She Wanted It All – True Crime with a Lesbian Twist

You all know how much I love a good mystery. Even more than a mystery fiction buff, I’m a true crime junkie. I read lots and lots of true crime. I once owned and read 21 different books – from both sides of the aisle – about the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The only one from a key player that I never bought was Simpson’s own book “I Want To Tell You”. That’s another story for a different day.

I’m I crime TV addict too and, no, I’m not talking about “Cops”. No one was more upset than me when “Court TV” switched from their all crime all the time format to become “Tru TV”. They still do true crime but not like they used to.

I used to watch Dayle Hinman in her show, Body of Evidence on Court TV all the time. I got very excited early this summer to learn that Headline News (HLN) was carrying it frequently on their channel. Did you know that HLN interrupts their programming at 26 minutes after the hour and 4 minutes before the hour to allow local stations 4 minutes to broadcast a segment from their most recent past newscast? I sure didn’t. I was so mad that these “old” newscasts from another channel were popping up just as I was about to find out “whodunit” that I made the cable company send someone over to check my systems out. Turns out, HLN programs it that way! Why on earth would they show a program and get viewers interested in it when they know they’re never going to show the end of anything and it’s going to royally tick people off?!

Anyway, I digress. Let me talk about a book. She Wanted It All: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and a Texas Millionaire by Kathryn Casey is, I feel, Casey’s best work to date. In this one she tells the true story of a 3-way love triangle and a murder with a lesbian twist.

The villain of this true story is blond haired, blue-eyed, Celeste Beard, a woman who found that life was always a case of “too much is never enough.” Her victim was actually her own husband, Steven Beard, a self-made Texas millionaire who in his seventies had recently lost his beloved wife of over forty years. He was what my grandma would have called an “old fool.” He fell for Celeste even though she was young enough to be his granddaughter. Like so many of her men, even though he began to see (too late) that she was evil, he couldn’t let her go.

Celeste had Steven murdered to get at his fortune. She used her lesbian lover, Tracey Tarlton, who had a history of mental illness and who was madly in love with Celeste to do the deed. Tarlton was, of course, being completely manipulated by Celeste.

The murder happens at the beginning of the book and you know “whodunit” then. Don’t put your book down though…there’s plenty of interesting story left to read after the demise of Mr. Beard!