On the morning of Monday, March, 3, 2003, Dick DeGuerin began Celeste’s defense with four Dallas mental health professionals from Timberlawn: her psychologist, Dr. Bernard Gotway; her psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Miller; the art therapist, Melissa Caldwell; and Tracey’s therapist, Susan Milholland. Under Texas law, no privilege exists that exempts physicians from testifying in criminal cases, and all raised their hands before Judge Kocurek and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth.
Wearing a tweedy sport coat fit for a college professor, his gray hair curly, Gotway, the first on the stand, estimated he’d treated, if not thousands, at least hundreds of patients. Licensed for eighteen years at the time he first saw Celeste, he specialized in patients who’d suffered severe trauma. Concerning his client on trial for murder, he described her as a needy woman who had flashbacks, overwhelming anxieties, and the need to spend lavishly on others to buy their friendships. “This is the kind of thing we treat every day,” Gotway said, adjusting his glasses. “She was ripe for treatment when she got to Timberlawn.”
Much of the turmoil in her marriage to Steve, the therapist said, involved her spending. Yet, here, he suggested, Celeste was merely a pawn of her history. “Whenever she got to feeling bad, she’d buy something,” he said. “She’d hide her anxiety by trying to make things perfect, especially in the house.”
While Celeste was his primary focus, he worked on the marriage as well, through couple’s therapy. “Steve told me he wanted Celeste to be happy. I thought these were people who wanted to be together,” Gotway said. “Celeste is complex. She’s had a lot of trauma in her life, and she tends to be histrionic. She seeks attention.” Then he went on to say something that caught Wetzel’s undivided attention. “Celeste isn’t capable of making long-term plans. She’s too impulsive, jumping from one thing to the next. She’s not a strategic thinker able to plan over a long period of time.”
“Could she have planned for months to influence Tracey Tarlton to kill her husband? Could she do that?” DeGuerin asked.
Wetzel jumped up. “I object your honor. That’s a question the jury has to answer.”
“Sustained,” Judge Kocurek ruled. Yet DeGuerin had made his point: Celeste’s psychologist judged her incapable of the murder.
“Are there some people who say things to their therapists that aren’t true?” Wetzel asked during cross examination.
“Yes,” Gotway said.
“Would the failure of a patient to disclose make a therapist’s opinion less valid?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you she was having an affair with her ex-husband?”
“No,” Gotway said.
“Did the defendant tell you this was the first time she’d ever told anyone about her sexual abuse?”
“That’s what I wrote in my notes,” he said.
“Would it surprise you that she told a therapist in 1995 about the abuse?”
“No,” he said.
Yes, he agreed, the nurses described Celeste as demanding and manipulative.
“Did she manipulate you?” Wetzel asked.
“In little ways, yes,” he said.
As Wetzel asked questions, a very different image of the sessions with Gotway emerged than his answers to the defense attorney revealed. Yes, she’d called Steve names and said that she hated him. While Gotway suggested under direct testimony that the relationship with Tracey had been one-sided, he admitted not knowing many things, including that the women slept in the same bed and that Celeste had given Tracey a wedding ring. Before long there seemed to be much about his patient that Gotway didn’t know.
Then Wetzel got a surprise. “Did she mention to you that she’d hired someone to kill Tracey Tarlton?” she asked.
“She said she’d discussed that with someone,” Gotway said.
Wetzel looked startled, then pointed out, “That’s not in your notes.”
“I didn’t write it down.”
“Why?” Wetzel asked, staring at Gotway. “Were you trying to protect her?”
“Probably,” Gotway answered. “Yes.”
When Susan Milholland took the stand, it was clear that she had reacted very differently when Tracey told her, “All my problems would be over if a certain person met an untimely death.” Though a less blatant threat than the one Gotway had testified to hearing, it was enough for Milholland to call a meeting and for Tracey to be transferred out of Celeste’s unit.
Next, Dr. Howard Miller, Celeste’s psychiatrist, a thick-necked man with a quiet voice, wearing a quiet suit, took the stand. “Tracey may have been delusional about her relationship with Celeste,” he said, well into his testimony. “She was certainly delusional about other things. She has a strong need to believe that the relationship was what she wanted it to be.”
