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Authors: M. William Phelps

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PART TWO
A FATHER'S PAIN
CHAPTER 16
G
EORGE KOLOROUTIS WAS
fraught. Part of the desperation and anxiety George felt was for selfish reasons, which he wasn't sharing with anyone. There was a deeper need, other than the obvious, for George to find his daughter's killer. If he could get to Rachael's murderer before police, George hoped, he could kill the perpetrator himself. The absolute terror his daughter had experienced in her final moments—her head being bashed in while she tried reaching for her cell phone to call for help—was too much for the guy to think about. He had to do something about all of the pent-up emotion and anger.
In recent days George and Ann had purchased a dog.
Sally, the boxer.
When George began to hear there was a good chance the Clear Lake murders were drug-related retaliation, or maybe even gang related, he thought it prudent to get a dog that he had been told was “as fierce as any guard dog.” Boxers, which are generally stocky and squarely built, are known to be protective and can be vicious if trained properly.
“I anticipated retaliation,” George said later. “In the early days we were all but sure it was [over] revenge . . . or gang related. I thought that because I was making so much noise—in the news, the papers, the community—that the killers would come to shut me up. It was weird because I was actually hopeful
and
scared. Hopeful they would come when I was there—the house was wired well and no one could get in or out without me knowing. Scared because I thought they would come when I was
not
there and kill my family.”
Even Lelah was terrified, later saying, “I remember those times. I remember driving home from school every day [and] expecting to walk in and see the whole family slaughtered. I'd be panicking. In tears. Driving as fast as I could, feeling that everyone down to the dog and bird was going to be lying there [dead] when I got home. It was horrible times.”
This was the sort of testimony, George added, that brought him to tears when he heard about it. “Just knowing ‘her pain' related to the loss is hard to handle. When you lose a child, you suffer from your own pain. But even worse is when you think of the pain felt by the others you love, who are suffering from the same loss. It hurts like nothing else. And you are helpless and can do nothing.”
Through that emotional roller coaster, George wanted to face the people who had taken his daughter's life. He welcomed the day. Ten years in prison might be worth a bullet to the head of the person who had killed Rachael and her friends. George was staying up most nights, weapon in hand, heading out to investigate every strange noise, walking the grounds of his home with a police flashlight, circling the perimeter like a burglar. I was “hoping,” George put it, “those [people] would come so I could blow their . . . heads off.”
Sally stayed in the house, watching over things there. George walked around the yard two or three times each night, paying special attention to a spot behind the detached garage, which was the perfect hiding place for a killer looking to silence a family.
“Sally was meant to be a guard dog—but was really a softhearted chicken,” George remembered.
Through this period, every creak or noise George and Ann heard was thought to be “them,” George said, “coming to get us.
“We were sort of ‘out of our minds' through this period. After all, someone had slaughtered our daughter and we had no idea why.”
In a weird way, George said, the unhealthy behavior (lack of sleep, festering on revenge and hate) was an imperative for this tortured father, helping him to keep his mind off the overwhelming pain. By filling his imagination with what he would do to Rachael's killers, it was almost like he was bringing Rachael back to life.
There was one day when George, Lelah, and her boyfriend went out driving through the town of Seabrook, the urban section of town George referred to as “the bastard child of Clear Lake and Houston.” Rumor was that Seabrook, or at least a small ghettoized portion of it, held a connection to the murders.
As George drove through town, he and Lelah spotted a guy who looked vaguely familiar. He had short hair to match his short stature. Looked to be about twenty. He was skinny. He also had a wiry, shifty look to him, as if he'd done his share of dope over the years.
George drove past him, then made a U-turn and doubled back.
Pulling up, rolling down his window, George said, “Hey!”
Lelah and her boyfriend looked on.
The guy turned, startled. “Yeah?”
“You know who Rachael Koloroutis and Tiffany Rowell are? Marcus Precella and Adelbert Sánchez?”
The kid thought about it. “Ah . . . yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“Well, then, you understand they were murdered. We're trying to find what everyone knows.” George explained who he was and how they were hoping to track down information.
