Never See Them Again, page 13
But Christine bit the bullet and remained calm.
At first.
“Christopher, look, you know, put that out,” she demanded. They were outside in the backyard, standing by the patio; Christine had managed to get him, at least, outdoors, so the inside of her mother’s house wouldn’t reek of dope. “I don’t want that stuff in my house.” Christine had smoked weed herself and “experimented,” she admitted, but never at home and not on that day. “I would never bring it home. I would never hurt [or] disrespect them (my parents) like that.”
(Yes, that might be true, but Christine surely had other ways of showing impertinence toward her parents’ authority, will, and overall desire for her to do good in life and become the adult they expected.)
“Whatever,” Christopher said, continuing to smoke, as if he didn’t give a hoot about what his girlfriend was asking of him. “I’ll be done quick enough. This is my last one. I don’t have any more. Let me do this real quick.”
Christine became upset, exploding, “You always have to do things your way.”
That initiated a loud argument between them, vulgarities and curses flying back and forth like spittle. It was the middle of the day in suburban Houston, people all around, neighbors with their ears wide open.
“Come into the house!” Christine yelled. “I am not going let my neighbors hear this.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” Christopher said. “Take me home, then! Now!”
“No, Christopher. Don’t be mad. Come on.” Christine calmed down. Then turned on the lovey-dovey charm. (“ ’Cause I didn’t want him to be mad at me,” she remarked later. “I just wanted him to understand.”)
Christopher didn’t say anything in response.
“Come on, baby,” Christine continued, “I just, like, please just respect my house and my parents.” She was whispering, trying to show him that she wasn’t into fighting about something that seemed so stupid. Christopher Snider, on the other hand, didn’t much appreciate his girlfriend barking at him as though he was a child. So Christopher did what, according to Christine, he did when someone pissed him off: he went after her.
“I tried to forget about [it],” she said later, describing that day, “[and] there was, like, physical contact.”
Christopher decided he was leaving. She wasn’t worth the trouble. The argument had gone and ruined his high, anyway. So he walked out of the yard.
Christine didn’t want him to go. She ran after Chris as he tried exiting the patio area. She grabbed at his shirt, trying to hold him back.
Christopher snapped, Christine said, and swatted her off him.
She fell back and “kind of hit [her] head on the foyer of the house.”
It was marble. Damn thing hurt like hell, too.
Christine panicked. Christopher had gotten physical with her in the past, so she claimed, and she was afraid he was going to let her really have it. That push was a prelude to a beating, she suggested.
So she pleaded with him.
“Now take me . . . home, I said!” he screamed.
“Okay, babe, okay . . . okay,” Christine said, trying to appease.
Next thing she recalled she was driving in her car with him, heading toward his house, still begging him to calm down, promising that everything was going to be okay. Just relax, baby. Try to steady your feelings and don’t allow your emotions to get the best of you. And yet that outburst back at the house, Christine Paolilla would later say, was nothing compared to what Christopher Snider would do next.
AS THE FALL of 2003 wound down with the Thanksgiving holiday around the corner, Christine Paolilla was back at Clear Lake High School, going about her senior year, one would imagine, totally numb from the effects of having her two best friends murdered in such a whirlwind of bloody violence. For Christine, life went on. It had to. She studied and she worked at Walgreens. What else could she do?
For Brian Harris and HPD’s Homicide Division, however, Christine Paolilla was probably someone they would love to speak to, her being good friends with Rachael and Tiffany. Only problem was, Christine’s name had not come up in the investigation as of yet. Nor had Christine come forward to talk about whatever she might know, if anything. In fact, what could have been a significant lead this early on in the investigation was sitting in a box, inside a cubicle, inside the Homicide Squad offices. It was a photo that was actually mislabeled. Buried in one of the Clear Lake murder investigation boxes was a photograph of Rachael Koloroutis lying on a couch, wearing a short red top, her six-pack abs quite visible, her hair up in a beehive hairdo. She had a bottle of booze in her hand. Rachael was smiling, a look of sexual flirtation on her face, her right hand over the back of another girl whose head was but a few inches away from Rachael’s crotch area. They were obviously horsing around, playing up things for the photographer, whoever—likely Tiffany—she was. This other girl, who also had a bottle of booze in one hand, was smiling, one bare foot on the carpet, the other tucked underneath her butt. She was leaning down and had the hip band from Rachael’s G-string panties by her teeth, stretching it out of Rachael’s pants. Rachael was staring down at the girl from her leaned-back position.
The photo was marked as “Rachael and Tiffany.”
Err, mismarked was maybe a better way to analyze this: because that girl with Rachael’s G-string panty band between her teeth was, in fact, Christine Paolilla, and no one in the Homicide Division knew this yet.
CHAPTER 19
IT WAS THE middle of the night. Somewhere near two or three o’clock, he wasn’t able to exactly recall what time, the phone was ringing. Brian Harris was opening his eyes, acclimating himself to his surroundings at such a late hour. He was bushed, having traveled back days before from that trip to Florida, which did not yield much as far as new leads went.
