Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  Steven Beard survived the attack and was allowed to leave hospital after emergency surgery, but four months later he died as a result of his wounds. Celeste was devastated and went into a state of severe depression. The burglary turned into a murder enquiry and when Steven’s adopted daughters were questioned the name ‘crazy’ Tracey kept cropping up.

  tracey tarlton

  Several months before Steven’s death, Celeste had befriended the manager of a bookstore, Tracey Tarlton. She was thirty-five years old, rather plain looking and slightly overweight. Her life had been marred by psychological problems, resulting in drug and alcohol abuse. Tracey was quite open about the fact she was a lesbian and felt comfortable working with the open-minded friends she had made at the bookshop. However, despite being very good at her job she suffered a mental breakdown in February 1999 which caused her to make a scene in public, shouting obscenities and threatening violence. With the encouragement of her family and friends, Tracey checked in to St David’s Pavilion, a mental clinic, to try and get her life back on the straight and narrow.

  the friendship

  Despite having a stable marriage, Celeste was having her own kind of problems, one of them being the amount of money she was spending. Steven was a very generous man and gave her a $10,000 allowance each month – but for Celeste this wasn’t nearly enough. In their four years of marriage she had managed to work her way through well over $1 million dollars of her husband’s wealth. This caused arguments and when Steven considered his wife’s spending to be totally out of control, he threatened to destroy her credit cards. Celeste couldn’t stand the thought of having no money and even threatened suicide, until Steven decided to take drastic action and sent her to St David’s Pavilion for some counselling.

  It was inevitable that Celeste and Tracey should become acquainted, taking solace in each other’s problems. They formed a close sexual relationship which worried many of the nurses at the hospital, but it would appear that nothing would tear them apart. Even when they both returned home they were caught kissing on several occasions by Celeste’s two daughters and on another by Steven, who banned Tracey from his house.

  When the news of Steven Beard’s shooting hit the headlines, quite a few people indicated that Tracey Tarlton might be involved, everyone that is except Celeste Beard. When Tracey was pulled in for questioning they asked her if she owned a 20-gauge shotgun, to which she replied ‘yes’ and quite willingly handed it in for ballistic testing.

  The tests proved positive, which confirmed that the shell found at the Beard house came from the shotgun the police found at Tracey’s house. Six days after the shooting Tracey was arrested and charged with assault.

  When Steven died, Tracey was indicted for murder and the police put two and two together that she had murdered Celeste’s husband out of sheer jealousy. Although the police were convinced that Celeste was somehow involved in the shooting, no amount of persuasion would get Tracey to implicate her lover. That was until she read an article in a newspaper saying that Celeste had married Cole Johnson, a bartender and musician, in a beautiful ceremony high in the mountains of Aspen.

  Tracey was enraged that she had been dumped for a man and decided to change her story, telling the police that ‘I did it for Celeste’.

  She told the police that Celeste had confided in her that the marriage was not happy and that Steven was the only person who stood in the way of her inheriting a fortune. Celeste was well aware that Tracey owned a gun and they made plans for her to creep into the house and shoot Steven.

  Celeste was arrested on March 28, 2002, and charged with Steven’s murder, with bail set at $8 million. Several months later she was indicted for a second felony, that of attempting to hire her friend Donna Goodson to murder Tracey Tarlton.

  In court, Tracey was angry and told the judge that both she and Steven had been tricked by the same scheming woman. Celeste went down the track that Tracey was lying, saying that she had never had a lesbian relationship with the woman, despite the evidence of several people to the contrary, including her two daughters.

  The jury deliberated for twenty-three hours and Celeste was given a mandatory life sentence. By Texas law she will have to spend at least forty years in prison, which means she will be eighty before she is eligible for parole. Tracey, on the other hand, who turned state’s evidence, could be free as early as 2009. Celeste never did inherit her ex-husband’s money. It was divided up between his blood children and Kristina and Jennifer, his adopted daughters. Mind you, money wouldn’t be much good to Celeste now anyway, as she has nowhere to go on her extravagant shopping sprees.

