Celeste Beard: fortune hunter has husband murdered the Crime Library — Guts Blown Out — Crime Library
Steven Beard, a retired television executive, was startled awake on Oct. 2, 1999, to find his innards lying where his belly should have been.
Conscious but bewildered, he reached for a phone on his nightstand and dialed 911 for Austin, Texas.
“I need an ambulance,” said Beard, 75. “My guts just jumped out of my stomach. They blew outyeah, they blew out of my stomach. They’re lying on my stomach.”
“OK,” said the 911 operator. “They’re laying on your stomach?”
“I’m in awful pain,” Beard said.
“How did this happen?”
“It just happened. I woke up. I just woke up.”
After another brief exchange, the operator said, “I’m having a hard time figuring out what happened.”
So was Beard.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’ve never had this happen before.”
As sheriff’s deputies and an ambulance rushed toward the house, Beard had the presence of mind to ask the operator to phone his young wife, Celeste, who was sleeping in another wing of the 5,300-square foot mini-mansion in pricey Toro Canyon west of Austin.
But the jangling phone did not rouse the woman.
The house was locked tight when help arrived. Rescuers peered through windows until they spotted Beard bleeding in bed. They broke a patio door to get inside.
EMS personnel sized up the wound and surmised an incision from a hernia operation had failed. But as they hoisted the 300-pound man onto a stretcher, Travis County Deputy Sheriff Russell Thompson found something on the bedroom floor that explained Beard’s intestinal blowout.
It was a freshly fired shell casing from a 20-gauge shotgun.
Beard was flown by medical helicopter to Brackenridge Hospital in Austin.
His wife and her twin teenage daughters, whom Beard had recently adopted, followed him to the hospital in a police car. The girls were joined there by their boyfriends, and the five began a waiting room vigil.
Paul Knight, a sheriff’s investigator, was sent to the hospital to question them.
He posed the query that every homicide investigator must ask the loved ones of a victim of an unsolved violent crime:
Any idea who would have done this?
Christopher Doose, the boyfriend of one of the twins, spoke up:
“How about that crazy Tracey?”
“That crazy Tracey,” as the teenager put it, was Tracey Nolyne Tarlton.
In the seven months before her husband was shot, Celeste Beard had become very friendly with Tarlton, manager of a bookstore.
Tarlton, a heavyset and plain 35-year-old, had led a rather troubled life, with bouts of narcotics and alcohol abuse, an attempted suicide and psychological problems.
The daughter of a respected Fort Worth lawyer, she graduated from Texas A&M in 1986 with a degree in biology. She worked in several unfulfilling natural resources jobs with the government before hiring on in 1994 at BookPeople, in downtown Austin.
She found her place there, working 60-hour weeks at a place that attracted the most eclectic elements of a very eclectic city. Tarlton was a lesbian, and she felt comfortable sharing her sexuality with the circle of open-minded friends and colleagues she developed at BookPeople.
She excelled in the job and soon was promoted to manager. She earned regional notice in the book world, appearing on C-SPAN to talk about books and turning up in the newspapers from time to time with comments about a new release or book trends.
But in February 1999 Tarlton suffered a very public nervous breakdown at work, shrieking obscenely and threatening violence.
With the encouragement of family and friends, she checked in to St. David’s Pavilion, an Austin mental health facility, to try to regain her balance.
Celeste Beard, meanwhile, was having problems of her own.
For one thing, she was spending her husband’s money like a crazy person.
He gave her a $10,000-a-month allowance, but that wasn’t nearly enough.
Her three walk-in closets were lined with hundreds of pairs of shoes, each with a purse to match. She could have gone a year and a half without donning the same footwear.
She once went on a $50,000 shopping jag. She would throw extravagant parties for her friends on a whim, and the couple spent nearly $100,000 on a month-long trip to China in 1998.
Beard was wealthy, but he was no Donald Trump.
He had an estimated net worth of $12 million. In just four years of marriage, Celeste had raced through well over $1 million.
Beard and his wife often bickered over her spending. But the issue reached a crisis stage when Beard’s accountant tallied up her 1998 holiday shopping and entertainment. She had blown nearly $300,000.
When Beard vowed to take away her credit cards, Celeste threatened suicide.
Beard paid to send her away to St. David’s Pavilionanother considerable expense, it was true, but one that might save him money in the long run.
