuzzled against him, then kissed him. Before long they were making out. Craig, then seventeen, was two years older than Celeste. With his parents divorced the house Craig lived in with his father and brothers was a magnet for the teenagers in the neighborhood, including Celeste. “There was something about Craig that I respected,” says a friend of Celeste’s. “He took things seriously.”
Many would say there was something special about Craig. He was muscular, with a slight paunch. Long brown hair combed to the side fell over his forehead and brushed the tops of thick eyebrows, over sad, dark eyes. He came from a family of four brothers and worked with his father for a big produce company that harvested the bounty of the neighboring valleys.
Perhaps Craig was already troubled when he met Celeste. More than one friend describes him as extraordinarily shy. “Craig had his ups and downs,” says his mom, Cherie Falke. “But he was young, just learning to get on in life, when he met Celeste. From the beginning, their relationship was a mistake.”
In Camarillo, Craig, his father, and brothers lived just blocks from the Johnsons’ home. Celeste skipped school and spent the days there with a batch of close friends, smoking pot and drinking. “We liked being with the older kids,” says one friend. “It made us feel cool.” By then Celeste’s dark blond hair was shoulder length and chopped into a layered Farah Fawcett hairdo. She was fun, with a quick wit and an easy laugh. Craig fell in love. Celeste seemed as taken, and spent every available moment with him. By sophomore year she rarely went to school. “All she wanted was Craig,” says Nancy.
From the onset their relationship was as troubled as Celeste’s family life. “She brought out the worst in him. She’d get him so riled up that he’d go crazy,” according to Craig’s younger brother, Jeff. “Craig believed the things she told him, and that was a mistake.”
After Celeste complained that her boss at a pizza restaurant sexually harassed her, Craig, Jeff, and their friends confronted the man. “The guy hit Craig with a hammer and we all got in trouble,” says Jeff. “Later, Craig figured she wasn’t even telling the truth.” Another night, at a party, Celeste kissed Jeff, then screamed for Craig claiming Jeff had come on to her. “From that point on, I knew she was just no good,” says Jeff.
The tricks she played often came back to haunt Celeste. By high school some teens didn’t want her around. Gail Sharkey, one of her best friends, found Celeste full of life and exhilarating. She was perplexed by how others responded to her. On weekends when they circulated from house party to house party, they were often told to leave by teenagers who didn’t like Celeste. Gail grew angry, but Celeste laughed and shouted curses at those who’d kicked her out.
“Why doesn’t anyone like you?” Gail asked one evening, stating what she thought was the obvious. Celeste looked crestfallen. “Before, she never acted like she cared, but she looked as if she didn’t realize it, and that I’d hurt her feelings.”
Years later Gail would also remember her friend’s recklessness. One afternoon they drove in Craig’s Toyota truck, listening to Fleetwood Mac on the radio, when Craig and some friends came after them in a car. Laughing, Celeste gunned the engine and took off just as the passenger door flew open. Gail fell out. Her pant leg caught on the door and she was dragged for three hundred feet before Celeste pulled into a driveway. “I had a heavy jacket on, or I would have been hurt,” says Gail. “My whole body was shaking.”
Weeks later that same truck was a pile of scrap. Celeste chuckled telling Gail how she and Craig argued. She said she pulled on the steering wheel and drove it off the road, where the truck rolled. Uninsured, it was a total loss. For weeks after, Celeste wore a thick cervical collar and claimed her neck was broken.
Meanwhile, in the courts, the Johnson divorce ground painfully on, the proceedings progressively more bitter. On the stand, during testimony, Edwin was startled by one question in particular. Nancy’s attorney asked: “Mr. Johnson, did you ever stab Celeste?” Edwin insisted he hadn’t.
Later, testifying for her mother, Celeste insisted that her father had stabbed her. Edwin suggested his attorney ask where. Celeste pointed under her eye.
“Here,” she said. “But the scar disappeared.”
