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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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HALEY DAWKINS AND
Chris Snider were living together in Greenville, South Carolina. Snider felt good about being so far away from a place where he had committed a crime that could ultimately put the type of needle in his arm, administered by the state of Texas, that wasn't going to get him high. Now he had Haley, who was, by standards Chris Snider had placed on himself regarding girlfriends of his past, a homecoming queen—the woman who could make him, he was certain, a better man.
“I knew that he was on probation,” Haley later told police. Chris had shown her a newspaper clipping written about him that previous January, when he was in jail on burglary charges. “Texas won't leave me alone,” he had told her, playing it up as though he had a bull's-eye on his back with the Texas law enforcement symbol in the center. He was convinced—and maybe he truly believed it—that he could do nothing right in the eyes of Texas law enforcement. He felt HPD was out to get him.
“He would never drive a car,” Haley recalled.
He also didn't have any friends, Haley said, besides a Vietnamese guy he called “Tommy.”
Chris's troubles, according to an interview a sibling family member later gave police, began when he was thirteen: marijuana and gasoline. He smoked one and sniffed the other. From there he developed a serious dislike for school and homework; and his mother had to continually discipline him about his lack of desire to get up and go.
Things never really got any better as he grew. Chris despised school. By the time he was fifteen, Snider had graduated to smoking marijuana cigarettes dipped in formaldehyde or embalming fluid. This drug wreaked havoc on the teenage mind, especially the developing brain of a fifteen-year-old. When Chris couldn't find wet joints, he settled for acid and mushrooms, sometimes all three. The one constant in his life, besides the use of drugs and his getting into trouble with the law, was a gradual desire to end his own life, a suicidal tendency. One of the more recent times he had been arrested (while trying to steal a car), he had left home that day saying he wanted to get caught committing a crime so the cops would shoot him: suicide by cop. Instead, he was pinched and put in jail.
But now he was out of jail, spending his days with Haley Dawkins, his Internet romantic interest.
Meanwhile, a team of police officers was preparing a nationwide search for the guy.
CHAPTER 47
I
T WAS THREE
years to the day when the search warrants came through, signed, sealed, and ready to be served. Brian Harris, Tom McCorvey, and Detective Breck McDaniel were ready to jump into a car and head west for San Antonio.
Harris needed to make one phone call before they hit the road, however. It was something, Harris knew, that had to be done. The guy had been there all along, praising the Homicide Division when they were on the right track and screaming through a bullhorn when they weren't. George Koloroutis needed to be brought up to speed.
George had been in Washington, D.C., attending a meeting. On this particular day George stood at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport waiting for his flight back home to Kansas. His cell phone rang. George looked down.
Harris?
“Hey, listen, you gotta promise me you won't say a word about this to anyone,” Harris began. “I need that promise from you.” Harris hated to have to say it, but business was business; George was a guy who understood that—maybe more than most.
“Course, Brian, what's up? What's going on?” George could feel that pulse rise inside him. He could not recall hearing Harris sound so different. “We know who did it,” Harris said. Was there any other way to put it?
“You're kidding me!” George responded.
“Yup . . . it's this girl named Christine Paolilla.”
The name did not ring a bell with George as he stood in the airport, people shuffling by, going about their lives, hurrying from one experience to the next.
“Do you know who she is?” Harris asked.
“No. But let me call Ann and find out if she does.”
“Okay. But again, not a word. Tell Ann and [Lelah] not to say anything to anyone. We still have not arrested her yet. We're about to go get her. We understand she's in a hotel.”
Harris explained that there was another person involved, a man named Chris Snider. George said he had no idea who that was and had never heard the name before.
“We're going to get her first—and then we're heading to Kentucky, where we think he is.”
George stood stunned, his legs numb, standing in the airport with this immense burden being slowly lifted from his heart. It was as if the world stopped for that moment.
They got 'em!
All that work. The interviews. The misinformed tips. The lies. The red herrings.
JU.
It was all over and done with now. Homicide had figured it out.
“Ann,” George said, the elation and the pain equally prevalent in his voice, “they got 'em!”
George explained all he knew. He told Ann not to say a word.
Ann understood.
Then: “Do you recognize the names?” George asked.