It was at St. David’s in March 1999 that Celeste Beard became acquainted with Tracey Tarlton.
Tarlton was immediately smitten by the attractive, leggy Celeste. A few weeks later, she wrote her a love note:
“Celeste, you are so beautiful. I think about your long, silky body and your incredible, long legs and I just can’t stand it. And then I think of your incredible face and I want to…stand outside your building and wail until I get arrested. We won’t even talk about what happens when I think about your sweet, tough, sexy voice.”
Christopher Doose was not alone in suggesting Tarlton’s name to authorities. When news of the Beard shooting broke, any number of people stepped forward to identify her as a possible suspectjust about everyone, investigators noted, except Celeste Beard.
Detective Rick Wines paid Tarlton a visit at her apartment two days after the shooting.
“We asked if she owned a 20-gauge shotgun, and she said yes, she did,” Wines told CBS’s “48 Hours.”
Tarlton was an avid skeet-shooter. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to hand over her shotgun for ballistic testing. The $1,000 Franchi, manufactured in Italy, was engraved with Tracey’s name. It had been a gift from her father.
A few days later, police had their results.
“The shotgun shell that we found at the scene came from the shotgun that we found in her house,” Wines said. “You know, two and two to me has always been four.”
On Oct. 8, six days after the shooting, Tarlton was arrested and charged with assault.
Meanwhile, against long odds Steven Beard seemed to begin a gradual recovery.
His assailant had taken poor aim in the darkened bedroom: His brain and heart were spared, although his digestive organs were decimated.
His condition stabilized after a series of seven surgeries, and the immediate threat to his life seemed to pass.
He was eventually released from the hospital, although he was considered to be at continued risk of infection due to the nature of his wound.
Shotgun wounds to the midsection can kill slowly.
When the digestive tract is perforated, the leakage can prove deadly through any number of infections, including peritonitis or bacterial sepsis in the blood.
Beard was treated with antibiotics to head off infection, and his recovery seemed to be on course when he was released from the hospital on Jan. 21, 2000. He died four days later.
By some accounts, Celeste Beard was a vigilant and loving wife in her husband’s final months. Friends said she spent countless hours at Steven’s side.
Yet there is indisputable evidence that she managed to console herself with a favorite pastime: shopping.
Beard’s accountant would later reveal that Celeste spent $321,000 during October and November 1999; an additional $249,000 by Dec. 10, and another $100,000 in the six weeks ending March 31, 2000.
Investigators reasoned that the circumstances of the shooting were too odd to be a coincidence.
A woman who was in love with Celeste Beard had murdered her husband.
Common sense would suggest that the widow Beard had played a role.
But Tracey Tarlton was not snitching.
Prosecutors dangled offers for plea bargains if she would talk, but she sat mute, marking time in jail month after month.
A grand jury called to hear evidence in the case was kept active for more than a year after Beard died because prosecutors hoped Tarlton would have a change of heart and implicate Celeste Beard.
They finally gave up, and Tarlton was indicted for murder on Feb. 16, 2001.
And then came the unexpected.
Tarlton had a revelation, but it had nothing to do with anything proffered by prosecutors.
Sitting in jail and reading an Austin newspaper, she saw an item about her beloved Celeste.
The widow Beard had gotten over her loss and had quietly wed Cole Johnson, a bartender and musician in a part-time bar band, in a lovely private ceremony amid the mountain splendor of Aspen, Colo.
Dumped for a man, Tarlton began to understand that she had been duped.
The enraged woman asked to meet with prosecutors.
She spoke the words they had been waiting more than 18 months to hear: “I did it for Celeste.”
Celeste’s marriage to Cole Johnson was her fifth trip to the altar.
One could pick nits over the wisdom of each of the blessed events. But without question the last would prove to be the most unwise.
Celeste was raised in Ventura County, Calif., one of four adopted children of Edwin and Nancy Johnson.
It was not a childhood filled with Golden State sunshine.
She told intimates that she was sexually abused by her adoptive father from age 4 to 12. Her adoptive mother was psychologically unstable and was institutionalized several times.
She blamed the abuse for problems later in life.
Once, during a conversation that was recorded by her daughter Kristina, she said, “Do you know what it feels like when you’re 4 years oldyou aren’t even in kindergarten? Do you know what that does to you?”
She said she was later sexually abused by an older adoptive brother, as well.
Celeste attempted suicide during puberty.
