Never See Them Again, page 16
As far as where Tiffany and Rachael fit into Christine’s life after Christine ended up in Texas, according to Lori, Christine claimed that Rachael and Tiffany were “the sweetest girls [she had] ever met. She couldn’t speak highly enough about Tiffany or Rachael,” Lori said later. Christine called them “fun,” “loving,” and her mother saw a real change in Christine’s personality and overall demeanor after they met and started hanging out. One of the things that proved to Lori how serious Christine was about her feelings toward Rachael and Tiffany was that they were the only friends Christine had allowed to see her without her wig on. Some of the other kids at Clear Lake High had walked up behind Christine and had pulled her wig off when she was standing, talking to someone. They publicly embarrassed her. However, she was actually sharing her condition with Tiffany and Rachael in a personal and private way. It said a lot, according to Lori, about the person Christine was when she was around Rachael and Tiffany.
Along the way, though, this spiked-haired, skinny kid, with all sorts of body piercings and chains hanging from his greasy blue jeans, appeared one day and was back into Christine’s life. Christopher Snider was, in one sense, a manifestation of what Christine’s life had become at that time. She saw something in Chris. He won her heart, and, maybe more important, according to Lori, he developed a hold on her mind. Christine believed she could fix Chris Snider, which was when the problems started for her at home.
“There was something in [his] eyes,” Lori Paolilla told ABC. She noticed it from the first moment she met him. That look he had told her that this boy was going to be trouble for her daughter. One of the things Lori noticed, and Christine’s stepfather, Tom Dick, agreed, was how Chris Snider began to isolate Christine. He kept close tabs on her, Lori claimed. One of the ways he did this was to show Christine that he was in control of her life—as in, one day, according to Christine, Chris showed up at Clear Lake High, stood around with Christine as she talked with her friends, and then, without warning, yanked her wig off in front of everyone, laughing as he did it. And still, Christine defended her man, cleaving to his side even more; she claimed, she was in fear of losing him. It was as if she expected to be shamed, to be ridiculed, to be put down, because it had been her view of life for so long. Some said Chris Snider would tell her, “No one else will have you but me. . . . You better not do anything I don’t like or disapprove of.”
Others, though, tell this story differently. One source there on that day later claimed Christine’s version of Chris Snider being the quintessential abusive/tough guy, embarrassing her in front of her friends, was nothing more than a faux persona she had dreamt up to cover her own sick and twisted behavior.
Chris and Christine had been flirting back and forth on that day. One of Chris’s friends said to him, “Hey, you know she’s wearing a wig, right?” Then Chris’s friend walked over and pulled it off Christine’s head.
Chris felt bad for her. “He kind of just fell into the boyfriend role,” a source explained, referencing when they reconnected at the party and hooked up for the second time.
Tiffany and Rachael explained to Christine that she could do better; there was another guy out there for her who would treat her with dignity, respect, and kindness. Tiffany and Rachael were strong personalities, who grew up in supportive, sturdy households, where morals and regard for others had been instilled. They’d had their share of pain throughout life, as most kids do, but they were not about to let a friend of theirs be abused by her boyfriend. They knew better.
Christine wrote it off as not being as bad as it looked. The guy had his good side, too.
Lori and her second husband, Tom Dick, did “everything in their power,” Tom later explained to ABC, to keep Christine away from Chris Snider. “There’s only so much you can do. . . .”
They grounded her.
Didn’t work.
It was hard to keep watch on a teenager and put in a full day at the office.
They took away her privileges to use the car whenever she wanted.
That didn’t work, either.
She stole the keys.
Christine ran away.
They went out and found her.
And there she’d be, in her man’s arms, Chris Snider smiling that devilish grin, as though he had won a round.
They called the police.
They sat with an attorney.
Neither could do much more than point out the frustration of having their hands tied as parents.
They tried getting a restraining order against Chris Snider, on top of having him arrested (he was two years older than Christine).
Yet, according to Lori and Tom, neither did any good.
They sat Christine down and talked about her life and the trouble they saw heading her way down the road.
It did nothing.
They warned her that her boyfriend was a different kind of player. She could never fix him. She didn’t know what the hell she was getting herself into.
Christine ignored the advice.
“He had some sort of mental control over her that we couldn’t break,” Tom Dick recalled.
And now here Christine was, with the summer of 2004 before her, only a few credits shy of her diploma. Snider was in Kentucky facing charges, doing time. Christine had a shot at a new start. The ball was missing from a chain still tied to her ankle.
Still, the last thing on Christine Paolilla’s mind at this time was school. In fact, Christine ended up at a rehab in Kerrville, Texas, a near five-hour, 250-mile ride west of Clear Lake, past San Antonio. And it would be there, in the hills of Texas, where Christine fell into an even darker hole than she had just climbed out from, having been arrested and sent to drug rehab before she was even out of high school. If Christine and her parents thought Chris Snider—finally out of her life, for the time being—was troublesome and a menace to her well-being, the man Christine was about to meet (on top of getting that truckload of money in her hands) was going to put Chris Snider to shame.