Not long after, Gail asked Celeste why she hadn’t been at school. “I had to go to testify against my father,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”
Gail wondered why her friend never mentioned the attack before. They were together nearly every day, and she had never seen bandages on Celeste, except the cervical collar. All that was forgotten just weeks later when Celeste had yet another crisis: She discovered she was pregnant and dropped out of school. As usual, when she told Gail, the story was far from ordinary. It wasn’t just a case of teenage pregnancy, it was a miracle. “I was told I could never get pregnant,” Celeste said.
“I couldn’t imagine why any doctor would say that to a healthy seventeen-year-old,” says Gail. “The whole thing just seemed really, really odd.”
On December 6, 1980, Celeste Johnson married Craig Bratcher. The seventeen-year-old bride was heavily pregnant with what by then doctors predicted would be twins. She wore a sleeveless red gingham maternity dress with a tuck-pointed front trimmed in white cotton lace that hung loosely across her rounded abdomen. The groom, by then nineteen, wore a blue and white shirt and jeans. It was a small affair, just family and close friends, and the cake had two tiers, with wedding bells and a brave little pouf of white netting at the top.
After the wedding, the young couple moved into a rented flat in nearby Oxnard. Gail visited during the day when Craig was at work. On February 6, 1981, she drove up to find Celeste, who’d been ordered by her doctor to stay in bed until the births, walking down the street on her way home from a liquor store, where she’d bought junk food and candy. Gail parked the car and they went inside.
“I don’t do bed rest,” Celeste said. “But I’ve been feeling bad all day.”
That evening at 7:27 P.M., two months early, Celeste gave birth to identical twins. Jennifer Lynn Bratcher was born first, followed by Kristina Ann Bratcher. The infants were tiny, weighting only two pounds seven ounces and two pounds eleven ounces. Doctors had hoped that on bed rest Celeste could have carried them longer, and now they feared the infants weren’t breathing well. An ambulance rushed them to a larger medical center, where they were put on respirators, but the girls were strong and recovered quickly.
Months later the twins sat for a family portrait, the kind taken at department stores in front of a marbled blue background. In it, they wore matching yellow terry-cloth sleepers, their identical little faces flushed and red, eyes wide and intense, hands reaching toward the camera.
That day, Craig looked young and happy. Next to him, Celeste, dressed all in black, smiled shyly. Her dark blond hair framing her pretty face, she appeared the prototype for a content young mother. Barely more than children themselves, they were embarking on what should have been an exciting adventure: building a family with two perfect baby girls. A hint of what lay ahead, however, was also in that photo. While Craig wrapped a protective hand tightly around Jennifer, Celeste’s grasp on Kristina looked reluctant. In the photo, Kristina frowns, her face red and her brow heavily furrowed. Perhaps she already sensed she would never be secure in her mother’s arms.
Less than a year after the wedding the marriage was troubled. Young, with no money and two small babies, they lived like nomads, moving seven times in six months, from Craig’s father’s house, to sharing apartments with friends, to a guest house next to Craig’s grandfather in Washington State, and back to California. When they were happy, friends say Celeste was all Craig could have asked for, vibrant and exciting, full of plans and launching schemes, sprinting through life. She had great dreams—to go to college, to get a good job and buy a house. Yet as quickly, she became distracted, usually by another man, the next door neighbor or somebody she met while waitressing. At times she ran off, leaving the twins behind, with only Craig to care for them.
When she wanted him to take her back, Celeste explained away her behavior by saying she had demons in her childhood, dark secrets that haunted her. “From the beginning when she did something awful, she blamed it on what happened to her as a kid,” says Craig’s mother, Cherie. “Celeste told us her father sexually abused her and that was why she acted like she did.”
Craig felt sorry for her and, despite everything, took her back.
