Soon after Craig moved Celeste and the twins to Arizona, she was pregnant again. “I thought maybe it would calm her down and we could try to make it work,” he’d later write. In November 1986, Celeste gave birth to a third baby girl and decided to put it up for adoption. The twins, then six, never saw their baby sister. “I remember Celeste being pregnant, then she wasn’t,” says Jennifer. “She never talked about it.”
It was the way she handled the adoption, what Celeste got in return for the child, that rankled Craig. “She told the adoptive parent we had to pay the hospital bills, when my insurance did,” he wrote. “She got ten thousand dollars cash for that baby.”
Soon after, Celeste had yet another man in her life. Devastated, Craig stood helplessly by as she took the twins, their income tax refund, the $10,000 from the adoption, and left. Weeks later he tried to cut his wrists. When he was well enough, Jeff put him on an airplane for Washington State to live near their mother.
That fall, Celeste left the six-year-olds home alone at night and someone reported her to authorities. They were taken away to yet another foster home. Looking back, the twins had mixed feelings about the families that took them in. With a mother whose attention was spotty at best, it was a foster couple that took them for their first school vaccinations and to their first dental appointment. Yet, many of the homes were frightening and heartless. When they arrived, they were stripped and inspected for bruises. At one, the parents ridiculed Jennifer for wetting the bed, then pushed her into the swimming pool. “I couldn’t understand why our mom did this to us,” she says. “Kristina and I schemed about running away. We dug holes in the yard, trying to dig our way to China. When our mom came, we begged to go home. She walked away. She didn’t even look sad.”
That fall, Harald Wolf, an Air Force, jet-engine mechanic who worked on F-15 fighter planes at Luke Air Force Base, was the new man in Celeste’s life. Six-foot-three, muscular, of German descent with prematurely gray hair, Wolf had eleven years in the service when they met. He’d grown up in a military family, traveled the world, and married once. Despite a divorce, he never considered that marriage a mistake. He’d feel vastly different about his connection to Celeste Johnson Bratcher.
“I felt drawn to her, but from the beginning, I never trusted her,” says Wolf. “Call it spidey-sense, that feeling that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.” After they dated for a few months, Harald tried to break up. Celeste announced she was pregnant. When he resisted marriage, she suggested they go for counseling. At the sessions, the counselor pegged his distrust as irrational.
“If she hasn’t given you reason not to, you should trust her,” the counselor argued.
Maybe she’s right, Harald thought.
In December 1988 they married. Not long after, Celeste called him at the base and said she’d lost the baby. “From that point on our lives went up and down like a drug addiction,” he says.
The twins were released back to Celeste’s custody, and they rented an apartment in Glendale, a bedroom community northwest of Phoenix near the base. Celeste was obsessed with keeping it clean, so much so that she and Harald argued about the pressure it put on the girls. “She insisted they pick up their rooms,” he says. “They were little kids. I told her, just shut the door. She couldn’t. She never left anything alone.”
Sex was intense, but as with Craig and Timm, Celeste pulled back. “She was so good, it felt like paying a hooker,” Harald says. “But she never seemed really interested.”
When he wanted to know why, she cried. Only after he pushed did she whisper her claim that she’d been molested by her father. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?” she asked.
“I did,” says Harald.
After that, when they fought she reminded him of her past and sobbed. Harald felt his anger fade. “I’m not so bad, am I?” she asked, nuzzling against him.
In Phoenix in 1987, Celeste was hired on at Crystal Ice, an ice wholesaler. Claiming to have a junior college degree, she was made head of accounts payable; Lue Thompson was in charge of accounts receivable. Years later, Lue—twenty-two years older than Celeste and married with grown sons— believed she understood how Celeste insinuated herself into her life. “She saw something in me even I didn’t understand,” she says. “Celeste knew I’d spent my life wishing for a daughter.”
First at work then during their off hours, the women became inseparable. “I wish I had a mom like you,” Celeste said that Mother’s Day, when she gave Lue a brightly wrapped box with a dress inside. She remarked on Lue’s acceptance of her gay son, Jimmy, complaining that her own mother would never accept such news. Lue grew sad thinking about all Celeste had been through. Soon she was buying her presents and doing the things a mother does for a daughter, even brushing her long, curly blond hair.
“Mom, I wish you could adopt me. I wish I could really be your daughter,” Celeste told her, and Lue dreamed it, too, that Celeste would truly be hers.
When Celeste and Harald fought, she ran to the Thompsons’. One night she cried in Lue’s arms while Lue’s husband, Gary, listened to Harald’s complaints then ordered him to go home. By morning both their tempers had cooled. Harald, however, still felt ill at ease. Just too much about Celeste seemed suspicious. At times she arrived home hours late. She said she was having her hair done, but it looked the same as when she’d left for work. “Can’t you see it’s different?” she’d say.
On the other hand, Lue believed everything Celeste told her. She worried about her new “daughter,” whose life was constantly in turmoil. Celeste complained often of being ill, once telling Lue she had a virus that went to her heart and could have killed her. She cried about Harald, claiming he abused her. When she said Harald didn’t want the girls, Lue and Gary, who’d often helped children in trouble, offered to take them weekdays.