CHAPTER 26
BRIAN HARRIS HAD never had total access to the Clear Lake case file, or complete control of the investigation in the way an officer looking to dig in wanted. One day near the first anniversary of the murders, Harris took the boxes of interviews and reports and photographs and wheeled them over to his cubicle. It was time he settled into the case and took a sharper look at everything in its entirety. There was an answer in there somewhere. The Adelbert side of it all that Harris had been working on never panned out. As much as the Homicide Division might have thought there was a connection between Adelbert and Marcus and drug dealing, it just wasn’t there. And as a competent investigator, giving into the will to solve the case, you had to, at some point, let go of the obvious and turn your attention toward other ideas, develop new leads and think outside the box.
Part of Harris’s strategy was to learn everything he could from the case files. Then meet with the families. Talk things over with them and see if anything new emerged. Homicide needed to do something, Harris was convinced, and it was probably a good time to release the sketches. Get the case back in front of the news media and out in the public eye. Ask people in the community to start thinking about it differently. Let everyone—especially the killer—know HPD was not going to stop until the killers were caught.
As a stage one, new plan of attack, Harris decided to release the sketches during a bona fide press conference. He was well aware that an onslaught of questions would come regarding why they had not released the sketches earlier. The best answer, which turned out to be true, was that HPD had been looking into several different angles of the case and they did not want to scare off potential suspects, had they seen themselves in those sketches. There was the thought that the sketches looked like several people whom HPD had been looking at as suspects.
Now, though, a year after the crime, and not one palpable suspect on radar, to say they were desperate for the public’s help might not be something HPD wanted to admit; yet it was absolutely true.
The second stage of this new strategy, which would take place sometime after the sketches were released, was to place those billboards up around Clear Lake City. That was going to fall on George Koloroutis’s shoulders. Put the sketches on billboards heading in and out of town, at calculated locations, where motorists had to look at them while coming in or going out of the city.
After the press conference and official release of the sketches, Harris called Michelle and Craig Lackner. He had never really spoken to them. He wanted to follow up. Reading the report Michelle had given on the night of the murders, Harris knew this witness was a detailed person; it was there in her observations. Of particular interest to Harris was that Michelle Lackner had reported that one of the suspects carried a bag. What more did she know?
“Hey,” Harris said casually, “do you recall what happened that night?” It was not a formal interview. He was simply calling as a police officer looking for additional information.
Michelle Lackner ran through the entire scenario for him. When she got to the purse, she described it as a “big banana-boat type” of handbag.
Harris was impressed with her recollection. This was going to become important. With any luck, Harris would be able to head out to the Lackners’ with a photo lineup someday to show Michelle and Craig. So many tips were coming in since the public release of the sketches that they were having trouble keeping up. But sooner or later, as they went through and checked people off the list, the Homicide Unit was going to be left with a few key suspects. That was when Harris could go to Michelle and Craig, a mug shot lineup in hand, which matched the sketches, and their perp would be one of the suspects in the lineup. If the Lackners could verify without a doubt that they were certain, there would be no question about the killer’s identity. On the other hand, Harris considered, he was walking a tightrope: he couldn’t run out to the Lackners’ every week with a different set of mug shots.
“I thought, ‘I am going to get one shot at this,’ ” Harris recalled. “I cannot risk a misidentification and so I want to make sure that when I show [the Lackners] a photo array, I have verified everything.”
Harris had some raw experience with a witness who had shown him just how fragile these sketches and a possible photo lineup were. There was a girl who had been brought in under a tip. She had been obsessed with Tiffany and Rachael to a creepy Single White Female point of contention. The tip appeared to be legit. So they brought her in.
Harris showed the girl the sketches.
She took one look at the drawing of the female, freaked out, and screamed, “That’s me!”
But as it turned out, it couldn’t have been. She had a rock solid alibi.
SO THE SKETCHES were made public and the billboards set to go up.
“Seeing the sketches,” Nichole Sánchez recalled later, speaking for her family, “gave us some comfort. We knew then, looking at these two people in the drawings, that the murders had nothing to do with Adelbert.”
Calls came into the Crime Stoppers tip line. It seemed several people knew someone who looked like one of the two characters depicted in the drawings. The problem was that the drawings, although fairly detailed, could be put up to literally hundreds of people and made to match. There was nothing distinctive about either of the two people, besides their thin lips and the fact that HPD was looking to talk to a male and a female.
But again, this, too, was about to change.
CHAPTER 27
JUST BEFORE THE one-year anniversary, Brian Harris’s boss assigned a second investigator, Waymon Allen, a sergeant, to help Harris, who was an officer at the time. Allen outranked Harris, but Harris knew the case by now inside out. Allen could help, however, dig through what was a mountain of evidence to see if they had overlooked or missed anything important. Allen was a solid cop, a good guy. He knew what to look for. The answer, Harris was convinced, had to be there—sometimes it is right in front of you, Harris knew from his years investigating murder. You just need a fresh set of eyes to flesh it out.