“I'm on my way over to a dude named Fazz's (pseudonym) house right now,” the skinny kid said. “I know Rachael was over there a few nights before the murders.” He pointed to the house Fazz lived in with his mother. It was right up the road.
George pulled into the driveway.
Fazz's mother walked out of the house. She and George talked. Fazz's mother said she'd had Rachael's cell phone at one time; Rachael had left it at her house. “Rachael said she was going to live at Tiffany's.”
This was nothing new, of course.
Fazz soon came out of the house. “Hey,” he said.
George asked him if he knew anything about the murders. They were doing a little investigation of their own. George was hoping to uncover some things.
Fazz found a spot on the ground and stared at it, hands in his pockets.
“What is it?” George pressed, walking closer toward him. Then George looked at Lelah and her boyfriend. He didn't have to say it:
This kid knows something.
“I know a guy who knows what happened,” Fazz admitted, although the statement didn't come out as sincere as they might have hoped.
Maybe he was scared?
“You'll show us where he lives?” George asked, exalted and excited, more of a demand, not so much a question.
Fazz jumped into George's car and told him where to drive. “I'll go with you.”
There was a Kroger grocery store up the street. Fazz said the guy worked there. He told George to pull up in front. They could go in and talk to him.
George parked. Fazz popped out of the car quickly, and then ran into the store. As George walked in, twenty or so paces behind him, Fazz had the guy by the shirt. He was saying something to him that George couldn't hear. Fazz kept looking back at George while he was talking to the guy. It seemed to George as though the two men were almost agreeing on something.
As George later retold it, “We then pulled this guy out of the store.”
Dragged him out by the shirt was more like it.
“Look, my girlfriend drove up to that house,” the Kroger guy said when they got him outside and George asked what he knew. “She saw this guy run out of the house. He started chasing her. . . .”
“You saw someone running out of Tiffany Rowell's house on the day of the murders?” George asked, fairly shocked by this disclosure, wondering why in the hell this punk had never taken the information to the police.
“Yeah . . . yeah,” the guy said, most of the time with his eyes locked on Fazz.
George grabbed the Kroger kid and held him down. Then he told Lelah to take his cell phone and dial up Tom Ladd.
“I've basically taken this employee out of Kroger's and I am holding him in custody,” George recalled. Looking back at the situation, he realized how crazy it all was; but truly, George Koloroutis believed at that moment he had stumbled onto something big—something that was about to solve his daughter's murder.
George got Tom Ladd on the phone and explained the situation.
Ladd laid into George, yelling, “Damn it all, Koloroutis! You have to stop doing this! What the hell! You're not a damn cop.”
By the end of the conversation, the guy agreed to go downtown with his girlfriend the following day and submit to an interview.
“It turned out,” George later said, “that it was all just one massive lie.”
The Kroger kid had made it up for some strange reason. HPD checked it out and confronted the kid, and he admitted to lying about the entire story.
But he never said why.
Sometime later, George and Ann were driving through Seabrook on George's Harley. They pulled up to Kroger. George saw the punk who had initiated the entire debacle with his ginormous lie. He stood in front of the store, on the sidewalk, with two old ladies. They smoked cigarettes.
George pulled right up on the kid, the front tire of his bike nearly brushing his leg. Without dismounting from his bike, George stared at him. There was that trademark George Koloroutis look: the sadness and intensity of a man who was looking only to find out who had taken his little girl away from him. He had the look of someone you didn't want to be messing with.
The Kroger guy's hand trembled. George could see how nervous he was as he brought the cigarette up to his mouth for a drag.
After a short time George asked, “Why did you lie to the police?”
That was all George wanted to know. Like many, George believed there were a few things you didn't meddle with in life: one of those was a father whose daughter had been murdered. George was looking into this kid's eyes for an answer. He needed something, or he was going to step off the bike and beat the snot out of him.
“Hey, man, they put that [stuff] on me,” the kid said.
