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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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The songwriter blew off the notion. It wasn't until a year later, after that painful call from her mother regarding Rachael's death, and a desire to help the families raise money for Crime Stoppers through the benefit concert, that Jennifer Grassman wrote a song for her old friend. The idea came to her when she saw Rachael's photo on the local news one night.
“There was video of a memorial on the sidewalk outside the house in which Rachael and her friends had died.”
People had left scores of traditional roadside remembrances: roses, teddy bears, candles, and cards. Looking at it all that day, Jennifer “felt sick.” But then she went home and, recalling that Rachael had asked her about writing a song almost a year earlier, she sat and penned the song “White Roses” for her dead friend. It was a way to release her pent-up feelings, a way to pay homage to a friend she had never really gotten to know as well as she would have liked, and also a way to put into song how much Rachael would be missed by the community and her dear friends.
Now, a week after that benefit concert, on November 19, a day before Rachael would have turned nineteen, Crime Stoppers was holding a press conference. The reward, Crime Stoppers announced, which over two hundred donors were said to have contributed to, was the largest cash reward ever offered through any Crime Stoppers organization nationwide. Quite a message was being sent by those who knew the victims and, for that matter, those who didn't.
The reward of $100,000 was a lot of money for the person who could call in a tip anonymously. The amount alone, most were certain, would generate interest and stir the community into action.
If there was one final message by family members related on that day of the press conference, it was that the kids “were targeted” and that “somebody out there knew something.”
Hopefully, money would draw that person out of his or her shell.
At the end of the press conference, it was declared that anyone with information about the case should call the Crime Stoppers tip line.
With that, what else was left to say?
As the event broke up, Tom Ladd called George and Ann Koloroutis off to the side. “I want to introduce you to Detective Brian Harris. He's part of the team now working on the case.”
Harris stood with a bashful smile. He and George Koloroutis exchanged pleasantries. They had met once before, but not formally.
George appeared to be encouraged: here was someone new, someone with a fresh perspective, someone with some fire in his eyes for finding answers.
“Great to meet you,” George said, sticking out his hand, rubbing Harris's shoulder with the other. He liked Harris the moment the officer spoke. “Look,” Ladd explained, “Harris is working on a few leads. He's heading off to Jacksonville tomorrow to check out some things. I can't discuss them with you right now.”
This impressed George. Maybe there was a break in the case? George didn't want to get his hopes up or meddle. He never did. He wanted only what was best for the case. He wasn't going to push Ladd into telling him what Harris was onto. When the time was right, George knew, they would come to him and talk about it.
Leaving the press conference, Harris stopped by the office to pick up some cash and a few other personal items he needed for the trip. His plane was flying out that night. Within several hours, Harris would touch down in Jacksonville, Florida, and be on his way to following a new trail.
CHAPTER 18
O
NE OF RACHAEL
and Tiffany's best friends back in high school, Christine Paolilla, had been bouncing around town after the school year ended. Christine still had another year of high school left. That summer of 2003, Christine was doing what young girls with little direction, a chip on their shoulders, and an erogenous appetite do when left to their own devices. She was working at Walgreens, a job Christine claimed to like, but she was beginning to dabble more and more in a serious side of teen life as each day passed—a side that can grow out of control without warning.
Some of Christine's acting out—the drinking, the dirty sex, the dope smoking, and the pill popping—was said to be based in the fact that she had grown up without her biological father since the time she was two years old. There had not been a male role model figure in her life for what was an important formative time period. Also, Christine's mother was an admitted drug user, fully recovered as Christine headed into her latter high-school years; but, nonetheless, she had not been the best mother to Christine, as a clean and sober mom might have been.
One of Christine's psychological doctors later commented on the girl's overall childhood experience, saying, she “had these great big glasses, growing up from first grade, and she had no hair—no eyebrows, no body hair, no head hair. She was a little girl who just wanted to kind of . . . be liked, like all of us.”
The doctor went on to say that Christine also wanted to be like every other child she grew up with and met in school. She was a follower, in other words. Definitely not a leader.
“And those kids would tease her because kids do that. She's got great big glasses. She's got a wig. And they pull and play with that stuff. She just kind of wants to fit in. . . . And she's got ADD. So, she's not like a great student, either. So, she's got no way to fit in.”
While her mother was away “getting fixed,” the doctor added, Christine went to stay with her grandparents, who were “old [and] they're kind of old-time strict folks.”
