Never See Them Again, page 25
Inside the safe was a second weapon.
Both of these guns would soon be connected to the Clear Lake murders and proven to be the weapons that had killed Marcus, Tiffany, Adelbert, and Rachael.
“Do you think this has anything to do with the murders?” Snider’s mother asked when she called Brandee in Texas and told her what was going on. The cops who had stormed into the house were somewhat vague in describing why they were actually there. It was quite obvious they were looking for Chris; but beyond that, nobody knew what was happening.
“What?” Brandee responded. She had no idea what her mother was talking about.
About three weeks prior, Brandee had gotten into some trouble attacking her boyfriend and tossing his computer into a public pool. In fact, it was the last time Brandee had seen Chris. The day before she was arrested and placed in lockup overnight, Brandee and Chris had gone shopping. They spent a great day together. But when Brandee got out of jail the following day and moved in with her aunt in Pasadena, Chris had already taken off with Haley for South Carolina. In speaking with her mother about the search of the Kettucky house, Brandee assumed that the Robocop assault unit busting into Mom and Dad’s was in response to her throwing her boyfriend’s computer into the water. She thought maybe her boyfriend had called the police and had made up a story.
But murder? What was her mom talking about?
“Yeah, the murders.”
Brandee hadn’t thought about the Clear Lake murders crime in years. Not since it was breaking news. She’d had no reason to.
But then Brandee put the thought into her mind and juxtaposed it with what had been going on with her brother and the conversations they’d had over the years. She then considered Chris’s severe depression and total withdrawal from society, along with the increasing, monstrous appetite the guy had developed for getting as high as he could. Then there were those times (several of them) when Chris had tried to commit suicide over the past three years. Something had been bothering him, Brandee knew. No doubt about it.
“Oh my, I hope it’s not that,” she said.
“They took the guns,” Brandee’s mom said.
The other little factoid Brandee got from her mom was that the cops were on their way over to Brandee’s aunt’s home in Pasadena, and would be arriving anytime to interview her next. It seemed someone had said Brandee was involved in the murders, too.
Later that same afternoon, in Greenville, South Carolina, Chris Snider’s aunt called him. This occurred after Brandee had explained to her what had happened in Kentucky.
Haley Dawkins felt this call was strange, she later said, from the first moment she saw the number on her cell phone and noticed the Texas area code.
His family never calls him, Haley thought as she stared at the number.
This was speculation on Haley’s part. Brandee and her brother, along with their mother, had been in contact with Chris ever since he left Texas. Snider’s father had given him $1,000, in fact, to help him get on his feet. The Sniders weren’t the Waltons, but they held close ties.
Chris was outside playing basketball when Haley took the call. Haley distinctly recalled him wearing black tennis shoes, a black muscle shirt, and gray shorts. He seemed to be in a good mood. He had purchased the clothes during a shopping trip he and Brandee had taken shortly before he left for South Carolina. Brandee had picked out the sneakers for him.
Haley picked up the ringing phone. “Hello?”
“I need to speak with Chris,” the aunt said. The urgency in her voice was clear.
Haley handed Chris the phone. He was out of breath, sweating. “What’s going on?” he asked, wiping himself with a towel.
Haley shrugged. She had no clue.
“The cops are looking for you on murder charges,” the aunt said.
“What? What? Stop joking with me,” Chris said into the phone. Haley later said he used “a panic type of voice” while speaking to his aunt.
“I’m not joking around here, Chris—this is very serious,” his aunt said.
“How could a murder be pinned on me? Don’t call here,” he said. “Don’t call me back.” He hung up.
The aunt called back.
“Don’t call me here, I said!”
“This is serious, Chris.” They talked for about fifteen minutes, according to one police report.
“No, I cannot call Mom,” Chris said. “Look, the cops are going to come here and catch me. Every time you call, they could be closer to the house.”
Snider’s family was trying to tell him it was too late for all that. The police knew where he was, and they were on their way. There was nothing he could do now but tell the truth.
After he hung up, Chris ran over to the computer he was using inside Haley’s house. He logged on to his Myspace account and searched frantically through the site links and icons for directions on how to delete his account.
Haley didn’t know what was going on. She assumed it had something to do with Chris ducking out on his probation.
“How the hell . . . do . . . you do this?” Snider asked, tapping keys; he was frightened and nervous. “The police are going to find me through Myspace.”
Brandee Snider called her brother after getting off the phone with her mother. By this point, Haley had left the house. Brandee was never told why. Regardless, Brandee needed to speak with Chris right away. She had been thinking about his Myspace account, too; that if the cops were smart, they’d log on to Myspace and see that he was in Greenville, South Carolina, living with this new girlfriend. Brandee needed to delete the account for him and, also, ask him point-blank what this was all about. They were close in age and had always been tight. She knew her brother—and the guy she knew was not a murderer. But Brandee also realized that Chris had changed over the past several years. Something wasn’t right with him. She needed to know if he was involved in this vicious crime, or if it was all some sort of misunderstanding.
