Ayear into their marriage, Steve’s finances were becoming ever more enmeshed with Celeste, much of it by his own hand. In early 1996 he brought in Brian Rahlfs, a vice president and portfolio manager with Bank of America, Dallas, to meet with them about investing his fortune. Over lunch at the country club, where Celeste ordered her usual chicken-fried steak and Coke in a can, they discussed his plans for the eventual disbursement of his money, the Steven F. Beard Jr. Trust. Without counting the lake house, his IRAs, and personal property, Steve’s fortune totaled more than $10 million. That same month, Steve had his lawyer, David Kuperman, draw up a new marital agreement. In the event of his death, Steve wanted to leave Celeste not only the $1 million, but half of both the lake house and a lot he purchased at 3900 Toro Canyon Road in Austin.
In the more than a decade since Steve and Elise moved into the house in Westlake Hills, Austin had grown westward. Million-dollar estates proliferated; so much so that by the time he married Celeste, the Terrace Mountain Drive house had been surpassed by neighborhoods of stately homes in Georgian, English Tudor, and modern design.
After selling the house in 1995, Steve purchased the prime undeveloped acre lot little more than a mile from Terrace Mountain Drive, in an exclusive, gated enclave called the Gardens of Westlake. The slice of land was just down the street from thick metal gates that guarded the mega-million-dollar estate of Michael Dell. In Austin, Dell was royalty. As the founder of the highly successful Dell Computer Corporation, he was the poster boy for the city’s burgeoning hightech industry.
One day the phone rang in the office of Gus Voelzel, who specialized in high-end residential and commercial construction. “I hear you’re a great architect,” Steve said.
“Some people say I am,” Voelzel replied. “Who told you?”
“My builder. He tells me that I need to get you to design my new house.”
Two days later Gus pulled up in front of the Toro Canyon lot and Steve was already there, standing outside his Cadillac with his dog, Meagan. When Gus got out of his car, the lab growled and bared her teeth. “Now you stop that, girl,” Steve said, walking forward. “She just needs to know we’re friendly, and she’ll be okay.”
Steve took a good look at Voelzel, a tall man with shoulder length white hair and a beard. Around the waist, Voelzel was nearly as broad as Steve. “Looks like you’re about my size,” Steve said. “I think we might be able to do some business.”
Voelzel laughed. “Sounds good to me,” he agreed.
With that, the two men walked the property. Steve’s lot was wooded with gnarled oaks and rough cedar that appeared as ancient and rugged as the rocky hills. Eventually, five houses would be built behind the Gardens of Westlake gate, but as yet, only one was under construction, a rustic, ranch-style house with a long front porch that recalled the Texas Hill Country. Although beautiful, it wasn’t what Steve had in mind.
“I’ve always loved Fallingwater, and I’d like something with that kind of feel,” Steve said, referring to Frank Lloyd Wright’s cantilevered design in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Perched over a rushing mountain spring, it epitomized Wright’s concept of organic architecture, design so well integrated with its setting that it appeared unified with nature.
“This site won’t work,” Volezel said. “We need a creek.”
“Hell, can’t we build one?” Steve said with a twinkle in his eye.
Voelzel laughed. “I guess we could.”
Steve told Voelzel how he envisioned the house. He wanted a sprawling one-story, with a separate master wing and a wing for Kristina and guests. “Does your wife have some ideas? Should we include her?” Voelzel asked.
“Nah, we made a deal. I build the house and she decorates it,” he said with a grin. “You’re going to be really surprised when you meet my wife.” He then went on to say that his first wife had died just three years earlier and he’d married a “younger woman. I dated older women, but they didn’t appreciate me for what I could provide: money.”
Voelzel laughed again.
In the ensuing months, Gus worked closely with Steve, translating his ideas to paper. The two men formed a quick friendship, and the house, as it evolved, took on a contemporary look with expansive windows. The first time Voelzel met Celeste, as Steve had predicted, he was surprised. “I didn’t expect her to be quite that young. She didn’t say much,” he says. “She kind of looked over the plans and nodded.”