Years later the Johnson family had conflicting theories on what happened between Edwin and Celeste and whether the abuse ever occurred. Edwin categorically denied ever sexually abusing either of his daughters. “It didn’t happen,” he says. Cole and Eddy agreed, insisting they saw no indication of anything improper. “It was a small house, and I saw nothing that even vaguely suggested it,” says Cole. “As nosy as our mom was, she would have known. If Dad did anything wrong, he catered to my sisters too much. Did my father molest Celeste? No.”
Nancy was less sure.
Recounting how she’d tried to get psychiatric help for Celeste, never understanding what was wrong with her, she would say, “I can’t confirm the abuse, but I don’t discount it.” She remembered once walking in to find Edwin in bed with Celeste, yet both were clothed and he was on top of the blanket and sheet with Celeste underneath. Her most troubling memory, perhaps, was waking to find Edwin watching television—in the early hours of the morning—with their youngest daughter, Caresse, on his lap. “He said he couldn’t sleep and got her up to keep him company,” says Nancy.
“It started when I was five or six and went on for a long time,” says Caresse. “Right up until he was thrown out of the house. He’d wake Celeste and me up and want us to watch television with him. Then he sent me to bed, and I heard Celeste crying. I don’t remember it happening to me. Celeste says I don’t want to. Maybe she’s right.”
If Celeste came to motherhood reluctantly, Craig’s world revolved around the twins, giving them baths, feeding them, becoming both mother and father. Years later, when he and Celeste fought over the girls in court, he’d write an account of his life with her for the judge. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have written her off and raised the girls by myself,” he wrote. “But I was young and ignorant, and I thought I was in love.”
In Celeste’s version, Craig was an abusive man who stalked and even raped her. There was no doubt that he had a temper. He would later admit that, saying, “I did a lot of things that I regret.” When she took off with a new man, he fought to get her back. Once, he broke into a house where she and a boyfriend were staying. Another time he stood outside a window, pointing a gun at Celeste and a lover in bed. There were police reports, restraining orders, and Craig spent a four-month stint in jail for brandishing a firearm. That time, he’d later claim, Celeste took his money and left with one of his fellow inmates, a man he introduced her to in the jail visiting room. When the affairs ended, Craig took her back. “I don’t know if I was lonely or naive,” he later wrote, “but I moved right back in with her… She stayed out all night. We had violent confrontations … She called the cops with wild stories and, because of my record, they believed her.”
At one point she claimed that Craig put cat feces in her mouth as she slept. Another time she charged that he broke her arm. Did it happen? Later, many would be skeptical. “She was always bragging about how she had a high pain tolerance,” says Kristina. “When I was little, I remember seeing her slam her arm in a car door on purpose, until it broke. I don’t know if that’s the time she said my dad did it. But I never saw him hit her.”
One thing stood out: Craig felt powerless with Celeste, sucked into her world of chaos. To explain why she didn’t enjoy sex with him, she talked of the sexual abuse she claimed she suffered at her father’s hand. At their apartment, Gail once saw a hole punched in the wall. Inside, Craig had scrawled: No Sex! Yet, at the same time she rebuffed her husband, Celeste seemed driven by lust, jumping in bed with man after man. The message for Craig must have been that she was interested in sex, just not with him.
His mother, Cherie, spent enough time with Celeste to understand what kind of woman her son had married. One day a friend called to say she saw Celeste in the registrar’s office of a business college she was attending, demanding a tuition refund past the cutoff date. When the clerk refused, Celeste cried and said she had a good reason for not attending classes. “One of my twin daughters died,” she said.
The friend was distraught, calling Cherie with condolences over the death of her grandchild. Cherie knew it wasn’t true. “I wasn’t surprised,” she says. “Money meant more to Celeste than anything, even her own children.”
Eighteen months after they married, on May 18, 1982, Craig and Celeste divorced. Celeste was granted custody of the year-old twins, with Craig having a share of holidays, vacations, and weekends. He was ordered to pay $300 a month in child support, and Celeste was given their 1962 VW, a share of the furniture, her personal items and clothing. A $1,400 tax refund and money from the sale of Craig’s 1974 Honda motorcycle were to be used to pay off bills, including $28 for a diaper service and three doctor bills. Both parties were ordered to restrain from harassing the other.
