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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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CHAPTER 42
N
O ONE EXPECTED
it to happen the way it did. But in the end, when you look at the ebb and flow of the investigation from an unbiased point of hindsight, you can truly see how the entire Clear Lake investigation led up to this one moment.
It was 2:02
P.M.
on July 8, 2006, ten days before the third anniversary of the murders. A call came into Crime Stoppers. Sergeant Eddie Diaz was manning the desk.
“I overheard Christine Paolilla talking about the murders in Clear Lake, back in July '03,” the tipster said. “Christine was in the Starlite rehab in Center Point, Texas, back in '04 and I was in the same facility.”
It's important to note here that although the anonymous caller was male, it was
not
Justin Rott (as many would later speculate). Justin had never been in the Starlite Recovery Center, and at the time the call came in, he was actively using drugs with Christine, both embroiled in the disease of addiction on a level snowballing out of control.
Diaz asked for more info.
“She claimed that she helped her boyfriend commit the murders,” the male tipster continued. “I have no idea who the boyfriend is, but his name might have been Chris. Not sure. Christine, though, was a friend to one of the girls who was killed.”
In a report of the call, HPD pointed out:
The caller was very forthcoming, not shy, and didn't express any fear.
Christine Paolilla, apparently under the auspices of sobriety and maybe guilt, had opened up to the tipster. They were alone one afternoon in the rehab, sitting together, talking. Christine started the conversation by posing a shocking question to the tipster: “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No,” he said.
What a damn thing to ask someone.
“
I
did,” Christine said, as if proud she had it in her. “And it wasn't something I thought I would ever do.”
She proceeded to explain, in graphic detail, what had happened that day.
“She and her boyfriend,” the tipster told Sergeant Diaz, “killed the four to get large amounts of money and X pills stashed in the home. She said they used a forty-five-caliber and nine-millimeter weapon. I [later] overheard her say that they got the guns from a safe inside the boyfriend's father's house. And she also said that the guns were put
back
inside the safe after the murders,” and her boyfriend had wiped both weapons clean of any prints.
As the tipster talked through Christine's confession, this new version added details to Justin's description. For one, the tipster said Christine talked about her telling Chris Snider she thought they (Marcus and D) had a gun inside the house, and she didn't, at first, want to go through with robbing them.
“She said she got sick to her stomach while walking up to the house and lost her nerve.” But Chris Snider convinced her to go through with it. (A comment that spoke of premeditation.) “They then went . . . inside and opened fire.”
Christine even gave particulars: “One male was shot on the sofa and died instantly.” She had no idea who shot whom. She didn't know if she shot the girls, or if he shot the boys, because they fired at the same time, as soon as they entered the house. It sounded as though they rang the doorbell and barged in while unloading the chambers of their weapons. Shoot first, search for the drugs and cash after.
Those kids never had a chance.
“She also said that after leaving the scene, she became scared and worried that one of the victims could still be alive and that the surviving victim could ultimately identify her and her boyfriend. So she walked back into the house. I am not sure if the boyfriend went with her. But one of the victims was still alive, and this person was crawling on the floor. She was out of bullets and had to beat the victim to death with the [butt] of her gun.”
(In a later version of this same moment, Christine said that Rachael, while crawling and pleading for her life, had her phone in her hand and was trying to dial 911, which ended up being consistent with Rachael's bloody fingerprints found on the numbers 9-1-1.)
The tipster spoke of Christine working at Walgreens; he said Christine and Chris changed clothes after the murders and “she went to work.” He had “no idea” where Chris and Christine might be these days; but the last he knew, Christine was at a halfway house in Kerrville, Texas.
“She claimed to no longer be with the boyfriend . . . that he had moved somewhere in Kentucky, but he still calls her from time to time. She said he usually calls her to threaten her by telling her he will kill her if she ever tells anyone about the crime.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the confession for police was that Christine had told the tipster, “After the shots they did not get hardly anything they wanted.” Christine and Snider had assumed that Marcus and D had a wad of money hanging around the house, along with a major stash of drugs. And this sort of pissed them off. They had killed four people, essentially, for nothing.
The call into the Crime Stoppers tip line came in on a Saturday—and wouldn't you know, Brian Harris was on vacation that week, out of touch until the following Monday morning.
CHAPTER 43
I
T WAS JULY 11, 2006,
before Brian Harris and his new partner, Detective Tom “TJ” McCorvey, were located. Harris was with McCorvey, it turned out. They were at a gas station fueling up.
“Frank Poe from Crime Stoppers,” the caller said to Harris.
“Yeah?” Harris said.