Wetzel and Cobb assumed that Celeste’s therapist would testify only about his patient. Instead, DeGuerin had asked about Tracey. Although Miller never treated her, he voiced his opinions.
“We’d like to take Dr. Miller on a sidebar,” Wetzel said, wanting to stop the testimony and argue outside the jury’s presence that he shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the mental state of a woman who wasn’t his patient.
“Not timely,” the judge ruled, saying the objection came too late.
With that, DeGuerin dug out the chart he’d branded Tracey with, the one that read: suicidal, homicidal, delusional, and psychotic. The defense attorney placed it beside Miller, asking him if those words fit Tracey Tarlton. Yes, Miller said, they did, “Tracey’s illness makes her likely to give in to her feelings and act on them in violence.”
When it came to the relationship between the two women, Miller said that he urged his patient to distance herself from Tracey. “I believe Tracey sustains a delusional belief system,” he said. “She believes the relationship with Celeste was more than it was.”
On the stand, Miller came across as sincere and believable. The first day of his case and five weeks into the trial, DeGuerin was making headway. Then he turned the witness over to Wetzel for cross examination.
“Isn’t it true that in August, September, and October of 1999, Tracey Tarlton reported no auditory hallucinations of any kind?” Wetzel asked.
“In July of 1999 the notes indicate some auditory hallucinations,” Miller answered.
“My question was later in 1999, say in October?” Wetzel replied pointedly.
“The notes I have don’t indicate any,” he said.
“When Tracey hears these voices, does she know they’re not real?”
“Yes,” he said. “I believe she does.”
With Wetzel prompting him, Miller discussed the rules at Timberlawn, including those that barred sexual contact. Yes, if Tracey had admitted a sexual affair with Celeste, they would have been separated, so there were reasons for her not to flaunt a relationship with Celeste or write about it in a journal that could be read by others.
“If Tracey had told you about a sexual relationship, you’d shut it down?” she asked.
“We’d try to interrupt it,” he said.
“You were Celeste’s therapist, not Tracey’s,” Wetzel pointed out.
“Yes,” Miller agreed. At the defense table, DeGuerin frowned. Wetzel then began what would become a routine tactic throughout the trial: to prove Miller knew little about the real Celeste. She showed photos of Tracey and Celeste together on the overhead projector and listed many of the things the women had done together, from parties to kissing on the lips at social events, ending with the wedding ring. “If ten people saw them together [acting as a couple], would they be delusional?” she said.
“Tracey was delusional at the time she was at Timberlawn,” Miller said.
“Is it possible that their relationship changed after Timberlawn?”
“It may have,” Miller conceded.
“Dr. Miller, do people in relationships, whether mentally ill or not, want to believe the person they love?” asked Wetzel.
“Yes,” he said.
“Is it possible that the defendant encouraged Tracey to believe their relationship was closer than it was?”
“Yes.”
Over the weeks of the defense, DeGuerin had fought to tear apart the evidence the prosecutors had put before the jury, but made little progress. The prosecutors, meanwhile, insinuated doubt into the testimony of one defense witness after another. An attendant from St. David’s who insisted the women couldn’t have kissed while there found himself staring at photos taken on the hospital grounds, a place where cameras were forbidden. If the women broke one rule, what kept them from flouting others? When Dr. Michele Hauser, Celeste’s Austin psychiatrist, took the stand, DeGuerin worked on the twins’ remarks that Celeste went to St. David’s to prevent Steve from divorcing her, not because she was truly ill.
“Was she depressed?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
In some ways, Hauser’s testimony helped Celeste. She painted her patient not as a leader, but a follower, someone easily manipulated. Still, other points in her testimony hurt DeGuerin’s case. Yes, Steve was angry late that September, aware that Celeste was not including him in her plans. He discovered she’d used aliases to get credit cards. As she had with the others, on cross exam, Wetzel turned Hauser’s testimony to her advantage. Again, Celeste had hid much from Hauser. One thing came through loud and clear—an indication of Celeste’s personality. When Tracey overdosed before Celeste’s trip to Australia, Celeste told the therapist she was worried. “Celeste had concerns that Tracey would try to kill herself and that this would interrupt her vacation,” Hauser said.
More than one juror stared at Celeste, who glared at the therapist on the stand.