“Oh, my God . . . that [animal],” Ann said, referring to Christine. “There's a picture of her in Rachael's wallet!”
“Take out that picture. Go get it. Read to me what it says on the back.”
Ann went to get the photo. As she pulled it from Rachael's wallet, a memory hit her: that dream she'd had long ago. Rachael had come to her and told her about a pocketbook. Ann had called Harris in the middle of the night to explain the dream.
Chill bumps.
Rachael had spoken to her mother in a scene right out of Alice Sebold's
The Lovely Bones
.
George waited. He needed to hear what his daughter's killer—at least one of them—had written to her months before taking her life. “Only a demented person would write something sincere and then murder that person,” George said later. It was important for this father to get to know who the person was in reference to Rachael. It was part of a process on the road toward healing, toward quelling that anger George had built up all these years, that frustration and pain that at one time had been driving him in his desire to kill the people who had killed his little girl.
Any delight about their daughter's killer being found was now gone. Anger settled on George and Ann, the people who had loved this dead child. As they talked, the hate for their daughter's killer rose inside them.
“We spoke for a short time about what we would love to do to Christine Paolilla, had we the opportunity to be alone with her,” George said later.
Then it was back to business: “I have never heard the other name,” Ann said, speaking of Chris Snider. Lelah, who was in the background with Ann during the call, said she had never heard of him, either. But she
did
know Christine.
And now that phone call from Harris asking her to identify the girl in the photo made sense to Lelah.
This was not another one of those get-your-hopes-up moments they had all gone through so many times throughout the investigation; this was the real deal.
CHAPTER 48
W
EDNESDAY, JULY 19
, 2006. Noon. Room 111. La Quinta motel. San Antonio, Texas. Just off Interstate 10, at the intersection of Vance Jackson. It sounded like the dateline to a news story, but that was the information Harris had bouncing around inside his head as he stepped from the car. He, Tom McCorvey and Breck McDaniel were here, together with their counterparts—the local tactical unit—in San Antonio. Christine was in room 111 with her husband, Justin Rott. The search warrant they were going into that room under was actually for “the body of Justin Rott.”
San Antonio's tactical unit had already set up on room 111 and had surveillance set up around the entire perimeter of the hotel, not to mention a bead on the only door in and out of the room.
Harris, McCorvey, and McDaniel stood with the team and watched. There was no movement for quite some time. Justin and Christine were sleeping off their high, getting high, or preparing to get high. Either way, Harris had that warrant for Justin, who had an outstanding charge of theft pending. The warrant, essentially, was also for the room itself, a way for them to legally search for the body of Justin Rott. It was a slick move by law enforcement to get inside the room and take Christine Paolilla and Justin Rott into custody to see what they knew about the murders. Heck, for all the detectives knew, Chris Snider and Justin Rott could have easily been mixed up—perhaps it was Justin who had committed the murders with Christine. Perhaps neither had done anything and this was one more dead end! Harris had put his money on the case being solved here, but one never knew what was beyond a door.
The plan, which Harris had designed with his San Antonio colleagues, was to bust in while screaming,
Homicide, Homicide, Homicide—Houston PD!
Yell that, over and over, to see what type of reaction they got. Homicide and drug busts were two different things. Even hard-core drug addicts knew that much.
And that's exactly what they did.
Boom
.
The door was kicked open. And in went the troops screaming and yelling and pointing their weapons, flak jackets, goggles, gloves, the works. Just like on television. It was designed this way to intimidate and make it known that this wasn't some sort of drill or a simple drug bust going on here.
It had taken two solid hits with the boom to bust the door open, then a good kick. That provided a warning and enough time for Christine to realize that trouble was on the opposite side of the door and soon coming in. She had jumped out of bed and, nearly naked, nestled herself into a corner of the room on the floor. She was, of course, shaking and crying and shivering, mumbling to herself, “What's happening? Why are you doing this?” Lines very similar to what Rachael was pleading as Christine kept bashing her skull in.
The dog barked. Cops stepped in dog doo-doo and flanked around the bed. They had Justin Rott and his wife cornered. They were not going anywhere.
