MFDJ 9/12/2022: The Crimes of Celeste

Today’s Open and Shut Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

You would think that a name like Celeste Simone Carrington would belong to a person of royal blood, or at least rich East Coast stock, but Celeste Carrington was anything but royalty.  She and her siblings were born poor and black in Philadelphia to parents who barely provided for them.  When Celeste’s mother would leave her children alone in their home for days without food, Celeste had to take care of her younger siblings, begging for food from neighbors and digging through garbage cans behind restaurants.  When her mother was home, she beat Celeste and her siblings for any reason.  Her father began raping her when she was seven years old and got her pregnant when she was fourteen.  After getting an abortion, she left home.

Carrington spent the next sixteen years on the edges of society.  Moving often, she worked menial jobs and, surprisingly, when considering her upbringing, stayed out of trouble.  Either that or she never got caught.  Somewhere along the line she earned her General Education Diploma and took some courses at a Southern California community college.  Sometime in the early 1990s, she ended up in East Palo Alto, California.

East Palo Alto is not a prosperous place like the city to the west that shares its name.  Until 1983, it was officially an unincorporated part of San Mateo County, and was technically an island dependent on county services with no city government.  Prior to WWII, Japanese-Americans and other immigrants tended the farmland-rich area, but once the war began and those of Japanese heritage were relocated, the U.S. military used it as a training camp.

When the war ended, and along with it restrictions on building materials, cheap housing was built to relieve the Bay Area housing shortage.  Racist real estate laws and the discriminating practice of banks redlining areas where they would not secure loans doomed East Palo Alto to become a city of claptrap apartments and rampant crime.  In 1992, East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate (172.7 homicides per 100,000 residents) per capita in the country.  Overall, crime in the Bay Area was at an all-time high.

But Carrington’s life was finally settling down.  She shared an apartment with Jackie, a single mother of three whom she was madly in love with.  Having to provide for herself, Jackie, and the children, Celeste worked for a janitorial company that serviced office buildings on the peninsula.  However, she was fired in late 1991 when caught stealing checks.  Carrington kept the keys of the buildings that she had cleaned, knowing they could come in handy at a later time.


Celeste Carrington. ‘Nuff said.

With no money coming in to support Jackie and her brood, Carrington broke into a Dodge auto dealership in Redwood City on January 17, 1992, where along with cash and electronics she stole a loaded .357 Magnum pistol from an employee’s desk.

On January 26, Carrington borrowed a neighbor’s car and used her stolen keys to gain entrance to an office building at 1123 Industrial Road in San Carlos.  When she tripped off the alarm, custodian Victor Esparaz approached Carrington.  She told him she was also from the janitorial company and was scheduled to work there that night.  When Esparaz let his guard down, Carrington pulled out the large pistol on him and took forty dollars that he had in his wallet, his ATM card and his personal identification number.  She made him get down on his knees before shooting the thirty-four-year-old in the head.

Carrington was believed to have been involved in a dozen burglaries on the peninsula during the early months of 1992, all of them with the same method of operation.  Using her stolen keys and a crowbar, Carrington would enter businesses that she used to clean and go through desks, looking for cash or anything of value.

On March 11, 1992, Carrington got a ride from a neighbor to 777 California Street in Palo Alto, to burglarize yet another building she had the keys to.  The lock to the building had been changed, but Carrington saw two custodians inside and decided to wait until they finished before she would break in.  Once the cleaning crew left, Carrington used a screwdriver to open the lock.  The building was slim pickings for the thief, until she heard thirty-six-year-old property manager Carolyn Gleason enter the building.  Ambushing her in a photocopy room, Carrington took four hundred dollars, an ATM card and the car keys from the frightened woman.  She forced Gleason to her knees and mercilessly shot her in the head.

Carrington took Gleason’s car and drove to ATM machines to raid Gleason’s bank account.  Only two of the cash machines gave her money, and only a few hundred dollars.  She ditched the car at a Palo Alto hospital and called a taxi to take her home to East Palo Alto.

Five days later, on March 16, Carrington went to another office building at 801 Brewster Avenue in Redwood City.  She was surprised to find the building still open, so she hid in a closet to wait for everyone to leave for the day.  After the building cleared out, Carrington attempted to enter offices she had the keys to, but none of the locks would open.  Spotting Dr. Allan Marks alone in his office, Carrington burst through the door waving her gun.  The young pediatrician recognized her from when she cleaned his building and put up a fight.  During the struggle, Dr. Marks was shot twice with the large caliber bullets hitting him in the left shoulder, left thumb, and right forearm.  Luckily for the doctor, the last bullet in the pistol misfired.  Carrington managed to steal some sample drugs and access cards before Marks shoved her out of his office, locking the door and calling the police.

Amazingly, Carrington continued her burglary spree, possibly committing two more burglaries until the early morning hours of March 21, when police from Los Altos, Redwood City, and Palo Alto arrived with a search warrant at the apartment she shared with Jackie and the three children.  The detectives found a staggering amount of evidence, including the keys Carrington failed to return, as well as Gleason’s cash box, her PIN written on a piece of paper, and her purse.  The police also found drug packets from Doctor Marks’ office, and the .357 Magnum pistol, with spent shells still inside the cylinders.

The trial was an open and shut case with the evidence overwhelming the jury.  Despite the public defender’s plea to spare her the death penalty because of her horrible childhood, Celeste Simone Carrington was found guilty of the attempted murder of Dr. Allan Marks and guilty of the murders of Victor Esparaz and Carolyn Gleason. She remains on San Quentin’s death row.

Culled from:  California’s Deadliest Women by David Kulczyk

 

Sing Sing Prisoner Du Jour!

NAME:  Edward Haight
NUMBER:  101-698
BORN:  9-19-25
AGE:  17
PHYSICAL:  5’7″, 152 lbs.
CRIME:  Assaulted, murdered two girls, aged 6 and 8
CLAIMS:  “I don’t know why I did it”
SENTENCED:  11-17-42
RECEIVED:  11-17-42
EXECUTED:  7-8-43

Sing Sing Psychologist’s Examination of Haight

Examiner:  Argento
Age:  17
Mental age:  16.0
School grades completed:  1 year HS
Test results:  Language:  Alpha:  16.0
Classification:  Normal Type:  Unstable

Comments or test finding:  Cynical attitude, Silly cooperation and quite efficient effort.

Impression:  Normal level of intelligence.  Anomalous character; intensive volitional and emotional reactions.  Poverty of sentiment, purpose and ambition. [I think that’s what they’d say about me. – DeSpair]  Peculiar sexual reaction degenerating into chaotic sex.  A readiness of psychoneurotic episodes from trivial causes.

Outlook:  Doubtful; but environmental control with maturity, marriage and development of balancing forces might help.

Culled from: Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House

One comment

  1. “Silly cooperation”? What in the world is that?
    As for the name Celeste Simone Carrington, well, that’s a “Dynasty” name if ever there was one.

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