The one change Celeste did make was to her closet. The original plan called for cubbyholes to store three hundred pairs of shoes. “She said that would never be enough. She needed room for five hundred,” says Voelzel.
As Gus designed it, visitors walked up three short flights of stairs to reach double stained-glass front doors set into a panel of glass. Squared columns held up a wide overhang, and, emanating from a backyard koi pond, a man-made stream bubbled out from beneath the house and ran along the front flower beds into two large ponds.
Inside, the house fanned out in a U from the entry to a full 5,800 square feet. Walking straight ahead, one entered a grand living room with a high coffered ceiling. Three steps up to the right brought visitors into an elaborate gourmet kitchen and dinette area that overlooked the koi pond. The fireplace, entrance, and walls leading into the dining room and kitchen were constructed of the same Golden Arkansas ledge stone as much of the exterior. The master wing, three steps up from the living room to the left, housed Steve’s office, a large bedroom, and a bathroom with a room-size glass shower and closets. If one walked from the entry to the right instead, there were two additional bedrooms with separate baths, one for Kristina, the other a guest room.
On the blueprint, Steve had concerns. “He wanted the living room bar as a command post,” says Gus. “He wanted to serve drinks and look out at a party. Steve was a people person, he liked seeing people happy, and he wanted to see them enjoying his house.”
When Voelzel estimated a seven-figure price tag to build the house, Steve sucked in a whistle. “I’m going to need a really big credit card for this,” he joked. A week later at lunch, Gus gifted him with the house floor plan shrunk down and laminated to look like a credit card. “He loved it, showed it to everyone,” Gus says.
Planning quickly gave way to construction. After the groundbreaking, Steve, with Meagan at his side, became a constant presence, sitting in a lawn chair under an umbrella with a cooler of water, watching as the house grew out of the lot. He was there the day the masons laid out the stone. When it came to the fireplace mantel, Gus had the stone beaten with chains and coated with buttermilk to age it. Once installed, the mantel was held up by carved lions, a symbol from the Beard family crest.
His soon-to-be next door neighbors, Bob and Bess Dennison, a retired orthopedic surgeon and his wife, in the throes of building their own home, stopped over often to see Steve. It was obvious that he was immensely proud of the house. On more than one occasion Steve told Bob it would have the perfect living room: one with a big screen television and a wet bar. “Steve wasn’t overly impressed with his money. He had fun with it,” says Dennison, who quickly decided he liked his new neighbor.
When it came to Celeste, Dr. Dennison wasn’t as sure. Steve bragged about her, telling Dennison she had a degree from Pepperdine. “She’s beautiful,” Steve said, “and smart as a whip.” The Dennisons weren’t impressed. Around them, Celeste barely spoke. It was as if their money and genteel manners intimidated her.
That year, Steve brought Celeste and Kristina to Virginia to meet his youngest son, Paul, and his wife, Kim. A hospital corpsman, at the time of the wedding Paul had been aboard ship, unable to attend. When Paul entered the bar at the Williamsburg Country Club, it stung to see Celeste wearing his mother’s gold watch. Still, dinner went well. Celeste was affectionate toward Steve, bragging about him to his son and daughter-in-law. When Paul and Kim left to smoke cigarettes, Celeste joined them, but not before she bent over and kissed Steve on the cheek. “She seemed all right,” says Paul. “I thought maybe things would be okay. Maybe she loved him and he’d be happy.”
Yet his misgivings quickly returned. From that point on, whenever he attempted to visit his father, Celeste rebuffed them. “She’d say it was never the right time. They were always going somewhere, something was happening,” he says. “She kept all of us kids away from our dad. There was always a reason we weren’t welcome.”
“Mom didn’t want the older Beard kids around,” says Kristina. “She didn’t want them poking their noses into her business.”