When Christine turned fifteen, her mother, Lori Paolilla, fresh from rehab and rebuilding her life with a new outlook, asked her daughter for a second chance. “ ‘I'm a different person now' ” was the way the doctor recalled Lori putting it, “and they ship Christine to her mother . . . with her new husband to try and give everybody a fresh start.”
Christine had a brother, whom the grandparents “kept,” the doctor said.
The implication by the doctor was that Christine had never been raised in a stable environment that would allow her to evolve into a productive teen and young adult.
“She's still looking for a place, somebody to kind of take care of her,” the doctor recalled, describing what he said was a pivotal time in Christine's upbringing.
By any standards this would make any kid in the same position grow to be wracked with control and codependency issues. Christine didn't know what a stable environment was like; she had been living with the idea that her father was killed when she was a young girl; and, truthfully, no matter how she turned out later, in Christine's view of herself, she believed her life had been one uphill battle (and disappointment) after another, at least according to this one doctor.
Christine had said herself that as she moved through high school, she always gravitated toward “stray dogs and losers” for boyfriends. It was her sole intention when taking on those lost causes, perhaps subconsciously or consciously (she never said which), to
fix
them, and then move on to the next challenge. The idea was, she couldn't fix her own life or her own psyche, so she'd settle for fixing somebody else's and meet her emotional needs from that. There were additional, mitigating factors involved, that same doctor explained. Because she had lost her dad in that workplace accident (which one source later claimed was brought on by the man's own issues with drug use), Christine feared losing the people in her life more than anything else. She woke every morning with the anxiety of someone she loved walking away from her, or not coming home from a simple trip to the store. She did whatever she could then to keep people in her life. She didn't want to be left alone; it brought back all of that repressed feeling of loss and solitude she had grown up with, so claimed this same psychologist.
Tiffany and Rachael had always been there for Christine through their high-school years. Christine could count on these girls; she could depend on them for whatever problem came up. Christine even wrote about her love for the two girls in her school notebooks. If there was one constant in Christine's life when she arrived at Clear Lake High School, it was that Tiffany and Rachael always had her back and were the cushion for whatever fall she'd have on a particular day. And when we're talking about Christine Paolilla, there seemed to be one drama after the next happening on any given day.
On one piece of notebook paper, Christine had shared with the girls how much they meant to her:
Christine + Rachel
[sic]
+ Tiffani
[sic]
= B.F.F.E.
She dotted the
i's
in “Christine” with hearts, and wrote
I love you guys
on the top of the page.
Tiffany responded underneath, writing:
Christine, I love you! You have been there for me when I needed you! I really appreciate how nice you are. -
♥
-Tiff.
If nothing else, Christine could depend on Rachael and Tiffany when all else—and everyone else—failed her. But now they were gone: two more people who had been there for Christine throughout a rough period in her life but were suddenly swept away in a violent, untimely, and unspeakable manner. And Christine, as she went about her days postmurder, was experiencing that loss in ways no one could have ever imagined.
 
 
IN JUNIOR HIGH
, before she ever met Tiffany or Rachael, Christine had hooked up with a kid whom she liked a lot, but whom she became scared of, she later claimed. The kid, Chris, was pushy and aggressive, which she knew from experience could easily turn into violence. Christine had lost touch with the boy for a time. But at a party one night during the winter of 2003, Christine ran into Chris. It was great to see him. He looked so different and grown-up. Since the school year had ended, Christine had been hanging out with Christopher Snider again, the boy who had, according to her, terrified her so much back in junior high. He was a good-looking man now, with neatly cropped, nearly buzz-cut, short, dark blond hair, which he combed down in front to hide what was a receding hairline. Like many kids of his era, Chris had a barbell eyebrow piercing. Christine liked his striking blue eyes, the color of Caribbean water, the neatly trimmed goatee he kept; yet at the same time, Christopher still had that strange look of confusion about him, which she had noticed years before. He was definitely twisted and mentally agile. Something was going on inside his head, for sure. Maybe not something that Christine wanted anything to do with at this point in her life. Yet, she was drawn in by Christopher Snider from almost the minute they reconnected.
Christopher liked his drugs, mainly whatever he could get his hands on. Christine claimed later that she was smoking
only
pot at the time she met and hooked back up romantically with him, but that he kept pushing other dope on her, demanding that she use it with him.
“He was,” Christine later explained, “just, like, a very, uh, hopeless person—yeah, a hopeless person.”
Her boyfriend had a certain darkness he kept within. He was definitely depressed and internalized those feelings to a point where the only thing that took away the pain was the numbing effect of drugs. This was one reason why lots of kids felt the urge to do drugs to begin with: that the hardships of life, whatever they might be, would magically disappear if only they could get high enough.