She got pregnant at age 17, married another teenager, Craig Bratcher, and gave birth to twin girls, Kristina and Jennifer.
It was a tempestuous, brief marriage that included bouts of physical abuse and restraining orders.
She was divorced in 1983, but Celeste proved to be the marrying kind.
She soon wed Harald Wolf, an Air Force mechanic, but they divorced in 1991. (According to Celeste, her divorce lawyer paid for her to have a boob job after the split-up.)
Celeste then moved to Arizona, wherestruggling to make ends meetshe got into trouble for burning a car she had reported stolen. She was convicted of insurance fraud and spent three months in jail.
Husband No. 3 was a Mexican-American named Jimmy Martinez.
Celeste had a raunchy sense of humor, and it would later come to light that she had a nickname for Martinez’ private parts: BMW, for Big Mexican Weiner.
That marriage, too, went kaput, and Celeste found herself single again in a new city, Austin, Texas.
As she entered her 30s, she was treading water, working as a waitress in 1993 at the Austin Country Club.
Among the regular customers there were Steven and Elise Beard, both in their 60s with grown children.
Elise was an avid golfer, while Steven preferred the club’s indoor activitieseating and drinking.
Elise fell ill with cancer and went quickly, dying on Oct. 13, 1993.
Steven did not do well alone.
Within weeks of the funeral he yearned for steady company, and he began pursuing companionship in the person of Celeste Johnson Bratcher Wolf Martinez.
They had their first date less than three weeks after Elise’s death.
Beard, 68, treated Celeste, 30, to a lavish Italian meal at Mama Mia’s restaurant in Austin. They enjoyed a nightcap at the mini-mansion, and Steven allowed Celeste to drive herself home in his $50,000 Lexus sedan.
This, Celeste must have said to herself, could work out quite nicely. A Lexus beats the hell out of a BMW.
Beard courted Celeste with ardor and an open checkbook.
For Christmas 1993, he gave Celeste a $16,000 diamond cocktail ring, a $3,000 wrist watch and a new Ford Explorer.
He also invited her to move in with him, and they began playing house on Jan. 1, 1994.
In the first year of the relationship, Beard paid a $20,000 restitution bill hanging over Celeste’s head from the insurance fraud in Arizona, and he funded a custody battle over the twin girls with Celeste’s first husband.
After 13 months of shacking up, Steven agreed to make the relationship legitimate.
But first, on Feb. 8, 1995, he and Celeste signed a prenuptial agreement. She would get $500,000 and not a penny more if they divorced. If she became his widow, she would stand to get much, much more, based upon a written will.
He was generous, but he was no fool.
Perhaps that is because nobody ever gave Steven Beard a dime.
The Texas native was a true bootstrapper. He served in the Navy Air Corps and attended college at Texas Christian and Southern Methodist.
He worked in radio and advertising in Dallas in the 1950s and ’60s, starting at the bottom and climbing steadily up the business ladder. He switched to television in the ’70s, and by 1981 he had found financial success as partner and general manager of KBVO in Austin.
In 1985, the station became one of the original affiliates of the fledgling Fox network. It grew in value and stature over the following decade, and on Oct. 3, 1994, a year after his wife’s death, Beard sold his share of the station for a small fortune.
On Feb. 18, 1995, Celeste and Steven were married at the Austin Country Club.
Their honeymoon passion involved a penis-stiffening drug injection that was administered by Celeste. She found the needles and medication unromantic and “kind of traumatizing,” as she put it.
She would later say that the couple had sexual intercourse just twice: on the day she moved in with him, and on the day they were married.
The first months of marriage did not work out to Beard’s satisfaction, perhaps due to Celeste’s reticence to wield the sex needle.
Beard got so desperate that he filed for divorce just four months after the wedding. He withdrew the petition after the couple came up with what Celeste later called “the oral sex solution.” Sunday mornings at the Beard mini-mansion were reserved just for that.
“I gotta go make some money,” she would tell her daughtersand anyone else within earshotas she plodded dourly toward her husband’s den for his weekly sexual service.
She made certain there were no distractionspets locked up, doors secured, phones disconnectedbecause she wanted Steven to reach his happy ending as quickly as possible, according to an account in Suzy Spencer’s book “The Fortune Hunter.” She loathed having to stop and begin again once she got started.
Once they worked out this sexual kink in the relationship, money became their primary source of conflict.