If Paul had been at the lake house that summer, he would have seen much to disturb him. Kristina did. She’d grown to care about Steve. In her young life, with the exception of her father, he was the first man who’d stayed long enough to become a presence. Yet, she loved her mother and felt responsible for her. She said nothing when she saw Celeste combing grocery store shelves for dented and bulging cans, then bringing them home and feeding the contents to Steve. She never connected it with a memory out of her own childhood. Years earlier, Kristina and Jen had faint recollections of being rushed to a hospital, where doctors pumped their stomachs. Steve never did get sick, convincing Kristina that Celeste wasn’t really hurting him.
That year as the house construction continued and summer beckoned, Kristina’s school counselor asked her what she’d like to be when she grew up. She answered, “A vet, because I like animals.” She listed her hobbies as volleyball, basketball, and watching television, and her teacher commented that she was conscientious. Yet the counselor’s note reflected something else, something about how Kristina had closed off her emotions in order to live with her mother: “Kristina’s affect is flat. She seems distant from her feelings. She was unable to generate three wishes when asked.” Her teacher added, “Kristina is friendly, easygoing, likable, responsible, and willing to work.” But she displayed “a significant amount of emotional distress as related to family issues.”
In July 1996, Kristina left to see Jennifer at their paternal grandfather’s ranch in California. The two-week vacation had been an annual event since the girls were very young, and she was eager to go, even more so that year because she’d missed Jennifer. In Washington State, however, Jennifer hesitated, unsure she should leave their father. She worried about Craig, whose life had taken a dangerous turn.
In April of that year, when the girls were fifteen, after just two years of marriage, Kathryn filed for divorce. Later, she’d say Craig was drinking and taking methamphetamines. He’d become sullen and angry. Hoping she’d come back to him, Craig joined AA, quit drinking, cut out the drugs, and went for counseling. With Jennifer, he moved into a small apartment. It was during that time that Celeste and Craig began talking. “I called Kristina a lot,” says Jennifer. “That’s how it got started.” Before long they were on the telephone nightly. When she heard, Cherie was concerned. Whenever Celeste entered her son’s life, something bad happened.
“They were even making plans to take the girls to Disney World that fall,” says Jeff. “Celeste was married to Steve, but she wanted to see Craig. It was the typical old stuff.”
Yet, Craig continued to be morose. At times he cried, telling Jennifer he missed Kathryn. To Jeff, he said he couldn’t survive another divorce. “I told him it wouldn’t be that way, that Kathryn wasn’t Celeste,” says Jeff. “But he didn’t believe me.”
Everyone around him knew Craig was deeply depressed in the summer of 1996. Cherie tried to talk to him, but to no avail. Jennifer panicked when her father missed one of her softball games. It was the first time Craig wasn’t in the stands. When she got home, he admitted he was thinking about suicide.
With the trip to her grandfather’s approaching, Jennifer refused to go, afraid of what might happen unless she was there to watch over her father. Craig insisted and promised he’d be all right. “I believed him,” she says.
The day after she arrived, Jennifer called home, but Craig didn’t answer. Cherie called, too, and got no response. For nearly two days Craig’s phone rang without an answer. Finally, on July 19, 1996, Cherie pounded on his door. When he didn’t open it, she went to the landlord and returned with a key. Her heart pounding, she walked in and saw blood splattered against a wall. “I didn’t go any farther. I knew,” she says.
Craig’s dad tried to break the horrible news to his granddaughters gently, but there was no way to soften the blow. Immediately, Jennifer screamed, “No,” over and over, while Kristina tried to comfort her. Later, Jennifer wouldn’t remember anything about that afternoon, except Kristina whispering in her ear, “Jen, I’m so sorry.”
On his death certificate, the cause was listed as a contact gunshot wound to the head; suicide. Craig had left behind letters to Cherie and Jennifer, saying he simply wasn’t strong enough to keep fighting. “He said God didn’t hear him, and he couldn’t handle it anymore,” says Jeff.
