From their first days together, Celeste moved gracefully into Steve’s life, artfully filling the void left by Elise’s death. Startled by his age, Kristina asked her mother why she was with him. Celeste didn’t hesitate.
“Steve’s rich,” she answered.
While she was blunt with Kristina, to others Celeste professed her love of Steve. In January she quit her job at the Austin Country Club and brought Anita a crystal vase to thank her for her help during the custody battle. “Sorry I couldn’t have done more,” Anita said, mindful that they’d lost. The final decision came down early that month, granting Craig custody of both twins. Aware of the pressure on her, Craig agreed to allow Kristina to live with Celeste. When it came to Jennifer, the judge granted Celeste visitation, but at Jennifer’s discretion, and she refused to see her mother.
But, Celeste wasn’t interested in the twins that day. Instead she gushed to Anita about the new man in her life, Steve Beard, a country club member. “I want you to meet him,” she said. “It’s magic.” She explained that she’d moved in as his housekeeper and they’d fallen in love.
While some might have been shocked in the difference in their ages—Steve was sixty-nine and Celeste just thirty-one—Anita wasn’t fazed. Her husband, Jerry, was older than Anita, and they had a happy marriage. “I never thought age mattered,” she says.
Steve’s daughter had no such romantic notions about her father’s new girlfriend.
Becky Beard learned about Celeste Martinez when her father said he had a new housekeeper. Becky was surprised to see the young blonde who appeared at her door in Dallas that same month, holding some of her mother’s jewelry. Steve had wanted her to have a few of her mother’s things, Celeste said. They sat and talked, Celeste telling Becky a web of lies, including that she’d graduated with an accounting degree from Pepperdine University. “I got tired of accounting,” Celeste said. “It was boring.”
From that first meeting, Becky never believed Celeste was who she claimed to be. Rather, she worried about what her father was getting into. Her apprehension grew in January, when Steve had tickets for the Super Bowl, the Cowboys against the Buffalo Bills in Atlanta. Becky called his hotel room and Celeste answered. “I didn’t like what was happening, but I didn’t know what to do,” she says.
When Celeste invited Anita and her husband, Jerry, to the house for cocktails, the Inglises knew him only slightly from the club and had never spent any time with him. That night, Anita thought she understood why Celeste was attracted to Steve, as he joked and laughed, often poking fun at himself. Meanwhile, Celeste bragged about his accomplishments and the fun they had together.
“She appeared devoted to him,” says Anita.
It was abundantly clear that Steve was crazy about Celeste. He beamed just looking at her. As so many other men before him had found, being with Celeste was invigorating. It wasn’t just her physical beauty. She exuded a playful, highly sexual manner, an infectious enthusiasm. To Steve, who’d just endured the most painful year of his life, she must have represented the promise that his life hadn’t ended with Elise’s death. She offered a new beginning, the opportunity to be loved again, and the chance—with Kristina—to start a whole new family.
In the months that followed, Steve’s secretary Lisa, grew accustomed to hearing Celeste’s wispy voice when she answered his phone. At first Celeste called about household matters, like getting the rugs cleaned or problems with the hot tub. Then, gradually, the reasons changed. As she had throughout the years, Celeste quickly shifted the spotlight back to herself. In early 1994 the issue that consumed her was the fight to recover Jennifer.
That summer, when the girls were twelve, Celeste left Austin, telling Steve she was traveling to Washington and intended to return with Jennifer. She was gone a few days when the phone rang at KBVO. “Celeste called and said she was in jail in Washington, for trying to see Jennifer,” says Lisa. Steve tried to calm Celeste, who sounded frantic. He hired an attorney and spent more than $20,000 on legal fees.
Later, Jennifer remembered nothing of her mother’s supposed arrest. She would, however, never forget the phone calls Celeste made to her that year. “I’m going to take you away from your father,” she said.
One night Steve answered the phone when Craig called to talk to Kristina. Craig’s brother, Jeff, overheard the call. “Celeste isn’t who you think she is,” Craig told Steve. “Be careful. You think she’s wonderful now, but she’ll hurt you. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. If you’re not careful, you’re a dead man.”
Jeff couldn’t hear Steve, but when Craig hung up he said, “He won’t believe me. No one believes Celeste’s as ruthless as she is until it’s too late.”