From the first, the Thompsons fell in love with Jen and Kris. At six, they were miniature versions of their mother, with dark blond hair and large blue eyes. Lue signed up the girls, natural athletes, for baseball, and she and Gary went to the games. Evenings, they gabbed as she cooked dinner. After the years with Celeste, it was a welcome break for the girls. Off and on, for nearly two years, the girls lived with the Thompsons, who grew to think of them as their own.
Financially, Celeste was better off with Harald than she’d been with Craig. They lived in a good neighborhood, and he bought her a car, a yellow Ford Taurus. But from the beginning she hated the car, so much so that she ordered a vanity plate that read: Lemon. One morning she left for work and ran back in the house, shouting that someone had attacked the car. When Harald got outside, the fenders were scratched and the seats slashed. “It was weird,” he says. “The cuts were perfect lines at the seams.”
When police arrived, the officer, too, thought the damage suspicious. “It’s funny they didn’t slash the tires,” he said, mentioning that Celeste could still drive it to work.
“Deep down, I knew Celeste did it,” Harald says. “I couldn’t admit it, even to myself.”
Something else happened that year, something the twins would remember vividly. Sobbing, Celeste told them that their grandmother, Nancy, had died. At the California funeral, the twins stretched on tiptoe to see into the coffin. They hadn’t seen their maternal grandmother since infancy and didn’t recognize the white-haired woman inside.
Along with the stability they found at the Thompsons,’ summers in Washington with their father brought solidity to the twins’ lives, playing sports and spending time with Craig’s mom, Cherie, and their circle of relatives. Coaching the teams, Craig never looked happier. Weekends they camped in mountain parks, where the trees towered. On Sundays, Cherie brought doughnuts for Craig and her eight-year-old granddaughters and found them fishing in a stream, their baseball hats turned backward.
Those were happy times, and Jennifer cried at the thought of leaving her father to return to the chaos of her mother. In contrast, for Kristina every minute apart from Celeste filled her with pain. She was their mother’s favorite. Celeste whispered in her ear that she was special, that she was the daughter she truly loved. She called her in Washington State, urging her to hurry home. “Kristina was a little girl who wanted a mother,” says Lue. “Jennifer began pulling away, but Kristina couldn’t. When Celeste screamed, Jennifer was angry, but Kristina was devastated.”
At home, Kristina panicked every time Celeste seemed blue. She didn’t complain when Celeste kept them out of school, hauling them on shopping trips or running errands. “I knew she hated being alone,” says Kristina. “She just couldn’t stand it.”
From an early age, Kristina understood her mother had a sadness about her that never totally went away. As manic and happy as Celeste acted, it seemed a hollow ruse, as she quickly flipped back to depression and anger. She had children, a home, and a husband, but it wasn’t enough. Celeste filled every minute, planning weeks in advance: doctor appointments, movies, going out with friends. She shopped without regard, filling her closet with clothes she never wore.
The longer she and Harald lived together, the more erratic her behavior became. One weekend he arrived home to find a note saying she was visiting a friend. That night, two men from his unit came to the apartment to drink beer. An hour later Celeste burst in, angry that he wasn’t missing her. Harald and his friends sprinted for the door as beer bottles flew. “I stayed away for the night,” he says. “I knew the marriage was a mistake, but every time I tried to leave, Celeste went crazy.”
One time, she took a handful of pills; another, she stood next to a full bathtub with a hair dryer, threatening to step in and drop the hair dryer in the water. Their eyes wide with terror, the twins pleaded with her not to, and Harald agreed to stay if they saw a counselor. From that point on, while other little girls pondered friends and homework, Kristina worried about keeping her mother alive.
The sessions began as couples counseling, but within a few visits the therapist zeroed in on Celeste, suggesting her suicide threats needed intense treatment and checking her into the base hospital’s psychiatric unit. “I thought she was trying to get better,” says Harald. “At times, she could be loving, wonderful.”
By then Celeste had become a regular in the Phoenix court system. When Jennifer fell off of a swing set at school and broke her arm, she sued. She tried to sue again after she quit her job at Crystal Ice, saying one of the men in charge sexually harassed her. “The attorney refused the case,” says Lue. “The man she complained about seemed like a nice guy. But I believed Celeste.”
Lue always believed Celeste, even when her niece told her she shouldn’t; that she’d seen Celeste being manipulative and mean and that she wasn’t the woman Lue believed. Craig, too, warned Lue that Celeste could be dangerous, but Lue scoffed, “You don’t know the real Celeste.”
“I do, and someday you’ll meet her, too,” Craig countered. “Please, be careful.”
In 1989 the Air Force notified Harald he was being transferred to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan. Word came down that due to her hospitalization in the psychiatric unit, Celeste wouldn’t be allowed to go. Furious, she mounted a campaign, calling his superiors and arguing that they were being treated unfairly. She complained so vociferously that the transfer was eventually cancelled. “Tell your wife to stop calling,” Harald’s sergeant told him.
