Never See Them Again (17 page)
Read Never See Them Again Online
Authors: M. William Phelps
CHAPTER 26
B
RIAN HARRIS HAD
never had total access to the Clear Lake case file, or complete control of the investigation in the way an officer looking to dig in wanted. One day near the first anniversary of the murders, Harris took the boxes of interviews and reports and photographs and wheeled them over to his cubicle. It was time he settled into the case and took a sharper look at everything in its entirety. There was an answer in there somewhere. The Adelbert side of it all that Harris had been working on never panned out. As much as the Homicide Division might have thought there was a connection between Adelbert and Marcus and drug dealing, it just wasn't there. And as a competent investigator, giving into the will to solve the case, you had to, at some point, let go of the obvious and turn your attention toward other ideas, develop new leads and think outside the box.
RIAN HARRIS HAD
never had total access to the Clear Lake case file, or complete control of the investigation in the way an officer looking to dig in wanted. One day near the first anniversary of the murders, Harris took the boxes of interviews and reports and photographs and wheeled them over to his cubicle. It was time he settled into the case and took a sharper look at everything in its entirety. There was an answer in there somewhere. The Adelbert side of it all that Harris had been working on never panned out. As much as the Homicide Division might have thought there was a connection between Adelbert and Marcus and drug dealing, it just wasn't there. And as a competent investigator, giving into the will to solve the case, you had to, at some point, let go of the obvious and turn your attention toward other ideas, develop new leads and think outside the box.
Part of Harris's strategy was to learn everything he could from the case files. Then meet with the families. Talk things over with them and see if anything new emerged. Homicide needed to do something, Harris was convinced, and it was probably a good time to release the sketches. Get the case back in front of the news media and out in the public eye. Ask people in the community to start thinking about it differently. Let everyoneâespecially the killerâknow HPD was not going to stop until the killers were caught.
As a stage one, new plan of attack, Harris decided to release the sketches during a bona fide press conference. He was well aware that an onslaught of questions would come regarding why they had not released the sketches earlier. The best answer, which turned out to be true, was that HPD had been looking into several different angles of the case and they did not want to scare off potential suspects, had they seen themselves in those sketches. There was the thought that the sketches looked like several people whom HPD had been looking at as suspects.
Now, though, a year after the crime, and not one palpable suspect on radar, to say they were desperate for the public's help might not be something HPD wanted to admit; yet it was absolutely true.
The second stage of this new strategy, which would take place sometime after the sketches were released, was to place those billboards up around Clear Lake City. That was going to fall on George Koloroutis's shoulders. Put the sketches on billboards heading in and out of town, at calculated locations, where motorists had to look at them while coming in or going out of the city.
After the press conference and official release of the sketches, Harris called Michelle and Craig Lackner. He had never really spoken to them. He wanted to follow up. Reading the report Michelle had given on the night of the murders, Harris knew this witness was a detailed person; it was there in her observations. Of particular interest to Harris was that Michelle Lackner had reported that one of the suspects carried a bag. What more did she know?
“Hey,” Harris said casually, “do you recall what happened that night?” It was not a formal interview. He was simply calling as a police officer looking for additional information.
Michelle Lackner ran through the entire scenario for him. When she got to the purse, she described it as a “big banana-boat type” of handbag.
Harris was impressed with her recollection. This was going to become important. With any luck, Harris would be able to head out to the Lackners' with a photo lineup someday to show Michelle and Craig. So many tips were coming in since the public release of the sketches that they were having trouble keeping up. But sooner or later, as they went through and checked people off the list, the Homicide Unit was going to be left with a few key suspects. That was when Harris could go to Michelle and Craig, a mug shot lineup in hand, which matched the sketches, and their perp would be one of the suspects in the lineup. If the Lackners could verify without a doubt that they were certain, there would be no question about the killer's identity. On the other hand, Harris considered, he was walking a tightrope: he couldn't run out to the Lackners' every week with a different set of mug shots.
“I thought, âI am going to get one shot at this,' ” Harris recalled. “I cannot risk a misidentification and so I want to make sure that when I show [the Lackners] a photo array, I have verified everything.”
