Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Read Online Free Page A

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. She 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.

    "George was strange, but I never
saw him in headdresses," she fired back. Then she added: "I took
one other thing that is probably not on this list that I returned
to him because I was fascinated with it, and I knew it meant a
great deal to him. It was a human fetus that he kept in a jar. That
was his only child, and I gave it back."

    Adding that the lawyer's list
looked like "padding for the insurance company," she admitted
getting $950 for some of the art, but refused to identify the
buyer.

    She admitted knowing that Tedesco was taping
their telephone conversations in the months prior to his death as
they continued to squabble about her divorce case.

    "You have obviously gone over all
the tapes and prepared questions from them," she told the lawyers
during her deposition. "We both know. Let's not insult each other's
intelligence."

    Jumping to her challenge, one of
the lawyers asked: "Did you ever tell Dr. Tedesco in a telephone
conversation back in January 1978, 'I came there tonight to kill
you. Can I kill George Tedesco?'"

    She replied: "I don't recall but I
could have. I think anybody who ever knew George probably at one
time or another—including Robert—wanted to kill George, but George
just was not worth it."

    The lawyer continued: "Did you ever
tell him in January of 1978 that 'You are going to be very, very
sorry as far as threatening me. I am a lawyer, and I know the
tricks of the trade.' Do you know the tricks of the
trade?"

    That question
brought an answer that twenty years later would