The $500,000 of the prenuptial agreement was a contentious issue for Celeste, and one day Beard decided to simply give her the money and get it over with. He may have reasoned she would spend less of his money if she had some of her own.
He was wrong.
The half-million was gone in six months.
After that spending binge, Celeste became increasingly vocal about her distaste for her older, overweight husband.
She began to refer to Beard as “the fat bastard” or “the old fool,” according to her daughters and friends.
More than once, people heard her say with exasperation, “Why doesn’t he just die already!”
Celeste began spending more and more time at a weekend house Beard owned on the Pedernales River, 40 miles northwest of Austin.
She also rekindled an old flameex-husband Jimmy (BMW) Martinez.
Her daughters would later reveal that Celeste often slipped out of the house when Steven went to bed at 9:30. Sometimes, they said, she would hasten his bedtime by spiking his food or drinks with pulverized sleeping pills.
After the old man conked out, she would steal away to meet Martinez or party with her favorite drinking buddy, beauty salon receptionist Donna Goodson.
But Beard finally got wise. He confronted Celeste after New Year’s in 1999 about her out-of-control spending and trysts with Martinez. He hinted at divorce.
After five years of a champagne-and-diamonds lifestyle, Celeste could not fathom regressing to her old selfthe car-torching, plate-carrying Celeste. Even her prenup nest egg had evaporated.
She threatened suicide and was packed off to St. David’s Pavilion for mental health treatment.
Her daughters judged that she was play-acting “to get what she wanted,” as Kristina put it.
What she wanted was money unencumbered by marriage to Beard.
At St. David’s, she took a foolish first step toward getting her wish.
Tracey Tarlton and Celeste Beard met at St. David’s, then transferred together to Timberlawn, a mental health facility in Dallas.
The women were caught in a passionate love clutch at Timberlawn, and the staff there tried to keep them separated.
But buckets of ice water couldn’t have kept them apart, apparently.
“Celeste was extremely flirtatious with me from the beginning,” Tarlton told CBS. “And I responded in kind. Eventually, she came into my room and kissed me. She wanted to have a sexual relationship with me.”
Tarlton said the two women first had sex on March 20, 1999, and the physical relationship continued until Oct. 1 that year, the day before she shot Beard.
They were no more discreet about their affair outside the hospital than they were inside.
A photo from a BookPeople party shows Celeste sitting on Tarlton’s lap. Other partygoers would later say they saw the women kissing passionately.
“Tracey wasn’t secretive,” Jeremy Ellis, who worked with Tarlton, told CBS. “Everyone in the store knew she was dating someone named Celeste. She spoke about her like she was her girlfriend. They were sort of physical, close with each other and I thought, ‘Well, good for Tracey.'”
Tarlton sent Celeste love letters, and Celeste sent Tarlton a birthday card addressed “To the One I Love.” They became regular customers at an Austin Red Roof Inn.
Yet Celeste apparently had to labor at sapphic love.
In July, the women had a counseling session with Barbara Grant, an Austin psychotherapist, concerning their sexual relationship.
Grant would later say that Celeste told her she doubted she was a lesbian because she needed alcohol to help work up the nerve to have sex with Tarlton.
Celeste’s daughters caught the women in bed at least twice, and they began seeing books about lesbian sex around the house.
Pressed by her daughters to explain her behavior, Celeste said, “Tracey’s a lesbian, and she’s in love with me. Isn’t that funny?”
“My mother has acknowledged to me that she is involved in a romantic relationship with Tracey Tarlton, and that she and Tracey have had sexual relations together,” Kristina later stated in an affidavit. “Tracey Tarlton has openly admitted to me that she and my mother are lovers. In September of 1999, I witnessed Tracey and my mother kissing passionately.”
So did Steven Beard. After witnessing the women kiss on the lips on Sept. 29, he ran Tarlton out of his house.
Another therapist, Susan Milholland, revealed that Tarlton had a romantic problem of her own.
Milholland said Tarlton told her she had a self-destructive habit of falling passionately in love with married heterosexual women.
Tarlton dreamed of marrying Celeste, and she viewed Steven Beard as an obstacle to her happily-ever-after fantasy.
As the relationship developed, Celeste complained bitterly to Tarlton that Beard was abusive. He belittled her, taunted her and beat her down emotionally, according to Celeste. She added that she feared Beard would assault her if she threatened divorce.