Frank Poe explained the call Diaz had taken. Harris knew right there it was a turning point and the call that they had been waiting on all along. He could feel it. As Harris listened, the evidence left behind came to mind. It all backed up what the caller said.
Harris got back into the car. Looked over at McCorvey. Turned the ignition key. “Hey, TJ, buckle up, partner—we're in for a hell of a ride!”
Yet, hearing that Crime Stoppers had taken a call about the Clear Lake case should not have been something to get too excited about. It's safe to say that Harris had been jaded by this point and was not going to jump up on his feet and pump a fist because a tipster had phoned in.
Tom McCorvey researched this new name connected to the Clear Lake case: Christine Paolilla.
Christine had just turned twenty. Almost immediately, Chris Snider's name came up as being connected to Christine. In the system it showed that Snider and Paolilla had been arrested together back in October 2003 “in the same part of town where the murders of Millbridge Drive took place.”
A viable link . . . finally.
What also showed up was that Christine had been ticketed several times while in Kerrville by law enforcement (Kerrville being another indicator that the tipster was accurate with his info). After that, McCorvey found out that Chris Snider had a Kentucky state identification number indicating that he had at one time been handled by Kentucky law enforcement. More info consistent with what the tipster had reported.
It was all fitting together.
Harris had a thought when he heard about all this new information: that tipster calling HPD back in 2005 and giving them Chris Snider's name and his girlfriend as “Christine,” with no last name.
Now it made sense.
Harris went through the file and pulled out that photograph of Rachael and the other girl, the one who had Rachael's panty band in her teeth. They now had a driver's license file photo of Christine Paolilla.
A match.
The photo had been mislabeled.
Damn it all.
Harris called Lelah Koloroutis. He explained the photo of her sister and the girl he now knew to be Christine Paolilla.
“Yeah, that's Christine,” Lelah confirmed. “She and Rachael were friends. Rachael used to carry a photo of Christine in her wallet.”
There was a photo in Rachael's purse. Christine had written Rachael a note on the back.
Damn we've had some crazy memories. . . .
CHAPTER 44
J
USTIN ROTT AND
Christine Paolilla had found a new home at La Quinta Inn on the I-10 in San Antonio, not too far away from one of Justin's suppliers. The hotel was nearly on the corner of Vance Jackson Road and the interstate. They had been there for about seven or eight months, paying for the room every two weeks by calling in a credit card. In fact, Christine was so terribly consumed by the drugs she was injecting, that since they had rented the room back in December 2005, she had never left it.
“Not once,” Justin said later.
Their life together—that love story they had both dreamt of and jumped into back in Kerrville, falling hard and marrying without giving sobriety a chance—had come down to eating boxes of Cheez-Its, packages of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, drinking bottled water and soda, along with $250 worth of heroin and $250 worth of cocaine (that “speedball”—the same deadly combination of poison that had killed actor John Belushi) per day. They were shooting $500 worth of drugs into their veins every day. Justin's routine consisted of getting up, hitting the local gas station food mart across the street from La Quinta to purchase cigarettes, snack food, maybe a magazine, and then the ATM for their daily drug money.
On the dresser next to the only bed in the room was a mishmash of used Reese's wrappers, plastic cups, alcohol swabs, packages (empty and full) of Marlboro Reds, bottles of rubbing alcohol (it was always good to make sure you had a nice clean vein to tap so as not to get an infection), and over one hundred syringes, some ready to be booted, others used and tossed.
Scattered on the floor around the bed were animal feces from the dog they kept in the room, alongside dirty clothes, towels with bloodstains, vomit, any number of bacteria, and plain old-fashioned garbage. This was what drugs did: sent you down on your knees to the lowest depths of hell. If they didn't have a dwindling bank account (nearly tapped out now), both would have probably been homeless, living in Christine's purple Prizm. The only difference between living on the street like the junkies they were and having a roof over their heads was some cash in the bank and several credit cards in Christine's name.
There was also a laptop computer in the room. And lo and behold, near this same time, George Koloroutis had taken a call from his source tracking the hits on the website he had put up with the Crime Stoppers number and the sketches: “There's one address repeatedly hitting the site,” George was told. Every day. The same IP address, it would turn out, belonging to that computer in Christine and Justin's hotel room.
Christine Paolilla was getting high and visiting the site devoted to catching her.
CHAPTER 45
T
OM MCCORVEY WAS
a down-home Texas “country boy.” Called a “big muscle-type cowboy” by a colleague, McCorvey is that Texan with the unmistakable native drawl you recognize immediately if you're not from the region. Tom liked to wear the finest clothes and always showed up to work wearing a tie. He bowled. He golfed. The kind of guy who takes care of his father, and still finds it within himself to refer to the old man who raised him as
Daddy
.