Death must have been on Steve’s mind a lot that year. In February he’d been in for a checkup with Dr. George Handley, an avuncular man who’d been his personal physician and friend for many years. At five-ten and 312 pounds, Steve suffered from high blood pressure, asthma, and sleep apnea that forced him to use an oxygen machine while sleeping. Even worse, on a chest X ray, Dr. Handley discovered that Steve’s heart was enlarged, a sign of heart disease. Rich foods, drinking, and a lack of exercise had taken their toll. As spry as he may have seemed, as young at heart as his friends found Steve, he was aging quickly and not well.
That spring, Celeste put Steve on a diet. He walked and paid attention to his health. In no time he’d dropped fifty pounds and looked better than he had in years. He went to see Dr. Handley and told him that he needed help with his sexual prowess, now that he was with a younger woman. Handley suggested monthly testosterone injections. Steve laughed and agreed, jokingly dubbing the shots his “Vitamin T.”
At KBVO, Ray McEachern wondered if he’d been wrong about Celeste. From the first day they’d met, he hadn’t liked her, sizing her up as an opportunist out to cash in on a lonely, rich old man. “But I couldn’t deny that Steve looked happy,” he says. “He told me older women had bankrolls of their own and didn’t appreciate what he had to offer. But he could spoil Celeste, and she enjoyed what he could give her. He could bring stability to her life, and for the first time since Elise’s death, he wasn’t lonely.”
Yet Craig had been right. There was much Steve didn’t know about Celeste. As she had with Jimmy, she’d reinvented her past, spinning a web of lies. She failed to tell Steve about her second marriage, to Harald Wolf, only admitting to having been married twice, to Craig and Jimmy. “It was hard to know what to say,” says Kristina. “She told one person one thing and another something else. I just kept quiet.”
Although she was technically the housekeeper, Celeste knew little about how to care for a home. At one point she went to the store to buy new sheets. She bought four-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets that came out of the dryer in a ball of wrinkles. Since Celeste didn’t iron, the sheets went with all the clothes, even the underwear, to the dry cleaner.
Yet, Celeste knew what was important to Steve. He was a careful man, one who’d spent a lifetime keeping his world in order. He’d retained habits he learned in the navy, where he had little room aboard the ship, and kept his possessions neatly folded and stored. She didn’t wash his shirts, but made sure they were organized, neatly stacked, and arranged by color in his closet. Celeste smoked, but only outside, often commenting that she was being careful of Steve’s house, making sure the smoke from her Marlboro Light 100s didn’t ruin the paint.
Yet her talents as a housekeeper undoubtedly meant little to Steve, who wanted a companion and lover, not someone to wash his floors. He wasn’t accustomed to a woman he could rule. Elise had always spoken her mind, and Celeste did the same, giving him back everything he shot at her. Steve liked that. He’d never wanted an anemic woman who danced around issues. He told friends he liked Celeste’s spunk.
From her first days there, Celeste slept in Steve’s bedroom and moved Kristina into an extra bedroom, enrolling her in Hill Country Middle School, where the students came from affluent families. “Kristina wasn’t like a lot of the kids,” says another student. “She wasn’t spoiled. She hadn’t grown up with money.”
Perhaps remembering her own girlhood when she was considered odd, Celeste appeared determined to see that her daughter fit in. To that end, she threw a slumber party, inviting thirty girls from the soccer team. Celeste made up the guest list and reigned over the party, laughing and gossiping with the girls. Instead of talking like a parent, she joked about sex and Steve, saying he was fat and old but that his money made him good-looking. Late that night, she took them to a neighbor’s house, loaded down with shopping bags of toilet paper. Stifling giggles, Celeste and the girls threw roll after roll into the air, allowing the long strands to hang from the trees. Through it all, Celeste laughed like the teenagers. When they finished, it looked like the site of an aberrant snow storm, one that had befallen one house without touching the rest of the block.
“Celeste wasn’t like the rest of our moms,” says one girl. “She was young and pretty and liked to have fun. I thought she was just the coolest mom.”
In the shadow of her mother, Kristina was Celeste’s opposite. As mercurial and outgoing as Celeste was, Kristina was soft-spoken and shy. Yet there was a connection between the mother and daughter that seemed almost unnatural. Steve’s secretary Lisa learned quickly that when Celeste was in turmoil, Kristina was the only one who could calm her. “Kris would talk to her, tell her that it would be all right,” says Lisa. “No matter how upset Celeste was, she’d calm down with Kris.”
