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

hover as a Dallas Morning News headline above a lengthy article the paper called "Tricks of
the Trade."

    "Me?" she asked rhetorically.
"Tricks?"

    Asked if she ever bragged about
getting into his house through the mail slot, she replied: "Yes. I
had a little bottle and on it, it would say, 'Drink me.' And I
would drink it, and then I would shrink to an incredibly small
size, and I would literally walk through whatever it was that Alice
walked through."

    But her sarcasm turned dark at one
point when the lawyer elaborated, and accused her of sticking her
"skinny" little arm through the mail slot to open the door. She
shot back: "Wait a minute. I don't have a skinny arm. I look just
fine. You ought to re-examine yourself a little bit
physiologically."

    Tedesco's family had charged that
her removal of items occurred in 1978 and again after the doctor's
death in January 1979. Dancing like a prize fighter along the
ropes, however, Catherine bobbed and weaved around questions that
tried to trace the trail of Tedesco's property. Investigators
apparently had tied some of the loot to Catherine's acquaintance,
Tommy Bell—a character destined to play a significant role in the
violence of my confrontation with her.

    While evading questions that would
link the missing art to anyone, however, she admitted her role with
a comment that sounded like a boast: "And I sold it. How about
that?"

    Not even Tedesco's murder in
January 1979 stopped Catherine's removal of their "community
property." If anything, it added more urgency as she told lawyers
she suddenly feared that Robert would race inside the townhouse and
grab some for himself.

    She told the lawyers she had not
learned of Tedesco's death until mid-afternoon on that day when she
went to the Family Law Center for the divorce hearing. The police
had contacted her divorce attorney, and he told her they wanted to
talk.

    "I couldn't tell them much," she
recounted in her July deposition. "I was stunned. I didn't really
believe he was dead until I saw this little purse he carried
sitting on the desk."

    She said she went to the townhouse
that night "because I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to
know how he had been killed, where he had been killed. I found it
incredible."

    Catherine said she saw the report
on the detective's desk while he was out of the room. She said she
only talked to the detective for twenty minutes. But, before going
to the townhouse, she said, all that she knew had come from him.
She said the detective approved her trip that night to the
townhouse.

    "It looked like there had been a
ferocious battle in the garage," she testified in her deposition.
"I saw a lot of blood. It was all over the right side of the
garage. There were pieces of more than blood out there, and I never
saw anything like that in my life."

    She admitted she took documents
that night but nothing else.

    "When we got there somebody had
poured glue in the lock, and they had pasted a sign on the front
door written in paper that said, 'Sealed by order of the court.' We
did not know what court—the kangaroo court?" she testified. "We
didn't know, so we went around to the back."

    She said they entered through the
garage because she suspected Robert would be "in there plundering
heavily, so I decided to take that which was mine out of the
house."

    Catherine began to ramble in her
testimony. She told the lawyers: "I think the next day somebody
told me the homicide detectives figured that it was either a
homosexual who killed him or a drug-related deal because they had
found some boxes there, crates, packing crates, and I started to
receive a large input of information at this time from many people
who began telling me things that they had heard, and I could not
tell you what one told me and what the other didn't."

    She said: "I also heard that they
thought that if I had done it, I would have used a gun."

    Catherine said she couldn't recall
the names of the locksmiths or a friend who