The relationship left her feeling suicidal, Celeste told her lover.
Tarlton could not imagine life without Celeste, and she vowed to do anything she could to save her from the professed cruelty of Beard. Together, the women began plotting to do away with Celeste’s man problem, according to Tarlton.
They came up with enough murder methods to flesh out the plots of a series of mystery novels.
For example, they tried to concoct homemade botulism by allowing food to spoil then fester. The women sprinkled the vile substance on a chili dog. Beard ate itand liked it.
They spiked his drinks with 190-proof grain alcohol, then fastened a plastic bag around his head when he passed out. They dusted his food with sleeping pills and, on one occasion, 10 ecstasy tablets. He survived it all.
The plotting became increasingly urgent in late September. Beard and his wife were scheduled to travel to Europe. Celeste dreaded the trip, and she convinced Tarltonin her finest drama queen high dudgeonthat her life hung in the balance.
“She came over and was just hysterical, beside herself,” Tarlton told CBS. “She said, ‘I’ll never survive this trip.’ I wanted to help her.”
The women came up with the shotgun solution.
Tarlton told investigators that Celeste set it all up. Beard was asleep, doors were open, and Celeste was in another wing of the house.
Tarlton slipped in, fired a single shot in the dark, and slipped out unnoticed.
The scheme didn’t have a prayer of working, of course, since half of Austin knew that the victim’s wife had a lesbian lover who owned a shotgun.
Tarlton and Celeste managed to maintain regular phone contact for the first nine months Tarlton spent in jail. But their relationship became strained as Celeste grew increasingly overwrought.
Finally, in the summer of 2000, Tarlton and Celeste called off their relationship.
“Celeste started going bananas, hysterical a lot of the time,” Tarlton told CBS. “We both said, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore. You won’t see me again.'”
Tarlton was distraught and apparently took an overdose of Valium. Still, she refused to finger Celeste in the murder.
That changed a few weeks after the breakup when she read a newspaper story about Celeste. It said she had married Cole Johnson on July 3, 2000, within few days of their breakup.
Tarlton reached the conclusion that she had been used.
“She’s off at her honeymoon in Aspen,” she told CBS. “Even I couldn’t overlook that. It was like everything started unraveling very quickly for me after that article…I started realizing Celeste had been lying to me all alongthat this man was not abusing her, that she had married him for his money, that she had been lying to me about our relationship. All of it was a farce.”
Tarlton sat down with prosecutors and detectives and told her story.
Celeste was arrested on March 28, 2002, and charged with her former husband’s murder.
A judge set bail at $8 million, noting that Celeste had earned $2 million after selling the mini-mansion just months after Beard died. The woman’s lawyer argued she had just $7,289 left, one year and four months later.
Celeste’s problems deepened a few months later when she was indicted for another felony that was perhaps even more Quixotic than the murder. Authorities alleged that she had tried to hire her friend Donna Goodson to murder Tracey Tarlton.
Celeste’s trial was like a nightmare variation on “This Is Your Life.”
“She couldn’t stand Steve Beard,” prosecutor Allison Weitzel told jurors. “She talked to people about how she hated him. He disgusted her…What happened here is a simple case of a greedy, manipulative defendant who took advantage of a mentally ill woman who was in love with her. She told Tracey that with Steve gone, they could be together.”
Tarlton, appearing sullen, took the witness stand for a total of 15 hours over three days. She guided jurors through the affair and the murder scheme. (She had pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in exchange for a 20-year sentence.)
“I just saw this woman that I loved in a desperate situation trying to find a way to survive this man that was so awful,” Tarlton said. “She had a plan. She wanted me to shoot him at Toro Canyon with my shotgun. I was willing to shoot him, and I went and did it.”
She added that she and Steven Beard had been “betrayed by the same woman.”
Relatives, friends, shrinks and Tarlton’s colleagues from work all testified that they believed the women had a sexual relationship. Prosecutors added photographs, love notes, cards and Tarlton’s journal as further documentary proof.
Yet Dick DeGuerin, Celeste’s prominentand expensivecriminal defense attorney, dismissed this mountain of evidence as part of a fantasy of a “predatory, aggressive lesbian.” The defense strategy boiled down to three words: Tracey is crazy.
“This is a case of fatal attraction,” said DeGuerin. “Tracey Tarlton is psychotic. She’s been diagnosed as having delusions, as hearing voices that aren’t there, as seeing things that aren’t there.”