But rather than an ending, the divorce represented little more than an intermission.
“I hooked up with Celeste again after she left Craig,” says Gail. “She was living with a woman with a bunch of kids on welfare. Celeste was on welfare, too, and working as a waitress at a pizza place. She asked if I wanted to live with her, and we got an apartment together. At first, it was fun. Then things got crazy. When I left, I fled for my life.”
Years later Gail would remember Celeste being ill-equipped for motherhood. When Gail returned home from waitressing, Celeste was dressed and ready for work, leaving the babies with Gail, crying and dirty. Making their lives more chaotic, Craig often arrived at the apartment uninvited. To Gail, it seemed Celeste enjoyed manipulating him. Once, she found a love letter Celeste wrote him, which she’d signed with another woman’s name. “One minute they’d be fine,” says Gail. “The next, pots were flying. But I never saw Craig get physical. She’d throw things, but he’d just turn and leave.”
Since the apartment had only two bedrooms, the girls’ cribs took up one room, and Gail shared a bed with Celeste in the second bedroom. “There was nothing going on. It just worked better that way,” says Gail.
Yet one morning she awoke to see Craig glaring down at them. “You’re a lesbian,” he said to Celeste. “That’s why you never want sex with me.”
Gail was horrified, but Celeste just laughed.
Soon Gail worried their friendship had taken an odd turn. Gradually, Celeste had become possessive, insisting Gail tell her where she went every moment of every day. “She got really strange. She treated me like a daughter or a boyfriend,” she says. “I felt smothered.” Seven months after she moved in with her, Gail wanted out. Hoping to avoid a confrontation, she packed her things in her car while Celeste worked. When Celeste arrived, Gail said she was going out. Celeste badgered her, insisting she say where. Gail refused. In a rage, Celeste cursed. As Gail walked to the door, something whizzed past her. When she looked, she saw a butcher knife embedded in the wall. Terrified, Gail ran.
At a friend’s house the following morning, Gail hoped the worst was over, but a friend phoned and told her Celeste had called, claiming police were looking for her. “Celeste had pressed charges, claiming I stole her purse with her welfare checks and food stamps,” says Gail.
Not knowing what to do, she called the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office. “Are you looking for me? Do I need to come in?” she asked.
“No,” the prosecutor said, explaining Celeste’s purse had been found along the side of a road. “She won’t bother you anymore. We’ll take care of it.”
“I don’t know why he said that, except they knew she was lying,” says Gail, who was so frightened of Celeste that she left the county and hid.
Later, Gail heard that after she moved out, Celeste abandoned the twins in a foster home. Over the years there would be a string of such periods, times when Celeste turned the girls over to others to raise. She’d later claim she couldn’t afford to support them; others would charge she was distracted by her latest man. “My first memories are of her leaving us with strangers,” says her daughter Jennifer. “We never knew if or when she’d come back.”
Later, Celeste moved back in with Craig and regained custody of the twins. Living in an apartment, they must have looked to the outside world like the perfect young family, a handsome dad, beautiful mom, and two identical little toddlers. It was then that Celeste’s father, Edwin, came to live with them. As she had with Gail, Celeste became demanding, insisting he report where he was and with whom. A few months after Edwin moved in, he spent a night with friends. He and Celeste argued, but he didn’t realize how angry she was until he was picked up by police the next day. In the past, Celeste had claimed to others that she’d been sexually abused, but she’d never confronted him. Now, she made the accusation to the police. “I told them that it never happened,” Edwin says. “I didn’t abuse my daughter. I would never do that.”
The deciding bit of information for Celeste’s oldest brother Cole came from a detective. The day in 1985 when Edwin was taken in for questioning, one of the officers told Cole that Edwin had been given a lie detector test. In it he denied Celeste’s charges. “The detective said Dad passed with flying colors. The police never pressed charges,” says Cole. “Celeste was lying. Celeste was always lying. She was mad at our dad, and she was out to get him.”