At home, their arguments escalated. One night, in bed, Celeste screamed at him. He turned his back, and she kicked him. Harald hit her with a pillow and then went outside to cool off. As he stood in the darkness, the police drove up. Celeste had called in a domestic violence report. When the officers questioned her, Celeste pulled up her shirt to display an angry red bruise on her back and claimed Harald had punched her. He suspected she’d done it to herself, by ramming into a doorknob. “I never saw a pillow leave a mark,” he says. That night, Harald had time in jail to think. The next day she bailed him out, but he refused to go home and moved in with a friend.
Looking back, it would seem Celeste was incapable of letting go of anyone. As soon as they pulled away, she became frantic to win them back. One night she showed up at a bar where Harald played pool. When he refused to take her back, she dug her long nails into his arm until it bled. Later, he stood on the outside balcony at the apartment. When he looked down, Celeste glowered up at him. Smiling, she popped the lid on a can and poured a Coke over his Camaro. When he turned to go inside the apartment, the door wouldn’t open. “She’d gotten inside and bolted it,” he says.
A little over a year into their marriage, his career in the Air Force was in shambles. Before he’d married Celeste, his reviews had been high. After two years with her, he was barely satisfactory. Why he’d take her back was something he could never explain, even to himself. But he did, weeks later, at the pool at the apartment complex. His roommate said, “She’s here,” and he looked up and saw Celeste.
When he approached her, she held out a box. Inside was a ring she’d bought for him. “I love you,” she said. “I want us to be together.”
They argued, she pleaded, and Harald relented. “I got so deep in a rut with her I couldn’t see above the rut to find a way out,” he says. “I was like a beaten dog. I didn’t want to be confrontational anymore. Looking back, the orders to Iceland saved my life.”
He’d been told to report to Keflavik Air Force Base for a one-year tour of duty a few weeks after they reconciled. On the plane, he felt the sting of separation. “I missed her,” he says. “Even after everything, I still missed her.”
In Phoenix, Celeste moved in with Lue, Gary, and the twins. She quickly had an affair with a bartender and became pregnant. After she lost the baby, she had a hysterectomy. The reason was not clear. Years later she claimed she had ovarian cancer, an insidious disease with few symptoms that is often deadly. Lue Thompson remembers it differently: “Celeste told me she had the hysterectomy because she never wanted to worry about getting pregnant. I never remember her having any type of cancer.”
Two months later Celeste left the girls with Lue and moved into an apartment with Jimmy, Lue’s son, and his male partner. At the time, Celeste was dating a middle-age lawyer she met hanging out at a Phoenix bar frequented by the big-money crowd. He gifted her with something she’d often talked of wanting: breast implants.
When not out with her wealthy beau, Celeste partied with Jimmy and his crowd at gay bars. Because of her giggle, they nicknamed her Silly. “Celeste can be sweet, but she can turn backstabbing,” he says. “There’s something about her that you go back to her.”
Still, their friendship soured. Jimmy complained to Lue that Celeste had come between him and his partner, pitting one against the other. As she had when anyone criticized Celeste, Lue defended her, this time instead of believing her own son.
From Jimmy’s apartment, Celeste, who had a string of jobs from office work to waitressing, moved into an apartment with the girls. By then they’d become her shadows. Jennifer ached to play ball or spend time with friends, but that was out of the question. Celeste wouldn’t permit it. Often they weren’t even allowed to attend school, not when Celeste preferred to have them with her, to follow behind her as she shopped or ran errands. Through it all, Kristina kept silent, rarely complaining. She watched their mother with anxious eyes, afraid anything could send her over the suicidal edge.
Lue, too, was frightened, but for a different reason. Celeste drove at breakneck speeds and had one wreck after another. The nine-year-olds were terrified as their mother careened around corners. When a check-engine light came on in the yellow Taurus, Celeste screamed, “The car’s going to explode.”
The twins panicked as she shouted to hold onto the doors. “Be ready to jump,” Celeste ordered, but nothing ever happened. Years later Jennifer remembered holding so tight her knuckles turned white, terrified they would all die. “I think she did it so we’d be quiet,” she says. “We were so scared, and she laughed like it was all a joke.”
At night Celeste left the girls alone in the apartment and partied. Hour after hour they waited for her return. “From when I was little on, what I remember most about being with her was that I was always hungry,” says Jennifer. “She spent money on herself and never had any for food.”
Despite all she’d learned about Celeste, Lue still thought of her as a daughter, and there were things she could never imagine she was capable of. That winter, the girls seemed afraid of their mother, and after much prodding, they told Lue why. Celeste, they said, ground something up and put it in their food, something that made them sleep. The girls begged Lue not to tell their mother. She agreed. While Lue found the conversation disturbing, she suspected it was nothing more than overactive childish imaginations.
Years later Kristina would have other memories of her mother: days an angry Celeste hit them with wooden spoons so hard they broke. And when Kristina suffered unexplained seizures, Celeste rarely visited her in the hospital. In the evenings, Kris called the apartment, but it was her sister, Jen, home alone, who answered. Those nights, Kris fell asleep watching the Cosby Show and wishing for a mother like Claire Huxtable, one who loved her children.
