03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (5 page)

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.