Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (3 page)

According to Catherine, she and Tedesco
announced their common-law marriage to her parents about that time
in 1977 at a dinner. Her parents ran a day care center in southwest
Houston, but her father died of natural causes just after Catherine
filed for divorce from Tedesco in 1978.

Questioned about her use of
Tedesco's name, she noted she had helped him change his first name
from Jorge to George so he could present a more Americanized image.
As far as her using Tedesco for her last name, Catherine told his
family's lawyers with a hearty laugh that Tedesco had been thinking
about changing his last name to Mehaffey.

Volunteering extended answers to
questions about their relationship, however, she managed to portray
him as the jealous tyrant of the house. She said he established
rules limiting her phone conversations to one minute and
prohibiting her from drinking in the house. And, she said, they
clashed immediately over her lack of culinary skills: "I think I
fixed dinner maybe once or twice, and he threw it down the sink,
and said that it was shit, and he always did the
cooking."

She tried to bolster her claim that
George agreed to a marriage by relating an incident at a party when
a black man invited her to dance. She said by this time their
relationship "had reached a crescendo of jealousy and insanity with
George, and he told them that I was his wife."

On January 2, 1978, she claimed she
sought help from a friend because George had beaten her with a belt
for "several days on and off." She said they started fighting
because she took an old boyfriend to the airport after a party.
Then she added an offhand slap at the man she considered her dead
husband: "We fought about a trip George was going to take, and,
again, he was taking this young boy with him."

Continuing that homosexual theme,
she volunteered at another point in the deposition: "A couple of
times I asked him who a couple of guys were that came there, and
one worked at the hospital. I think he was one of the orderlies,
and he was a faggot, and I didn't care for him. I don't recall his
name. He didn't like me because he was George's boyfriend, and one
time I came home and found out George had gone some place with him,
and I got mad, and left."

Catherine used a question about
bills from a hospital to mention that George had taken her there to
have her stomach pumped after a suicide attempt.

Of course, Tedesco wasn't around to
refute any of this. Catherine made observers wonder how all that
abuse could have occurred in just five months. She decided to draw
her old attorney pal Robert into the mix by slandering his ex-wife.
She charged that Tedesco had publicly consecrated an affair with
the woman by having sex with her on the living room floor of their
townhouse while Catherine and Robert watched.

Catherine said she wasn't shocked,
however, because she already had watched one time when Robert's
ex-wife serviced a soccer player while waiting to welcome the rest
of the team. Carried away by the recollection, she said she had
secured an affidavit from the soccer player. She described the
scene for everyone at the deposition, including Robert.

"It was wonderful," she said. "You
have got to hear this one affidavit, it is the best. The guy was
quite a rider. The noises were unmistakable, and I turned around.
She forced this guy. I mean, you know."

Robert needed a recess to compose
himself as a member of her audience, so they took a break. Then she
tried to soothe everyone's nerves with a disclaimer: "Oh, come on.
We are just having a little fun."

Asked how the tryst with a soccer
player could relate to the Tedesco estate case, Catherine mumbled
something about 'legal strategy.' Then she said she couldn't quite
remember. One of the Tedesco family lawyers asked her to notify him
if she ever recalled, and she responded with sarcasm: "You will be
the first one to know. I will call you."

Obviously frustrated, he replied,
"Will you, as soon as you have that? All right. Will you make me
the first to know? Please don't call me. Call your attorney, and I
will talk to him."

Unable to resist a jibe, his
associate jumped in and instructed Catherine to "call him at
home."

"Don't hold your breath," she
replied. "Just wait until trial time."

Of course, none of this would ever surface in
a courtroom without some relation to the Tedesco case, and
Catherine kept trying to tie it in. She said she suspected Robert
of killing Tedesco because the anesthesiologist had seduced his
wife in front of him. She said Robert aimed to take advantage of
the doctor, and had grown to hate him because of the
affair.

"It wasn't a general feeling," she
said of her charge he wanted to take advantage of Tedesco. "When
you stand in a room, and you watch a man have anal intercourse with
your wife while she kneels on the floor on all fours laughing and
screaming, I would say that is advantage."

She added with dramatic flare: "I
begged Robert to stop them. I begged him to stop them, and he said
it is just good, clean fun. He had this really silly look on his
face."

I wish I'd have been a fly on the
wall for that deposition. While reading it years later, I wondered
what kind of silly look Robert had on his face while Catherine was
recounting the alleged scene. And they were only just warming up.
Next they moved forward with more serious questions about the
burglary of Tedesco's townhouse, the reason for their split, and
the events surrounding his brutal demise.

FOUR

July 17, 1979

Surprise pregnancies seemed to
occur frequently in Catherine's relationships. At least, that's
what investigators would tell me later, warning me to beware if she
started warning how she'd missed a period. They would charge she
had used the threat of pregnancies in the past to extort money or
other concessions from discarded lovers. And the Tedesco estate
case files included not just one, but two examples of the pregnancy
wedge. Not only was an alleged pregnancy central to her break-up
with Tedesco, but Tedesco lawyers located another old boyfriend who
received similar news.

That old boyfriend was a six-year
veteran of the sheriff's department who admitted to a recent
extramarital affair with Catherine. He became material to the
estate case in 1979 when attorneys learned he had fenced an antique
sword removed from Tedesco's collection at Catherine's request,
netting $175. Besides locating a missing item for their probate
inventory, Tedesco's attorneys received an added bonus from the
deputy's pre-trial deposition. He had testified she later demanded
three hundred dollars to finance an abortion with the threat:
"Remember George? Remember what happened to him? Remember your son
and wife."