The room stunk of feces and body odor and garbage. It was disgusting. Drug paraphernalia was scattered everywhere: needles (used and unused), bags of dope (empty and full), soda cans and bottles, empty chip and snack bags, cigarette butts, you name it. There was also a large amount of blood spattered around the room (on the sheets, the rug, towels, on the damn walls, all over Christine's filthy nightshirt).
Harris took Rott, handcuffed him without allowing him a chance to put a shirt on; then he led him out the door toward a waiting patrol car.
“I know what this is about. . . . I know what this is about,” Rott said, turning his head, whispering behind his back to Harris.
“Okay. Okay. Take it easy,” Harris advised. “You play your cards right, man, everything will be okay.”
Now was not the time to talk.
Harris called McCorvey over. “You take Rott and interview him. I'll grab her.”
“Right.”
The entire operation took a few short moments. By 12:38
P.M.
, Justin Rott was sitting inside the San Antonio Police Department. It took him no time at all to “summon” investigators, saying, “I wanna talk.”
They knew why.
TJ McCorvey sat with Justin Rott inside an interview room at the San Antonio PD, in the Homicide Division headquarters. Rott was dressed in only pants and sneakers. He came across fidgety and nervous, more from using heroin and cocaine than anything else. He had no trouble dropping a dime on his wife. Within a few minutes of sitting down, right after giving McCorvey his vitals, Rott laid it out: “She told me that she was, uh, dating, like, uh, a guy by the name of Chris Snider and, uh, all . . . the whole group, I mean, four of 'em, you know, Rachael, and all of them were friends. . . .”
From that point on, it was hard to stop Justin Rott from talking. He told McCorvey everything Christine had related to him vis-à-vis the murders.
Detail after horrifying detail.
“Dude,” Rott said at one point, “it was just so brutal, what she told me, you know, what they, it was all in close range, you know . . . and then, you know, just beating her over the head, over and over again, just, you know, I couldn't believe it.”
McCorvey peppered Rott with inquiries concerning dates, times, names, all the essentials that would help them when Harris got his crack at Christine—an interview that was about to get under way in the room next door, a box that was being prepped as they spoke.
What Rott said was going to paint a picture of what had happened inside that house. Within that framework of stories, the truth would eventually emerge, without Justin Rott or Christine Paolilla realizing it.
Near one o'clock, Harris entered the interview room, where Christine sat on a chair, her legs crisscrossed, and her feet tucked underneath her butt. She hugged a bright yellow blanket around her shivering body. Christine came across as a chronic dope addict in the throes of an addiction that was potentially at its peak. She wore a white nightshirt stained with dried blood from all those times she or Justin had stuck a needle in her arm. All told, considering what she had been through, and how much dope she and Rott had shot over the past half year or more, she didn't look or sound half bad. She was coherent. She knew what was happening.
Donning a bright blue shirt, his sleeves rolled about elbow high, Harris sat in a chair with wheels. He came across a bit wired and anxious, likely because he was finally facing the yellow crime-scene tape at the end of the finish line, literally just around the last bend of a three-year-old marathon case. Christine was moving back and forth, hugging herself, yawning, staring at the floor. Her hair was up in a bun, her eyebrows gone, leaving these two white bumps jetting out from the bottom of her forehead. Her skin was as white as the Styrofoam coffee cup sitting on the table to her right. The room was rather bleak: gray, not too much light; a computer monitor turned off; a video camera facing the two of them, its red light letting them know Harris was recording every word and action.
It was close to two forty-five by the time Harris pulled out a card and Mirandized Christine, who kept responding rather politely, “Yes, sir,” whenever Harris asked if she understood. It was clear from the video that Christine was not yet withdrawing from the massive amount of drugs she had injected that day, nor in a state of needing a fix—not yet. She was in junkie limbo. There is a period between bags of dope when the junkie is quite coherent. The point being that Christine knew exactly what she was doing and why she was sitting, speaking to an HPD Homicide Division detective; and once she got herself acclimated and worked up some tears, she had no trouble feeling comfortable and talking.
“Do you understand you have the right to terminate this interview at any time? You know, just say, ‘Brian, stop.' And that's it. Do you understand that?” Harris said.
“Yes, sir,” she answered, her voice cracking. An avalanche of emotion was rumbling. This was clear from Christine's facial expressions. She was feeling the weight of killing four people and the consequences of that crime, which were right around the corner.
