Never See Them Again, page 3
Chester Rowell owned the Clear Lake house. Chester was a musician. He had remarried and lived with his new wife on a farm in Manvel, a forty-minute ride from Clear Lake.
Eighteen-year-old Rachael Koloroutis was Tiffany’s best friend. Rachael had been staying at the house with Tiffany and Marcus since Rachael had left home weeks earlier after she and her parents had a blowup over a cell phone bill. The problems at home had started for Rachael almost a year earlier, when Rachael had a major blowout with her mother over a few personal issues.
“She turned eighteen,” George Koloroutis later said, “and we got the feeling that she was saying, ‘Screw it, I am going to go and do what I want.’ ”
Kids . . . when you’re eighteen, nineteen, even into your early twenties, life is about the moment—you think you have all the answers. What can a parent do but allow his or her child to go out into the world and learn for himself or herself.
Technically, you couldn’t say Rachael had run away from her Noble Oak Trail home, slightly more than a two-mile, six-minute ride on the Clear Lake/Friendswood town line. Legally, Rachael was an adult. Still, to her family, Rachael had left abruptly and maybe even bitterly. She might have felt she couldn’t cope and decided to run. Yet, on July 16, 2003, two days before she was found dead, Rachael had been in the mood to reconcile things. She had left her mother a voice message: “Mom, I really just want to talk to you. I want to talk to [my little sister]. I’ve got to go, but I’ll call you again later. Love ya!”
Earlier that same day Rachael had sent George an e-mail, expressing how happy it made her that they were all going to sit down and talk, make amends:
I’m looking forward to getting together . . . and all that good stuff. . . . I will consider everything you said. I can see the truth in it. I will try to call you. . . . It is hard. I am afraid to see [Lelah] or even Mom. . . . I feel bad. . . . I do not know when I can face y’all. I don’t know exactly what to do. There are many times I want to pick up the phone but just am not able to. I love you all and will try to get up the courage to call.
She signed the e-mail as she generally did:
Always your little girl, Rach.
After George received the e-mail, he was driving down Clear Lake City Boulevard, heading home on his Harley from a day’s work. He happened to look to his left and spied Rachael, who was sitting in the passenger seat of Tiffany Rowell’s pickup. Seeing George, Tiffany drove up next to him in the left lane. George looked over. He was wearing dark shades and, in his words, “trying to be cool by giving them a head nod and slight smile.” Inside, he later admitted, he was screaming: “Honey, please come home!” Rachael smiled and waved. Tiffany blew George an exaggerated kiss with her right hand. They sped away from each other.
“I watched my little girl drive off,” George said later. “I felt sad, but I knew she needed me and her Mom and sisters back in her life. I knew we would be reunited soon.”
George never saw his daughter alive again.
Ann and George had raised a smart child, loving and caring. Both Tiffany and Rachael had graduated—not two months before—from Clear Lake High School.
They were kids.
Both had their entire lives ahead of them.
THE TWO OTHER victims found inside the house were Adelbert Nicholas Sánchez and Marcus Ray Precella, Tiffany’s boyfriend. “D,” as they called Adelbert, was Marcus’s cousin. According to the medical examiner (ME), he had been killed by “multiple gunshot wounds,” one of which pierced the middle of his forehead. Another round entered Adelbert’s neck. A third hit his left arm. Two rounds had been pumped into his torso, another into his left shoulder. Adelbert was sitting on the couch opposite his cousin’s girlfriend, Tiffany. He wore blue shorts, a T-shirt, and white sweat socks. Lying there, his head leaning slightly on the soft contoured headrest of the couch to his right, D looked as though he was sleeping. With the exception of a large bloodstain halo in the back cushion of the couch outlining his upper body, and D’s eyes closed, a person would expect the boy to wake any minute. He looked so peaceful. Yet, as the forensic evidence would soon prove, a hail of gunfire had killed this twenty-one-year-old, who had recently gotten his high-school diploma from W. T. Hall night school.
