Never See Them Again, page 18
“Listen, I heard that some black guy, who was supposed to be all doped up, one night at a party, he was, like, mouthing off that he had done it. . . .”
“You heard that?”
“I’ll try to find out who it was,” Abby said.
“Don’t do anything dangerous. Please use caution . . . and notify the police or me as soon as you can.”
Another week—heck, another year—and another new theory to add to that growing list of possibilities.
George hung up the phone and sat back. Some days were tougher than others. All he could do was take a deep breath, have a good cry, and carry on.
CHAPTER 31
AS THANKSGIVING 2004 arrived, Justin Rott and his new girl decided to part ways for what was the first time in their near month-old relationship. Because Justin didn’t have any family nearby, he went with a couple of guys from the halfway house to San Antonio and spent the holiday with one of their families. Christine drove back to Friendswood to spend the weekend with Tom Dick and Lori Paolilla.
Christine had been transformed. She was feeling good, looking good, and comprehending the notion that drugs were only going to slow her down in life. She saw Justin Rott as the ideal man for her, mainly because he was gentle, soft-spoken, and, according to her, nonviolent in every way that she had been accustomed to with Chris Snider. Justin treated her like a lady, and Christine had never experienced such affection and tenderness from a man. He allowed her to have her own feelings, think for herself, and be herself. And she truly felt, for maybe the first time, that a healthy relationship with a man was possible. She could love someone without smothering him with insecurities.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Justin and Christine continued to see each other every day. Perhaps against their better judgment, Lori Paolilla and Tom Dick told Christine that Justin Rott was welcome in their house for the Christmas holiday. No doubt Christine had told them about Justin during the Thanksgiving break. And she must have worked them hard since then. Look how great I’m doing, Ma. . . . He’s an excellent guy! I love him. In any event Christine approached her new man just before the Christmas break. “Why don’t you come to Friendswood and spend the holiday with us?”
“Of course,” Justin answered. “Yes, absolutely.”
Justin Rott had some news himself. Just before they prepared to head northeast to her parents’ house, he took Christine out to a bridge in Kerrville. It wasn’t the George Washington or the Golden Gate, but the small concrete edifice with the murky, muddy water below was good enough to serve his purpose on this day, and perhaps even act as a portent, pointing out what was ahead for both of them.
“I cannot be with you anymore,” he said as they stood on the bridge, a slight wind blowing cool winter air.
Christine’s jaw dropped. Then the tears came.
Here we go again: more rejection. She thought she’d escaped it this time. But here was another human being she had given her heart to about to walk out of her life and never return. It felt like murder. And if there was one person who knew about those feelings, how much they tore at the heart, it was Christine Paolilla.
CHAPTER 32
GEORGE WAS HOME in his office, working late. He had been feeling as though the case was never going to be solved. It was that up and down, back and forth, hot and cold nonsense that comes with the territory of losing a child to murder, and then becoming actively involved in catching her killer.
In the days to come, George Koloroutis and Brian Harris would refer to them as the “old guys.” One of the old guys called George at home. George had been the most visible of the victims’ family members. He was on the news and in the newspapers.
One of the old guys decided to phone him with news that sent George’s heart racing.
“We think we know who killed your daughter,” the old guy said.
George stood up from his desk chair. “You what?”
The old guy repeated it.
They talked some more. The old guy explained that he and his partner, a retired cop, were private investigators. They wanted to help. You know, go over some things the police had already investigated and follow a few leads they had developed on their own. George set up a meeting and hung up. Why not hear them out?
No sooner had he cradled the phone, than George called Brian Harris and explained what was going on.
“We want to be there,” Harris told George, meaning at his house when the old guys came for that meeting.
“No problem.”
CHAPTER 33
JUSTIN ROTT KNEW immediately that he’d made a terrible mistake in teasing the love of his life. “I cannot be with you anymore”—he corrected himself quickly after seeing the tears run down Christine’s cheeks—“as your boyfriend!”
“What?” she said, perking up. “What did you just say?”
“Christine, I love you. Could you please make me the happiest man and make me your husband, and you be my wife?”
Not so much a smooth wordsmith, but the guy was proposing marriage in his own sincere way.
“Yes. Yes. Yes!” Christine answered. She wanted to jump up and down, but instead she hugged her man and wept some more—this time tears of joy.
They were engaged. Weeks after meeting, while both were in treatment for serious drug addictions, Christine Paolilla and Stanley Justin Rott were planning on getting married. This was no simple train wreck in motion; it was more like a fifty-car pileup on the highway, and a train with a dozen railcars was heading toward it!
“It was one of the reasons,” Justin Rott said later, “why she wanted me to meet her parents” during Christmas break.
Both agreed, however, that it would not be a good idea to tell Lori and Tom that they were going to be husband and wife within a few short months. That would be their secret, at least for the time being.
“Well, I mean,” Justin recalled, “everybody thought we were kind of crazy because we didn’t know each other that long. And that’s one of the reasons why she wanted me to meet her parents—because we got engaged.”