After all he’d been through, Steve appeared both taken aback and overjoyed by the turmoil and excitement Celeste brought to his life. When he complained that he couldn’t keep toilet paper in the house, blaming Celeste for using it to T.P. the neighborhood, he’d ask, “Is this what teenagers do?” When Celeste said it was, he laughed heartily.
As always, Celeste was on overdrive, hustling through her days with enough energy to take her well into the night. With Steve, her youth brought a special charm. He was a man who saw old age staring him in the eye. Being a dad again also held its allure. He talked about Kristina with friends, discussing the differences between teenagers in the nineties and when his own daughter had entered her teen years, thirty years earlier. In the mornings, Steve drove her to school while Celeste slept in. “Steve loved Kris from the start,” says Anita. “We all did.”
On Mountain Terrace Drive their lives took on a routine. As long as the house was well cared for, Celeste was free to do as she pleased, while Kristina was at school and Steve at work. Sometimes, Steve even found himself taking over the household tasks, as on the morning Becky called and discovered her father at home. Celeste, the alleged housekeeper, was out, and he was waiting for a maid to arrive to do the actual cleaning.
Each evening at five Steve poured himself and Celeste their first cocktails of the night and started cooking dinner. While he drank martinis made with Wolfschmidt, an inexpensive vodka, and two olives, Celeste only drank top brands, usually Stoli. He wouldn’t buy it for himself, but he bought it for her. “Celeste kept up with him,” says Gene Bauman. “She matched him drink for drink.”
That summer, Steve purchased a lot in the Windermere Oaks subdivision in Spicewood, Texas, thirty-five miles west of Austin, in an unincorporated area of Burnet County, on the south shore of Lake Travis. The homes in the area started at $200,000, and his corner lot was covered with gnarled live oaks and across the street from homes that overlooked the lake. Down a winding road lay a row of covered boat slips and a pier. From dam to dam Lake Travis, a constricted stretch of the Colorado River, measured sixty-four miles, and on summers and weekends it buzzed with boats, skiers, and jet skis.
Once he had the lot, Steve hired a local home builder, Jim Madigan, to construct a one-story house. It was small, just three bedrooms and two baths, but well-appointed. Constructed of limestone, it had a solid look. Steve installed two heavy wood front doors bearing elaborate carvings of nymphs riding seahorses, and the flower beds were lined with white stone. “The idea was that it would someday be Celeste’s,” says Anita. “By then he cared about them and didn’t want Celeste and Kristina to ever be without a home.”
In August, Celeste’s divorce from Jimmy Martinez became final, clearing the way for her to marry Steve, if he asked. His bankroll must have looked ever more attractive to her as that year drew to a close. In October, an offer to purchase KBVO came from Granite Broadcasting Corporation, a New York media giant that was buying up stations across the country. Steve grew excited as it appeared he’d be able to cash in on more than a decade of hard work. He negotiated hard. Granite offered $54 million, and since Steve owned thirty percent, his share came to $16.2 million. Later, Granite flipped networks, turning it into KEYE, the city’s CBS affiliate. “Steve was proud of what he’d built,” says Lisa. “He said he was ready for a new chapter.”
As 1994 drew to a close the KBVO staff gathered to bid Steve good-bye. As a remembrance, they gave him a plaque bearing a branding iron that read: “You really made a mark on Austin.” Steve packed up his office and walked out the door a very rich man.
In no time at all he was bored.
“It wasn’t as sweet as Steve thought it would be,” says McEachern. “His two great loves in life had been Elise and the station, and now they were both gone.” Steve had always had an eye for art, and he tried painting, but that failed to catch his interest. One day in early 1995 he called McEachern. “I’m going to marry Celeste,” he said. “Hell, we’re already living together. We might as well.”
In hindsight, Steve’s friends wondered if they should have tried to talk him out of the marriage. Early on there were signs that Celeste had only contempt for him.
As the wedding drew near, Steve called Gene and asked a favor. “Celeste hasn’t any friends in our group,” he said. “Would Sue go to lunch with her?”
“Sure,” Gene agreed. “I bet she’d be happy to.”
Days later, Sue and Celeste met at a Mexican restaurant. What began as an ordinary lunch suddenly took an odd turn. Although Celeste knew that Sue and Gene were close to Steve, she confided in Sue as if they were old friends. Celeste called Steve a fat slob and bemoaned the way she said he ruled her life. “I have to turn my cell phone off to get away, otherwise he’d call me twenty times a day,” she said. “I never have any peace.”