Harris leaned forward, a foot or two away from Christine, put his elbows on his knees, and spoke with his hands. “Look, in order for me to understand what happened, for you to speak about the emotions you say you've been going through, you have to waive, give up your right, so I can hear what's going on, what happened.”
Before he could finish, Christine broke down, bawling like a child, pulling that raincoat-yellow blanket even tighter, as if she could somehow disappear inside it.
“Do you understand? I know you're scared. But are you ready to tell me what happened?”
More tears. No words.
“Let me ask you this,” Harris said. “I see that you're crying, okay. When we talked earlier about justice and mercy”—this was one of Harris's themes to get a suspect to understand that he (the cop) was not there to judge or condemn, but only wanted to understand and get to the truth—“you remember that?”
Christine nodded through more tears. She looked down. Stared at the floor. The immensity of this horrible crime was implicit in the way she squirmed.
Harris spoke about people getting what they deserve—
justice
—and others getting what they need—
mercy
. He explained how important this was within the context of what he and Christine needed to get into. Before the formal interview started, Harris had spoken to Christine about his philosophy behind mercy and justice, and how this would decide what type of person she was and what type of penance she was going to ultimately receive. Christine had a chance at mercy, Harris had explained in no uncertain terms. She had a moment here where she could ask for and receive compassion, at least from him. It would not save her from any potential penance. But Harris was clear that we all had a choice when facing that mountain of judgment; and Christine was there, standing before it. She could climb over, or turn around and walk away.
“Do you believe,” Harris asked after Christine refused to say anything for a few beats, “that you deserve justice or mercy?”
She was interested in this. He could see her eyes light up. She squeaked her answer through tears, stretching out the word “M-e-r-r-r-c-c-c-y,” while nodding her head to Harris and repeating it.
“Okay,” Harris said. He sat back.
“Yes,” she said, again nodding. “Yes, yes. Very much so.”
Harris found an opening.
“Okay . . . I'd like to be able to understand
why. . . .
Can you give us some insight as to what's going on? Okay?”
This seemed to lighten Christine's load. “Justice for
him
?” she asked. “Justice for him and mercy for me? Or justice for
him
?” She sounded confused.
“Well, when you mean ‘for him,' who are you talking about?”
“Justice for
him,
” she repeated. “Mercy for me.”
“Okay,” Harris said, raising his voice, “when you say justice for ‘him,' now who do you mean?”
“Chris Snider.”
“Okay, now mercy for who?”
“Me.”
“Okay, okay. Well, tell me why, then?”
With that, Christine broke into one of those chest-thumping crying fits that moved her entire upper body up and down. She did not say anything right away.
“Look, all I can go by right now,” Harris said in a cop-type authoritative voice, “is what other people have told me and”—he paused—“and what
Chris
has told me.” Another pause. Then: “I mean, you don't have to tell me anything. I'll just go with what we have.”
They had not spoken to Chris Snider. In fact, HPD had no idea where he was.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a high-pitched voice, nodding.
“Okay. What happened?”
Christine sat still for a brief moment. “He can't have contact with me, right?”
“Excuse me?” Harris asked. “He cannot contact you. . . .”
“I don't want him to hurt my family. . . ,” she said, crying harder, “or
anybody
to hurt my family.”
“Has he threatened your family in the past?”
Christine looked off to her right, as if the question hurt her.
“Let me ask you. Tell me what kind of person Chris was?”
“Um . . . he was very . . . just . . . um . . . very”—she looked at the floor, thinking, going back, or maybe trying to come up with something that would suffice—“um . . . hopeless. Just a hopeless person.” Then she broke out of her shell a bit: “He was begging me for all that pity, you know. I am the type of person . . . you know . . . I have always dated, you know, stupid guys, just because, you know, I think that I can help them. Get them back on their feet. You know, all the wonderful stuff that I could never do.” She reached across the table (startling Harris) to grab a tissue. “But then . . . like . . . you know . . . but then . . . there was times, you know, when I meant
everything
to him. But that was when, you know, whenever I was giving him whatever he wanted. You know, towing him when he wanted . . . sticking up for him, lying to him, or lying
for
him. . . .”

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