Jan 12, 2011 Now in prison, Tracy says that she was the victim of Celeste's delusions. True Crime Files by Investigation Discovery Add Hundreds of Crime Shows to Amazon Prime. Email this Article. Celeste Beard.
OccupationInmateCriminal statusIncarceratedSpouse(s)Craig Bratcher (divorced) Henry Wolfe (divorced) Jimmy Martinez (divorced) Steven Beard (widowed) Spencer Cole Johnson (divorced)Children2, injury to an elderly individual, andCriminal penaltyCeleste Beard Johnson (born February 13, 1963), more commonly known as Celeste Beard, is a convicted murderer who is serving a at the in, for the 1999 murder of her millionaire husband, Steven Beard. Contents.BackgroundCeleste Johnson's biological parents are unknown. She claimed that her adoptive parents, Edwin and Nancy Johnson, her as a child and that she made a during puberty. At age 17, Johnson became pregnant and gave birth to twins, Jennifer and Kristina, with first husband Craig Bratcher. After their divorce, she lost custody of her daughters.Johnson married twice more before meeting Steven Beard while she was a waitress at a country club in,.
Beard, a retired executive and self-made multi-millionaire more than twice her age, was a widower whose wife had died of cancer. Johnson moved in with Beard after he convinced her that he would help her regain custody of her daughters. After winning the case, they began dating in secret (with Johnson pretending to be Beard's housekeeper) until his daughter discovered them in a hotel room during the. They were married on February 18, 1995, with Beard's family and friends suspicious that Johnson had married him for his money.
CrimeOn October 2, 1999, Beard was shot in the stomach while he was asleep, at his home near. Beard was later released from the hospital, but succumbed to a on January 22, 2000.
Local police tied the shooting to Tracey Tarlton, who Johnson had met at Saint David’s Pavilion, a facility, after Johnson threatened to commit suicide when she began fighting with Beard over her lavish spending. Tarlton, arrested at home six days after the shooting, was charged with.
The police began to hear that Johnson had spoken negatively about Beard. She refused to let them interview him while he was hospitalized, behaved inappropriately after his death, and had slept in a different room the night he was shot. External video HLN:Despite mounting suspicion of a relationship between Johnson and Tarlton, the latter remained silent until July 2000, when she read in a local newspaper that Johnson had remarried six months after Beard’s death and realized that their relationship was a sham. Shortly before her murder trial began in March 2002, Tarlton told police that Johnson had persuaded her to shoot Beard; Johnson claimed that Beard had her to the point of suicide, and getting rid of him was the only way the women could be together. TrialBased on Tarlton's statement, Johnson was arrested on March 28, 2002. At Johnson's trial, charged that she had married Beard for his money and wanted him dead because he was tired of her extravagant spending and was considering divorce. According to Beard's, Johnson spent $321,000 in October and November 1999, an additional $249,000 by December 10 and another $100,000 in the six weeks ending March 31, 2000.
Prosecutors alleged that Johnson had never loved Beard because of their age difference and his. She had a hostile relationship with her daughters, who claimed to have heard their mother make threats against Beard. A friend of Johnson claimed that she had hired her a month after Beard's death to kill Tarlton and cover up her crime. Other witnesses testified that they saw Tarlton and Johnson flirting and behaving affectionately, demonstrating Johnson's manipulative personality.Johnson's attorney, alleged that she had nothing to do with the shooting and that Tarlton (whom he dismissed as an unreliable witness due to mental instability) acted alone; Tarlton was obsessed with Johnson, who denied making sexual advances toward her.
According to Johnson, Tarlton tried to kiss her after she had passed out during her daughters' 1999 high school graduation. When Tarlton was arrested for and Johnson bailed her out, Beard (angered by photos of Johnson and Tarlton together) demanded that Tarlton stop contacting the couple. Several witnesses saw no problems in Johnson and Beard's marriage, and DeGuerin alleged that Johnson's daughters lied on the witness stand because they would inherit less money if their mother was.In 2003, Johnson was convicted of, receiving a mandatory.
She will be eligible for parole on April 1, 2042. Johnson continues to maintain her innocence and as of 2019, is imprisoned at the in. Tarlton received a 10-year reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against Johnson, and was released on in August 2011 and lives in. In the mediaCrime author covered the Beard case in her book She Wanted it All: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and a Texas Millionaire. Author wrote the book The Fortune Hunter, with a 2nd edition released in 2015.The case was covered on the documentary shows, and, as well as 's.Johnson and five other inmates published From the Big House to Your House, a that lists recipes that can be made in prison cells with ingredients from the prison commissary.Celeste's biography Celeste: The Celeste Beard Johnson Story was released January 2019.In 2017, Celeste's daughter Jennifer was wounded after a shooting while attending a Halloween party. She suffered injuries and has had to undergo over ten surgeries but survived. Charles Joseph Whitman was an American mass murderer who became infamous as the 'Texas Tower Sniper'.