During a pre-trial deposition, Celeste had flatly denied so much as kissing Tarlton. The statement was read to jurors, who surely puzzled over the denial in the face of contradictory testimony from a dozen eyewitnesses.
These included Celeste’s twin daughters, who added devastating corroborating testimony.
Over three days on the witness stand, the young women said it was a mercenary marriage for their mother.
“She said that she married Steve for his money,” testified Jennifer.
Kristina added, “She would sometimes make comments like, ‘Why doesn’t he just die already’…She would say that he disgusted her.”
No detail was spared, including the Sabbath sexual get-togethers.
“What was the ‘Sunday suck?'” asked prosecutor Weitzel.
“Celeste giving Steve a blow job,” replied Jennifer.
The daughters said Celeste would rant about the “Sunday suck,” then run off to see Tarlton or Jimmy Martinez.
Jurors heard Celeste’s raunchy mouth first-hand during a “Mommy Dearest” moment on a recording daughter Kristina made of one of their conversations.
When the girl accused her mother of threatening suicide in February 1999 “get what you wanted,” Celeste screamed, “I was fking depressed, you god-damned little bitch!”
Bankers and accountants offered itemized details on Celeste’s extravagant spending. They also detailed the prenuptial agreement and testified that Celeste stood to gain roughly $6 millionhalf of Beard’s estateas a result of his death.
At the end of testimony, prosecutor Weitzel summed up by saying, “Money is what this whole case is about.”
Jurors deliberated 23 hours over three days before voting to convict.
Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, and the conviction brought a mandatory life sentence.
But Steven Beard’s loved ones were given the opportunity to address Celeste during a sentencing hearing.
“I hope you burn in hell,” said Beard’s namesake son, Steven Beard III.
Perhaps most punishing were the comments of Celeste’s daughter Kristina.
“You say we turned on you,” Kristina said. “Well, you turned on us. You turned on the whole Beard family. He let you into his home, loved you, honored, obeyed you, and you violated him and murdered him…Shame on you!”
By Texas law, Celeste must serve at least 40 years in prison. She won’t be eligible for parole until age 80.
Trigger woman Tarlton could be free as early as 2009.
Celeste was denied the inheritance she expected to receive.
Beard’s estate went to his blood children as well as Kristina and Jennifer, his adopted daughters.
In TV interviews, Celeste continued to deny any involvement. She said she was a victim of her daughters, whom she accusedin a neat twistof being motivated by money.
“I hate to admit it, but the only reason why they could have turned on me was for the money,” she told CBS. “They have two million reasons to lie.”
Celeste did receive more than $1 million from the sale of property for which she was legally the co-owner.
She paid much of it to DeGuerin but was left with a six-figure sum.
Until 2043, her shopping sprees will be limited to prison commissaries.
Books
She Wanted It All: a True Story of Sex, Murder, and a Texas Millionaire, by Kathryn Casey, Mass Market Paperback, 2005
The Fortune Hunter: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Heartland of Texas, by Suzy Spencer, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2005
News Articles
“Marriage, Money and Murder: The mastermind in millionaire Steven Beard’s murder? His much younger wife,” by Bill Hewitt, People, Aug. 11, 2003
“After Weeks of Testimony, Verdict in Murder Trial Came Down to One Vote,” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, March 30, 2003
“Beard Widow Convicted of Murder,” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, March 20, 2003
“Avid Court Watchers Can’t Stand to Miss Johnson’s Murder Trial,” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, March 11, 2003
“Beard Shooting Detailed,” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 20, 2003
“Johnson’s Murder Trial Focuses on Relationships,” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 13, 2003
“Was Love a Killer’s Tool?” by Andrea Ball, Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 7, 2003
“Judge Allows Widow to Use Estate Money,” by Laylan Copelin, Austin American-Statesman, Sept. 1, 2000
“Teens Testify in Fight Over TV Executive’s Estate,” by Laylan Copelin, Austin American-Statesman, Aug. 30, 2000
“A Shot in the Night,” by Laylan Copelin, Austin American-Statesman, Nov. 4, 1999
Television
“For Love or Money,” 48 Hours Investigates, CBS, May 14, 2003
“The Waitress and the Millionaire,” Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice, Court TV, July 30, 2003
“For Love or Money,” American Justice, A&E, Sept. 15, 2003