Harris had a good partner in McCorvey. They made the perfect team, at least for this nagging Clear Lake case. And now, perhaps more than ever, Harris needed a cop like McCorvey by his side; someone he could bounce ideas off to see if he was being overzealous or heading down the right track.
“I want to take a photo lineup to the Lackners,” Harris told McCorvey one day after the recent tipster phoned in. “What do you think?”
Now was as good a time as any.
McCorvey and Harris arrived at Michelle Lackner's work with a female and male lineup of six photos each. They sat down. Michelle Lackner viewed the lineup. She took her time, studying each male suspect with guarded curiosity. Then she pointed to one particular photo.
“That's him,” she said, sure of herself.
The photo was of Christopher Snider.
Harris placed the female lineup in front of her.
Michelle Lackner took her time again, studying each photo carefully.
“That's her—the woman I saw carrying the purse.”
Christine Paolilla.
When they met with Craig Lackner later that same day at his place of employment, he took a look at each lineup and agreed with his wife.
 
 
IT WAS A
day later, July 14, the middle of the afternoon, when Crime Stoppers called Harris and told him to phone Officer Frank Poe immediately. Poe had someone on the line. He said he wanted Harris to listen.
Poe was talking to a male, who was whispering. Harris was patient. Poe repeated whatever the caller said.
“I'm calling from out of state. . . .”
Poe repeated it.
“I'm not familiar with Houston,” the caller said. “I'm scared. I was with a dude named Chris Snider last week in a nightclub. Chris had been drinking. He told me that he and his girlfriend, who he called ‘Chrissie,' had killed four people a few years back. It was somewhere in Houston called Clear Lake. Chrissie, I guess, knew these people and had bought some dope from them in the past. Chris said he used a nine-millimeter gun and still has it.”
“Do you know what kind of other weapon they might have used?”
“No,” the caller said. “Chris told me that he killed two and Chrissie killed two. But that they didn't get the money they wanted.”
Harris pulled the phone records. He reviewed Tiffany Rowell's cellular calls to and from her number. On Tiffany's number list was the name “Christine,” along with her phone number. The last time Christine had phoned Tiffany before the murders was late into the night on July 14/15, 2003. This phone, which was always thought to be Rachael's (found near Rachael's head) had dialed 911 at 3:12
P.M.
on July 18, 2003. This was the exact time, Harris knew, that Christine Paolilla was beating Rachael Koloroutis to death with her pistol to make sure she was dead.
The following day, July 17, 2006, two arrest warrants—one for Christopher Snider, the other for Christine Paolilla—were signed by a judge and given to Brian Harris.
Now all they had to do was locate Snider and Paolilla, an effort that would soon prove to be almost as difficult as solving the case.
Finding Christine wasn't a problem. HPD sergeant Guillermo “Will” Gonzales and Harris County District Attorney investigator Johnny Bonds tracked down Lori Paolilla at the University of Houston, in Clear Lake, where she now worked.
They advised Lori that they were looking for both Christine and her husband, Justin Rott; had she seen them? Harris had looked Christine up in the system and found that she had gotten married to Justin Rott, who himself was no stranger to law enforcement.
“She got married without our blessing,” Lori said. She sounded disgusted by the thought of it. They liked Justin, sure, but as a husband? Lori knew better. “She met him at a halfway house in Kerrville.”
“You have any idea where they are?” one of the investigators asked.
“Christine has been able to access her trust fund since she turned eighteen”—two years ago—“but since September of '05, we haven't heard from her at all.” It was clear to Lori—she could only guess—what Christine was doing with her money. It was so unlike her not to communicate with her mother or Tom Dick for such an extended period of time. “We have, though, spoken to Justin.”
“What's going on with him?”
“He would send us text messages.”
Lori was able to track down the location of the ATM machine they were drawing money from and gave it to the investigators.
“We tried to help Justin. My husband gave him a job as a plumber's helper, but he didn't last. Then they moved away from Houston.” Lori looked concerned. And why shouldn't she be? She knew what Christine and Justin were doing. But why were two investigators looking for her daughter?
It didn't take detectives long to figure out, with a bit of bank and credit card searching, that Justin Rott and his wife were holed up at La Quinta hotel in San Antonio.
Harris assembled a team for the long ride west to San Antonio. It was time to go kick a door in and get Christine Paolilla under a spotlight in the box to see what she had to say.

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