“Chris, Houston Homicide cops are looking for you, really? Come on. They pulled Mom out of the shower and were looking for the guns in Dad’s bedroom. Did you kill anybody, Chris?”
“No,” he said.
“Chris?”
“No,” he screamed a second time.
“Are you sure you didn’t kill anybody?”
“No,” Snider yelled.
“Well, I don’t know what’s going on, but I need your Myspace password because you have where you’re living on there.” Brandee told him she’d delete the account herself; she knew he wouldn’t be able to do it.
“I don’t know what it is. . . . I don’t know what it is,” Snider said, referring to his password. He was freaking out.
Brandee had helped her brother set up the account. She remembered the password—BOOGER1—and got into the account. Then she handed the phone to her aunt, and the aunt spoke to Chris while Brandee went in.
Chris was going crazy. He knew that the police were on their way.
“No, [Haley’s] not here. . . . I don’t know what to do.” His mind raced.
They talked a few moments more and hung up.
Brandee called back after she completed the computer task. Some time had passed. Maybe an hour or two.
“Where’s my brother?” Brandee asked.
Haley had picked up the phone. “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” she said. “But Chris was running out of the house as I came in.”
“Where did he go?”
“I have no idea. . . .”
“None?” Come on, Brandee wanted to say, you don’t know where the hell your boyfriend went off to?
“No, but I can tell you that he took all of my prescription pills . . . but left three hundred dollars in cash, his cell phone, wallet, and everything else of his here.”
This stunned Brandee. Stopped her in her tracks. She knew her brother—and also where he was going.
Game over, Brandee thought as she hung up with Haley.
For Chris Snider, Brandee later said, there was no way he could have come to the conclusion that at that time he could have sat down with police and maybe turned in Christine and told his side of the murder tale. There was no way Snider would have thought that far in advance, or decided on taking life without parole and giving the police Christine. He just didn’t have the mind capacity, Brandee explained.
“He had a very childlike mind,” Brandee said respectfully. There was a sadness in her voice toward a brother who never really seemed to find his way in life. Chris Snider was a guy who used drugs to fill a hole in his soul, compress any emotional pain, and stuff any feelings of inadequacy he had about himself into a ball, deep down. Chris never thought of himself as anybody, somebody, anyone, or someone. To him, he was nobody, a person whose life was nothing more than gray clouds. Getting up in the morning was a chore for Chris. Facing life was an uphill battle all the time. He was constantly running to stand still, going nowhere.
“You can see how he misspelled words,” Brandee added, “in the letters he wrote. And the way he talked was kind of baby-fied.”
Where this all came from was a mystery. Chris Snider and his sister had a good upbringing in a good home. They were loved. They loved their parents. They didn’t get to know their biological father until they were both adults.
“And what a disappointment that was,” Brandee said.
The guy was a drug addict and an alcoholic. There was no mystery where Chris had gotten that taste in his DNA for drugs; it had been inherited. But he had never grown up in a household environment strewn with drug use, abuse, yelling, and screaming. They were a happy family.
And now he was on the run—again. This time, Brandee feared, heading to a place where he would never have to chase the dragon or run from the police again. Christopher Snider was finished looking behind his back, his sister knew. As Brandee hung up the phone with Haley, she considered how he was going off like a wounded wild animal to die in the woods somewhere, alone—that is, if HPD didn’t find him first.
CHAPTER 51
NOT LONG AFTER Brandee Snider spoke to her brother, she looked out the window and saw a “huge SWAT van” backing up to the door of her aunt’s apartment. From there, Brandee and her aunt watched “these militant cops” file out of the van as if they were zeroing in on a 9/11 suspect. One after the other, they jumped out of the van, Kevlar vests, rifles, goggles, just like at her parents’ house in Louisville, under the impression that Chris Snider was hiding out in her aunt’s home.
“Don’t move!” the first cops in the apartment shouted.
Brandee and her aunt were not going anywhere.
They looked under mattresses, in closets, in drawers, everywhere.
“It was crazy,” Brandee said.
When they were finished, one of the investigators pulled Brandee aside and told her that she was going to have to go with them “downtown.”
“Whatever,” she said.
“Let’s go.”
“Can I at least put on some deodorant and change my clothes?”
Silence. Then a wave of a pistol and nod of the head as an officer followed her into the bathroom first, her bedroom second.
This is nuts. . . . There must really be something going on here, Brandee thought as she got ready.
Once they got Brandee down to HPD, she was put in the box. Brandee thought she was going to be interviewed as part of the investigation into whatever her brother might have gotten mixed up with; but within a few moments, she realized that was not the case.
Brandee referred to the investigator who “interrogated” her (“I refuse to say ‘interviewed,’ that’d be way too nice,” she stated later) as “some really sharp-dressed man.”
According to Brandee, the detective told her, “Look, if you don’t tell us the truth, the truth we already know, you will be charged as an accomplice and possibly be put in prison for life.”