“They put that [stuff] on me.”
They? Why
they
and not
he
or
she
?
George wondered.
“Who did?” George asked.
“They did, man. It was
them
!” The kid looked at the head of his cigarette and flicked the butt into the road and then walked back into the store as quickly as he could. He was finished talking.
George turned to Ann. “What in the hell is he talking about?”
They
.
Then it hit him:
Fazz!
When Fazz had gone into that store on the day George grabbed the kid and pulled him out, had Fazz told him to manufacture a story about the night of the murders?
HPD told George they'd look into it.
 
 
THAT WEBSITE GEORGE
had promised to create with the announcement of the reward money was written and designed by him, but put together and created for the Internet by a good friend in information technology (IT), Shane Merz. MRE Consulting, in Houston, the company Merz cofounded in 1994, also gave George a substantial sum of money to put toward the reward.
“Shane is a really great guy,” George said. “He put one of his key guys on building the website.”
Merz was smart, too. Not every IT guy you meet has a master's degree from MIT.
The website received lots of hits almost immediately—loads upon loads of unique visitors from all over Texas and the rest of the country. People were certainly interested in looking at the info on the site (those sketches would be put up, front and center, on the home page in the coming months), on top of reading about how to get the reward money.
HPD and George decided to have someone (from George's end) monitor the site to see if a particular Internet protocol (IP) address frequented the URL; if so, there was a good chance, George knew, they had their killer out there fixated on his or her work. Many law enforcement agencies today do this to entice suspects into visiting the e-scene of the crime.
All they could do now, however, was wait to see what happened, maybe hope for a suspect to walk into the trap.
CHAPTER 17
B
RIAN HARRIS WAS
confident that following the evidence would lead to an arrest in the Clear Lake case. A seasoned investigator, Harris knew most cases were solved by putting together that puzzle without a picture. Websites were great tools; they could ultimately help. Interviews were supportive. Ballistics and trace evidence collection was central. Yet, catching killers was a science that hadn't changed in a century: you beat a path until a suspect emerged.
Still, tracking killers was not always what Brian Harris had in mind when he saw himself as a working adult in the real world. Quite incredibly, Harris had followed a rare, albeit interesting—and quite unbelievable—track into police work. His vocational story didn't involve some sort of a torch being passed down from one generation to the next, a proud grandpa and papa standing, clapping at Brian's graduation from the police academy, their boy following in “blue gene” footsteps.
No. In Harris's past there was nothing of the sort. Brian Harris, instead, took the
scared straight
route: some time in jail actually opened up a doorway into HPD.
Harris was born in Westchester County, New York, located near the Connecticut border; he was the youngest of five children. The television shows
T.J. Hooker
and
CHiPs
influenced young Brian, he said, about as much as playing cops and robbers had when he was a tyke running around the neighborhood. Harris thought of being a cop, but there was nothing there early on to guide him in a specific direction. It was simply a dream:
That's what I want to be when I grow up
.
After high school Brian moved to Huntsville, Texas, and attended Sam Houston State University, under the pretenses of making criminal justice his major.
“I was going to go to college in Buffalo, New York,” Harris recalled. “My parents were split up. My dad lived down in Houston. School was a lot cheaper down there.”
Brian's Texas welcome was not all that, well, welcoming. Here was an East Coast Yank, with red hair, freckles, and a small frame, trying to make a way for himself down in good ol' boy country.
Mistake number one: He went to a pool hall the second night he was in town. Hurricane Alicia had hit the Houston and Galveston region, a spinning hell of fury that had blown in and blew just about everything in its path to bits. Most notable was how the hurricane had shattered thousands of windows in downtown Houston, which made a terrific mess of the streets. The cleanup was going on when Brian arrived. He and his dad, along with a brother, were driving around, surveying the damage, checking things out. His dad pointed out the touristy spots in town, hoping to get young Brian acclimated to city life in southeast America, his new home.
Life would be different in Texas for a kid from suburban New York.