Harris had some raw experience with a witness who had shown him just how fragile these sketches and a possible photo lineup were. There was a girl who had been brought in under a tip. She had been obsessed with Tiffany and Rachael to a creepy
Single White Female
point of contention. The tip appeared to be legit. So they brought her in.
Single White Female
point of contention. The tip appeared to be legit. So they brought her in.
Harris showed the girl the sketches.
She took one look at the drawing of the female, freaked out, and screamed, “That's me!”
But as it turned out, it couldn't have been. She had a rock solid alibi.
SO THE SKETCHES
were made public and the billboards set to go up.
were made public and the billboards set to go up.
“Seeing the sketches,” Nichole Sánchez recalled later, speaking for her family, “gave us some comfort. We knew then, looking at these two people in the drawings, that the murders had nothing to do with Adelbert.”
Calls came into the Crime Stoppers tip line. It seemed several people knew someone who looked like one of the two characters depicted in the drawings. The problem was that the drawings, although fairly detailed, could be put up to literally hundreds of people and made to match. There was nothing distinctive about either of the two people, besides their thin lips and the fact that HPD was looking to talk to a male and a female.
But again, this, too, was about to change.
CHAPTER 27
J
UST BEFORE THE
one-year anniversary, Brian Harris's boss assigned a second investigator, Waymon Allen, a sergeant, to help Harris, who was an officer at the time. Allen outranked Harris, but Harris knew the case by now inside out. Allen could help, however, dig through what was a mountain of evidence to see if they had overlooked or missed anything important. Allen was a solid cop, a good guy. He knew what to look for. The answer, Harris was convinced, had to be thereâsometimes it
is
right in front of you, Harris knew from his years investigating murder. You just need a fresh set of eyes to flesh it out.
UST BEFORE THE
one-year anniversary, Brian Harris's boss assigned a second investigator, Waymon Allen, a sergeant, to help Harris, who was an officer at the time. Allen outranked Harris, but Harris knew the case by now inside out. Allen could help, however, dig through what was a mountain of evidence to see if they had overlooked or missed anything important. Allen was a solid cop, a good guy. He knew what to look for. The answer, Harris was convinced, had to be thereâsometimes it
is
right in front of you, Harris knew from his years investigating murder. You just need a fresh set of eyes to flesh it out.
Maybe Waymon Allen was that guy.
“Hey, I'd like to be a part of this,” Allen told Harris.
“Give me, like, a week to read through everything and familiarize myself with it all, and we'll get together and see what we need to do next.”
Harris liked the sound of that.
“We're going to reinterview everybody, take another look and talk to some of the witnesses,” Harris suggested. “We missed something. We should probably go back forty-eight hours on the telephone records and see what type of timeline and witness list we can develop from those calls the kids made in the days leading up to the murders.”
Waymon Allen agreed. It was a smart approach.
(Funny thing was, which truly shows how complicated and subjective police work can be, that if they would have gone back an additional twenty-four hours, making a total of seventy-two, they could have solved the case right then and there. The killer had called Rachael Koloroutis not
two
days before the murders, but
three
days before.)
two
days before the murders, but
three
days before.)
Harris and Allen called the families back in. They discussed the sketches. They discussed George's plan for the billboards. It was time to push the public even more.
“I want to put up those billboards,” George said. He had been working on them for some time now. It was time.
“Yes,” Harris and Allen agreed.
Something was happening; there was an energy to the case now that had not been there for some time. The families, along with Harris and Allen, felt it. HPD had done its job focusing on Marcus and Adelbert and the choices they had made in life. But now it was time to look in other directions, search out other possibilities, flip over new stones and see what was underneath. Harris believed he had gone down every path imaginable as far as the Adelbert and Marcus angle. The answer just wasn't there.
Allen and Harris worked another lead they had just made public. A few nights before the murders, there was a party for Tiffany Rowell's birthday. Allen and Harris knew there was a good chance that someone at that party had information, or that the killer(s) might have possibly even attended the party. In an article published by the
Houston Chronicle
on July 19, 2004, a year and a day after the murders, Allen and Harris set the stage for the direction they saw the investigation taking, announcing that they were planning on reinterviewing everyone involved.