  Winnie Ruth Judd

  The daughter of a reverend, the wife of a doctor, and the subject of one of the most sensational news stories to rock the depression-hit United States.

  Winnie Ruth Judd had been married to Dr William C. Judd, a morphine addict, for seven years. His drug habit, which commenced initially as treatment of a wound sustained during the Great War, contributed to his failing practice and the marriage in general was not what Winnie had expected. The plans they had made for their future and the dreams they had shared were affected in the early days of their union by two failed pregnancies and Winnie’s contraction of tuberculosis, which resulted in her husband’s placement of her in a Californian sanatorium while he continued his medical duty in Mexico, travelling through poverty-stricken towns. Upon regaining her health, his wife joined him on several occasions, but the conditions in which he was working only worsened her frail condition. Unable to endure this, she moved back to the United States, to Phoenix, and her husband with whom she remained in frequent contact continued his work and travels in Mexico.

  Perhaps predictably, the relationship suffered from the distance and it was not long before Winnie’s attentions were diverted by a charismatic man named Jack Halloran, the married neighbour of a family for whom she worked as governess and a well-known local figure. Despite the continuation of her correspondence and declarations of love to her husband, an affair quickly began.

  Soon Winnie gave up work as a governess and took on a job as a medical secretary in a private clinic. By this time, her husband had been admitted into a rehabilitation clinic in California to cure his drug habit. Her salary was an improvement, and enabled her to send what was left over after rent and living to Dr Judd for his care.

  In her new place of employment, Winnie became acquainted with Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson (‘Sammy’). Anne and Sammy were a lesbian couple who loved to party, and who frequently invited Winnie and Jack to gatherings at their place. In spite of their own relationship, the girls displayed a keen interest, not only in Jack, but in the married colleagues who would frequently accompany him to their parties (while their wives assumed they were working late) and leave significant amounts of cash on their departure. On occasion, Jack himself visited the two girls alone, and Winnie could have been in little doubt as to the purpose of his visit. However, she never attempted to stop him.

  Soon, Winnie moved in with Anne and Sammy, but it was not to last. The two girls, meticulously tidy, were ill at ease with Winnie’s sloppy habits and regular arguments ensued. Winnie moved out, but the experience had damaged the friendship. Added to grievances which had resulted from living together, Winnie was beginning to feel uncomfortable regarding the girls’ relationship with her precious lover, Jack.

  On Thursday October 15, 1931, Jack picked Winnie up and they drove to the house of Miss Lucille Moore, a colleague of Winnie’s at the clinic. Winnie had arranged the meeting with Lucille as the young nurse came from the White Mountains of Arizona, an area where Jack had arranged a deer-hunting party with his friends. Winnie felt that Lucille would be able to inform Jack further on the wildlife of the region. They were due to go to Winnie’s house for dinner, but on the return journey Jack declared that they would stop in on Anne and Sammy, who were entertaining friends of Jack’s who he wanted to see. As Anne had previously declined a dinner invitation from the two girls, she was reluc
tant to pop in. Opinions differ however, regarding Winnie’s hesitation. Some believe that Winnie anticipated the jealousy that would surface in the two girls if they knew that Jack was being introduced to the pretty, young nurse. Yet, they arrived at the house, Jack spoke to his friends, and the four women appeared to chat amicably. Appearances, however, can be deceptive, as the events of the following night would testify.

  Having been left waiting by Jack, who was supposed to be taking her out to dinner on that fateful Friday night, Winnie decided to take the bus to Anne and Sammy’s. She knew that they were hosting a bridge game, but when she arrived it was all over and their other guests had left. Nonetheless they asked her to stay the night, especially as Winnie and Anne would be going to work in the clinic together in the morning. But for Anne, the morning would never come. Whilst preparing for bed, Anne began to criticise Winnie for having introduced Jack to Lucille. The nurse, she claimed, was being treated for syphilis, and Winnie therefore was putting Jack’s life in danger. Winnie replied that Jack had no interest in Lucille and reminded Anne that regardless of that, clinic information should be confidential and she was not at liberty to be discussing Lucille’s condition. An argument erupted in which Anne and Sammy united against Winnie. Insults and threats flew between the women, each party hell bent on destroying the other.