Both were able to secure the required permissions from their halfway houses to go to Christine’s parents for the holiday. They drove down to Houston/Friendswood from Kerrville, arriving a few days before Christmas Eve, with the intention of staying about five days. It was supposed to be Justin Rott, Christine, and her parents. Christine’s brother showed up and took the spare bedroom, while Justin was given one of those plastic Walmart blow-up mattresses to put on the floor of the entertainment room, a section of the house, he later added, that impressed him. There was a large-screen television and a nice setup for showing movies.
Christine and Justin slept together on the blow-up mattress. And, according to Justin, neither Lori nor Tom voiced any objection to the arrangement.
During Christmas dinner, Christine appeared depressed, looking down at her plate of food, playing with her vegetables. She seemed to be forever on the verge of saying something that never came out of her mouth. Justin looked on and listened most of the time, knowing his boundaries.
“I miss home,” Christine finally voiced.
“We want you back here,” Lori said.
Christine smiled. She wanted to come back.
“I can offer you a job,” Tom Dick told Justin at one point during the meal. It wasn’t pitching bales of hay or picking up horse dung, either. Tom Dick promised Justin he could help get him into the plumber’s apprenticeship program. Not too shabby for a dope addict in recovery.
At some point during the dinner, Lori, according to a source at the table, brought up the Clear Lake murders, saying, “How difficult this holiday season must be for those families that lost their children.”
They all knew what Lori was referring to. The crime was still something the community, of which Lori and Tom were a part of, had been concerned about and were still coming down from. If four kids could be murdered like that in broad daylight, and the crime went unsolved for as long as it did, what role did the community play in the delay? Not only that, but Lori had met Tiffany and Rachael.
Christine didn’t seem to want to discuss the crime, especially since her friends had been among the murdered.
She was still as a stone. Quiet too.
“I think,” Lori said next, “that whoever did this to these kids should get the needle.”
Such a bold statement.
Justin Rott agreed.
Christine, white as paper, “with a frozen look on her face,” Justin later said, didn’t respond. She looked at her man, however, with her eyes bulged out, or, as Justin later put it, “just . . . huge.” Christine was shocked that her mother had said such a thing.
Justin thought something was up: There was more to the look on Christine’s face than someone, per se, reacting to an audacious remark about the death penalty. There was something about the way she protruded her eyes out at him. He made a mental note to continue the conversation with her later, when they were alone.
After a brief moment, Christine pushed her meal aside and complained about not having much of an appetite.
Dinner was over.
The Christmas holiday visit to Friendswood ended without drama or problems for Christine and Justin.
For Justin Rott, it was the first time in years that he had sat down to a Christmas dinner within the framework and closeness of a family environment, and it made him feel great about the people who were going to be his in-laws. He had gotten along well with Christine’s parents.
“They were wonderful,” Justin said of Tom Dick and Lori Paolilla. “They bought me Christmas gifts. They were polite to me. It was one of the best Christmases I had had in years.”
Besides that one instance—Lori’s death penalty comment—Christine seemed happy over the holiday. She had matured in some ways and was ready to take on life with a new outlook. And now her stepfather had offered her soon-to-be husband a job. Sobriety was everything they had promised.
When they returned to Kerrville, Christine and Justin took in a New Year’s Eve party at La Hacienda, a treatment center for alcoholism and other chemical dependencies where Justin had taken on service work in the past with younger kids, helping out classes on Thursday nights. He knew mostly everyone at La Hacienda, had a good rapport with many of the employees and several of the counselors. Introducing Christine to everyone felt good; he had found someone. It was rewarding to show her off.
The party went off as planned, and Justin and his girl had a great time. Christine was so comfortable with her new surroundings, the way of life she now led with her new man, that she even raised her hand and decided to give karaoke a try. Everyone laughed and clapped along as Christine belted out a few pop songs in her squeaky, high-pitched, off-key singing voice.
At some point during that same week, Justin pulled Christine aside and told her: “I want to take that job your father offered me. Let’s go to Friendswood together. Start new lives.”
Christine was beside herself. Awesome. Another reason to celebrate. Lest they forget, within months Christine was going to be coming into a whopping sum of money from her biological father’s death—$360,000.
They could get married, buy themselves a home, and begin to live happily ever after.
Both Justin Rott and Christine Paolilla had to know that happily ever after was truly something written in fairy-tale marriages only, and this about-to-be union between two recovering drug addicts stepping into a ton of cash—well, let’s just say that it would turn into anything but a Rapunzel moment.
THE OLD GUYS showed up at George’s house. Detective Brian Harris and a colleague sat with George and greeted the two men as they got comfortable.
The old guys brought photographs and reports. They sat and talked about JU and that drug ring connection. They were certain the JU path was the right way to go with the case. It had to be.
All of the evidence pointed to JU and/or one of his drug-dealing cohorts.
“All right,” George said.
After discussing it with Harris as the old guys were out the door, heading back to wherever they had come from, George decided to keep in contact with them and see what they could come up with.
To put it mildly, Harris was “unimpressed.”