By the time the check arrived, Sue couldn’t wait to leave. That evening she told Gene, “They’re not even married yet, and she’s saying awful things. It makes me uncomfortable. If Steve asks, tell him I’m not going out with Celeste again.”
When Steve’s children heard about his upcoming wedding, they, too, worried. “Why would a woman of thirty-two marry a seventy-year-old man except for his money?” says Becky. She called Paul and Steven III, and they all talked. Afterward, Paul called Steve’s ex-brother-in-law, Judge Harold Entz, who’d remained a close friend. A state district court judge in Dallas, Entz listened patiently, then said what Paul expected to hear: that their father was a bright man and had to be trusted to know what he was getting into. “The bottom line was we all agreed we had to abide by Dad’s decision,” says Paul.
Steve, too, must have remained at least somewhat unsure of the match. As the time for the ceremony neared, he asked David Kuperman, his attorney, who’d handled his personal and business matters for years, to write a prenuptial agreement, limiting his losses if his marriage to Celeste failed.
On the papers Kuperman drew up, Celeste estimated her net worth—mainly clothes and jewelry—at $20,000. She listed no liabilities, ignoring her credit card bills and the $20,000 she’d been ordered by the Arizona court to pay in restitution for the fraud case.
Meanwhile, Steve estimated his net worth—after paying taxes on the sale of KBVO—at $11 to $12 million. Under the agreement, Steve and Celeste each retained their personal property, including Steve’s separate ownership of the house on Terrace Mountain Drive and the lake house. If they divorced before their third anniversary, Celeste agreed she would receive nothing. If the marriage lasted a minimum of three years, however, she was entitled to a onetime payment of $500,000. If married when he died, he doubled that bequest to $1 million.
Yet, that was only a fraction of his money. It was a conservative document engineered by a conservative man. Steve wanted to share his life with Celeste but didn’t intend to act rashly. As in love with her as he appeared, he’d spent a lifetime building his fortune, and he didn’t intend to lose it.
It must have seemed the ultimate triumph, as Celeste stood beside Steve under an arch in Harvey’s, the main dining room at the Austin Country Club, on February 18, 1995, near windows that overlooked a garden. Little more than a year earlier she’d been a waitress in that same room. Now, surrounded by fifty or so guests, many from Austin’s elite, she was becoming the bride of a very wealthy man.
The ceremony didn’t escape the notice of the staff. “There was a lot of talk,” says the maitre d’, Fernando von Hapsburgh. “We’d never had a waitress marry a member before.”
As her matron of honor, Celeste had Ana Presse, a petite and pretty woman with frosted hair. She and her attorney husband, Philip, had been acquaintances of Steve’s and Elise’s, meeting in the early nineties on a radio station trip to Hong Kong. Some would wonder why Celeste asked Ana, whom she’d only recently met through Steve, when such honors are often reserved for old, dear friends.
Meanwhile, Steve’s best man was someone he’d known since boyhood, his first cousin, C.W. Beard. A tall, dour-looking Dallas banker with large ears and horn-rimmed glasses, C. W. had handled Steve’s financial affairs since the eighties.
Paul was on a ship and couldn’t attend the ceremony, but Becky was in the audience, watching apprehensively as her father recited his vows. In her heart she knew it was a terrible mistake. Celeste was a full fourteen years younger than Steve III, and Becky was acutely aware that her father was nearly old enough to be Celeste’s grandfather. But that wasn’t what bothered her. There was something about Celeste she simply didn’t trust. “She was fake,” says Becky. “We could see it. We just wished Dad could have seen it.”
If he sensed his daughter’s apprehension, Steve didn’t acknowledge it. That day, he exuded happiness. He must have believed he had good reason to be proud. Dressed in a cream brocade suit cut to show off her trim waistline, with her blond hair swept up in a sophisticated French twist, Celeste looked truly lovely. She was dressed with exquisite care and taste. Her jewelry was simple, a strand of pearls around her neck with matching earrings, and on her left-hand ring finger a beautiful diamond solitaire. “It wasn’t flashy big, but it was stunning,” says a friend.
After the ceremony, the group dispersed to tables adorned with rose centerpieces for a four-course dinner as waiters circulated with trays of crystal flutes bubbling with champagne. As they mingled, Steve grinned so broadly one friend said that a young wife must be the road to happiness.
