Never See Them Again, page 34
“So, did they give her drugs?”
“Yes, they did.”
“What did they give her?”
“They gave her . . . at approximately six-fifteen at night they gave her twenty milligrams of methadone by mouth. Methadone is a long-acting narcotic. Unlike heroin, which has a four- to six-hour half-life, or in that frame, methadone has a, you know, eighteen- to twenty-four-, thirty-six-hour half-life, which means you go through withdrawal much [longer] if you take it. Twenty milligrams of methadone is relatively . . . [for] someone who doesn’t normally take any narcotics, that would be enough to, if not put you to sleep, really tranquilize you for a time. An hour later they gave her six milligrams of morphine sulfate in a shot by IV. They had an IV running. The normal dose, if you were to go to the hospital with a heart attack, the first treatment is they give you a shot of morphine sulfate, the normal dose is four to eight milligrams. So, she got approximately what would have been the dose for a fifty-year-old guy with a heart attack—on top of the methadone. And then a couple hours later, before she leaves the hospital at nine o’clock, they give her another twenty milligrams of methadone and they give her another shot of morphine two or three hours later.”
The point Glass left out, which would have been critical for jurors to hear, was that for a junkie of Christine’s caliber, these narcotics would have brought her to a normal state, calmed her down and leveled her out.
This argument by Glass went on and on. The point he was trying to make was that Christine had not been in her right frame of mind to have been questioned for as long or as vigorously as she had been by police.
He talked about Christine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of her father’s death. He mentioned that she had low self-esteem because of her alopecia. She was “susceptible to what are called . . . codependent abusive relationships.”
Late into the day, as Tom Goodhart began his cross-examination, DeGeurin needed to leave the room for some reason.
“Doctor,” Goodhart began anyway, “we’ve met once before, correct?”
“Yes.”
“May I be excused, Your Honor?” DeGeurin stood and said. “I’ve got co-counsel—I’ve got to find out . . .”
“Okay,” the judge said.
“Judge, may I approach?” Goodhart asked.
“Yes.”
“Considering this is the foundation of their defensive argument, the fact he just left the courtroom, I think, is a bad thing for the record. I trust him completely in his capabilities, but I don’t want to take this chance.”
“This is ridiculous,” the judge said in frustration. He sent the jury out of the room.
Moments later the judge called them back and got the trial going again.
Drama. Every trial had its share.
One of Goodhart’s main points was to show the jury that Glass was walking into this situation after the fact, and his comments and opinions should be taken as such. For example, Goodhart questioned whether Christine was addicted to heroin and how the doctor would know if he had not treated her at the time, asking, “Doctor, were there any medical tests run at either hospital to verify the presence of opiate heroin inside of her system?”
“No.”
“There were not.”
Well into his cross, Goodhart pressed the doctor for his professional opinion of Christine at the time of her arrest.
“Is she a liar?”
Dr. Glass gave the prosecutor a dragged-out version of yes, stating: “She’s distorting, as do most addicts. When they go somewhere and they want to get something, to a doctor’s office, emergency room, they usually bump up what they’re taking when they tell somebody, in the hope that they’ll get more rather than less.”
“They lie about it, don’t they?” Goodhart clarified.
“Yeah. Lie, distort, whatever.”
“Addicts are liars—”
“Judge,” interrupted DeGeurin, who had not left the room after all, “I’m going to—I can’t let that question go. I object to it.”
The judge leaned toward the gallery: “Overruled. Answer the question, sir.”
“Are you asking me a philosophical question, or are you making a moral statement?” Glass wanted to know.
“No, sir. I’m flat asking you—what you just said a little while ago in your direct testimony—they will do just about anything to get more drugs?”
“That’s true.”
“Okay. That means they’re liars, manipulators, fabricators. Would that not be a fair statement?”
“They may do all those things.”
“Would you say that’s indicative of just about every junkie you’ve ever known?”
“At different times, yes.”