He rejected her pregnancy claim and
denied her the money. But Catherine told me later she had the last
laugh by snitching him out to his wife, who responded with divorce
papers. Catherine cackled as she told his story, adding the moral:
"He saved three hundred dollars, but it cost him everything else."
Then she would turn sullen and add, "If I saw him and his precious
kids in a desert needing a drink, I'd pour their water on the
ground."

With Tedesco, she levered the
surprise pregnancy theme differently. Instead of using it as
blackmail with a threat to tell the wife, in this instance she was
the wife. So she raised the issue of an unborn child in the waning
days of their life together, apparently hoping to stampede Tedesco
into a quick settlement in exchange for an abortion. So the Tedesco
family lawyers naturally asked her about the baby that never came.
And Catherine used her explanation to launch another assault of the
dead doctor's character, charging he had forced her into an
abortion.

"He had stopped beating me because
he was ready to do anything to procure this abortion," she said.
"He was willing to eat much dirt and be real nice to me, 'Oh, come
back, it's so wonderful and so sweet. Just do what I say.' So I
went back, and this was after the beating, and I already knew what
I was going to do. I was going to liquidate the community assets at
that time fairly and equitably."

She claimed he told her he had performed
between three hundred and four hundred abortions in South America
and in New York. She said she believed her pregnancy test had
registered a false positive.

Catherine admitted warning Tedesco
at one point that the child might be illegitimate. But she softened
that blow by reminding him that a lot of great people were
illegitimate. In the deposition, she listed Alexander Hamilton, and
Napoleon Bonaparte. Then she looked around the table and added
Robert.

"I was dealing with a mad man, and
I would have said anything necessary that George wanted to hear
that would keep him from going completely wild," she
testified.

She admitted taking items from
their home, including parts of Tedesco's collection of
pre-Columbian art from South America. She argued that he had
acquired it during their marriage so she considered it community
property. She said she needed the money because he wouldn't give
her any.

Catherine listened patiently while
one lawyer presented his list of items he felt were stolen from the
house: three tuxedos, three suits, two African headdresses, a
Persian sword, a Chinese matchlock rifle, a Jivaro blowgun, a
Hoover vacuum cleaner, a designer lamp, a machete in a holster, and
120 record albums.

"George was strange, but I never
saw him in headdresses," she fired back. Then she added: "I took
one other thing that is probably not on this list that I returned
to him because I was fascinated with it, and I knew it meant a
great deal to him. It was a human fetus that he kept in a jar. That
was his only child, and I gave it back."

Adding that the lawyer's list
looked like "padding for the insurance company," she admitted
getting $950 for some of the art, but refused to identify the
buyer.

She admitted knowing that Tedesco was taping
their telephone conversations in the months prior to his death as
they continued to squabble about her divorce case.

"You have obviously gone over all
the tapes and prepared questions from them," she told the lawyers
during her deposition. "We both know. Let's not insult each other's
intelligence."

Jumping to her challenge, one of
the lawyers asked: "Did you ever tell Dr. Tedesco in a telephone
conversation back in January 1978, 'I came there tonight to kill
you. Can I kill George Tedesco?'"

She replied: "I don't recall but I
could have. I think anybody who ever knew George probably at one
time or another—including Robert—wanted to kill George, but George
just was not worth it."

The lawyer continued: "Did you ever
tell him in January of 1978 that 'You are going to be very, very
sorry as far as threatening me. I am a lawyer, and I know the
tricks of the trade.' Do you know the tricks of the
trade?"

That question
brought an answer that twenty years later would hover as a
Dallas Morning News
headline above a lengthy article the paper called "Tricks of
the Trade."

"Me?" she asked rhetorically.
"Tricks?"

Asked if she ever bragged about
getting into his house through the mail slot, she replied: "Yes. I
had a little bottle and on it, it would say, 'Drink me.' And I
would drink it, and then I would shrink to an incredibly small
size, and I would literally walk through whatever it was that Alice
walked through."

But her sarcasm turned dark at one
point when the lawyer elaborated, and accused her of sticking her
"skinny" little arm through the mail slot to open the door. She
shot back: "Wait a minute. I don't have a skinny arm. I look just
fine. You ought to re-examine yourself a little bit
physiologically."

Tedesco's family had charged that
her removal of items occurred in 1978 and again after the doctor's
death in January 1979. Dancing like a prize fighter along the
ropes, however, Catherine bobbed and weaved around questions that
tried to trace the trail of Tedesco's property. Investigators
apparently had tied some of the loot to Catherine's acquaintance,
Tommy Bell—a character destined to play a significant role in the
violence of my confrontation with her.

While evading questions that would
link the missing art to anyone, however, she admitted her role with
a comment that sounded like a boast: "And I sold it. How about
that?"

Not even Tedesco's murder in
January 1979 stopped Catherine's removal of their "community
property." If anything, it added more urgency as she told lawyers
she suddenly feared that Robert would race inside the townhouse and
grab some for himself.

She told the lawyers she had not
learned of Tedesco's death until mid-afternoon on that day when she
went to the Family Law Center for the divorce hearing. The police
had contacted her divorce attorney, and he told her they wanted to
talk.

"I couldn't tell them much," she
recounted in her July deposition. "I was stunned. I didn't really
believe he was dead until I saw this little purse he carried
sitting on the desk."

She said she went to the townhouse
that night "because I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to
know how he had been killed, where he had been killed. I found it
incredible."