Cherie and Jeff, however, would never agree with the finding of suicide. “We always believed Celeste pushed him to do it,” says Jeff. “That she was the last person he talked to, and that she told him she was married to a rich man who could take care of the girls better than he could. Celeste may not have pulled the trigger, but she loaded the gun.”
Later, Celeste would tell her mother, Nancy, that she did talk to Craig the day he died, but insisted that “if she’d known, she would have stopped him.”
The day after the body was discovered, Celeste rushed to California to claim the girls. Jennifer was in shock. “When I was with my dad, everything was all right,” she says. Of her mother, she says, “She frightened me.”
In the small town of Stanwood, where he’d lived, Craig’s remains were cremated. The Bratchers so hated Celeste that Jeff went to the police and cautioned them to keep her away from the funeral. “I told them that if I saw her, I’d kill her,” he says.
Perhaps they relayed the message, for Celeste dropped the girls at the funeral but didn’t go inside. Something, however, did happen that day to rupture the family. After the funeral, Jennifer begged her grandmother to let her move in with her. Cherie refused. “I’d just lost my son, and I had to let go of my granddaughters,” she says. “I wasn’t strong enough to handle the interference that I knew Celeste would bring into my life.”
As a result, the girls had only their mother to turn to, the same mother who had abandoned them to foster homes whenever they’d been inconvenient, the same mother who’d yelled and screamed at them, insisting they were never good enough. That point must have been driven home further when, as soon as they got off the plane in Austin, Celeste stopped at Jimmy’s house to tell him what happened. After comforting Celeste and the girls, he told them, “You girls better take care of your mother, be there for her and do whatever she needs. Because now she’s all you have left.”
That was something Kristina understood—that she only had Celeste and that Celeste needed her. For Jennifer, it was very different. She grieved for her father. “For the first four days after we got to Austin, I stayed in the bedroom and cried,” she says.
Now that he was gone, Celeste, too, became preoccupied with Craig. In the months that followed, she badgered Cherie, demanding his ring, watch, and even her last letter from Craig. Cherie refused. When Celeste wanted photos of Craig, Cherie told her no. Not to be denied, Celeste bought a full-page ad in a Stanwood newspaper that read:
WANTED
ANY PHOTOGRAPHS
OF
J. CRAIG BRATCHER
His 15-year-old daughters are distraught.
We did not receive any physical memories of our father.
Just one photo would help ease the pain of his death.
PLEASE HELP US!
We Will Pay All Expenses
Jennifer and Kristina
The ad ended with a P.O. box and phone number. The twins knew nothing of the ad until she came to them giggling and said, “Look what I did.” Spurred by the ad, a Seattle television station requested an interview with the girls, and Celeste happily agreed. During the news footage, the twins said they missed their father and that his family had refused to give them photos. “I was a zombie, still really missing our dad,” says Jen. “Celeste told us to do it, and we didn’t refuse. You didn’t tell Celeste no. You just didn’t.”
In Stanwood, Cherie felt humiliated to have her family troubles so publicly aired. What remained of the relationship between her and her granddaughters dissolved the following year, when a Mother’s Day card arrived. Amid tiny hearts and a cheery verse that thanked Cherie for being an inspiration, was a letter that began: “Grandma, we really mean this.” It went on to voice an indictment of Cherie for turning her back on the girls and to gushingly praise Celeste.
Years later, Kristina would look at the letter and insist she didn’t write it. “That’s not my handwriting,” she says. “It’s Celeste’s.”
In Texas, Celeste must have seen the grief in Jennifer’s eyes, as, for the most part, she left her alone. She did complain to Steve about the way her newly reclaimed daughter dressed: baggy pants and big T-shirts; Seattle grunge. While Celeste didn’t appear to know what to do with Jennifer, Steve opened his arms wide to the sad teenager. Each day, he drove the girls to Westlake High School for their freshman year. On Sundays, while Celeste and Kristina slept in, he and Jennifer began a weekly ritual: breakfast at the country club. “We’d just go and talk,” says Jen, smiling at the memory. “It was fun.”