Houston Chronicle
on July 19, 2004, a year and a day after the murders, Allen and Harris set the stage for the direction they saw the investigation taking, announcing that they were planning on reinterviewing everyone involved.
“The goal is to close the case,” Harris said as plainly as possible. Nothing less, Harris made a point to note, would suffice. Justice had to be served here. Four kids, no one needed to be reminded, had been mauled by a storm of gunfire, two of them beaten with a pistol. HPD could not allow the case to go unsolved.
“They were all very young, very immature, and on their own [for the first time in their lives],” Waymon Allen explained to the
Chronicle.
“They have exercised bad judgment at times, but certainly didn't deserve what happened to them.”
Chronicle.
“They have exercised bad judgment at times, but certainly didn't deserve what happened to them.”
Both cops were hoping to send a message and ignite some sort of reaction from their killer.
The billboards went up all over town, staring down at commuters, community members, dopers, criminals of all types, the victims' family members, subtly reminding everyone that
someone
knew
something.
As it turned out, those billboards would prove to be one of many stars that were about to align, this as one of the killersâthere
were
two!âdrove by one of the billboards and felt as though he or she was looking into a mirror.
someone
knew
something.
As it turned out, those billboards would prove to be one of many stars that were about to align, this as one of the killersâthere
were
two!âdrove by one of the billboards and felt as though he or she was looking into a mirror.
PART THREE
BETWEEN A ROTT AND A HARD PLACE
CHAPTER 28
T
O HIM, SHE
looked “pretty” (his word) just sitting there, minding her own business. She wasn't talking, but more or less relaxing quietly, a look of bashfulness and maybe contemptuousness about her. It was November 1, 2004. “Alive” was how he referred to his first impression of Christine Paolilla as she sat waiting for a 12-step meeting to get under way at a community center near downtown Kerrville, Texas, not far from the halfway house she had been staying at as part of her probation and drug treatment program. Christine hadn't gone back to summer school and finished her diploma, after all; she spent most of her time trying to stay out of trouble, fighting off what had become an obvious monkey on her back.
O HIM, SHE
looked “pretty” (his word) just sitting there, minding her own business. She wasn't talking, but more or less relaxing quietly, a look of bashfulness and maybe contemptuousness about her. It was November 1, 2004. “Alive” was how he referred to his first impression of Christine Paolilla as she sat waiting for a 12-step meeting to get under way at a community center near downtown Kerrville, Texas, not far from the halfway house she had been staying at as part of her probation and drug treatment program. Christine hadn't gone back to summer school and finished her diploma, after all; she spent most of her time trying to stay out of trouble, fighting off what had become an obvious monkey on her back.
“She was beautiful,” he added later, referring to the moment he walked into the 12-step room and set eyes on Christine.
Right away, they locked glances and “flirted,” an immediate attraction settling on the two of them as they gaped at each other, a coy smile and a bit of chemistry at play.
It was a coincidence, he speculated, that they ended up sitting next to each other. Yet, right away, he sensed that Christine was like himâthat is, a stranger in a foreign place.
“Hi,” he said, sitting down in one of those folding metal chairs used at stag parties and church hall bingo.
“Hello,” Christine said back.
He went by Justin, but he had been born Stanley Justin Rott. Originally, he was from the Chicago area, Schaumburg, a graduate of Schaumburg High School. He had been in Texas since early 2004. Justin had moved from the upper Midwest down to San Antonio to be with his mother, a woman he'd not had a relationship with since he was two years old.
“And so, I really never
had
a relationship with her,” he commented later.
had
a relationship with her,” he commented later.
Justin Rott's biological mother had called her boy one day out of the blue and asked if she could begin to get to know him. Not having much of anything tying him down in Illinois, he made the trip to San Antonio, with the hope of starting over. Sadly, though, as he would later tell it, this renewed “new relationship” didn't come packaged with a Disney ending.