Nineteen-year-old Marcus Precella, dressed in plaid boxer shorts, a white cotton undershirt, white sweat socks, had been shot in the head, stomach, right forearm, and right shoulder. There was also a graze wound running across his chest. It appeared that Marcus had been beaten, too. He ended up with what the coroner referred to as “blunt-force head injuries.” There was a cluster of patterned abrasions on his right temple and five lacerations found on the back of Marcus’s head. There was also a star-shaped pattern of blowback, the remnants of gunpowder from Marcus’s killer walking up to him, holding the barrel of the weapon on his head, and firing, likely to make certain he was dead. Marcus was lying on the carpet on his side, almost directly in back of Adelbert, his chest and stomach up against the side of the couch.
This was significant to police as they went through and studied this incredible crime scene. It was an indication, maybe, that they were looking at four execution-style slayings.
Rachael had been beaten the worst, considering how many lacerations, abrasions, and blows her skull had endured; but she had also been shot in the lower abdomen, directly in the vagina (could this be a clue?), five rounds into her right thigh, three to her left shin, one to her right foot. There was even a gunshot wound in Rachael’s left buttock, no doubt fired as she tried desperately to run away from her assailant. Rachael was found facedown on the floor at the foot of the television. She had bruises police believed had likely been sustained from a fall to the ground. Rachael wore a pink top, part of which had been pulled up her back, blue jeans, and white (with gray stripes) Adidas sneakers. Bruises on the back of her left hand were consistent with a person trying to protect herself from a beating—which meant Rachael Koloroutis was possibly alive at the point of which she was beaten to death. Rachael also had a clump of what would turn out to be her own hair in her right hand, a second indication that she had put her hands over her head, trying to protect herself from a violent pistol-whipping.
“To me,” said a detective who would later step into the investigation and put some of the pieces together, “it seemed that Rachael had put up her hands to protect herself, perhaps saying, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ This, mind you, after being shot multiple times.”
Considering all of these wounds, many of which would have been ultimately fatal if she didn’t get immediate help, it appeared Rachael’s murderer had a tremendous amount of anger directed specifically toward her.
Not an indication of an execution-style murder.
Tiffany was on the couch, one foot leisurely on the chair in front of her as though she had been using it as a leg rest. She wore a white sleeveless top and faded blue jeans. Her curly, dark brown hair had flowed naturally down her back and over her shoulders to the top of her breasts. There was a pink blanket to her right, a cup holder armrest in the middle, between her and Adelbert, who sat on the opposite side of the couch. A Sprite can sat in one of the armrest cup holders. Eerily, it appeared Tiffany and Adelbert were watching TV one minute, drinking Sprite, maybe laughing and joking; and the next, dead. No warning. This indicated that they were not afraid of their attacker and perhaps knew him or her, simply because they had not moved. Of course, playing devil’s advocate, one could say that their killer held them there, on the couch, with his or her weapon. (“Don’t move!”) Nonetheless, Tiffany’s white top was now dark red from all the blood, which had run down her head and soaked through her blouse and jeans. She had a bullet wound straight through her forehead, nearly in the middle; she had also been hit in the chin, left cheek, left shoulder, lower left abdomen (an injury that probably produced most of the blood soaking her jeans and lower body), just to the left of her vagina, right leg, right knee, and right shin.
Make no mistake, this was a bloodbath. Or as the prosecutor who would eventually get the case observed, “It’s unfair to the word ‘crime scene’. . . because . . . it was outright carnage. . . .”
Whoever murdered these kids had walked into the house and unleashed a barrage of gunfire. At least that’s what appeared to be the case from a first look. Any police officer could come to this theory straight away. The kids still had plenty of bling on. Some even had cash. There was lots of valuable merchandise spread throughout the house. From a quick look it seemed as though Adelbert and Tiffany were taken out immediately so as not to be a threat. More than that, with so many gunshots—close to forty—from two different-caliber weapons (twenty shell casings left behind telling that story; bullet fragments lodged in the walls and even outside in the fence), it meant one killer had brought two weapons, which told cops that he or she knew there was going to be a large gathering at the house. Or there had been two shooters, which also alluded to the idea that the killer(s) knew what they were walking into.