“Yeah? What is it?” he said after answering the phone.
She sounded frantic and, at the same time, scared. It was Ann Koloroutis.
“What can I do for you?” Brian Harris asked. He was half asleep.
“I had a dream. She came to me in my dream.”
Rachael.
Great, Harris thought.
“What happened?”
“Rachael said something about a pocketbook. ‘The pocketbook, ’ she kept saying. ‘The pocketbook.’ I don’t know what it means.”
Harris didn’t know what to think. At this point in the investigation, with so many dead ends and red herrings and leads that fizzled into dust, the idea that one of the victims was speaking to her mother from beyond didn’t seem at all that far fetched.
Harris wrote it down in his notes.
Pocketbook.
CHAPTER 20
THE TIPS SPILLING into Crime Stoppers came in at such a continuous clip that you’d have to wonder where all of these people had been hiding since the murders, nearly five months before. In some ways many of the tips bolstered Detective Brian Harris’s growing theories; but in others they put the kibosh on what he thought and, simultaneously, opened additional doors that had to be, on merit alone, checked into with as much enthusiasm as any other lead.
One woman called in with a “vision” she’d had of Rachael or Tiffany “having an affair with a married man by the waterfront,” though she did not go into great detail about how that vision was actually connected to the murders.
It was taken with a roll of the eyes.
Another tip, from a “white-sounding voice,” the report noted, said there was a party for her back on July 17 and Marcus had left with someone there and had bought some weed, and then returned a half hour later. She mentioned a name that would once again become synonymous with the murders as each day turned to night and a new tipster called in.
JU.
A young-sounding female called to say that she had overheard JU on the telephone saying, “You won’t go down for it if the cops don’t know anything.” This gave a bit more credence to the idea that JU had brought someone with him.
Yet, another female called to say she’d had sex with JU on the day after the murders, and that when he heard about who was killed, JU “cried.” One of her friends, she reported, described JU as a “small dealer,” and not someone who could have been involved in something so horrific.
A woman called to say she had heard a local funeral director had had something to do with the murders.
“That was a misunderstanding,” the funeral director told Tom Ladd. “I know nothing about the murders other than what the victims’ family [members said] and [what] looking at the bodies for my work told me.”
Then the tone of the calls shifted altogether. Now the blame was cast on George Koloroutis.
“I think George had something to do with it,” said one caller, who identified himself as being related to Marcus.
George Koloroutis had long ago been eliminated as a suspect: He had been in a staff meeting at the time of the murders. There had been twelve senior people from the company George worked for with him at the time. There was no way George Koloroutis could have committed the murders—that is, himself.
Someone called and said George had tried to hire Marcus and Adelbert “to do a thing” for him and that they wouldn’t do it.
Still, no one in HPD was on board with the notion that George was behind the murders in any way whatsoever.
Concluding the report detailing all of these phone calls, Harris wrote about the “possible working scenarios” that his department had to contend with as the case carried on into the Christmas holiday. One of the scenarios included the idea that George could have done the murders because he was outraged over Rachael’s lifestyle. The other, stronger possibility, Harris noted, was this name “Fats,” which came up several times with several of the callers.
“No matter who we were talking about,” Harris said later, “George, Fats, JU—any one of them—they all had to be checked and rechecked. No one could be scratched off the list. And the thing was, we were so far off from what truly happened inside that house.”
GEORGE KOLOROUTIS WAS all about full disclosure where he was concerned. He had already given his life story to detectives. He kept repeating the same thing every time the idea that he was involved came up: the sooner you get through looking at me, the sooner you can get out there and locate the real killers. In meeting Brian Harris, George was enthusiastic about having a new investigator involved in the case. It gave the entire investigation a freshness, which it required, and, with no disrespect to Tom Ladd, a shot in the arm, which it needed.
George had met Harris earlier in the case a few times, but now they were working together on a closer, more intimate level.
“My impression of Harris was good right from the start,” George recalled. “Right away, I sensed that he wanted to catch who did this and that he felt he could figure it out. I looked at all the cops involved . . . just like I do [my] employees. Their mission is to catch killers. This became a business plan to me, and in order to execute the plan and meet the objective, I had to set clear expectations and provide constant feedback. Of course, I understand that there are others besides me who set expectations and provide feedback, such as their supervisors, their own work ethic, sense of duty, and so on. But all of those other drivers are outside of my control. I was competing with hundreds of other cases. What I could control was my own level of engagement—I had only one case to focus on.”
In George’s view of things, the one item that remained clear about Harris from the get-go turned out to be the idea that Harris was “a winner. I have many on my team in business, people who are simply rock stars, Super Bowl weapons. They produce at a high level, year after year, and do it regardless of the circumstances or challenges.” George saw Harris as one of those “rock star” quality producers in life: someone who could get the job done, regardless of the adversity, nepotism, and negativity he faced.