To Hauser, like Gotway, Celeste had said she “should hire a hit man to kill Tracey.”
“What did you tell her?” Wetzel asked.
“I told her that wasn’t good judgment, not a good way to handle things.”
On the stand, Jimmy Martinez smiled at the spectators and swiveled nervously from side to side in the chair. For two days he’d waited in the hall to be called. Now it appeared he’d rather be anywhere but testifying at his former wife’s capital murder trial. Seated next to DeGuerin, Celeste beamed. Later, one spectator would say she “lit up like a Roman candle with Martinez on the stand.” Another thought he actually detected flirting between the defendant and the witness.
Yes, Martinez testified, the alarm system in the Toro Canyon home was faulty, and he’d fixed it. He testified that Celeste loved the twins and would have done anything for them, and that his sexual liaison with her was more of a close friendship than an affair. Yes, he agreed with DeGuerin, Tracey “bird-dogged” Celeste at the graduation party. “Celeste told me to tell Tracey that she wasn’t a lesbian,” Martinez testified.
When Cobb took over, he concentrated on the money, mainly the check Celeste had written for Martinez’s work, inflated by tens of thousands of dollars, money Celeste pocketed.
“She gave you a lot, didn’t she?” Cobb asked.
“Yes,” said Martinez.
“You’d do anything for her?”
“Yes,” he said again.
Those first days of the defense, with DeGuerin and the prosecutors squaring off in front of the judge with opposing objections, tempers flared. DeGuerin called Cobb and Wetzel unprofessional for talking while he asked questions, and Cobb countered that DeGuerin objected simply to interrupt his cross exams. At the bench, Baen and Wetzel towered over their male counterparts. When witnesses like the executives from Bank of America brought in their own attorneys, the judge was swarmed by business suits. At one point nine lawyers clustered about her, each listening to every word, waiting to argue for his or her client’s best interest.
The animosity between the two sides was exemplified by one of the final witnesses in the fifth week. DeGuerin brought a Houston accountant named Jeff Compton to the stand to testify about Celeste’s finances. With colorful charts, Compton argued that Celeste hadn’t profited from Steve’s death, as the prosecutors maintained.
“Did expenditures increase after Steve’s death?” DeGuerin asked.
“It was stable to declining, as far as expenditures from those accounts,” Compton said.
“Was Celeste better off financially with Steve dead or alive?”
“She had access to more property with him alive,” Compton said.
On cross, Wetzel pointed out that the figures Compton quoted as spending from before Steve’s death included major onetime expenses, like the cost of building and decorating the two houses. Those skewed the figures, she argued. On the stand, Compton bristled, angrily insisting she was wrong, that the Beards had continued to spend. With that, Wetzel pulled out a chart she’d pulled together with Kuperman, when he was on the stand. In two vertical columns, she compared what Celeste got under the trust to what she would receive in a divorce. Under the divorce column, she was entitled to nothing other than the half interests in the two houses and her personal property. If he died, she received a hundred percent of the value of the houses plus the income from the trust for the rest of her life, a difference of millions of dollars.
Compton shot back, insisting the prenup might not hold up in a divorce. But then he conceded that, at least at face value, Celeste had more money of her own if Steve died.
“Would you agree with me that having access to something is not the same as owning it and being able to sell it for cash if you wish to?” Wetzel asked.
“Yes,” Compton agreed.
Throughout the trial, DeGuerin fought no issue as ferociously as his contention that the relationship with Celeste existed only in Tracey’s mind. If he could convince the jury that the affair was a figment of a diseased mind, he might persuade them that Celeste’s involvement in the murder was untrue as well. To do that, he’d put on a parade of mental health professionals.
With his furrowed brow and graying mustache, Dr. Randy Frazier, Tracey’s psychologist, made an affable witness. That fall, after the shooting, he said, Tracey was consumed by a lack of access to Celeste. It was all she talked about. “What did Celeste and Tracey do together?” DeGuerin asked.
“She alluded to sexual contact and social contact,” Frazier said.
While DeGuerin appeared to gain nothing of importance from Frazier, Wetzel scored when she asked him to point out in his patient’s charts when and where he’d noted evidence that Tracey suffered from psychotic episodes. From June 1999 through the time frame of the shooting, Frazier had seen no sign of either hallucinations or delusions.