In 1990, Celeste reported the yellow Taurus stolen. When the insurance money came in, she purchased a brand new Thunderbird.
That summer, Celeste’s landlord called Lue complaining about unsanitary conditions in the apartment. More and more, Kristina and Jennifer were alone and burdened with cleaning and cooking. Kristina even ironed the white tuxedo shirts from Celeste’s waitress uniforms. In the mornings, waking Celeste was an unhappy task. She cursed and shouted. “I never woke her up when she didn’t make me feel bad,” says Kristina.
That fall, someone reported Celeste to Maricopa County’s Children’s Protective Services, and the girls were taken away. Despite the abysmal conditions they lived in, Kristina and Jennifer cried. “That was the last time I let myself care about her,” says Jennifer. “From then on I couldn’t love her, because she didn’t love Kristina and me.”
Not long after, police found the charred remnants of the Taurus in the desert outside Phoenix. Excited, Celeste asked Lue to bring her video camera and drive to the site with her. Once there, she filmed the car’s blackened skeleton and giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Lue asked.
“I burned it,” Celeste answered with a wide grin. “I did it for the insurance.”
“You’re going to get caught, honey,” Lue said. “You can’t do things like that.”
“People do it all the time,” Celeste scoffed. “It was a piece of crap.”
Perhaps Lue should have thought of that day when, weeks later, on October 14, Celeste called, crying. The Thompsons were in California, where they’d just returned to Gary’s mother’s house after a funeral. “Someone robbed your house!” Celeste screamed into the telephone. “They took a bunch of your stuff and my things.”
When they arrived the next day, Lue realized how much was gone. They’d lost the television and VCR, as well as family heirlooms, including silver candlesticks and Lue’s late mother’s jewelry, Gary’s class ring, even silver dollars commemorating their children’s births. The point of entry was a single, small, neat cut in the back door screen.
“This was done by someone you know,” an officer who stopped by told them. “They didn’t mess up the place to look for things, and they knew what to take.”
Days later Lue and Celeste filled out insurance forms. By then the Thompsons had more bad news: They weren’t insured for replacement value and would collect nowhere near enough to restore all they’d lost.
“Why don’t you add some things to your list?” Celeste urged.
“It’s wrong, and I’ll get caught,” Lue told her.
“My attorney says everyone does it,” she said. “That’s what he told me to do.”
Lue thought it over, and then, despite knowing that she was doing something wrong, padded the list of stolen valuables.
As always, Celeste’s world changed quickly and without warning. At the end of 1990 she called Craig and announced that she wanted to join the army. She was willing to sign papers giving him custody of the twins. The girls, finally out of the foster home, left for Washington. But an odd thing happened that year while they lived with their father—they received a postcard in the mail, signed “Grandma.”
“Who is this?” Jennifer asked her father. “This isn’t from your mom.”
“Your mother’s mother, your grandmother,” Craig explained. “She lives in California.”
Jennifer and Kristina never asked their mother about the postcard or whose body they’d looked at in a coffin years earlier. They heard from Celeste rarely that year. When she did call, it was never good news. “She screamed at Craig, threatening to take the girls back,” says his sister-in-law, Denise. “She never left him alone.”
That spring, 1991, Celeste had her first serious brush with the law. Like all of her plots, her plan to join the army quickly dissipated. Instead she’d decided to stay in Phoenix. It was there, on May 6, that she became furious with the Thompsons. Celeste demanded they return a dog she’d given their youngest son. They refused, and she called the police. When Celeste claimed to the officer who responded that the Thompsons had staged the previous fall’s robbery, Detective R. T. Phillips was put on the case.
In his nearly two decades on the force, Phillips, a lean man with a well-groomed mustache, specialized in uncovering insurance fraud. He was so good at it that he’d been written up in an insurance industry publication. “I felt like they [insurance frauds] were ripping me off,” he says. “I had to pay my insurance, and they were driving up the rates.”
When Phillips questioned her, Celeste told him she’d seen many of the items the Thompsons reported stolen in their house months after the robbery. She said she believed they’d staged the robbery, then inflated their losses. Based on her information, Phillips went to the Thompsons’ house.
“Celeste loves me. She’d never hurt me,” Lue told Phillips that day.
Yet, Phillips assured her, Celeste had made serious allegations against her and Gary. Quickly, the Thompsons admitted their guilt; they had inflated their insurance claim by $13,000. But they insisted they hadn’t staged the robbery. In fact, Lue gave Phillips one more bit of information, recounting the story of the incinerated Taurus.
Phillips’s gut told him the Thompsons were telling the truth, and he brought Celeste in for questioning. Each time he pointed out inconsistencies with the evidence, her story changed. When he found the stolen items in her two rented storage units, he felt certain she was the one behind the robbery. When he asked about the incinerated Taurus, Celeste just laughed. “Sure, I took it out in the desert and torched it,” she said. “The damn thing didn’t work half the time.”
“She was cool the whole time,” says Phillips, who wrote in his report: “Based on the inconsistencies in what Celeste Wolf has told me and her insurance company, it appears no burglary ever occurred at the Thompsons’… in fact, Celeste Wolf took property belonging to the Thompsons to make it look like a burglary occurred, then made false reports to her insurance company.”