Still, many of his friends had a sense of impending trouble. In the men’s rest room one asked another, “What the hell is Steve doing?”
“I’ve got no damn clue,” the other answered.
At the wedding, Kristina was delighted for her mother. Celeste was exuberant, flushed with excitement, and Kris wondered if this, perhaps, would be it—the match that gave her mother everything she’d ever wanted, the marriage that would finally make her happy. Halfway through dinner, Kristina left for softball practice. At the door, as she walked out, she took one last look at the happy couple. “I hoped it worked,” she says. “Steve seemed like such a nice man.”
Jennifer learned the way she had always did about Celeste’s wedding. “I got a postcard,” she says. “I just threw it away. I figured, well, here’s another new guy.”
On March 3, 1995, after they returned from a New Orleans honeymoon, Celeste and Steve signed a postnuptial agreement confirming the terms of their prenup. It must have made Celeste pause, realizing she hovered so close to wealth and all it could buy, but it still wasn’t hers. Even as Steve’s wife, she had no claim to his money. Only if he died while they were married would she be entitled to any substantial portion of his fortune.
That same month, Kristina saw her mother do something odd. Steve, who fashioned himself a gourmet cook, made dinner, but she and Celeste set the table and served. That night, Celeste ground up pills in a bowl, then mixed the powder into Steve’s food.
“What’s that?” Kristina asked.
“Sleeping pills. I can’t stand being here all night with that fat fuck,” she said. “This way, he’ll have a couple of drinks and pass out. Then I can go out.”
When she put the food on the table, Celeste beamed at Steve, from every appearance the dedicated wife. Kristina would later say that she was so used to her mother doing odd things, she thought little of it, never thinking the pills could be dangerous.
About that same time, little more than a month after the wedding, Ray heard rumors around the television station. A friend had seen Celeste out on Sixth Street, partying at night. “I figured it was true,” says Ray. “But it wasn’t my business. I never told Steve.”
Celeste had made it amply clear to Kristina that money was the reason she was with Steve, and she lived the part. As his wife, she had a wallet full of credit cards and spent with abandon. She had a beautiful home, and he bought her jewelry and presents. Yet, it must have troubled her that she had little she could truly call her own. That summer, Steve was furious when she overdrew the checking account, and an incident from her past loomed—Celeste still owed the $20,000 in Arizona.
In June, Steve went to his safe deposit box at the Bank of America, where he’d banked since the eighties. When he opened the box, he called out for an officer. In moments he was complaining to a teller and the branch manager that his valuables had been stolen. When they couldn’t explain it, Steve called Chuck Fuqua, who’d handled his affairs with the bank since he arrived in Austin. “Someone’s stolen Elise’s jewelry out of my box,” Steve told him. “It’s all gone.”
“We’ll look into it,” Fuqua told him. The bank ran a records check, and later that same day Fuqua, who’d been at the wedding, reluctantly called Steve. It was a duty he dreaded. “Celeste’s been in your box,” he said. “She’s been in twice, once on May third and again on the twenty-second. She signed the register. No one else has been in there.”
The phone was silent. Then Steve said only, “Thank you.”
That day, he ordered Celeste to leave his house, and within a week he’d hired a divorce attorney. He brought the prenuptial agreement and the postnup that reaffirmed it to the first meeting. Celeste was frantic. If Steve divorced her then, she’d have nothing more than her personal possessions, no share of his fortune, no alimony. The message must have come through loud and clear when he brought in a locksmith and changed all the locks on the Austin house and the lake house.
When Anita encountered her at a shop, Celeste looked awful, tired, with large circles under her eyes, as if she’d been crying through sleepless nights.
“What’s wrong?” Anita asked.
“Steve and I are getting a divorce.”
“You’ve only just married,” Anita said, shocked.
On June 18, Celeste wrote a letter to Steve saying: “I don’t know where to begin. 99% of our problems are my fault.” She then bemoaned the horrors of her past, saying that even if she explained it, he couldn’t envision all she’d endured. Perhaps by then Steve knew about Harald, for she wrote that his leaving had devastated her. Or perhaps it was something else she said in the letter, something that must have been true—that she’d told so many people so many different stories she couldn’t keep them all straight. “I don’t remember how much I have told you,” she wrote.