“If Tracey believed Steve was standing in the way of her relationship with Celeste, would that get in the way of reality?” DeGuerin asked on redirect.
“If there was no reality basis to that, I would consider that delusional,” Frazier said.
“Assume there was a friendship, nothing more, is that delusional?”
“If she’s getting clear information from Celeste,” Frazier said.
“Suppose there was actual sexual contact?” DeGuerin asked, and Wetzel looked up from her notes to listen carefully, as DeGuerin seemed to abandon his entire strategy mid-witness.
“Then Tracey would be getting mixed messages,” Frazier said. “The word that comes to mind is confusion.”
DeGuerin handed him Celeste’s birthday card to Tracey, reading, “To the One I Love,” and asked, “Would that be a mixed message?”
“It would fuel a hope Tracey had,” Frazier said. “It doesn’t sound like such a distortion in that context to think this person cares.”
“Could there then have been a delusional hope that with Steve out of the way she’d have what she wanted?”
“It certainly could,” Frazier said.
Clearly, in the sixth week of the trial the defense attorney had backed off his declaration that the affair had all been a figment of Tracey’s mind. With so much evidence against him, perhaps he’d simply decided it was time to move on.
From that point on, the defense witnesses taking the stand fell into groups: the lawyers, from Charles Burton to Philip Presse, whom Celeste had hired after the shooting; and the friends, from Ana Presse and Dawn Madigan to Terry Meyer, her manicurist. As Mange had planned if he’d taken Tracey Tarlton to trial, DeGuerin used Meyer to introduce Tracey’s words at Tramps: “If that old man hurts Celeste, I’ll kill him.” One of Celeste’s hairdresser friends, Denise, never made it from the hallway to the witness stand. Although she was prepared to testify, she’d later say the defense decided not to call her. She suspected it was because of what she might say that would bolster the prosecution, including that Celeste had told called Steve names and told her about putting the sleeping pills in his food.
On the stand, Celeste’s friend from the lake, Marilou Gibbs, a heavyset woman with a thick helmet of gray hair, at first charmed the courtroom. She laughed about Celeste and Steve, describing them as very much in love. Rather than add Everclear to his vodka, Gibbs said Celeste watered it down, to keep him sober. It was true that Celeste argued with him, “even flipping him the bird,” she said, but she did it to his face, and Steve loved her more for it. Rather than Celeste and Steve arguing, Gibbs suggested it was Kristina who clashed with her adoptive father. “She called him names behind his back,” Gibbs said. “She complained about having to sit down to dinner with him.”
The jurors warmed to Gibbs, laughing along with her. Perhaps they thought that if Celeste had such a good friend, she couldn’t be all bad. But during her second day on the stand, the mood in the courtroom turned dark when Gibbs insisted that Steve was the one who convinced Celeste to go to relationship counseling with Tracey. The picture before the courtroom of the old-fashioned businessman contrasted sharply with the new-age notion of a husband sending his wife to relationship counseling with her gay lover. Gibbs even maintained that she’d found a bottle of sleeping pills at the lake house when she cleaned it up, and had taken the time to count them. None were missing. DeGuerin suggested this implied the teens were lying and that Celeste hadn’t put any in Steve’s food.
On the stand, Gibbs systematically addressed nearly every issue in the trial. Yes, she said, Tracey “bird-dogged” Celeste at the graduation party, stalking her, obsessed with her, giving her long, glaring looks when she talked to or danced with others. Celeste, on the other hand, was merely friendly. Before long the jury, which had been sitting up and smiling at the old woman, sat back in their chairs, frowning.
Listening to Gibbs, it seemed that she’d been friends to all in the family, especially Steve, who she said confided in her about personal matters, including his concerns about Tracey. Then DeGuerin used Gibbs to introduce Defendant’s Exhibit 15: the “Hey Dyke” letter, which read: “No one believes anything you tell them. You are never going to ever have another friend ever again. No one will ever like you again. You need to prove to everyone that you really do love Steve and join him. It is the only way that anyone will like you. I promise.”
Unsigned, Celeste maintained she’d received it in the mail after Kristina and Jennifer went into hiding. Gibbs said she’d been the one to notice an indentation of a signature in the note. “It was Kristina’s,” she said. “I advised Celeste to take it to her attorney.”