Despite all the evidence Phillips had, when he called Craig in Washington State to ask about Celeste’s past for her pretrial report, Celeste’s first husband laughed at the notion that she’d be punished. “Celeste gets away with everything,” he said. “I’ll bet my hard-earned money—every penny I’ve got—that she’ll talk that judge into letting her go.”
In 1991, while the insurance fraud case ground on, a new man, Jimmy Martinez, entered Celeste’s life. It was he who would bring her to Texas and into Steve Beard’s world.
Swarthy and handsome, Martinez was thirty—nearly three years older than Celeste—had a stable job planning and managing security systems, and had never been married. Like Celeste, he exuded a palpable sexual tension and a flirtatious manner. Someone who knew them both would later say, “I don’t think it was ever love between them. To me, it always looked more like lust.”
They met at Mr. Lucky’s, a legendary Phoenix country bar, famous for its mechanical bulls. With a mischievous grin and a cowboy’s swagger, Jimmy had just left a country western concert when he saw Celeste with a woman he’d once dated. They were quickly attracted. “I’m a leg man,” he says. “And Celeste looked great in a miniskirt.”
On August 24, 1991, Celeste was twenty-eight and marrying for the third time. At least one matter remained unresolved the day she promised to love Jimmy Martinez until death they did part: She was still legally married to Harald Wolf. In her busy life, she’d never gotten around to filing for divorce.
In Washington State, Jennifer and Kristina learned about the marriage on a postcard. The girls must have been on Celeste’s mind often that fall. She didn’t like having anyone out of her reach, and just months after voluntarily giving them up, she called Craig, demanding he send them to her. He refused. Many who knew him gave the credit for his ability to stand up to Celeste to the new woman in his life, Kathryn Morton, a bright, determined woman who worked at the Snohomish County Attorney’s Office. They met at a park, while he was camping with Jennifer and Kristina, and it was his dedication to them that attracted Kathryn, who had two young children of her own. “Craig described Celeste as a Coyote Bitch,” says Morton. “He was exhausted from battling her.”
The battle became a war as Celeste began a court fight to reclaim the twins.
That summer, Jen and Kristina were ten and about to enter fourth grade; they lost a year when they had to repeat second grade, after Celeste kept them out of school so often that they couldn’t keep up. A thousand miles away, Celeste called often and pulled the strings that attached Kristina to her. The youngster sobbed as Celeste put the weight of the world on her thin, young shoulders, telling her she couldn’t live without her, at times threatening suicide. “It was awful. She was my mother. I loved her,” says Kristina.
Her identical twin couldn’t have been more different in her reaction to their mother. Even the thought of seeing Celeste gave Jen terrible nightmares. “She’d be killing us,” says Jennifer. At times she saw herself firing a gun at her mother. The bullet ricocheted, then struck her instead, as if embodying an unspoken fear that anything she did to hurt Celeste would come back to injure her.
In Arizona, Celeste moved to Tucson with Jimmy, but soon this marriage, too, was troubled. When they argued, she raged, then explained away her erratic behavior by saying she forgot to take the hormone supplements given to her after her hysterectomy. “That’s why the girls are so important,” she said. “I can never have other children.”
As far as Jimmy was concerned, Celeste had so much else to offer that he overlooked her tantrums. He loved watching her at a party, proud of the way she talked to anyone, not relying on him for support. “She made people laugh,” he says. Where Celeste held back with others, their sex life couldn’t have been better. In the end he would wonder if he was swept up in the passion and the lure of finding someone who needed him. “I was there to protect Celeste,” he says.
Meanwhile, in May 1992, Celeste arrived at Craig’s, demanding to see Kristina. When they dropped her twin off, Jennifer didn’t even look at her mother’s car. With tears in her eyes, she watched Kristina walk away, wondering if she’d return. She came home later that night, but Jennifer instinctively knew Celeste wasn’t finished with them.
All the next day, Jen watched Kristina at school, assessing her face to see what she was thinking. Kris seemed quiet, with faraway thoughts. In final period, Jen lost track of her sister, and when she arrived at the bus stop, Kristina wasn’t there. At home, Craig called the police. When they found Kristina with her mother, Celeste had cards she said Kris had written her. In them, Kris described Craig as abusive, saying he’d hit her. The following day, Jen was pulled out of school and questioned. Police even asked the girls’ friends if they’d seen signs of abuse. The investigation came up empty. After seventy-two hours Kristina was released to Craig. On the way home she cried and told him that she was sorry. Later, she’d deny that her father ever hit her or Jen. “Kris was just doing what our mom told her to,” says Jen.
In Phoenix, on May 28, 1992, Gary and Lue Thompson stood before a judge and were sentenced to probation—Lue to three years and Gary to five—and they were ordered to pay $8,000 in restitution to their insurance company. For Lue, the sentence paled in comparison to who was there to witness it: a group of schoolchildren on a class trip. “I thought of all the troubled kids we’d taken in and all the good we’d tried to do,” she says. “I couldn’t look at those kids. It just tore me to pieces.”