In the letter, Celeste said she’d fallen in with bad friends: “What I didn’t tell you is that I was fined $20,000 in order to remain in Texas so I could fight for the girls.” When it came to the overdrawn checking account, she wrote: “When you told me I didn’t believe you … I really didn’t realize I had spent so much money. So I went to the safety deposit box and got a loan on the missing jewelry. I owe about $2,500 … I know by telling you all of this our marriage is over …no matter what, I need to be honest with you. I am so sorry.”
In the end, she professed her love, saying: “I am hurting so much that I seem to screw everything up. I really do want to get help… Whatever you want to do to me, I’ll accept it.” She closed by writing that she and Kristina would be staying at the Harvey Hotel, and signed the letter, “I love you—Celeste.”
As she had when Harald and Jimmy threatened divorce, Celeste then held out the promise that she could change. Maintaining that she wanted to stop feeling and acting the way she had been, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. There, for perhaps the first time, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,
One of the most controversial of diagnoses, BPD describes a cluster of personality traits often tied to early trauma. Some experts believe that from birth, borderlines have biological tendencies to overreact to stress. Their emotions are volatile and violent, plunging from despair to euphoria. Even small slights become gaping emotional wounds. Without filters to keep them from fulfilling every desire, borderlines binge on food, sex, gambling, or compulsive shopping. They self-mutilate or threaten suicide, often using such threats to control others. They fear being alone, even for short periods, and experience anxiety at any sign of being abandoned. Borderlines push people away, then panic when they leave.
Often bright and witty, fun to be around, borderlines are the life of the party. Yet for those who love them, the road is a hard one. They breed chaos and judge people without context, based not on an entire relationship but solely the most recent interaction. Years of devotion can be ignored for the slight of one unkind look. All the while, borderline personalities search for a rescuer, someone to save them from the disarray they create.
Steve was a bright man, one who’d lived long enough to learn when to be skeptical, and, at least initially, he didn’t accept Celeste’s excuses. On June 25 she was discharged from the hospital. Four days later he filed for a divorce.
His marriage crumbling, Steve told few about the impending divorce. Lifelong lessons are hard to ignore, and he was a reflection of his time, when such matters were not discussed. Perhaps he was embarrassed, fearing his friends and family thought him an old fool for marrying Celeste. To him, a divorce would prove them right.
Finally, in August, like the husbands before him, Steve took Celeste back. What convinced him would remain a mystery, but he told one friend that everyone deserved a second chance and that, with the difficult life she’d lived, he understood that Celeste would make mistakes. By then he’d recovered Elise’s precious things from a pawnshop. “Money is just money,” he said.
Soon after, Kristina and Celeste moved back into the house on Terrace Mountain Drive, and Steve paid off her debts— including the $20,000 restitution for the insurance fraud. On August 29, 1995, he withdrew his petition for divorce.
“Maybe it was just that Steve knew what it was like before Celeste, when he was lonely,” says a friend. “And by then he was in love not just with Celeste, but Kristina. Losing Celeste meant losing her as a daughter.” That fall, Kristina moved a step closer to becoming Steve’s child, when he agreed to have her name legally changed to Beard.
Later, it would seem Celeste learned from Steve’s threats of divorce. She’d nearly lost everything: her beautiful home and access to his millions. After living a life of wealth, how could she be forced back to her old life? It must have seemed impossible. From that point on, divorce was Celeste’s enemy. She’d forestalled losing Steve and his millions, but did she wonder how long she could hold him? Later, it would seem she had a motive: manipulating him into giving her a greater claim to his wealth.
“We need to get Steve to sell the house,” Celeste told Kristina. “If he dies, the kids get it. If he builds or buys us a new one, it becomes community property.”
Days after he dropped the divorce, Steve put the house up for sale. The plan was that they’d live at the lake house while he built a new home. To friends, he said Celeste saw the house as Elise’s, not hers. He wanted her to have a home of her own.
In September, Richard Oppel relocated from D.C., where he’d been Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder newspapers, to take the editor’s job at the Austin American Statesman, the city’s daily. Oppel and his wife, Carol, drove by the house and jotted down the address. The following day they were waiting on the doorstep with their realtor when the door swung open and Celeste glared at them. After persuading Steve to sell, she didn’t want to give the house up.
“Go away. We don’t want to sell,” she snapped.
The realtor argued, “It’s listed on the market, and I made an appointment.”
