Title: She Wanted It All
First published: 2005
Description: Kathryn Casey's She Wanted It All (2005) is an extraordinarily researched, incredibly detailed and amazingly well-organized story that is even better than any of that fine trio, and for once the Texas judicial system, despite some initial stupidities, gets the job done right, thanks mainly to prosecutor Allison Wetzel who bested famed defense attorney Dick DeGuerin in a case that could easily have been lost.

The villain is blond, blue-eyed, sexy Celeste (née Johnson) Beard, a woman who found that life was always a case of "too much is never enough." She was actually raised in California, the adopted daughter of Edwin and Nancy Johnson. She claims to have been sexually abused by her adoptive father, but one can clearly see in Casey's mesmerizing narrative that it was the adoptive mother who was not only a psychological abuser, but something of negative role model for the kind of controlling, selfish, neurotic, abusive, sociopathic murderess that Celeste would become.

The primary victim of the story is Steven Beard, a self-made Texas millionaire who in his seventies had recently lost his beloved wife of over forty years. (Of course, there were many victims of Celeste. As with most sociopaths, almost everybody who knew Celeste was victimized in one way or another.) He is the "old fool." He falls for her even though she is young enough to be his granddaughter; and like so many of her men, even though he begins to see (after it's too late) that she is evil, he can't let her go. Part of the reason is that he also fell in love with her identical twin daughters, Jennifer and Kristina, who helped to rejuvenate his life by giving him a purpose as their stepfather. One can only feel sorry for such a man, and think how ironic it is that before he lost his wife and met Celeste he was in charge of his life, a successful man who was well-liked and admired. But Celeste laid him low.

Celeste is an interesting study, a kind of femme fatale on steroids. The portrait that Casey draws of her in these pages is that of an attractive and vital woman with a gift for persuasion, for acting, for bullying, and for the confidence game; a woman with a pathological need to control others and to acquire money and to spend it recklessly; a woman with a terrible need to be surrounded by people, but a woman with no love for anyone but herself. She was also a sexual predator who used and disposed of men at will, a woman as experienced in sex as a prostitute. Furthermore, she had the manic/depressive's bipolar nature that drove her from the depths of depression to the heights of reckless abandonment--sometimes almost simultaneously.

People like Celeste tend to die young or end up in prison. Somebody kills them or they kill themselves, or they get caught and exposed. Celeste got caught. Ironically, what did her in was the person she felt she had the most control over. That is, her "favorite" daughter, Kristina, who was so in thrall of "Mommie Dearest," as the twins liked to call her, that she would do whatever her mom told her to do and could not, no matter how hard she tried, ever go against her mom. She was psychologically cowed in one way and in another way she formed part of a dependency relationship in which she, the daughter, found herself doing everything she could to help her mother get safely through another day.

Add to this mix Tracy Tarlton, a middle-aged lesbian with a history of mental illness who fell madly in love with Celeste, and what we have is a scenario in which a kind of turbo'ed madness runs amuck. As the story nears its climax there is a nice natural irony that develops when Celeste hires Donna (née "Don") Goodson who cons her out of several thousand dollars by pretending to hire a hitman to kill Tracy.

One wonders what might have happened had Celeste not been stopped. Presumably she would have spent all her inherited millions and then found a new victim. However she was caught, and clearly the central event that led to her being caught was when Kristina finally saw the light and was able to escape from her mother's psychological dominance. Casey points to what she considers the turning point on page 325 when Kristina hears her mother say, "I hired somebody to kill Tracy." That statement ends Chapter 16 and begins Chapter 17. It a demarcation point before which Kristina's loyalty was to her mother and after which it was to herself. Yet one suspects that for Kristina to make this transformation of loyalty, she had to have help and she had to have some kind of ongoing relearning experience. One suspects that Justin, Kristina's boyfriend, was the person who gave her the strength to overcome her mother's psychological dominance. Once Celeste lost control of Kristina, her whole world fell apart.

Bottom line: She Wanted It All is one of the best true crime tales I've ever read. I promise all true crime fans that once you open the book and start reading you will burn some midnight oil. I would have read all 448 pages in one fell swoop except that I do have an occasional life. As it happened it took me two sessions.
Subjects: Murder, Case studies, Investigation, Beard, Celeste., Tarlton, Tracey., Beard, Steven., Murder -- Texas -- Austin -- Case studies., Murder -- Investigation -- Texas -- Austin -- Case studies., Murder, texas, Criminal investigation, united states
Places: Austin, Texas
People: Tracey Tarlton, Celeste Beard, Steven Beard
LC classification: HV6534.A8 C37 2005