Part of what changed Christopher Snider, family members later said, was an accident he was involved in as a child. He and his sister, Brandee, were playing football in the street in front of their Texas home one afternoon. He was twelve; his sister was fourteen. They were having fun, tossing the ball back and forth. A truck, apparently not seeing the children, came barreling around the corner and struck Christopher dead on. The impact was so powerful it threw him in the air, sending the boy flying across the street, his rag doll body thumping on the tar. Brandee ran over to her brother, scared he was hurt badly. She bent down. Her brother's eyes were rolling back into his head. His was in shock and going into convulsions.
“It seems that he changed a lot after that accident,” Brandee later said.
Christine fantasized about having a life with Christopher Snider: white picket fence, kids, boat, two cars, a dog maybe, and that suburban, blissful euphoria every human being chases in their mind at some point. Perhaps she saw an unrealistic juxtaposition between the good job and hard work during the week and the parties and good times on the weekends.
These feelings of running off into the sunset with Christopher Snider came, Christine later acknowledged, when he was at a “begging for pity” phase of his life.
“I'm the type of person,” Christine said, “[who has] always dated stupid guys just because, you know, I think I can help them and get them back on their feet. And, you know, all that wonderful stuff that I couldn't do for me.”
Christopher was not that much older than Christine; he had just turned nineteen when they reconnected. But the kid had a rap sheet. There were times, according to Christine, when Snider simply snapped, wielding that resource of anger and violence he kept buried within. He had a ticking time bomb, she suggested, a fuse inside him, which was waiting to be fired up by something she might inadvertently say or do.
“When I first met him, he made me feel so special,” Christine later said. “And there were times when he would act like a fool. He was just a very
violent
person. His family had called the cops on him a bunch of times, and, you know, I always tried to convince his mom that he's doing better—I was, like, enabling him. . . . I was
lying
for him.”
They were at Christine's house in Friendswood one afternoon. It happened to be the same day that Rachael and Tiffany, Marcus and Adelbert, were murdered, July 18. Christine's parents—her mother, Lori, and her stepdad, Tom Dick—weren't home. Snider decided he was going to light up a doobie.
“What the [heck] are you doing?” Christine said. “Put that out!” This particularly upset her because there wasn't any reason for him to be there while her parents were not at home. She was seventeen. They'd freak out if they knew he was even in the house, better yet sparking a spliff on their property. Christopher also knew damn well, Christine later speculated, “that my mom was a recovering drug addict— and yet he
still
thought it was okay, you know, to do drugs in my house.”
But Christine bit the bullet and remained calm.
At first.
“Christopher, look, you know, put that out,” she demanded. They were outside in the backyard, standing by the patio; Christine had managed to get him, at least, outdoors, so the inside of her mother's house wouldn't reek of dope. “I don't want that stuff in my house.” Christine had smoked weed herself and “experimented,” she admitted, but never at home and not on that day. “I would never bring it home. I would never hurt [or] disrespect them (my parents) like that.”
(Yes, that might be true, but Christine surely had other ways of showing impertinence toward her parents' authority, will, and overall desire for her to do good in life and become the adult they expected.)
“Whatever,” Christopher said, continuing to smoke, as if he didn't give a hoot about what his girlfriend was asking of him. “I'll be done quick enough. This is my last one. I don't have any more. Let me do this
real
quick.”
Christine became upset, exploding, “You always have to do things
your
way.”
That initiated a loud argument between them, vulgarities and curses flying back and forth like spittle. It was the middle of the day in suburban Houston, people all around, neighbors with their ears wide open.
“Come into the house!” Christine yelled. “I am not going let my neighbors hear this.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” Christopher said. “Take me home, then! Now!”
“No, Christopher. Don't be mad. Come on.” Christine calmed down. Then turned on the lovey-dovey charm. (“ 'Cause I didn't want him to be mad at me,” she remarked later. “I just wanted him to understand.”)
Christopher didn't say anything in response.
“Come on, baby,” Christine continued, “I just, like, please just respect my house and my parents.” She was whispering, trying to show him that she wasn't into fighting about something that seemed so stupid. Christopher Snider, on the other hand, didn't much appreciate his girlfriend barking at him as though he was a child. So Christopher did what, according to Christine, he did when someone pissed him off: he went after her.
“I tried to forget about [it],” she said later, describing that day, “[and] there was, like, physical contact.”

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