Papers, magazines, soda cans, and other household items were scattered all about the living-room carpet in front of Tiffany and Adelbert. This indicated a struggle. Rachael, found in front of the television facedown on the floor, had one leg crossed over the other. There were large patches (smudges) of blood all over the carpeting, a trail of smeared blood leading up to the fireplace. In front of the fireplace, crime scene techs located blood droplets, which led to Marcus’s body, found to the right of the fireplace in between the wall and the side/back of the couch, where Adelbert and Tiffany sat. The way Marcus’s body was positioned—his back facing the direction of the shooting—it looked as though he was walking (not running) away from the shooter, another indication he didn’t feel the shooter was a threat.
There was a small foyer leading down the hallway, where the bedrooms are located in the house. There were nine shell casings on the tile and edge of the carpet in the foyer near a dozen or more pairs of shoes. In the corner, by an electrical socket, police found a small pink cell phone that looked as if it had been tossed there or flung out of someone’s hand as he or she fell to the ground.
Between the dining-room and the living-room was a wall cutout with decorative spiral spindles separating the kitchen and a formal dining area. Above that cutout, heading toward the ceiling, was a small air-conditioning/heating vent. There were small blood droplets—spatter—in an arced pattern heading skyward, giving rise to the belief that someone had repeatedly hammered the weapon into the back of Rachael’s head and, while doing so, spattered blood on the wall as though shaking the excess paint off a brush.
North of Rachael’s head was her cell phone, sitting on the ground underneath the leg rest of a lounge chair. Her hand was stretched out heading for the cell phone as though she had been reaching for it when she died.
The photographer snapped a photo of the cell phone, as he did the remainder of the house, inside and out. So many rounds had been fired that several had even gone through the window in the back of the house and found a place in the wooden fence.
One cop walked into the kitchen. There on the counter was a plate of spaghetti, a fork poked into a mound of pasta. Next to it was an opened Tupperware container, pieces of garlic bread inside, crumbs on the counter next to it. Someone had been eating—likely Rachael—when whoever walked into the house, or some time before, unloaded.
Inside the living room, the ME reached inside Rachael’s back pocket and found her driver’s license and a business card. Rachael’s license had a bullet hole through her date of birth.
As they stood and looked over the scene, blood all around them, police realized that the most they could do now was shake their heads and begin to consider what a scene of this magnitude told them. There certainly was going to be many secrets within the context of it all. All they could do now was search for any trace evidence left behind by the killer; maybe a cigarette butt or a hair, a fiber of some sort. Anything that could help point in a direction. Anywhere, essentially. Because the way it looked at this moment, the evidence spoke to someone who had beamed down out of thin air and fired at these kids until the clips and chambers of the weapons they had come in with, and had taken with them, were empty. Then the shooter quickly disappeared back into whatever dimension he or she had emerged from.
Middle of the day and no one saw a thing?
Didn’t make sense.
Then again, four dead kids, for no obvious reason, wasn’t computing well, either.
Houston is home to approximately 2.3 million. The suburb of Clear Lake City had never seen a mass murder of this nature. Nor had any other region of the city and its surrounding counties. Four kids mowed down in cold blood with enough firepower to stage a small war. Who could have done such a thing? Maybe more important to solving the crime at this point, why?
What George Koloroutis, or anybody else—including detectives showing up, patrol officers minding the scene, and crime scene techs searching room by room—knew then was that the answers to this mystery would take years of old-fashioned gumshoe police work; some of it done by George Koloroutis himself. Little did anyone know at this point it was going to be three years—almost to the day—before a suspect worth considering was brought in. Or that it would turn into a case that would take investigators through nearly a dozen states, halfway across the country, and involve one of the most intense and puzzling murder investigations the HPD had ever probed. And when all was said and done, wouldn’t you know it, the murderer had been right under everyone’s nose the entire time, there, within reach. The least likely suspect imaginable.