Adding insult to injury, the Phoenix P.D. refused to prosecute Celeste for burglarizing their house. “We had no rights, because we lied on the insurance form,” says Lue.
Later that summer, Harald returned from Iceland. By then Celeste and his possessions had disappeared. When he tried to rent an apartment, his credit report came back with six pages of bad debts he didn’t know they had. Celeste’s legacy was $60,000 in unpaid bills. “My credit was toast,” he says. “She’d taken everything. My clothes, my books, my furniture, my photographs, even the stamp collection I started when I was a kid.”
In his truck—the one thing she’d left behind—he drove to the East Coast, eager to forget her. There, he filed for divorce, and on December 14, 1992, it became final. The process servers never found Celeste to serve the papers, and, as far as Harald knew, Celeste never learned of the divorce. Years later, married and happy, Harald saw a woman resembling Celeste at a mall. “My wife said my face was so full of hatred it scared her,” he says.
The following summer Jen was furious at her father and refused to even look at him when he took her and Kristina to the airport to fly to Arizona to spend two weeks with Celeste. In Tucson, Celeste put both the girls to work. The security company had transferred Jimmy to Austin, and he was already there. The furniture had been moved, but the apartment needed to be packed. Celeste didn’t plan to do it herself, not with the girls available. Besides, she was busy. She didn’t let being married infringe on her social life. The night before they were supposed to move, she had a date with a cop. “Finish packing,” she said. “I want it all done when I get home.”
After she left, the eleven-years-olds looked about them, not knowing how one went about packing an apartment. They started to put clothes in boxes while they watched television, but the food ads made them hungry. As usual, Celeste had left them nothing to eat. Not knowing what else to do, Jennifer searched and found change. Then the frightened little girls, holding hands walked through the dark streets to a convenience store where they bought TV dinners. Back at the apartment, they ate and fell asleep.
The following morning Celeste was livid to find the packing not completed. “You never do anything for me,” she screamed as she gathered their belongings. Months earlier the girls had watched a movie on TV based on the autobiography of screen siren Joan Crawford’s daughter. In it, Faye Dunaway, playing Crawford, shrieked at her children. That day, as on many others, Celeste lived up to the nickname the twins had given her, the title of the movie: Mommie Dearest.
On the nine hundred mile trip to Austin, Celeste was exuberant. She always seemed excited about change, and this was no exception. They stopped at one convenience store after another, where she loaded up on junk food and Cokes. Munching away, Celeste coached the girls on what they were and weren’t supposed to tell Jimmy. “Remember when I was in Phoenix, and I had cancer and all my hair fell out?” she said.
The twins had no such memories but nodded in agreement.
That afternoon, with her mother in a good mood, they talked. “How did you take care of us and go to high school?” Kristina asked.
“I graduated two years early, so I was out of high school,” Celeste lied, then, continuing her tale, told them, “After you were born, I went to college.”
When Jennifer asked why she’d married Jimmy Martinez, Celeste laughed smugly.
“Because of his BMW,” she answered.
“He has a Pontiac and a truck,” Jen said.
Celeste giggled. “No, his big Mexican wiener.”
Driving into Austin on Interstate 35, as Celeste and the twins did that day, one can look toward the east, to valleys that dwindle off to a flat coastal plain. Looking west from I-35, the landscape beckons to the rugged Texas Hill Country.
Some say Austin’s main attribute is its quirkiness. At dusk on summer nights the city’s prime attraction is the exodus of more than one million Mexican free-tailed bats, the largest urban colony in the world, from under the Congress Avenue Bridge. For decades before the advent of skyscrapers, the city’s skyline was dominated by the Texas State Capitol’s dome and the University of Texas clock tower. It was there on August 1, 1966, that Charles Whitman climbed the stairway to the twenty-eighth floor and opened fire. The siege left sixteen dead and thirty injured. It was a rude entry into the chaos of the sixties for a gentle city that had always welcomed a healthy dose of wildness.
Austin is a city where tie-dye never went out of fashion, and local merchants ran a campaign to “Keep Austin Weird.” One year the roster of mayoral candidates boasted a thong-wearing cross-dresser and a former hit man. The mid-eighties brought an influx of high-tech companies led by Dell Computer, and the city grew and prospered, making the new Austin not only part cowgirl and part flower child, but part Silicon Valley yuppie.
From the beginning, the free-spirited city matched Celeste well. Jimmy rented a town house on a street full of such double houses. Of the three bedrooms, when they visited, Kris and Jen shared one, Celeste and Jimmy another, leaving the last to serve as Celeste’s closet. After years of frenetic shopping, she had 160 pairs of shoes and enough clothes to fill the room. Many remained unworn and price-tagged, making it resemble a small, private boutique.
Throughout the two weeks Jennifer and Kristina spent in Texas, Jimmy and Celeste fought often. One day, Celeste covered a wall writing “I hate Jimmy Martinez” with a felt-tip pen. During another argument, Celeste stabbed herself in the wrist with a scissors, shouting that she would kill herself, while Kristina sobbed.