On August 1, 1966, he used knives in the slayings of his mother and his wife in their respective homes and then went to the University of Texas in Austin with multiple firearms and began indiscriminately shooting at people. He fatally shot three people inside the university tower. He then went to the tower's 28th-floor observation deck, where he fired at random people for some 96 minutes, killing an additional 10 people, and wounding 31 others before he was shot dead by Austin police officers. Whitman killed a total of 16 people; the 16th victim died 35 years later from injuries sustained in the attack. Karla Faye Tucker was an American woman sentenced to death for killing two people with a pickaxe during a burglary. She was the first woman to be executed in the United States since Velma Barfield in 1984, and the first in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez in 1863. She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and executed by lethal injection after 14 years on death row.
Due to her gender and widely publicized conversion to Christianity, she inspired an unusually large national and international movement that advocated the commutation of her sentence to life without parole, a movement that included a few foreign government officials. Genene Anne Jones is an American serial killer, responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children in her care as a licensed vocational nurse during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, Jones was convicted of murder and injury to a child. She had used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, causing numerous deaths. The exact number of victims remains unknown; hospital officials allegedly misplaced and then destroyed records of Jones' activities, to prevent further litigation after Jones' first conviction.
David Lynn Harris was an American orthodontist who owned a chain of offices along with his wife, Clara Suarez Harris. The chain was particularly successful, and the couple was able to afford an upscale home and lifestyle in Friendswood, Texas. On July 24, 2002, Clara Harris confronted her husband in a hotel parking lot over an extramarital affair, then struck and ran over him with her Mercedes-Benz sedan, killing him in an act of mariticide. She was convicted of sudden passion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The Christina Melton Crain Unit is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison for females in Gatesville, Texas. The prison is along Texas State Highway 36, 3 miles (4.8 km) north of central Gatesville. The unit, with about 1,317 acres (533 ha) of space, is co-located with the Hilltop Unit, the Dr.
Lane Murray Unit, and the Linda Woodman Unit. Nearby also is the Mountain View Unit, which houses all Texas female inmates on death row. Crain Unit's regular program houses around 1,500 women, and it is one of Texas's main prisons for women. Female prison offenders of the TDCJ are released from this unit. With a capacity of 2,013 inmates, Crain is the TDCJ's largest female prison.
The murder of John Forest 'Johnny' Goosey and Stacy Marie Barnett occurred on July 21, 2009 in the West Campus area of Austin, Texas, when a man, who had two accomplices, shot to death two recent graduates from the University of Texas at Austin who originated from the Greater Houston area. This event is sometimes called the West Campus murders. Police stated that the murder was the result of a drug deal debt. The murder resulted in media attention on the marijuana trade among young, college-educated people. Suzanne Margaret 'Sue' Basso was an American woman who was one of six co-defendants convicted in the August 1998 torture and murder of Louis 'Buddy' Musso, a mentally disabled man who was killed for his life insurance money. She was sentenced to death in October 1999.
Basso was executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014. Prior to her execution, Basso had been held at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where all of the state's female death row inmates are incarcerated. At the time of this crime, Basso lived in Jacinto City, Texas, a Houston suburb. Robert Lynn Pruett was a Texas man convicted and executed for the 1999 murder of TDCJ Correctional Officer Daniel Nagle at the McConnell Unit, Bee County. Pruett had been certified as an adult at 16 and was already serving a 99-year sentence for his involvement in the murder of Ray Yarborough, which occurred when Pruett was 15. Pruett was convicted along with Howard Steven 'Sam' Pruett Sr., his father, who received a life sentence for his participation in the murder, and Howard Steven Pruett Jr., his brother, who received a 40-year sentence. Testified that neither son took part in the killing, as did Robert, who was nonetheless convicted under the Texas law of parties.
Details of both the Yarborough and Nagle murders were featured in the BBC documentary Life and Death Row - Crisis Stage. TDCJ Number: 01157250. Retrieved January 11, 2017. HEWITT, BILL (August 11, 2003). Retrieved January 11, 2017. Travel Channel.
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Retrieved on January 6, 2015. Autullo, Ryan. Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved November 29, 2019.Further reading. Marlow, John (2009), Evil Wives: Deadly Women Whose Crimes Knew No Limits,. Celeste: The Celeste Beard Johnson Story by Nancy Hall and W.R.
MesianoExternal links. at.
Did Tarlton act alone or was she directedTarlton told authorities that Celeste had persuaded her to shoot Steven so that they could be together. Celeste’s defense lawyers argued that Tarlton was a spurned and jealous lover who had acted alone and shot Steven in a jealous rage.In 2003 Celeste was sentenced to 40 years in prison for conspiring to murder her husband. She continues to maintain her innocence, and i t remains unclear if Tarlton and Celeste were lovers or just friends More cases where there is reasonable doubtFollow the links to read about other cases of murder where the identity of the killer is far from clear. Reasonable Doubt recently looked at the in 1990. Her husband, Ken Middleton, is serving time for the murder, but many believe he is innocent.In another case profiled on The Object of Murder on ID, is examined.
Lincoln was convicted of the murder of JoAnn Tate in 1982 and was sentenced to life in prison. Lincoln spent 34 years incarcerated before authorities admitted they had made a mistake and released him in 2017.