  Breaking away, Winnie walked to the kitchen, but turned back again to see Sammy pointing a gun directly towards her chest. She pushed it away and reached for the kitchen knife. A struggle ensued in which Winnie was shot through the hand. As Sammy re-aimed the gun at Winnie’s chest, Winnie lurched forward with the knife and slashed Sammy across the shoulder. The women fell to the ground, and another bullet was fired. This one hit Sammy in the left shoulder but she continued to fight. Until that is, Winnie managed to wrestle the gun towards Sammy’s chest and pull the trigger.

  As quickly as this was happening, Anne was upon the two women, attacking Winnie’s head with an ironing board and encouraging Sammy to fire. There was no movement from Sammy so Anne continued her assault on Winnie with the board. Despite this, Winnie managed to stand, gun in hand, and shoot Anne until she fell lifeless to the floor.

  Winnie dressed herself, and returned to her home. According to her, the time was about 11.30 p.m. A drunken Jack Halloran was already there, and Winnie told him of the events and requested his help. He refused to believe her and insisted on returning to the girls’ house, which they did. After surveying the scene, Jack began to move the bodies, dropping Sammy’s corpse on to Anne’s bed and in doing so, scattering small droplets of her blood across the nearby wall. Winnie attempted to clean the floor but a combination of emotion, and pain from the bullet-wound in her hand, rendered her incapable of doing so. Jack took over. He also refused to let her talk to the police as she wanted to do, telling her instead to trust him and speak to no-one. In fact he went one step further and drove her home in order that he could return on his own, dispose of the bodies in a packing trunk he had found in the garage and drop it somewhere in the desert. Winnie dropped the murder weapon into her handbag and agreed to Jack’s plan.

  Jack did not make contact with Winnie until later the following afternoon when he asked her to take public transport to the girls’ place where he would meet her. When she walked in, her heart dropped at the sight of the packing trunk, still there. Jack explained that it was likely to be found if he simply deposited it in the desert and that Winnie would be an obvious suspect having been a friend and flatmate of the girls. He suggested instead that Winnie board a train to Los Angeles with the trunk, thereby taking it far away from Phoenix, where he promised that she would be met by an acquaintance of his. With the added incentive of visiting her husband, who could both attend to her hand and serve as an alibi for her trip, Winnie agreed to the plan. She did query the size of the trunk and its capacity to hold both bodies, to which Jack replied that Anne had fitted but that Sammy had been ‘operated on’. He told her that he would arrange for the train ticket to be waiting for her at the ticket office and that she was to call the ‘Lightning Delivery Service’ to take the trunk to the station and load it on to her train.

  None of Jack’s plans or promises materialised.

  Winnie contacted the ‘Lightning Delivery Service’, but when they turned up they informed her immediately that the trunk was too heavy to be loaded on to the train. She asked them instead, to their puzzlement, to deliver it to an alternative address – hers. Clearly she would need to divide the load into two cases. Jack was no longer anywhere to be found so Winnie began the nauseating task herself, frequently having to leave the house to take some fresh air, away from the stench of decomposing flesh.

  The next morning, unable to transport the heavy cases to the train station, Winnie enlisted the help of her landlord and his son, and they willingly cooperated. The larger case was significantly overweight, but to Winnie’s relief the porters accepted a fee to cover the surplus, gave her a receipt to sign, and took the cases out of her sight. With the trunks being taken care of, as she was sure Jack had arranged, Winnie boarded the train and looked forward to meeting Jack’s acquaintance at her destination twelve hours later. However, there was nobody there to meet her, and when Winnie phoned Jack for confirmation, she was told that he was away and would be for some time.