Maybe Waymon Allen was that guy.
“Hey, I’d like to be a part of this,” Allen told Harris.
“Give me, like, a week to read through everything and familiarize myself with it all, and we’ll get together and see what we need to do next.”
Harris liked the sound of that.
“We’re going to reinterview everybody, take another look and talk to some of the witnesses,” Harris suggested. “We missed something. We should probably go back forty-eight hours on the telephone records and see what type of timeline and witness list we can develop from those calls the kids made in the days leading up to the murders.”
Waymon Allen agreed. It was a smart approach.
(Funny thing was, which truly shows how complicated and subjective police work can be, that if they would have gone back an additional twenty-four hours, making a total of seventy-two, they could have solved the case right then and there. The killer had called Rachael Koloroutis not two days before the murders, but three days before.)
Harris and Allen called the families back in. They discussed the sketches. They discussed George’s plan for the billboards. It was time to push the public even more.
“I want to put up those billboards,” George said. He had been working on them for some time now. It was time.
“Yes,” Harris and Allen agreed.
Something was happening; there was an energy to the case now that had not been there for some time. The families, along with Harris and Allen, felt it. HPD had done its job focusing on Marcus and Adelbert and the choices they had made in life. But now it was time to look in other directions, search out other possibilities, flip over new stones and see what was underneath. Harris believed he had gone down every path imaginable as far as the Adelbert and Marcus angle. The answer just wasn’t there.
Allen and Harris worked another lead they had just made public. A few nights before the murders, there was a party for Tiffany Rowell’s birthday. Allen and Harris knew there was a good chance that someone at that party had information, or that the killer(s) might have possibly even attended the party. In an article published by the Houston Chronicle on July 19, 2004, a year and a day after the murders, Allen and Harris set the stage for the direction they saw the investigation taking, announcing that they were planning on reinterviewing everyone involved.
“The goal is to close the case,” Harris said as plainly as possible. Nothing less, Harris made a point to note, would suffice. Justice had to be served here. Four kids, no one needed to be reminded, had been mauled by a storm of gunfire, two of them beaten with a pistol. HPD could not allow the case to go unsolved.
“They were all very young, very immature, and on their own [for the first time in their lives],” Waymon Allen explained to the Chronicle. “They have exercised bad judgment at times, but certainly didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
Both cops were hoping to send a message and ignite some sort of reaction from their killer.
The billboards went up all over town, staring down at commuters, community members, dopers, criminals of all types, the victims’ family members, subtly reminding everyone that someone knew something. As it turned out, those billboards would prove to be one of many stars that were about to align, this as one of the killers—there were two!—drove by one of the billboards and felt as though he or she was looking into a mirror.
PART THREE
BETWEEN A ROTT AND A HARD PLACE
CHAPTER 28
TO HIM, SHE looked “pretty” (his word) just sitting there, minding her own business. She wasn’t talking, but more or less relaxing quietly, a look of bashfulness and maybe contemptuousness about her. It was November 1, 2004. “Alive” was how he referred to his first impression of Christine Paolilla as she sat waiting for a 12-step meeting to get under way at a community center near downtown Kerrville, Texas, not far from the halfway house she had been staying at as part of her probation and drug treatment program. Christine hadn’t gone back to summer school and finished her diploma, after all; she spent most of her time trying to stay out of trouble, fighting off what had become an obvious monkey on her back.
“She was beautiful,” he added later, referring to the moment he walked into the 12-step room and set eyes on Christine.
Right away, they locked glances and “flirted,” an immediate attraction settling on the two of them as they gaped at each other, a coy smile and a bit of chemistry at play.
It was a coincidence, he speculated, that they ended up sitting next to each other. Yet, right away, he sensed that Christine was like him—that is, a stranger in a foreign place.
“Hi,” he said, sitting down in one of those folding metal chairs used at stag parties and church hall bingo.
“Hello,” Christine said back.
He went by Justin, but he had been born Stanley Justin Rott. Originally, he was from the Chicago area, Schaumburg, a graduate of Schaumburg High School. He had been in Texas since early 2004. Justin had moved from the upper Midwest down to San Antonio to be with his mother, a woman he’d not had a relationship with since he was two years old.
“And so, I really never had a relationship with her,” he commented later.
Justin Rott’s biological mother had called her boy one day out of the blue and asked if she could begin to get to know him. Not having much of anything tying him down in Illinois, he made the trip to San Antonio, with the hope of starting over. Sadly, though, as he would later tell it, this renewed “new relationship” didn’t come packaged with a Disney ending.
“It didn’t work out so well,” he said. “She had some issues of her own.”
Since his early teens, Justin had internalized an itch for numbing the pain of life with drugs. He had done his share up north; but after moving in as a twenty-four-year-old with his mother, the six-four, 195-pound Chicagoan got an idea of where that longing for chasing the red dragon had come from.