CHAPTER 34
HARRIS HAD A feeling the old guys were either looking to collect on the reward money, or maybe looking to pilfer some quick cash out of a grieving father. Whether one or the other, Harris didn’t trust the old guys. But what the detective didn’t want, beyond anything else, was to have two Thomas Magnum, P.I., wannabes, who had probably watched far too much crime television, wiggling their way into his case and muddying the waters. If they knew something substantial, they needed to cough it up.
The old guys had certainly known things that only a cop on the inside could have given to them. By talking to them over the course of a few weeks, Harris could tell that much. So the old guys had some good contacts within HPD. What PI didn’t have a source inside the police?
In meeting with the old guys a few times after that night, George had come to realize that maybe they could help, but it was clear that they were also, at times, throwing mud against the wall, hoping some of it would stick.
“They were just rehashing stuff that HPD had scrubbed already,” George commented. “They were just trying to get a hundred-thousand-dollar reward! In my mind I was going to do what I could. And that was just one more avenue.”
Detective Harris had continually met with the old guys and, in George’s words, “they just had some stupid stuff to say to him.”
At one time the old guys had even made George feel as though he was a suspect.
“Guys, I was somewhere else—everybody knows that. I have an alibi.”
In a nice way, George was trying to say, Let it go. . . .
“In hindsight,” George said, “Brian Harris was right. They were a colossal waste of my time and money.”
George was a desperate father hoping to find his daughter’s killers. Why wouldn’t he jump at the chance to grab a rope that two private eyes were throwing him?
Brian Harris was finished with the old guys, however, and running out of patience. He had given the old guys the benefit of the doubt, hoping maybe they could dig something up. But their presence was becoming an irritation and hindrance more than anything else.
Harris had heard the old guys had gotten some information about a pistol—a weapon involved in the murders. He was curious, especially seeing that they hadn’t shared the information with HPD. So Harris called one of the old guys.
The old guy was hesitant about giving Harris the info.
“Well,” Harris suggested, “let’s meet up and talk then.”
The indication he left them with was that maybe they could help each other out.
“Yeah, okay,” the old guy said.
They met for breakfast.
Harris showed up with a subpoena for any information they had in relation to the Clear Lake murders. He threw it on the table.
One of the old guys placed his hand on Harris’s chest. “Brian, hey, man, we don’t have to turn anything over to you.”
Harris looked at his hand. “You have about one second to take your hand off my chest.”
They sat down.
A waitress came and Harris ordered coffee. “Listen,” he said, staring at the two of them, after she walked away, “you are not going to interfere with this investigation, you understand me? I want to see all your notes . . . anything you have!”
One old guy slid his notebook across the table. “Here.”
“You don’t dictate how an investigation goes,” Harris warned. “You operate under the law.”
The old guys understood their role. Harris was clear. He would give them leads to follow up on—things he didn’t have the manpower to get done himself. But they were not to hold anything back.
Breakfast was over.
CHAPTER 35
CHRISTINE PAOLILLA AND Justin Rott woke up one morning in March 2005 and decided, you know what, a big, traditional wedding, with ushers and bridesmaids, and long gowns and tuxedoes, and maybe those tiny hors d’oeuvres on silver serving platters, wasn’t what they wanted. It just didn’t seem to fit their character. Hundreds of guests and a big bill didn’t sound all that enticing. The time it would take to schedule and send out invitations. Order food. Hire a band. Then sit and listen to people they didn’t know clank forks against champagne glasses. Waiting and laying out a bunch of money for a huge celebration—for what?
Instead, they decided then and there, on that cold March morning, that a short shotgun ceremony would best reflect who they were as people and the love they had found in each other. A minister and a chapel, or perhaps a justice of the peace, would suffice.
Nothing more.
They chose March 22, 2005. Just like that, Justin and his girl woke up single and went to bed that same night a married couple. How easy it was to share a life, legally speaking, and turn over half of what you own to someone else.
Christine called Justin one day from the halfway house she was still living in: “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay,” he said.
And so that was it: they hopped in Christine’s car and bid Kerrville, Texas, adieu.
The plan was to move to Friendswood and buy a condo. But for the time being, they stayed holed up in a motel, already spending Christine’s cache of cash. The ATM became a daily stop for the both of them.
“No,” Justin said later when asked if they had started using drugs. “Not at this time. No.”
That was all about to change, however.
Very soon.
In a gigantic way.
HOMICIDE HAD BEEN manning the phones ever since those billboards went up all over town. The Crime Stoppers tip line and George Koloroutis’s website had been running on full speed. Now it was just after the two-year anniversary of the murders and HPD and the families launched another public cry for information. The anniversary was as good a time as any to continue to push the case. The past year had developed some leads, but nothing had ever come of them. With the announcement once more, the publication and the airing of the sketches again, came another round of new calls and leads to follow up on. Detective Brian Harris, who had been promoted to sergeant, supervising those men he had worked with (to the chagrin and resentment of some in the department), was working the case by himself by now. There was no team of investigators spending days looking at evidence, following up on calls, interviewing witnesses. Some cases get to a point where the thing that ultimately solves it is that notorious break.