  In desperation, Winnie tracked down her brother Burton and explained that she had just arrived in LA with heavy luggage and that she needed his help. He obliged, and drove her to the train station to collect the cases. But the baggage handler had been alerted by the foul odour emanating from the trunk, and had become suspicious of a liquid seeping out, which looked much like blood. He told Winnie she would have to open the trunks in front of him. Thinking quickly, Winnie replied that her husband held the key so she would need to find him and return with it in order to do so. Winnie fled the station. Burton was growing suspicious of his sister’s behaviour, anxiety and her reluctance to answer any of his questions. When she eventually asked him for money and told him she needed to get away, he stopped the car, told her he thought maybe that was for the best and wished her luck as she disappeared into the crowd.

  Police were soon scouring the city for the woman who had been labelled ‘The Trunk Murderess’. Both her husband and Burton were found and questioned but quickly dismissed as having had no involvement in the crime and no knowledge of Winnie’s whereabouts. A media frenzy erupted and a full-scale manhunt to find Winnie was launched. It didn’t last long. She was found on October 23, and gave herself up immediately. She tearfully claimed self-defence from the start, telling police and reporters that she ‘had to do it’, and this confused the baying public who had been expecting someone as cruel and vicious as her crimes suggested. LA was left in a state almost of sympathy for Winnie Ruth Judd. Unfortunately for her, Phoenix, Arizona, was not.

  Winnie was sent back to Phoenix, to a much more hostile reception. The court believed that Winnie had killed her two victims in cold blood and during their sleep, a belief supported by the absence of the mattress from one of the beds. This confused Winnie, who knew nothing of its disposal. Police had found the blood spots on the walls near the bed and drawn the conclusion that the murders must have happened in the bedroom. Winnie tried to explain Jack’s involvement in the clear-up, and that the blood must have come from his movement of the bodies, but she was not heard. Neither was the autopsy report which claimed that the dissection of Sammy’s body was more than likely to have been performed by somebody who had been trained in anatomy. Revealed instead was a letter which Sammy had happened to write to her sister on the very day of the crime in which she explained that she and Anne were both much happier since Winnie had moved out as Winnie and Anne were arguing on so many occasions, sometimes violently. But its words had been twisted and the original gave no indication of violent clashes at all.

  Winnie described the struggle and her self-defence, showed the bullet wound she received, and told of Anne’s attack on her with the ironing board. Physicians found
multiple wounds on her and reported that she must have ‘put up a tremendous fight for her life’. Yet these reports mysteriously never surfaced during the investigation. It was claimed she was lying and that she shot herself to support her self-defence claim.

  It is believed that the persecution of Winnie and the court’s refusal to acknowledge many of the facts which supported her case was in fact to protect Jack Halloran, Phoenix’s ‘Golden Boy’. Any incriminating evidence which pointed to him, such as numerous sightings of his car at both the scene of the crime and outside Winnie’s home that weekend were never recorded in court reports. His name, despite appearing in media reports all over the United States, was never reported in a Phoenix newspaper. In any discussion of a possible second person he was named simply ‘Mr X’, but even this suggestion was quickly dismissed. A diary kept by Anne surfaced during the search of their home, and it contained the names of many of the Phoenix elite, including Jack Halloran, who frequented the girls’ apartment and employed their ‘services’. Yet again, this was never brought into the investigation.

  The sham and farce of the investigation was matched, nay bettered, only by the trial itself. Vital evidence was ignored during the trial and even when it came to light afterwards, such as the fact that the dismemberment of Sammy’s body looked to professional eyes as if it could only have been performed by a surgeon or somebody trained to do so. Also never taken further was the fact that a Dr Charles Brown, friend of Jack’s and one whom Jack professed prior to the murders to be ‘in his debt’, turned up at the prison where Winnie was subsequently incarcerated, asking to speak to her and claiming that he was the only one who knew the truth about Winnie Ruth Judd, and then fled before further questioning to be found dead three days later in apparent suicide. Evidence regarding the crime scene, the location of the murders, the lack of any obvious premeditation, and the disappearance of one of the mattresses was never adequately explored and to many suggested a clear cover-up, or political interference. Winnie was never even called to speak during the trial. Surprisingly, given how often his name came up, neither was Jack Halloran.