“Sometimes we have to pick the kernels of truth from the lies,” Goodhart concluded his point, “. . . when we talk to junkies?”
“Depends on whether they’re using or whether they’re clean.”
The doctor finished earlier than expected. With that, DeGeurin whispered a few words to his co-counsel, said something to Christine, and then addressed the court.
“We’ll rest.”
Rob Freyer called one more witness, Rachael’s sister, Lelah Koloroutis. It took Lelah about thirty seconds to say she recognized Rachael, Tiffany, Adelbert, and Marcus in a photograph that Freyer wanted placed into the record.
Here was a smart prosecutor, once again reminding jurors what the trial was about: the victims.
After that, the day was concluded by the judge, who promised closing arguments from both sides next.
CHAPTER 71
DURING HIS CLOSING argument on Monday, October 13, 2008, ADA Rob Freyer told jurors that Chris Snider “alone, was not to blame” for the murders. He warned jurors about falling for that “tired and pathetic tactic.” Christine Paolilla was “just as responsible,” Freyer said, imploring each juror to ask him- or herself: “Could this horrible event have happened without her?”
He paused.
Then, “Of course not!”
Defense attorney Mike DeGeurin suggested to jurors that Christopher Snider was responsible all by himself. He rang that bell at the beginning of his closing, and he continued throughout. It was, after all, the only chance DeGeurin had to save his client.
Yet, none of it did any good.
“Guilty,” the judge read into the record after a brief deliberation by the jury.
One of the more interesting aspects of the guilty verdict, which came out later that same day, was a comment made by juror Cliff Sheets, who spoke to reporters outside the Harris County Justice Center, when he said that he had been “among four panelists who had initially voted for acquittal, but who all eventually changed their minds.” There were questions, Sheets added, but the answers the jury had come to during deliberations were satisfying enough to send Christine Paolilla to prison.
“There was a lot of contradiction in her stories,” Sheets offered, “in the three interviews she gave.”
Before she was sentenced, the families had an opportunity to read impact statements. George Koloroutis had written an emotionally charged testimonial that would allow him, for the first time, to face his daughter’s murderer and address her actions. George had spent thousands of dollars of his own money and enough emotion to probably strip a few years from his life, while trying to help solve his daughter’s murder. This verdict was not a payoff, a triumphant moment of any sort; it was an end to the criminal case.
It was justice.
Nothing more.
The loss. The real pain. The memories. They were all going to be there, waiting every morning for George, same as for the other families. There was no way of getting around the loss, no matter how much Christine suffered. There would be days when, for no apparent reason, after thinking they had come to terms with the loss, when tears would come from nowhere. Or a moment, a memory, a party somewhere, that would send them into a spiral of depression so consuming they had to get away by themselves and recover.
The look on the faces of these families as a video camera panned the room, and the court waited for Christine Paolilla to be brought back in after a break, depicted a group of people who had shed all the tears they had left and were now dredging up an even deeper layer of emotional agony.
Christine, in tears herself, was brought into the courtroom. She wore what had become her standard court attire: pink houndstooth headband to match a collared pink shirt underneath a reddish brown sweater vest. She had gained some weight since her arrest and her face was chubby and heavily made-up. Christine wiped tears and mouthed things to her mother and lawyers, all with a look that spoke of a woman who did not comprehend what she had done or what was happening.
George Koloroutis sat directly behind Christine with a look of absolute seriousness (or maybe disgust), waiting for his turn to speak.
The judge told Christine as she sat down that she didn’t need to do anything more than “listen” as the impact statements were read.
Sitting in the witness stand first, facing Christine, Nichole Sánchez read her prepared statement. The tears came almost immediately as Nichole talked about how much she and her family missed Adelbert. It was the simple things that they cherished the most, Nichole pointed out.
“His smell,” she said. “His laugh. . . . My parents will never get the chance to see Adelbert grow up and see what he would have become and done with his life.”
Christine wiped tears with a tissue.