On weekends, Steve, Jennifer, and Kristina loaded into his Cadillac and, while Celeste had plans with friends, explored the small Texas Hill Country towns, stopping for lunch at hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Before long Jennifer became Steve’s companion, driving to Home Depot with him to pick up things for the house, spending time together. For a girl whose heart ached for her lost father, he filled a painful void.
As time passed, Celeste’s world was becoming Steve’s as she methodically cut him off from his own children. Looking back, it would seem that he was trying to do for her and the twins what he’d done for Elise and his children: build a secure world, one based on solid footing. But Celeste undermined his best efforts. Although he showered her with gifts, it was never enough. No matter what she had, Celeste always wanted more.
That summer at the lake house, Kristina walked in and found her mother standing at a window, holding up a blank check over a cancelled one. With the light shining through illuminating the checks from behind, she traced Steve’s signature onto the blank check. Again, Chuck Fuqua called, this time to tell Steve that his personal checking account was overdrawn. “I’m not sure how Steve figured it out, but what he came up with was that Celeste had gotten very, very good at forging his signature,” says Fuqua.
After that, Steve had his financial papers, including his bank statements, sent to a P.O. box. For a short time he again pondered divorce, telling Kuperman that all wasn’t well, but he never went forward with it. “I guess he just decided against it,” Fuqua would say later. “He did love Celeste and the girls. He thought of them as his family.”
Throughout that summer, Celeste was in a whirlwind. While Steve had controlled the design of the home itself, inside he gave her free reign. Little from the first house except personal mementoes would be moved. Instead, as the house neared completion, Steve took Celeste to Louis Shanks, Austin’s top-end furniture store, where he introduced her to Michael Forwood. Decades earlier Steve had bought furniture from Forwood’s grandfather, the original Louis Shanks, who founded the chain in 1945. With the house plans under his arm, he showed Forwood the vast rooms they’d need to furnish. “I don’t mind paying what’s fair, but I want a good price,” Steve said.
“We’ll take care of it,” Forwood assured him.
From then on Celeste took over. The first time Greg Logsdon, a salesperson at the store, met Celeste, he saw an attractive blonde wandering the store in jeans and a T-shirt.
“Is anyone helping you?” he asked.
“No,” she said, flippantly adding, “probably because of the way I’m dressed. I want to see your Henredon and Baker catalogues.”
Fifteen minutes later Celeste had flipped through the Henredon catalogue and chosen $20,000 in occasional tables and benches. When she instructed Logsdon to put in the order, he asked for a deposit.
“You won’t need that,” she said. “Tell Mike Forwood that Celeste Beard was in.”
Later that day Logsdon relayed the message. “Order anything she wants. Mr. Beard is good for it,” Forwood instructed.
Over the next three years, Celeste was Logsdon’s best customer. She never quibbled about price, and she chose only the very best. For a woman who’d had little money in the past, everyone at Louis Shanks had to admit that Celeste knew what to buy. Sometimes, her requests were exceptional, however, even for a store as upscale as Shanks. There was the time she bought a heavily carved bedroom suite from the Henredon line named Natchez, after the Mississippi city. The king-size, four-poster bed alone ran more than $4,000. Celeste had Logsdon custom-order a heavy damask bedspread and pillows. While such a purchase wasn’t unusual, Celeste’s next request was: She wanted a duplicate of the bed made including the bedding but on a small scale, for her cocker spaniel, Nikki.
They did, at a cost of $3,000.
“I think that’s the first time we ever had a request like that from a customer,” says Forwood. “We were all frankly amazed.”
Steve, however, never questioned the expenditure. In fact, he rarely balked at any of her purchases. The one exception: the day Celeste spent $7,000 on throw pillows. When the bill arrived, Celeste called Logsdon.
