Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  Tedesco's next door neighbor told investigators she saw Catherine and her law office partner hopping the fence at Tedesco's townhome the evening of January 15, 1979, just after police had left the scene. Catherine would later explain the episode as one of her attempts to secure her "community property." According to the neighbor, however, Catherine did not even feign the role of a weeping widow.

  "You'll be sorry if you don't forget everything you've seen and heard," the neighbor recalled Catherine's threat when interrupted while using a crow bar to open Tedesco's back door. The neighbor said Catherine continued: "If you do talk to anyone about what you've seen and heard, you'll be sorry, I promise you, you'll regret it."

  Later on Catherine would cackle with glee telling me how lawyers from all over town pillaged Tedesco's place for weeks after his death, helping her reclaim her share of their estate so the parents couldn't haul it away.

  Police and Tedesco's investigator thought they had a good lead when they discovered Tedesco's stolen Corvette parked at a shopping mall. They staked it out for three days until they spotted a man sneaking around only to discover he wanted to steal the thing himself. So they gave up and just listed the car as abandoned.

  Their investigation of Catherine's client base and previous life did turn up a connection to another possible suspect named Tommy Bell. He was destined to become a defendant with Catherine in an unsuccessful, last gasp, $10 million wrongful death civil lawsuit filed by the family one year after the murder alleging the two of them had conspired to kill Tedesco.

  Investigators uncovered other sordid tales of repeated confrontations with the men in her past. A former court bailiff said an extramarital affair with Catherine had ended with her blackmailing him for money so she could abort his child. Then she told his wife anyway, destroying his life and leaving him penniless.

  Farther back in her mid-1970s law school days at the University of Houston, they found a former law student who had dated her. After their break-up, he suspected her in several acts of violence that included the beating of a new girlfriend, the burning of his apartment, and the ramming of his car in a fit of rage. After graduating, he said, he took his law degree, joined the US Marine Corps, and quietly relocated to another state, glad to be out of her life.

  Prior to that, they learned Catherine had been married to a classmate from the University of Texas who had joined the Navy and taken her to Tokyo with him. The product of a private Catholic girls' high school in Houston, she had returned home after that split determined to become a lawyer. She earned her undergraduate degree in 1974 from the University of Houston and stayed on to collect a law degree there in 1977. But the first husband, like most everyone else in her past, remained out of sight as foggy rumors filtered into the investigation. They heard tales of a military probe that followed complaints she had tried to shoot him while they lived in Japan. But no firm evidence emerged to do more than just color her reputation.

  Although frustrated by their failure to tie her to Tedesco's murder, the family's investigators still felt confident they could destroy her claim to ever have been Tedesco's common law wife. And the lawyers waited with great anticipation for what they believed would be the highlight of their pretrial campaign: the July deposition of Catherine herself and a chance to question her under oath in a setting where invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination would blow a big hole in her desire to convince any jury she deserved George Tedesco's estate.

  THREE

  July 17, 1979

  To win Tedesco's estate under Texas' common-law marriage rules, Catherine would have to convince a jury that the three months they had lived together in late 1977 constituted a state of informal matrimony. She could argue that length of cohabitation is not an element in proving a marriage, and Texas laws would bolster that contention. Texas allowed couples to declare themselves married without the trappings of a ceremony if they chose. But she knew jurors likely would want some strong evidence to counter any disgust with the short duration of their actual cohabitation. So she hammered that philosophy repeatedly during a marathon, ten-hour pre-trial deposition most remarkable for its moments of X-rated anecdotes and angry exchanges with a pair of lawyers representing the parents of the murdered anesthesiologist.

  Unencumbered by the need to clear all questions, answers, or voluntary responses with a judge, that session deteriorated immediately into a legal free-for-all with Catherine using the forum to torment her adversaries. Just like police detectives investigating Tedesco's murder, the Tedesco family's team of estate lawyers would leave the session with nothing in the way of confession about the crime. But they would compile a written record confirming suspicions that Catherine boasted special skills for frustrating anyone who stood in her way.

  The session was scheduled to start promptly at eleven in the morning with Catherine, her attorney, the two Tedesco lawyers, and a certified stenographer to make an official record. But Catherine managed to delay until after noon with an unusual demand that a third party attend and watch the entire proceeding. That third party was an attorney named Robert who had known Catherine since their days a few years before as law students at the University of Houston. He also had represented Tedesco in some business matters, and Catherine came determined to embarrass him with wild allegations about everything from sexual antics of his former wife to his relationship with Tedesco. She capped off the day insisting that Robert answer some questions himself under oath in a night-cap session that didn't begin until forty minutes after ten.

  During all of this, neither lawyer ever asked her directly if she had killed Tedesco or knew who had. But it became apparent early in the day that she had come prepared to deny any involvement and hint her own theory that Tedesco might have been killed by a gay lover, disgruntled drug smuggling associates, or…Robert. While slipping those theories into the record, she managed to avoid answering a number of specific questions about her background by forcefully ordering the Tedesco team to "move along" whenever they asked something she didn't like—such as the date of her birth.

  "George made known his feelings that he wanted to be married, and that he felt that you could be married without a piece of paper, and that he felt he was married to me," she said recounting a discussion she said occurred in October 1977. She believed that sealed their love when she moved into his townhouse about then. She conceded, however, that their common-law marriage had lasted only until January of 1978 when she vacated the place. But she couldn't be too specific about the date.

  "There was much moving in and out between the 21st of December and the 31st," she said. "You don't just move out in one day when you are moving out. You move out some things, and you come back and get some more, and then you move out some more things."

  She had met the anesthesiologist a few months before when introduced by a female acquaintance who worked for another doctor.

  Catherine told the lawyers: "He started calling me but I didn't remember him…I usually don't go out with people that have accents. I mean, I have never except for him."

  Asked if she had ever admitted targeting Tedesco for his money, Catherine denied it, then added: "Undoubtedly one of George's endearing qualities was that, I suppose, he did have some money. But nobody really understands. I think I am probably one of the only people in the world who ever really cared about George, and I would have liked him if he had acted a little better even if he didn't have any money."

  She said: "If I was going to get somebody's money, I wouldn't go around telling everybody about it first. I can get money for myself through my honest labors."

  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. S
he 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.