“What?”
The questioning soon turned to where Chris Snider might be and where they could locate him. Brandee gave up Haley’s name. She said she hadn’t spoken to her brother in some time. He might be on the run.
“I think [my boyfriend] made all this up about Chris to get back at us for what I did to him.” Brandee told them all about the Myspace account, her brother saying “no” he didn’t do what they were claiming he had done, and just about everything she could recall. Near the end of the “interview,” Brandee took a deep breath and accepted the idea that maybe Chris had committed murder.
She told the officer, “If this is true, then my brother is dead.”
It felt cold and numbing to say the words, but Brandee knew her brother.
“Christine Paolilla told us that you had something to do with this,” one of the interviewing officers said, according to Brandee.
Brandee had no idea what they were talking about. She felt like a murder suspect. A criminal. Brandee was the first to admit she had some pockmarks and the police knew her name, but a quadruple murder?
Come on.
Brandee said HPD kept her under the light for six hours, questioning her about things she didn’t know anything about. After repeatedly asking her what amounted to the same series of questions, Brandee giving them the same answers, “they realized,” she recalled, “that I didn’t know anything. Then they typed up a statement, had me sign it, and took me back to my aunt’s house.”
In defense of HPD, they had four dead people, a case that was three years old, the end in sight: it was unfortunate that Brandee Snider had to be subjected to such rigorous questioning, but if it could help solve this case (and maybe save her brother from hurting himself), it was part of the process.
Brandee’s mom called from Kentucky after hearing what had happened. “If you want to come out here to Kentucky, I’ll send you a plane ticket.”
Brandee said, “Yes. Yes.”
CHAPTER 52
ONE STORY CHRISTINE Paolilla failed to share with Brian Harris—or anyone else—as she began to talk about her role in what had happened on July 18, 2003, took place the day after the murders. She was at Chris Snider’s parents’ home in Crosby, Texas.
There was a part of Christine that viewed her relationship with Chris Snider as a “Bonnie and Clyde” type of romance, both of them connected by the crimes they had committed together. Some later said Christine had planned the murders of her friends so she and Chris could have this one interrelated bond between them that Snider could not sever—the ultimate secret, in other words, keeping him from ever walking out on her, like she presumed everyone else throughout her life had done.
Some evidence pertaining to this theory was the fact that Christine and Chris were routinely taking off to Walmart or another retail store with a strategy to rob the place. Snider later reported that during one afternoon postmurder, he and Christine took a trip to Walmart (she always drove; Snider never owned a car) and boosted two DVD players. They went back. Christine became manic inside the store, as if she was in her element, an elated state of grace to steal. She loved it. “Hey, babe,” she’d said to him while they were walking through the CD section. “Come here.” Chris walked over. Christine took a quick look around. Then, happy no one was watching, she stuffed his pants with CDs, laughing. There was a glistening look in her eyes.
The ultimate heist, though, took place on July 18, something both Chris and Christine could not help but to boast about twenty-four hours later. Brandee Snider was at home on this day, July 19, sitting on her bed inside her room. She heard her brother and Christine stumble into the house loudly, as they often did, making their presence known to anyone around.
Next thing Brandee knew, the door to her bedroom was flung open. There stood Christine and her brother, ear-to-ear grins on their faces. Chris was holding something.
“Look . . . what . . . we . . . have,” Christine said proudly, a look of euphoria on her face. Certainly not the dark and troubled gaze of someone who was overwhelmed by the fear of watching her boyfriend kill four people, worried he was going to kill her and her family (as she had said repeatedly in the months afterward).
Chris raised his eyebrows.
Christine now held the bag—the size of a pillowcase—full of pills.
“X,” one of them said. “An entire bag of X.”
Thousands upon thousands of dollars’ worth of the drug.
Brandee flipped out. Jumped up off her bed. “There’s only one way, Chris, that you could have gotten this.” Brandee was upset and angry. She didn’t understand what her brother wanted with all those drugs, enough to put him in jail for decades.
Chris and his girl stepped into Brandee’s room, closing the door behind them. Chris knew his sister. She couldn’t keep anything from their mother. She was honest like that, to the core. She would tell. But he went ahead, anyway, and showed her the bounty he and Christine had just burgled.
“What is all this? Are you guys crazy?”
They smiled over such a huge score.
“What do you think?”
“You’ve got to get rid of that right now,” Brandee said.
“Come on,” Chris told his girlfriend. He took the bag and walked toward the bathroom. “We’re flushing it.”
“What?” Christine responded, shocked. “No, Chris. No.”
Brandee stood by as her brother flushed the pills, handful by handful, down the toilet, the clear water spiraling dollar bills into the city sewer system. This was a major hurdle for Snider to overcome in the relationship, family members later said. For Chris to turn and tell Christine what they were going to do (especially with drugs) was out of character for him.
Later, Brandee found out that she should have stayed and watched them flush it all, because she heard from her brother that they had flushed only half of the bag and kept the rest.