Up next was Charlene Gronewold, Marcus’s mother, who spoke for both Marcus and Tiffany, two kids in love and ready to take on the world. “Our life is changed forever” was Charlene’s opening theme; she said it right away, through a torrent of anguish. Then, perhaps making the most profound statement a parent could make while responding to the death of a child, Charlene Gronewold said, quite emphatically, “The normal we knew will never be. We have to find a new normal. . . . But don’t pity me, pity those kids. There’s no victory here. Just justice”—and here she paused, dredging up the strength to continue—“because we still leave here without our kids, and we forever have to live that nightmare.”
Wearing an aqua blue business shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, George walked to the stand, a piece of paper in his hand. George told the story of the evening he found out that his daughter had been murdered, explaining how he, Ann, and Lelah had spent the night in front of Tiffany Rowell’s house, waiting for word that Rachael was one of the four.
From there, George talked about how it was that Rachael’s little sister, George and Ann’s then-nine-year-old daughter, found out that her big sister had been murdered. She had been at a neighbor’s house that night, George said. He had walked over the following morning to pick her up, this after not sleeping, watching his other daughter, Lelah, vomit, while his wife curled into a ball and cried as the sun came up.
“Hey, Dad,” George’s youngest child said as they walked back home. “I know what’s going on.”
George asked her what she meant.
“I snuck in and saw it on the news . . . four teens got shot.”
George told her, “Yeah, that’s true.” Then, as they approached the house, this broken father added, “Listen, your mom and [Lelah] and I, we need to talk to you.”
The little girl asked why.
“Because, you know, one of those teenagers was your sister Rachael.”
Five years later, George cried here on the stand, describing this scene, telling the court, “That day will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
George had become the quasi-public spokesperson for the group of families. Here, on this day, he called Christine—who wiped tears with a Kleenex, looking away and at her attorneys, shaking her head—an “evil” person, “cold, calculated, and heartless.” He then gave what was an image of lasting candor, adding, “[Rachael’s] picture never ages, while we do. . . . Christmas, birthdays . . . college graduation—there’s always an absence, a silence that is deafening.”
Perhaps one of the more incredible statements made by anyone that day came when George said that regardless of his ill health, both mentally and physically, due to the murder of his daughter, what her killers never realized was that “we would never stop! We worked diligently with HPD. And we give all credit to their heroic efforts—and especially that of Brian Harris. . . . David Gronewold was at my side at all times, as were the Sánchez family in this regard. We never gave up. . . . We take solace in the fact that was it not for our efforts, this killer would have gotten away. . . .”
The judge sent Christine back to her cell and adjourned court, retiring to his chambers from the bench quickly, perhaps in tears himself. As the families filed out of the courtroom, an onslaught of wailing was unleashed from them.
Brian Harris and ADA Rob Freyer stood and watched, both men fighting off tears themselves, staring at the ground, looking up, rolling their tongues around closed mouths, the emotional energy in the room too much to take. It was an ending for these two lawmen, who would go on to other cases and other families. But they knew, deep down, that this moment, the last time they would see Christine Paolilla, would be embedded in the families’ minds forever. Although it had been five years since their children had been taken away, it was only the beginning of a lifetime of mourning.
Christine cried as the court bailiff directed her out of the courtroom.
Before bolting from the scene, Judge Ellis had sentenced Christine to serve a mandatory life sentence, which would amount to forty years behind bars before she was even eligible for parole.
Outside the courtroom, Mike DeGeurin was asked how Christine reacted behind closed doors.
“She’s upset,” the veteran defense attorney said. “She totally understands the grief of the families, her friends, the ones who were killed. She only wishes they could understand that she didn’t want any of that to happen. But she understands their grief.”
TOM MCCORVEY, BRIAN Harris’s partner throughout much of the last year investigating and solving the case, walked over to Harris’s desk a few days after the verdict.
That cop who had sat next to Harris and had mocked him, from time to time, comparing his efforts to a capable chimp’s, was at his own desk doing paperwork.