They found a local pool hall, located off a busy, bustling strip of clubs and restaurants. Brian walked over and placed some money on the side of the table so he, his bother and their dad could play the next game. This was standard practice in any bar back home. You put your coins on the table to say you wanted some action.
A group of cops happened to be inside the bar, playing pool next to the table where Brian had just put down his money.
“And we were arrested for gambling,” Harris said, laughing, “by none other than the Houston Police Department.”
Holy crap,
Harris thought,
here I am heading to a Texas jail!
He was just a little thing. Definitely about as un-Texan as one could be.
“I looked like I was fourteen.”
Inside the jail, Harris said, he saw some things that would later shape him as a police officer; teaching him how he wanted to treat people—suspects, “turds” (Houston slang for perps), and people in general—with dignity and compassion.
They were lined up outside the jail: Brian, his dad, and several other prisoners. This short officer, a little bit of a Southern
y'all
chip on his shoulder, walked over to a tough-looking dude with some serious street battle scars.
“Were you in 'Nam?” the little cop asked.
“Yup,” the guy responded.
“What division, son?”
The guy told him, or made something up that he thought the cop wanted to hear.
“Well, boy,” the cop said gruffly, “did ya kill y'self any gooks?”
Sitting in the jail cell later, Brian took a look around. He saw the 'Nam guy and soon heard that the cop had beaten the snot out of him. Then there were “other things” going on that Brian didn't much appreciate (nor did he want to talk about later).
While waiting to be bailed out, Brian told himself,
I will never,
ever
work for the Houston Police Department.
Never say never—because it always comes back to bite you in the ass.
Several months after the ordeal, HPD's Internal Affairs Division (IAD) contacted Brian while conducting a complete investigation into several suspected Vice Division officers shaking down clubs that refused to hire off-duty cops for security. IAD heard Brian had seen some things and was taken aback by a lot of it.
Brian never identified any of the officers, but during the interview process with IAD, he expressed how turned off he was with the Houston police force and how it had soured him about perhaps one day getting into law enforcement there in Houston. There was a chance, he said, that he wanted to get into police work, and Houston had probably been his first choice.
Not anymore.
A week went by. To the credit of the HPD, Harris said later, someone from the department called him. He was impressed.
“We'd like to try and change your mind about the Houston Police Department,” the caller said. The officer had read Brian's IAD interview. “We'd like you to take a tour of the department and talk to you.”
They obviously cared. There were bad apples in any government business. Perhaps, Brian now considered, he'd had the bad luck of running into all of them at once inside HPD.
Brian explained he was just getting into college and was planning to study criminal justice and law.
After a meeting with the chief—the actual chief of the department had wanted to speak to him—and a tour of the department, a spokesperson turned to Harris and said, “We hope you might change your mind, and when you're finished with school, come back and keep us in mind.”
Brian Harris, a skinny kid from the East Coast, was shocked by this statement. What a turnaround. From being arrested to being offered a chance at a job.
In an unbelievable twist ending, Harris went back after school and got himself a job with HPD.
 
 
GEORGE KOLOROUTIS WAS
one of those guys who couldn't sit around and do nothing. He needed to be involved: hands on. Not only did it help George cope with such an immense loss, but it kept up pressure on HPD to stay focused on the case. George knew the more he pressed, the more headway they would all make. The more he stepped back, the better the chance the case would run cold.
“I just want to be real about all of the emotions,” George said, thinking back to this time. “Sure, overwhelming sadness and extreme rage were there and drove my actions. But there were days of fear, too, dictating what I did.”
“That Koloroutis could be a real pain in the ass,” Tom Ladd later said. “But without him, I'm not sure this case would have ever been solved.”
Ladd had a tremendous amount of respect for George, as did most of the law enforcement officers involved.
George had opened up an account for the reward website, which became the Rachael Koloroutis Memorial Fund. On Monday, November 3, 2003, George drove to the Southwest Texas Bank, near downtown, to finish some business with the accounts manager of the fund.
“How are all the memorial accounts doing?” George asked.