It was clear from the start that Harris didn’t care what other people thought, or how others in the department did things. He conducted himself with grace, professionalism, and tenacity. He was a cop to the core. Not that Tom Ladd wasn’t interested in solving the case, but Brian Harris came across differently. And George appreciated and welcomed it. The guy was clearly not going to stop until he caught the people who had murdered George’s daughter and the others.
“You just know it when you are around him,” George said of Harris. “Ladd [was leaving], and so [were] a series of sergeants after him.”
Harris became the most important part of the investigation moving forward, and George knew this.
Beyond that, a cop had committed suicide right in the detectives’ cubicle area of the Homicide Division; and the Homicide Squad was in the throes of going through a change in retirement plans, which had come from the top, the mayor’s office, and it had caused a plague of early retirements. This, mind you, in a division that was already strapped for detectives. Then a series of domestic violence cases were given to the group to investigate. They had countless murders still open. Where, then, did the Clear Lake case fit into all of this?
“This type of environment,” George concluded, “makes it hard for an average or below average performer to do well. At the same time, this environment makes a guy like Brian Harris stand out.”
CHAPTER 21
AS THE INVESTIGATION INTO the murder of her friends continued to limp along, Christine Paolilla did the same in school. It is safe to assume that Christine, about six months away from her eighteenth birthday, was counting down the days as if retirement was in her near future. On the day she turned eighteen, Christine could tap into that trust fund insurance money she was awarded after her father died on the job, sixteen years earlier. And what a pocket full of change it was going to be.
As she went through her final school year, every time Christine heard something about what she later called “the murders,” she “wanted to scream.” She didn’t really get along with many people in school. “You know, I mean,” Christine added, referring to Rachael and Tiffany, “they were really, like, the only girls that wouldn’t stab me in the back.”
Whenever Christine had a problem, she turned to either Tiffany or Rachael. “I could always talk to them, all the time, without a doubt, any time at night, you know, they could call me, I could call them, and I just got mad, you know. . . . [Someone had taken] away any, like, real friends that I really had. . . .”
Between all those stammers of “like” and “you know,” was Christine Paolilla saying that she missed her friends? That here were two more people she loved who had been taken from her?
It appeared so.
Christine later said that although she and Rachael often messed around at parties and teased each other about “getting together,” it was all “you know, joking around, but nothing ever sexual.”
The deaths of her friends had been so traumatic—bringing up all those repressed memories of her father’s death—Christine couldn’t even bring herself to go to the funerals. “Too much guilt,” she added. “All funerals brought back the death of my father, and I didn’t like funerals because of that.”
Even though she claimed he liked to get violent with her at times and the two of them together were more like oil and water, Christopher Snider was still a major part of Christine’s life during the fall of 2003. He was, in fact, more of an influence on her life now than her schoolwork, which was suffering greatly. And there was something else that Christopher—if you believe Christine—had turned her on to: crime.
In late October, Christine and Chris were picked up and booked for shoplifting. The arresting officer asked Christine her father’s name (she was seventeen then, a minor).
“Dick Thomas,” she said.
It was not hard for the cop to find out she was lying. A quick check of her address showed that Thomas Dick, her stepfather, the only father figure Christine had ever known, lived at her address.
Christine was able to get out of the shoplifting charge with a slap on the wrist, for the most part, and a promise to stay the heck out of trouble, finish school, and hopefully use all that money she was about to come into to go to one of the local colleges and get a decent education.
But that just wasn’t going to be the case. For some time now Christine had been dipping her toes in lawless waters, which apparently felt warm and comforting. Going back to March 2003, Tom Dick had called the police on his stepdaughter for “attacking [him] with her fists.” The incident stemmed from Christine’s desire to leave home and be with Chris Snider. Lori Paolilla had called the cops on Christine a number of times, once saying, “She thinks she can leave home. I’m having problems with her over her boyfriend, curfew, and general conduct” around the house. The girl believed she could do whatever she wanted and not have to suffer any repercussions for the behavior. That last time she ran away, Christine walked out of the house with her luggage. She said she was moving in with Chris.
A week later, she was back. It was May 2, 2003. The police officer who had responded to the call got ahold of Lori after Christine’s return to follow up and see how things were going.
“She’s still grounded,” Lori told the officer. “All her privileges have been removed. Christine was diagnosed with ADHD, and when she gets depressed, she starts to act out.”
Tom Dick told the officer Christine had said she understood what she had done was wrong and was regretful. She was ready and willing, at least superficially, to redeem herself.
Lori explained that (or maybe blamed) a lot of Christine’s conduct and acting out on Christopher Snider, whom Lori viewed as a misfit troublemaker, who was only making her daughter’s life more miserable than it had to be.
“Chris,” Lori explained to the police, “had been ‘protecting’ Christine.” Or that’s what Christine had told her mother he had said to her while she was gone with him. “She told us they had been riding around and staying in parks. . . .”