One afternoon as the family drove on a freeway, Celeste threatened to jump from the car. The girls screamed as their mother threw open the front passenger door. Jimmy grabbed her arm and yanked her back in. Later, just as she had with Craig and Harald, Celeste called police and claimed Jimmy had hit her. As proof, she showed officers a bruised handprint on her left arm, not explaining that it came from her husband pulling her back into the car as she attempted to throw herself onto a busy highway. Jimmy was locked up overnight. When he threatened to end the marriage, Celeste went to a psychiatrist and was put on medication for depression. “She was better for a while,” he says. “She was trying.”
Meanwhile, Celeste begged the twins not to return to Washington. She pleaded with them to stay with her. Unswayed, Jennifer boarded a flight home; but Kristina couldn’t part from her mother. Craig pushed Celeste to live up to the custody agreement and return her. She refused. “My whole life I felt bad for my mom. I felt like one of us needed to love her,” says Kristina. “She always said that she loved me and needed me. Two seconds later she was screaming that I wasn’t good enough or didn’t love her enough. Then she’d be sorry. I’d say it was okay. What else could I do?”
For the first time in their young lives, the girls were separated, and they missed each other dearly. Still, Celeste wasn’t satisfied. While Craig fought for Kristina, she wanted Jennifer. “The phone rang at the house, and it would be her,” says Jen. “She’d laugh and say she was going to take me away from my dad, that she’d get even with us for what we did to her. Once she told me that she had cancer and tried to make me feel sorry for her.”
After she had Kristina, Celeste changed her phone number. For months Craig was unable to call. When he finally got through, Kristina told him she loved him and missed him, but then he heard Celeste in the background, ordering Kristina to tell him she didn’t love him. At first Kristina said nothing; then she mumbled something into the telephone.
“You don’t ever want to live with your dad again, do you?” Craig heard Celeste prod.
Eventually he stopped calling.
Six months after the Thompsons’ sentencing, on November 27, 1992, Celeste returned to Phoenix on the insurance fraud charges. In the courtroom, Kristina sat beside her mother as the Thompsons watched from the gallery. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew Celeste had done something to cause them trouble,” says Kristina. “I couldn’t talk to them with Celeste there. So I didn’t even look at them.”
In his report to the court, Detective Phillips painted a damning picture of a woman who cared for no one but herself. He’d discovered Celeste had devastated lives wherever she’d gone and had a record of twelve insurance claims, each for an escalating amount. Nothing—not even her children, it appeared—mattered to Celeste as much as money.
As always, Celeste told a very different story that day to the judge, one in which she was a victim, not a predator. After her sad account of abuse at the hands of her parents and Craig, Celeste deflected responsibility for the offense by blaming a nameless attorney she said had advised her to inflate her report. Finally, she argued that she had a young daughter to support and—the key issue—she’d left Arizona. “She basically said, ‘I won’t bother you anymore. I’m Texas’s problem now,’” says Phillips. “And the judge bought it.”
As Craig predicted, Celeste received no jail time. Instead, the judge gave her two hundred hours of community service, four years’ probation, and ordered her to pay $20,000 to the insurance companies, then set her free to “proceed to the state of Texas.”
That day in the courtroom, Phillips shook his head in disgust. “I knew that woman wasn’t any good and that she’d only get worse,” he says. “I never kept files on old cases. I made an exception with Celeste. I kept those files until I retired, because I had no doubt I’d hear her name again, and the next time it would be for something truly bad.”
A month later Jimmy took Celeste and Kristina to spend the holidays with his family in El Paso. Kristina enjoyed the warmth of his large extended family. One night as they watched the news, a reporter warned the public to beware of con artists, people who weren’t what they seemed. That’s what my mom is, Kristina thought. She hurts everyone.
In Austin, Celeste first waitressed at the Springhill Restaurant, north of the city in a suburb called Pflugerville. A red clapboard structure with a saloon-shaped facade, it had a menu featuring chicken-fried steak, fried catfish, and burgers. Then, in early 1993, she applied at the exclusive Austin Country Club, where the city’s wealthy played tennis, golfed, dined, and mingled. Her first day working the main dining room opened up a new world for Celeste, one of money and prestige, a world she’d soon make her own.
Founded in 1899, the club was the first of its kind in the state, and over the decades the membership list read like a Who’s Who of Texas. Tucked next to Westlake Hills, where the city’s new money migrated to homes perched atop craggy bluffs, the club had sweeping fairways surrounded by gnarled live oaks, boat slips along Lake Austin, and a clubhouse with expansive windows framing breathtaking scenery.
There, Celeste became one of a staff of waitresses, bartenders, and busboys. She reported to Fernando von Hapsburg, the maitre d’. He’d remember her as a good waitress, popular with the members. At first Celeste was well-liked. She told more than one member about troubles at home, claiming she was hiding out from an abusive ex-husband, like Julia Roberts had in the 1991 movie Sleeping with the Enemy. Few knew she was actually living with Jimmy. “She always seemed to be dating some new guy,” says a waitress. “I felt sorry for her that she didn’t have anything positive in her life.”