“Steve got the bill,” she said. “He called me every name in the book, except my own.”
To mollify the situation, Logsdon gave Celeste an adjustment on the bill. But the next time she walked into Louis Shanks, Steve was beside her, watching over her shoulder as she made purchases. At times, he shook his head no. Celeste bristled.
“That’s why I don’t like to bring him shopping,” she said to Logsdon, loud enough for Steve to hear. Looking back, Logsdon would say it was as if Steve were a father with an errant child, paternal, wanting her to be happy, yet monitoring her actions.
“She was clearly unhappy he was there,” he says.
Throughout the three years she bought from him, Celeste spent more than $100,000 each year, for a total of nearly $400,000. She was always polite, always easygoing, never questioning prices or asking for discounts. “She was a dream customer,” he says.
Logsdon, then, found it difficult to understand why the women at Louis Shanks grated at having to deal with Celeste. While she was calm with him, with the women Celeste’s mood turned churlish with little provocation.
“Do you know who I am?” she said, irritated when things weren’t going her way.
The Bank of America teller who refused to cash Celeste’s check that summer when she went through the drive-through without identification was a woman. Celeste caused a scene, screaming, “Do you fucking know who I am?” Steve’s banker, Chuck Fuqua, was called. “She read me the riot act,” he says. All the while she was yelling he was recalling the way she’d talked about Steve at the last party. “She said he was disgusting.”
At the end of August, Brian Rahfls flew in from Dallas to discuss funding Steve’s trust. That day at the country club, Steve stopped Rahfls frequently to ask Celeste questions, making sure she understood the trust with its $7 million in cash, stocks, and bonds, explaining what her situation was should they remain married when he died. In a grand gesture, he had made Celeste the main beneficiary. If she remained his wife at his death, she wouldn’t have access to the principal but would receive all the earnings from the estate. At a twelve percent return, Rahfls estimated the trust would produce $290,000 a year.
That October, Steve and Celeste went on the radio station trip, this time to Madrid. During their stay at the palatial Ritz Hotel, Celeste grew angry. That night, she took his American Express card and left. The next morning she was gone, flying home on a first-class, one-way ticket. At breakfast Steve looked sheepish, not wanting to tell the others what had happened. Instead, he said that Celeste had something at home she had to attend to. But he told the truth to Roy Butler and Gene Bauman. “He kind of grinned, like ain’t this wild,” says Butler. “I got the feeling Steve thought he had a wild pony by the tail.”
Afterward, Butler and Bauman compared notes and figured Celeste’s impulsive departure probably cost Steve in the neighborhood of $7,000. Four days later the travelers returned to Austin. When they got off the plane, Celeste waited for Steve, waving and calling his name, as if she couldn’t wait to have him home.
That fall, Steve, Celeste, and the girls finally moved into the Toro Canyon house. Two months later they hosted an elaborate holiday open house. More than a hundred guests arrived to view the house and the treasures the Beards had amassed. Celeste had so many antique Staffordshire dogs, she couldn’t display them all, keeping many in closets. Over the living room fireplace hung a painting Celeste had commissioned for Father’s Day the previous year. It depicted Kristina, Jennifer, and Celeste in the forefront, with the koi pond fountain in the background. Buried in the fountain pedestal was a small medallion bearing Steve’s face. “Mom wanted it that way for a reason,” says Kristina. “She said it would be easy to paint over him when he died.”
The following February, 1997, a full year before she would have been entitled to the money under the prenup, Steve funded a $500,000 trust for Celeste. Perhaps he thought she’d be happier with money of her own. To counsel her on investing the sum, he brought in a specialist from Bank of America. Six months later every penny was gone. Celeste had spent it all. From that point on, his financial obligation to her in a divorce was satisfied. Even if they remained married for a decade, if they were to divorce, he owed her nothing, and she’d leave the marriage with only her half interests in the houses and her personal property.
From that point on Steve was worth considerably more to Celeste dead than alive and divorced.