CHAPTER 4
THE EXISTENTIAL QUESTION every police officer inevitably faces at the beginning of a murder investigation comes down to this: Is one piece of evidence any more significant than the other? Sure, DNA uncovered at the scene might be a bit more exciting than a witness who thinks she saw something, or, rather, might have seen something.
That’s not what we’re talking about here.
What a murder victim has done throughout his or her life, which is pertinent to any investigation of the magnitude HPD encountered on Millbridge Drive, became the focal point immediately. The fact that HPD found out the kids were into drugs turned out to be extremely relevant. Yet, a crime victim’s life is not something that should blemish an investigator’s sense of where to go with a case. You don’t solve murders with blinders on, in other words. You don’t track down killers by denying the obvious or looking the other way, either. You simply check your judgment at the door and follow the trail.
No matter where it leads.
It was no secret that the four murder victims found in Clear Lake City had been dabbling in an active and highly energized Houston drug culture—some more than others. Tiffany and Rachael had just started working at Club Exotica, a topless strip joint on the Gulf Freeway. And on the surface, if that’s all you looked at, you’d be inclined to draw some conclusions about these girls. Strippers and blow (cocaine) went together like bulimia and runway modeling. Indeed, you could probably scrape up a few residue lines of coke on the back counter of any stripper’s dressing room. But digging deeper into Tiffany and Rachael’s lives, you’d see that neither danced, although they had been asked to do so more than once. They waitressed and bartended; two gorgeous teenagers who fought the guys off with clubs, and could have made a bundle exposing what they had been born with. However, they chose to keep their clothes on. That said something about Rachael and Tiffany; it spoke to the kind of people they were at heart. And let’s face it: the difference in the tips waitressing at a strip joint as compared to the local Chili’s or T.G.I. Friday’s is tenfold.
“People might get the wrong impression of my daughter,” George Koloroutis later said. “But she was involved in church activities and taught vacation Bible school. She was a good kid. There are parts of her life that bear no relevance to her murder.”
Still, what if some whacko strip club patron developed an obsession with one of the girls and decided to take out Marcus and Adelbert after following the girls home from the club and knocking on the door?
Collateral damage: Marcus and Adelbert.
Investigators had to consider this.
Or what if Rachael and Tiffany had been mistaken for someone else? Maybe one of the two boys at the house had been a target?
Those scenarios had to be looked into.
In fact, there were so many different avenues the investigation could take in its initial stage, HPD realized, to start developing theories now would be absurd and purely inconsiderate to the memories of these kids. It would stifle progress. Slow the natural evolution of the investigation and what the evidence was about to bear out.
The job of juggling all of these questions was given to Detective Tom Ladd, a seasoned cop nearing the end of nearly three decades of work in HPD’s Homicide Division. Ladd spoke like a character out of The Last Picture Show or Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s Texas masterpieces. Ladd had an unshakable Western accent, a slight lisp, and a scratchy throttle from too many cigarettes.
It was 1969 when Tom arrived at the police academy in Texas, where he spent four months. Then, as Tom later put it, he “was put there on patrol in one of the black areas, here in Houston, called the Third Ward.”
Ladd spent three years patrolling one of the highest-crime districts in the city at the time. He was moved down by the docks, the Harrisburg Canal region, and made a decision while there that would ultimately change the person he became.
“I decided to study for detective,” Tom recalled. “And I scored high enough to qualify, and they put me into Homicide.”
It was 1975.
Ladd never left.
This Clear Lake City case, the massacre of the four out on Millbridge, was Detective Tom Ladd and his partner Phil Yochum’s case. Not because Ladd had some sort of long-lost wish to solve a case of this magnitude, but because of the time of day that the murders had been discovered. Ladd was one of the night men on HPD’s Homicide Division, the “skeleton crew” chief, as he put it, working the three-to-eleven or four-to-midnight watch. When this Clear Lake case came in, Ladd was busy finishing work up on a serial killer case. The problem, he said, with taking cases on the evening shift: “We didn’t have the luxury, because there was so few of us on the evening shift, to work just one case. A lot of times we would get assigned another case and it forced us to decide, ‘Okay, do we work this case, or do we work that case?’ It made us selective in the cases we followed through on.”