After work, the staff traveled downtown to Sixth Street, where run-down storefronts housed Austin’s music and bar scene, mingling taverns with vintage clothing stores and tattoo parlors. There they listened to music and drank. Celeste was often the center of attention. When she imitated von Hapsburg or a snooty member, she was dead-on, and the others roared. One night, while they circulated from bar to bar, Celeste flirted with a chauffeur, then took the others with her for a limo ride. “This is the only way to live,” she said, throwing back her head and laughing.
On such nights, Jimmy wondered about her absence, but the next morning she always had a good excuse. Often, she would tell him she’d been home all along, arriving after he’d fallen asleep. Instead of waking him, she claimed she’d slept with Kristina. Perhaps he didn’t investigate, or maybe he was beyond caring, for the marriage was already cooling. By the summer of 1993—not quite two years after their wedding— the bills were streaming in. Jimmy, who’d always been fastidious about his credit, discovered that Celeste had run up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He called the credit card companies saying they were Celeste’s cards, not his, and asking to have his name taken off the accounts.
“Your wife opened these accounts, and you’re responsible,” he was told.
“When I tried to talk to Celeste about it, she’d take Kristina and leave,” he says.
As usual when all didn’t go well, Celeste told those around her that she was sick. That year, she had herself tested for throat cancer. At the club, some members felt sorry for the pretty young waitress with the sad stories; others had a different impression. “She was husband-shopping,” says one woman. “She flirted with every man with a bankroll.”
In June 1993, when the twins were twelve, the custody battle escalated. Craig and Kathryn, who had by then married, went to Austin for a hearing. In the courtroom, Kristina looked tired and bowed, as if she’d gone through a horrific ordeal. “The brief glances we received from her were full of fear, trepidation, and sadness,” Craig wrote in his letter to the judge. “She is obviously going through a great deal of emotional turmoil.”
“Why didn’t you bring Kristina home?” Jen asked Craig when he returned.
“She told the judge she didn’t want to come,” he answered.
“Mom told her to say that,” she replied.
In July, Craig and Kathryn wrote their letters to the judge, detailing reasons Kristina would be better off with them: “Celeste is a pathological liar… She often takes the facts of situations … and twists them … taking something she did to someone and twisting it around as if they did it to her. It almost seems as if she believes it herself after a while.
“Celeste Martinez is a greedy, uncaring, cruel and evil individual … She is an accomplished con artist and is extremely dangerous.”
A month later, on August 10, in Washington, Jennifer met with the lawyer the court appointed to represent her interests. She was nervous, fidgeting in the chair as they talked. But when he asked, she was resolute: She never wanted to visit or live with Celeste again.
“Why?” she was asked.
“Mom makes me tell people lies, and I don’t like that,” she said.
At the country club, many members grew fond of Celeste. Among them were Anita Inglis and her husband Jerry. “She was charming. And she talked a lot about trying to regain custody of her daughters,” says Anita, an attorney and former prosecutor. “Some members slipped her hundred dollar bills to help pay for an attorney.”
One week, Celeste called Anita and said she had nasal cancer and needed surgery. She said she had nowhere to leave Kristina. Although she hardly knew Celeste, Anita told her she’d care for her daughter.
Forty-five minutes later Celeste and Kristina rang the bell. When Anita opened the door, she saw Celeste with a slight, quiet young girl with her mother’s athletic build, dark blond hair, and large blue eyes. “She was a little mouse, just scared to death,” says Anita, whose heart went out to the girl.
That week, Anita, a kind woman with thick, dark hair and a motherly manner, took Kristina to school and helped with her homework. At night she and Jerry tucked her in. “The whole time, Kris worried about Celeste. She kept asking when she’d be coming back,” she says. “She was this very sad but very sweet little girl.”
A week later Celeste returned and reclaimed Kristina. Not long after, she called again, this time asking for legal help with the custody battle. Craig had won, and the Washington court had ordered her to send Kristina to him in Washington. Anita met with her and with Kristina. Without Celeste in the room, Anita asked Kris, “Honey, what do you want? Do you want to live with your mom or with your dad?”
“I want to live with my mom,” Kristina answered.
Anita wrote petitions and tried to help, but the decisions went against Celeste. Days later Celeste put Kristina on an airplane in Austin, but Kristina never arrived in Seattle. During a Dallas layover, she refused to reboard. Although Celeste had repeatedly abandoned her, Kristina loved her mother so much she refused to leave her.
In Washington, Craig told Jennifer, “We have to let it be.”
That fall, many at the Austin Country Club noticed Steve Beard, a wealthy television executive, sitting alone at a table, eating dinner and staring out the window as darkness fell over the golf course. The death of his beloved wife had left the once gregarious man an empty shell. He asked around, looking for someone to hire as his house manager. Days later Celeste had the job.
In late 1994, Steve had no way of understanding who Celeste really was. Instead, he must have seen an attractive young mother who needed help and protection. As she had with so many others, Celeste told him her twisted version of her life, in which she was a victim, not someone who had destroyed lives across three states. “Steve was the kind of guy who figured he was a good judge of character. He went with his gut about people,” says a friend. “And Celeste was beautiful and persuasive.”