Months later, Celeste and Craig split once again and she dated a guy she’d known since high school, Pete Timm. An electrician, he came from a well-respected Camarillo family. “Celeste was one of those people you wanted to be around,” says Pete. “She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she was pretty, and she loved to laugh… She kind of drew you in.”
Attentive, Celeste said all the right things, including that she loved him. “Later, I wondered how I ended up with her, but I was only listening to my heart,” Timm says.
When Craig warned him to beware of Celeste, saying she’d “raked him over the coals,” Timm didn’t believe him. With the twins in foster care, Celeste worked in a deli and cleaned houses in Leisure Village, a well-to-do retirement community. She also went to school, first to be a hair stylist, then to Oxnard College, where she took a class in accounting. As she had with Craig, Celeste told sad stories about being abused by her father and having the twins so young she couldn’t afford them. Pete opened up his life to her. She became a part of his family, even living with his parents. In love, he even took her to the bank when he made deposits. That turned out to be a mistake, when he discovered $7,000 had disappeared from his account.
“Your wife withdrew all the money,” the teller told Pete. “She went through the drive-through taking out one to two thousand dollars at a time for a week.”
When he confronted her, Celeste cried and said she needed the money for an attorney to reclaim the twins. After she pledged her love, Pete forgave her. Yet, things gnawed at him. One was that she never enjoyed sex. “It was a chore for her,” he says. “She was really good at it, but it always felt like she wanted something in return. Celeste flipped the switch and acted upbeat, but there was never any real joy. She was beautiful and sad.”
Even with the girls, he saw little happiness and rarely motherly love. “She did all the right things, acting like she cared, but never showed real affection,” he says. On weekend visitations, a county caseworker dropped off the girls, then came to pick them up. The girls pleaded with her not to take them away from their mother. “It didn’t faze Celeste,” says Timm, who wondered how someone as caring as Celeste could be so cold.
Still, he loved her, and they made plans to marry. Once they did, Celeste told him caseworkers would release the girls to her and they’d be a family. As the wedding approached, his excitement grew. Celeste even told Pete’s religious parents that she’d found God. Then, just months before the wedding, Celeste found an apartment she wanted. She asked Timm to lend her the money for the deposit. Remembering how she’d cleaned him out, he was apprehensive. But then Celeste surprised him by saying she’d get the money from her mother. While he listened, she phoned someone she called “Mom.” When she hung up, she bubbled with excitement, saying Nancy had agreed. There was one catch: She wouldn’t get the money for three days. “Pete, could you loan it to me?” Celeste pleaded. “I’ll pay you back when Mom sends the check.”
Pete agreed, and when she asked him to, he signed the apartment lease.
The next day Pete’s money and Celeste were both gone. Compounding the blow, Celeste had turned in the lease, leaving him responsible for a full year’s rent. Spinning from the betrayal, he searched but couldn’t find her. In the end he didn’t care about the money, only that the woman he loved had left him. “Maybe it was never love,” he says. “But she broke my heart, and for three years I thought about her every day and wondered what I did to make her leave. In her own way, Celeste was intoxicating.”
Craig hadn’t been able to rid himself of his desire for Celeste, either, despite leaving California to flee her. It happened a few days after he was discovered sitting in a Camarillo hotel stairwell. He was drunk, morose, and had a shotgun poised under his chin. “I love her and she just does shit to me,” Craig said to Jeff, who’d been called by the police. “Why does Celeste do these things? Why does she hurt me?”
Jeff took away the gun, and Craig was taken in for observation. Three days later he gave Craig his car keys and convinced him to move to Phoenix. “There was nothing good about Craig’s relationship with Celeste except the twins,” says Jeff. “I hoped Craig would never see her again. That didn’t happen. He wasn’t there for more than a few days when she called, begging him to take her back.”