She said fine. Things were moving in the right direction. A woman from one of the other families had been to the bank to open a memorial fund account. “She seemed very nervous,” the accounts manager said.
“What do you mean?” George asked.
“She seemed more nervous about giving her Social Security number than [the death of her loved one].” The accounts manager thought the woman's behavior was out of character for someone who was supposed to be grieving. She didn't see that this person was “mourning” in the same way that George and other family members had been. The behavior concerned her.
Judgments—we all make them. Who can say how one person responds to trauma and loss as compared to another? People express grief differently.
The accounts manager explained to George that she had asked the relative if the police had any leads, or any idea about who might have killed the kids.
“What'd she say?” George wondered.
The accounts manager lowered her voice, looking from side to side as if to make sure no one was listening. “She said they—the police—knew who did it, but had to keep it on the ‘down low' to protect the other children.” There was also some indication about this person knowing who it was, but she was too afraid to say anything to the police in fear of other members from her family being the killer's
next
victim. “I think you need to know this, George,” the accounts manager concluded.
George had that reputation of being able to get things done—the “go-to” person within all the grieving families.
“Thanks,” George said.
“She called back,” the accounts manager said, “and I told her I was going to have to tell the police what she said.”
“Good,” George added, and left.
 
 
BRIAN HARRIS STOOD
by Tom Ladd, George Koloroutis, several of Marcus and Adelbert's family members, and several police officers as Crime Stoppers announced in front of a small crowd of media that HPD needed help in obtaining leads in the Clear Lake murder case. The press conference was something that needed to be done, they had all agreed.
“The plan is this,” George Koloroutis told the
Houston Chronicle
, “collect as much money as possible, put it all together, and set up a supplemental reward contract with Crime Stoppers to get the word out and draw these animals out.”
Animals
: it was clear where George Koloroutis stood.
The best thing about George leading the crusade to find the killers from the standpoint of the families was his ability to speak to the public as a father and family man, a member of the community, but also as a guy who just wanted to find his daughter's killer. Make no mistake about it: George was not going to stop until those responsible were in jail.
“We are a family in pain,” George added. “My wife, Ann, and daughters . . . are having a hard time coping with this. I can tell you, as a father, my heart is broken and I struggle making it from day to day.”
Just a few days before the press conference, a benefit concert was staged to honor the four victims and bring awareness to the investigation. The concert, held at the A.D. Bruce Religion Center, on the University of Houston (UH) campus, featured Jennifer Grassman, an up-and-coming local Houston singer-songwriter, who had worked with Rachael for a short time.
“I remember my mom calling me up at work,” Jennifer said later, talking about the moment she found out about Rachael's death. “ ‘Honey, I've got some horrible news: Rachael's dead. She's been murdered.' At first, I couldn't process the idea that she was talking about Rachael Koloroutis. I got numb all over. It was a feeling of profound shock, disbelief, and horror.”
When she first saw Rachael behind the cash register at Randall's, a local grocery store, where they had met as coworkers, Jennifer was impressed. “She had wavy honey-brown hair, big brown eyes, and an infectious smile. She was the sort of girl that other girls were jealous of, and all the boys ogled. It was high school. Rachael could have been one of those catty, ditsy girls that gossiped and flirted, but she wasn't. She was kind, gentle, and generous.”
They got along well, Jennifer recalled. They connected as friends. Soon Rachael and Jennifer were taking their breaks together. They'd sit and talk about family, school, boys, and all the weird customers they dealt with at work. All the guys would run toward Rachael's line because she was so pretty. And yet, to Jennifer, Rachael also had depth to go along with her looks; she never trounced around like some sort of beauty queen. She loved everyone the same.
“I distinctly remember Rachael telling me about church camp, and discussing various moral and religious issues. . . . She asked me about my music once, [about] how I had aspirations of becoming a recording artist. . . . She said, ‘When you write songs, do you ever write them about friends? Maybe you could write one for me!' ”
Jennifer was “caught off guard,” she remembered. “Sure, why not?” she told Rachael.

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