On cross exam, Gary Cobb pointed out that Gibbs had been right outside the courtroom door for most of the trial, often with her daughter, Dana, the realtor who had sold Steve the lake house lot, circulating in and out. “Every issue in this case, you’ve come up here and given testimony on,” he said. He then asked if Celeste had done things for Gibbs, from allowing her to live rent free in the lake house to loaning her $4,000 when her car broke down.
Gibbs said she’d repaid the loan and denied that the other instances were true: “I did not live at the lake house rent free.”
“You’ve said Celeste wasn’t a person who kept secrets. Did she ever tell you she had a sexual relationship with Jimmy Martinez?”
“No,” Gibbs said.
“Nothing would make you believe she had a sexual relationship with Tracey?”
“Not unless I saw it with my own eyes,” Gibbs said.
“Were you given some bedroom furniture by the defendant?”
“No,” Gibbs insisted, leading Cobb to ask again.
“She gave me a mattress and a box spring,” Gibbs said.
“Your answer is that I was not specific enough to name individual bed parts?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “You put yourself out to be a good friend of Steve Beard’s. How often did you visit him in the hospital?”
“I didn’t,” she admitted.
“Did you visit him in rehab?”
“No,” she said.
Throughout the defense, threads emerged that went nowhere. DeGuerin convinced Judge Kocurek to have Kristina— who denied writing the letter—fingerprinted, but her prints failed to match the one on the “Hey Dyke” letter. The indentation, an expert said, matched her signature, but on cross she admitted it could have been traced. A defense audio expert suggested the tape on which Celeste was heard saying she’d hired a hit man to kill Tracey might have been edited, but under cross examination he described editing as including turning the tape recorder on and off.
Yet, no testimony was as bizarre as that of Katina Lofton.
The issue with Lofton—a repeat felon serving a six-year sentence for theft and forgery—had cropped up late in 2002, as Wetzel and DeGuerin readied for trial, when Celeste wrote to DeGuerin telling him that Lofton had information about the case. On the stand, Lofton described having bunked in the same cell with Tracey for a period of a month, from March to April 2002.
“Did Tracey ever say if Celeste knew she was going to kill Steve?” DeGuerin asked.
“She didn’t,” Lofton said. “Tracey said she shot him. She never said that Celeste knew she was going to shoot her husband.”
“Did Tracey Tarlton say what she was going to say on the stand?”
“She was going to say Celeste did it to get out of jail quicker,” Lofton said. “She said she wasn’t going to rot in jail while Celeste lived the good life.”
“Did Tracey say they were lovers?” DeGuerin asked.
“She said they were friends, that Celeste helped her out.”
“Do you have anything to gain by testifying before this jury?”
“No,” she said. Yet she did admit that Celeste had once given her $200, stationery, and envelopes.
DeGuerin then led Lofton through a series of questions about a meeting she’d had with Wetzel and Sergeant Debra Smith, her investigator. Lofton claimed that Wetzel told her not to testify, that she’d get torn up on the stand.
A short, heavyset black woman, Lofton wore her green jail uniform. DeGuerin described her as taking the stand reluctantly, fearful for her own life for testifying. Wetzel countered that by calling her a liar, willing to say anything for money.
It wasn’t the first time the prosecutor’s path had crossed with the witness. Lofton was the mother in the “spiked baby case,” a horrific case of child abuse that had stunned Austin just a year earlier, when her husband, Jermaine Lofton Sr., dangled their infant son out of the window of a moving car, then carried him on a long foot chase with police. While officers begged him not to, he laughed and spiked the baby against the ground like a football. The child was left brain damaged. Wetzel had been the prosecutor, and she’d wanted Katina Lofton to testify against her husband. Even to help punish the man who’d nearly killed her baby, Lofton refused to take the stand. Without her help, Wetzel got a guilty verdict and a seventy-five-year sentence for Jermaine. She wouldn’t testify for her own child, but now Lofton was on the stand defending Celeste.
“Is it hard for you to remember all the different things you have told different people?” Wetzel asked when she took over.
“No,” Lofton said. But when Wetzel gave her the opportunity to amend her testimony, Lofton admitted she’d also gotten fifty dollars from one of Celeste’s friends, in her commissary fund.