McCorvey stood over Harris, making sure that the guy could hear him.
“Hey, hotshot!” McCorvey said loudly. “How’s it going these days?”
Harris didn’t have to reply. The headlines, the newscasts, the appreciation from the grief-stricken families, spoke volumes.
EPILOGUE
I ASKED GEORGE Koloroutis, as we finished up our interviews, if there is closure for him and his family in any of this. It is a word—“closure”—seemingly tossed around at the end of many murder trials, when families are trying to go on with their lives and justice has been (hypothetically speaking) served. “Closure” is something I generally ask all murder victims’ family members I write about, if I can. Having experienced the murder of a family member (my sister-in-law, five months pregnant, was murdered many years ago in Hartford, Connecticut: one account has a pillowcase placed over her head and her being strangled by a telephone cord), I could relate on a smaller scale to the families and wanted to know if we were on the same wavelength regarding that strange word.
I look at my nephews, Mark and Tyler Phelps, and my niece, Meranda VanDeventer (all of whom I love dearly). They are all grown now and have families of their own. They seem happy. Yet, the one thing I don’t see on their faces or hear in their voices when they talk about their mother is closure. (I should note that their mother’s murder remains unsolved to this day, and their father, my brother, Mark Anthony Phelps Sr., died at forty-seven years of age—from what I am convinced was a broken heart masked as drug and alcohol addiction.)
George gave me what I believe is the best answer I’ve heard thus far.
“Closure? There’s no closure—and there never will be,” he said. “My little girl was killed violently. She had the back of her head beaten in. She was going through hell during her last moments, choking on her own blood, while wondering, looking at her friend, why a friend of hers would do this. . . . She was scared . . . and I’m sure she was, ah, um”—he began crying, that endless pain deep within his soul emerging—“calling my name out. . . .”
George could not continue the conversation.
Later, when I had a chance to talk to him, he brought it up—because George Koloroutis, if nothing else, is a man who finishes things, no matter what.
“Closure,” George went on to conclude, “is not something you are seeking.”
I FELT COMPELLED to share the following transcript (nearly verbatim) of an interview I conducted with a source near the end of writing this book. I think it’s an important concluding (and uplifting) message. In this Q&A with Rachael Koloroutis’s sister Lelah, the true spirit of Rachael emerges. I didn’t want to incorporate Lelah’s answers into the narrative where they belong in relation to a chronological order of the story, simply because some of what Lelah shares is so powerful, if only in its simplicity. It truly shows that the Koloroutis family, same as all the families I write about (and certainly all the families touched by Christine Paolilla and Chris Snider’s crimes), is your typical family, going from day to day, unaware that tragedy is about to enter their lives and change them forever. It is also a good example of how I go about the interviewing process, allowing those people involved in the stories to speak on their own behalf by sharing their various memories and anecdotes. My bet is that I could have asked family members of each of the victims in this story the same set of questions and heard the same answers.
Could you give me one of your fondest memories of your sister?
My senior year of high school, I went to a prom with someone from a private school on a Thursday night. The next morning I was exhausted and wanted to stay home from school but didn’t want to be alone so I talked mom into letting Rachael stay home with me. Immediately we threw on our swimsuits and ran out to our pool in the backyard. We played all day. We had these floats and were practicing running and surfing across the pool on them to see who could stay on it the longest. Rachael was pretending to be the surf shop owner and kept doing a “dude” voice that made me laugh so hard I could barely keep standing. Later we built an obstacle course in the pool and made our little sister run courses through when she came back from school. It was a perfect day of sun and pool and popsicles and being young. I have used that day and the image of her standing on the sundeck as a way of meditating before . . . as my happy place. You see, my whole life she was the person I played with, we were imaginative kids, we made up voices and role played, and had elaborate schemes. [We] used to sit in my car outside the grocery store where we worked and make up stories for every person that walked by. We made each other laugh so hard. . . .