Then, Steve pulled Celeste out of the doorway from behind and ushered the Oppels and their realtor inside. For the rest of their house tour, Celeste remained out of sight. Oppel found Steve, in his Sansabelt slacks and golf shirt, an affable host. Enthralled with the view of the city, the Oppels made an offer, and negotiations produced an agreement. Before the closing, they stood in the study while Steve sat at his desk, ordering Celeste to retrieve items he needed. “He was clearly in charge,” says Oppel. “Very much the elderly gentleman.”
On another preclosing visit, Richard and Carol again found Steve, dressed in slacks and an open-collar plaid shirt, sitting at his desk in the library. This time he had a large checkbook in front of him. As they talked, Celeste shuffled in, wearing sandals, shorts, and a loose shirt. “Steve, Kristina and I are having so much fun on the jet ski up at the lake,” she said. “While you’re writing out checks, we really need another one.”
“Honey, those cost a lot of money,” Steve answered.
Celeste leaned over his shoulder, playfully wrapped her arms around his chest and said, “Oh, honey, you’ve got a lot of money.”
Without further comment, Steve laughed and wrote her a check.
As well as he appeared to be adapting to the move, Steve had a deep sadness about leaving a home that held so many happy memories. One day, after the Oppels moved in, Steve stopped by. Inside the house, he stood before a window in the bar that overlooked the orchid house, where Elise had spent many happy hours. Pointing at an orchid etched on the glass, he said, “That was a gift to my first wife.”
Years later, Oppel remembered the melancholy look on Steve’s face that day. “He was clearly very much in love with Elise,” he says. “He was still visibly sad at losing her.”
As Mrs. Steven Beard Jr., Celeste segmented her life into two distinct slices: time in Austin and at the lake house. While his friends remained cordial to Celeste, they never welcomed her into the group. It was with women more like those she’d come of age with that Celeste bonded. At Tramps, an upscale salon frequented by many in Austin’s old guard, she befriended her hairdresser, Denise Renfeldt. A small woman with the figure and the enthusiasm of a teenager, Denise immediately liked Celeste. “We were a lot alike,” she says. “We both liked to have fun.”
Over the years, Denise became Celeste’s confidante. In a station in the center of the salon—a busy establishment that smelled of shampoo and nail polish—Celeste talked of her life. In her account, Steve met her at the club and fell head over heels in love with her. “He offered me two million dollars to marry him,” Celeste told her. Calling Steve fat and old, she complained about having sex with him. Others overheard her, and the stories spread. “Austin is a big city, but it’s like a small town. Talk travels,” says Denise.
If Austin had a fast-paced edge, life at the lake took a more leisurely turn. Celeste spent much of the day in sandals, T-shirts, and shorts. The house was small for Celeste, Steve, Kristina, and the two dogs—Steve’s Meagan and Celeste’s constant companion, a black and white cocker spaniel named Nikki.
At the lake, Celeste made friends with Dawn, the wife of Jim Madigan, the builder Steve hired to put up the house. A petite woman with thick dark amber hair, she lived in a house her husband had built nearby. Another friend was an elderly, stocky woman named Marilou Gibbs, the mother of the realtor who’d sold Steve the lot. From the beginning, Kristina thought little of her mother’s friends. “Celeste was always buying them things,” she says.
One friend would later say that Celeste turned shopping into an Olympic sport, spending up to $50,000 in a single day. When the stores were closed and she couldn’t sleep, she took Kristina to a Super Wal-Mart that was open twenty-four hours, where she bought albums and books. Celeste loved to read mysteries and true crime books, working through the plots and figuring out what the bad guys did that got them caught.
At night, Celeste continued to sprinkle Steve’s food with ground-up sleeping pills, but it was while they were living at the lake house that Kristina noticed her mother do something else: pour half a bottle of Steve’s Wolfschmidt vodka down the drain and refill it with Everclear—pure grain alcohol. “This will help him pass out early,” Celeste said, laughing. “Then I can do what I want to do for the rest of the night.”
From that day on, Steve would sip his ritual cocktails, never knowing that rather than 80 proof vodka he was drinking half 190 proof Everclear. While Celeste filled his glass with alcohol, Kristina noticed she filled her own with water. Yet the teenager said nothing, afraid of her mother’s volcanic wrath. “I just never crossed her,” she says.
Kristina maintained her silence even after she overheard Celeste laughing and bragging to a friend about the Everclear cocktails. “I’ve got a name for them,” she said with a giggle. “‘The Graveyard.’”