With that, Wetzel pulled out Lofton’s jailhouse correspondence. After Celeste’s arrest, Mange had the jail copy everything coming in and out for her. “I’m here to support you,” Lofton wrote to Celeste in one letter. “You know, I’ll be looking out for you.”
In the letters, Lofton called Celeste “Dimples,” and asked her for many things, from school tuition, to full-body contouring, to support letters from Celeste’s friends for her parole. In a letter from July of the previous year, Wetzel asked, “Do you tell the defendant, ‘There’s no limit to what I would do for you?’”
“Yes,” Lofton said.
Lofton wrote Celeste fractured poems, extolling her platonic love, describing her as a good woman, then said, “I got some shit your attorney need to know.”
“Did you tell the defendant not to write you back until she’s had time to do these things and to remind her friend to do the support letters?”
“Yes.”
From one of Lofton’s letters, in which she told Celeste she wasn’t gay, Wetzel read, “I like Dick too much.”
“You’re not talking about Mr. DeGuerin here, are you?” Wetzel asked, straight-faced.
Above his suit collar, the defense attorney’s neck turned scarlet as Lofton said, “No.”
In the end, it would seem that Lofton would sum up her own testimony, saying, “Ain’t nobody here ever going to fess up to what’s really going on.”
The two witnesses DeGuerin fought the hardest to get on the stand would never be allowed to testify before the jury. The first was Tracey’s old girlfriend, Zan Ray. Tracey had been with Ray when she found her husband’s body, after he committed suicide. It would have been an enticing morsel to place before the jury to show Tracey had another girlfriend whose husband turned up dead, even if he had left a note and died of an overdose. The second: Reginald Breaux, the man Tracey had shared beers with then brushed against with her car. She’d been jailed overnight, but never charged with anything from the incident. DeGuerin argued the incident showed Tracey had attempted to kill someone before Steve Beard. Judge Kocurek ruled that neither witness was relevant.
As the defense rested, Wetzel worried the most about the impact of two of DeGuerin’s expert witnesses: Drs. Terry Satterwhite and Charles Petty.
A UT professor in infectious diseases, Satterwhite was an elderly, pale man with trembling hands, who seemed fascinated by the courtroom. DeGuerin had asked him to review the Brackenridge Hospital records for Steve’s final stay there, in the days leading up to and including his death.
“Did you review them?” he asked.
“Yes,” Satterwhite said.
“What did you conclude was the cause of death?”
“Group A strep, a blood infection, the same strain that causes a sore throat and acute rheumatic fever,” he said. Satterwhite went on to say Steve’s age, heart condition, asthma, alcohol abuse, and diabetes made him more vulnerable.
“What relation did his death have to the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked.
“I don’t think it had any relationship,” Satterwhite said. As evidence of the infection, DeGuerin led the physician through Steve’s chart, citing the notations as his temperature climbed. The groin rash, he said, may have been the point of entry.
“Could this Group A strep have been caused by changing his ileostomy bag with dirty hands?”
“No.”
“Did this infection have anything to do with the gunshot wound or the recovery from the gunshot wound?” DeGuerin asked again.
“No, in my opinion, it did not,” Satterwhite said.
On cross exam, Gary Cobb asked Satterwhite, “Did you look at the autopsy?”
“Yes,” he said. “Just a few days ago.”
“Did you look at the photos?”
“I’m not qualified to interpret the photos,” Satterwhite said. “I’m not trained in it.”
“Pulmonary embolisms are common with trauma surgery when a patient has not been ambulatory?”
“Yes,” Satterwhite said. “I haven’t seen the slides. There weren’t any microscopic findings in the autopsy report.”
“Wasn’t the rash a complication of the gunshot wound?”
“Not in my opinion,” Satterwhite said.
“But if he got it in HealthSouth, the reason he was there is because of the gunshot?”
“Yes,” Satterwhite said.
After Satterwhite, Dr. Charles Petty took the stand. An elderly, balding, 1950 Harvard Medical School graduate, Petty had established the Medical Examiner’s Office in Dallas and resembled a favorite uncle. In his career, he’d done more than 13,000 autopsies and testified in court 1,300 times. Unlike Dr. Satterwhite, Dr. Petty had reviewed not only the records, but the autopsy and slides.
