Crime
On October 2, 1999, Beard was shot in the stomach while sleeping at his and Celeste's home and died as a result of an infection caused by the open wound on January 21, 2000. Local police tied the shooting to Johnson's lesbian friend, Tracey Tarlton. The women had met in a mental health facility, Saint David’s Pavilion, after Johnson threatened to commit suicide when she and Beard began fighting over her constantly spending his money on expensive clothes and jewelry for herself. Tarlton was arrested at her home six days after the shooting and charged with assault. The police thought there was more to the story when people who were interviewed said that Johnson had spoken negatively about Beard. Further building their speculation was her refusal to let them interview Beard during his hospital stay, oddly casual behavior after his death, and sleeping in a different room the night Beard was shot.
Despite mounting suspicion on Johnson, Tarlton remained silent, having romantic feelings for Johnson, until July 2000 when she discovered through a local newspaper that she had remarried after Beard’s death. Realizing that their relationship was a sham and none of what Johnson told her about her marriage was true, she told police just before her murder trial began in March 2002 that Johnson had persuaded her to shoot Beard, claiming that he had been emotionally abusing her to the point where she wanted to commit suicide and getting rid of him was the only way the women could be together.
Read more about this topic: Celeste Beard
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)