Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer (Fortune Hunter Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a film called Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer, based on a true-crime story from Austin, Texas in the late 1990’s in which a woman named Celeste Johnson (Julie Benz), working as a waitress to support herself and her two teenage daughters (by her first husband, though she married twice more before the events depicted in the film), attracted the attention of a recently widowed multimillionaire named Steven Beard (Eli Gabay). She quit her job and moved herself and daughters Jennifer (Georgia Bradner) and Kristina (Roan Curtis – a first name which when I encountered it in the credits had me perplexed whether that was a woman or a man) into Beard’s mansion. Beard fell head over heels in love with Celeste – it’s not clear how much this is a rebound relationship after the loss of his wife and how much is a guy thinking with his dick, like all too many guys – and Celeste insists on a job as his “house manager” as cover for her living with him. Supposedly the Johnson girls will have their own wing of the house, but the daughters notice that Celeste is spending a lot of nights in Steven’s bedroom. Eventually Celeste and Steven marry, though he first gets a pre-nup limiting her to a $500,000 settlement in case they break up.

That’s a not bad piece of change but it’s only a fraction of Steven’s $10 million and it wouldn’t last long given Celeste and her spending addiction – in between cuddling, cooing and congratulating herself on scoring such a great trophy girl as wife number two, he’s upbraiding her about how fast she’s running through his credit cards and worrying that she’ll literally spend it out of house and home. At one point he decides she needs therapy, and as a result she goes to an inpatient treatment center – where she hooks up with Tracey Tarlton (Justine Warrington), a Lesbian with a history of depression and violent attacks – including an attempt to run down her girlfriend’s husband with a pickup truck when she left her and went back to hubby – and though it’s a commonplace in Lifetime movies for women who’ve “married up” and got bored to end up having an affair and seducing their affair partner to off their now inconvenient sugar daddy, it’s kinky and different that in this story the affair partner turned killer is a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend. Tarlton sneaks into Steven Beard’s bedroom, courtesy (natch) of keys Celeste has given her, and shoots him with a shotgun. As part of their deal Celeste was supposed to retrieve the casings of the shells, only she doesn’t because Steven doesn’t die immediately – he lasts long enough to call 911 and spends a few days in the hospital before he finally croaks – and in the confusion Celeste neglects her part of the deal.

Tracey gets arrested and charged with the crime, and, angered by Celeste’s cold rejection of her (this is a woman who doesn’t like rejection, remember?) as well as facing the death penalty in a state so serious about capital punishment they execute more people than all other U.S. states combined, she turns state’s evidence and testifies against Celeste in the trial. Celeste received a life sentence while Tarlton got 10 years, was released on parole in 2011 and will complete her parole this August. After the understated power of Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story. Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer is a return to pretty typical slovenly Lifetime form. The direction (by Robin Hays) and writing (by Margaux Froley and Donald Martin, based on a true-crime book on the case by Suzy Spencer) are acceptable without being special, and so is the acting – with one powerful exception. Lifetime regular Julie Benz turns in a powerful acid-etched performance as Celeste, looking more and more like Lady Macbeth as the story goes on and she plots more and more murders to safeguard her position – including giving her beautician, Heather (Beverley Elliott) $10,000 to hire a hit man to kill Tracey Tarlton and even getting her kids so frightened that she might have them offed.

Christine has already moved out of the Beard home and in with her rather twerpy boyfriend David Wittmer (the rather twerpy Anthony Timpano, who looks like a former Gay porn star about five years after he “aged out” of that career), and after her own crisis of conscience Jennifer joins them to get away from mom. I was annoyed early on in the movie because Benz’s accent seemed wrong – I got the impression she had picked up her Southern accent from listening to Dolly Parton, who was from Tennessee, not Texas – but as the story progressed her performance took on weight and power. She could have been even stronger with a script by a writer like Christine Conradt, who in her Lifetime scripts has managed to make the villains complex enough that we understand them and why they’ve been driven to heinous acts, but even with what she had from the writers on this film, she creates an indelible character of a woman descending further and further into crime just to avoid ever again having to scrounge and work menial jobs to survive. We don’t get much in the way of soft-core porn this time – we don’t see Celeste in bed with her sugar daddy at all and the only intimation of the Queer goings-on between her and Tracey is a scene in the treatment center in which Tracey is rubbing Celeste’s back before an officious nurse pops in and said they need to go to group therapy … now. But Benz’s performance is good enough we don’t miss such lubricious moments, even though the movie overall is quite less insightful than it could have been with the basic facts of the case.