“Mr. Beard died of overwhelming infection,” he said in a still strong voice. “His blood cultures showed GAS or Group A strep.”
Both on where the infection started and its relationship to the gunshot wound, Petty agreed with Satterwhite: It began in the rash on Steve’s groin and had no relationship to the gunshot. If the two doctors were right, Steve Beard had died not of homicide, but of natural causes. Perhaps it could even have been malpractice, DeGuerin suggested, since Steve went for a full day after lab tests found the infection before receiving an antibiotic. For this testimony, the jurors sat up straight, and some leaned forward.
As to the blood clots Dr. Bayardo had noted in Steve’s lungs, Dr. Petty saw them in the slides but disagreed about their significance. They were of different ages, some old, he said. They may have been associated with Steve’s chronic lung condition.
“Just because you have a pulmonary embolism, does that mean you’re going to die?” DeGuerin asked.
“No,” Dr. Petty said. “An area of this patient’s lungs was infarcted, dead, the blood supply from the artery cut off. It had been that way for some time. It indicates that these clots had gone on over a period of time.”
“Can a person survive such clots?”
“If they’re not big enough to cut off the blood to the lungs.”
“Could it cause death?”
“If it is predeath, yes,” he said. “I can’t tell if these were.”
Under cross exam, Dr. Petty said that the last time he’d conducted an autopsy had been seven years earlier and that he knew Dr. Bayardo well and considered him a good medical examiner. Since retiring, Petty had testified at other trials, sometimes for the prosecutors and other times for the defense.
“You lectured at a class with Mr. DeGuerin entitled, ‘You Sure It Was the Bullet and Not the Chili?—Cross Examining the Pathologist,’ didn’t you?’ On getting alternative causes of death in front of a jury?” Cobb asked.
Petty agreed he’d participated, but said he didn’t remember the seminar’s title. Then, while he said he’d discussed Dr. Satterwhite’s findings with him, Petty insisted he’d made up his mind about the cause of death in the Beard case on his own.
“The pulmonary embolism you mentioned, was that sufficient to cause death?” Cobb asked.
“He had an old pulmonary embolism that didn’t cause his death,” Petty said. “I’m just giving my opinion. He died of infection.”
“Could it be that Dr. Bayardo’s opinion is correct and yours was incorrect?”
“Could be,” he said.
“Are you familiar with the case of David Gunby?” Cobb asked, and DeGuerin objected. Shot in 1966 when Charles Whitman fired a high-powered rifle off the UT tower, Gunby lived until 2001, when he died after a failed kidney transplant. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, caused by longstanding complications of his wounds. Kocurek ruled in DeGuerin’s favor, disallowing the line of questioning.
“Can complications of a gunshot wound ultimately cause death even years later?” Cobb asked.
“Yes,” Petty said.
Although she believed Cobb had done well with both physicians, Wetzel worried. If jurors believed the testimony that Steve had died of an unrelated infection, they’d have to vote to acquit.
After the defense rested, both sides brought rebuttal witnesses to the stand, including battling psychologists. Yet, none opened up new territory. DeGuerin didn’t put Celeste on the stand. Instead, the final thing the jury heard was her videotaped deposition from the civil case. On the television screen, she dressed casually, in an orange sweater and jeans, her dyed blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. Wetzel wanted to play only a portion, but DeGuerin insisted the jury hear the entire three-hour deposition.
“Did you ever have any romantic involvement with Tracey Tarlton?” she was asked.
“No, I did not.”
“Why did you leave Meagan at the lake house that night?”
“Because Amy begged me to leave her.”
“How did it come about that Jennifer was at the lake house that night?”
“She had asked to stay there.”
“Did you talk to Tracey on October second?” The day of the shooting.
“She called me on my cell phone.”
“What did she say?”
“That the police had talked to her.”
“Did you ever ask Tracey Tarlton if she shot Steve?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said.
On the screen, Celeste contradicted points that DeGuerin had laboriously pushed during the seven weeks of testimony, including that Steve had ill feelings for Tracey. About one thing she held firm: “Tracey and I didn’t have a relationship. We had a friendship.”
Then, after more than one hundred witnesses, both sides finally rested. Judge Kocurek dismissed the two alternates and sent the jury home for the night. The following morning, closing arguments would begin.