“It didn't work out so well,” he said. “She had some issues of her own.”
Since his early teens, Justin had internalized an itch for numbing the pain of life with drugs. He had done his share up north; but after moving in as a twenty-four-year-old with his mother, the six-four, 195-pound Chicagoan got an idea of where that longing for chasing the red dragon had come from.
“My mother had a history of drug addiction and, also, some depression, and things like that.” He thought she had “changed,” Justin added, when he met her for what was the first time in 2004. But there was no denying that she had passed down the addict geneâif we can agree that the body produces oneâto him.
Stanley Justin Rott had been in the U.S. Marine Corps for about a year and a half as a young man just out of high school. The reason he was forced out of what was the best opportunity he'd ever had in life turned out to be a failed urinalysis. They called it an “other than honorable [discharge], with separation,” but there was no hiding the fact that the guy had messed up. He had done some cocaine while on leave and couldn't pass a drug test. So the military gave him the boot.
Justin said he had started using heavy drugs in junior high. In fact, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, he admitted, he didn't mess with simple drugs. Maybe weed in the woods behind school, or a few lines of coke here and there at a party with his mates? No. During that time Justin had been a full-blown heroin addict. A damn junkie. In and out of treatment centers and halfway houses for years, falling victim to that revolving-door syndrome many drug addicts can't seem to escape once they get caught in it. Justin later put part of the onus on his family, saying his parents (a father and stepmother) “looked down [on drugs] very strongly.” The first time he asked his dad for help, Justin claimed, “he just wouldn't, because it was drugs. You know, a lot of people today will at least give someone a chance. . . . I understand his position . . . [but] it was difficult, at nineteen years old, you know, it was just
hard
” to accept that his own father wouldn't help him.
hard
” to accept that his own father wouldn't help him.
When Justin left his mother's in San Antonio, after their little reunion in 2004 didn't go over so well, he fell back into his old behavior. This happened after having been sober for a time while staying with his mother.
“I was using,” he said. “She was using. . . . I ended up homeless.”
He was on the street, a dope addict, with nowhere to live. That was Justin Rott's life then. No money. No job. No future. The guy who loved to play pool, draw, hit the beach, listen to David Sides, watch
House
on television, sit back and put on one of his favorite movies,
GoodFellas
or
A Bronx Tale
, had nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to.
Conversations with God
, by Neale Donald Walsch, Justin Rott's favorite book, full of practical and spiritual advice, didn't have the answers this time. Justin knew what to do, but he didn't have the willpower or drive to do it.
House
on television, sit back and put on one of his favorite movies,
GoodFellas
or
A Bronx Tale
, had nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to.
Conversations with God
, by Neale Donald Walsch, Justin Rott's favorite book, full of practical and spiritual advice, didn't have the answers this time. Justin knew what to do, but he didn't have the willpower or drive to do it.
Beaten by the needle again, seemingly no hope in sight, Justin called on a friend, who picked him up and took him to the Serenity House, a detox center in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he spent twenty-eight days drying out, trying to get his actâbest he couldâtogether. From there he was shipped to the Norman Turner House, a halfway house in Kerrville, where he worked at his sobriety while living with twelve other men.
Life inside a halfway house is not a slacker's ride of smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee until his heart explodes and the enamel on his teeth is stained yellow. Nor is it a couch potato's orgy of watching reruns of
Sanford and Son
and
The Beverly Hillbillies,
while talking all things 12-step. A resident is required to work, pay rent, attend addiction meetings regularly, do certain chores around the house, stay sober (of course), and participate in community events. It would be nice, too, if a resident went out and volunteered his time at a soup kitchen or at a homeless shelter. Maybe showed by example how grateful he was for, one, being alive, and, two, being able to give back.
Sanford and Son
and
The Beverly Hillbillies,
while talking all things 12-step. A resident is required to work, pay rent, attend addiction meetings regularly, do certain chores around the house, stay sober (of course), and participate in community events. It would be nice, too, if a resident went out and volunteered his time at a soup kitchen or at a homeless shelter. Maybe showed by example how grateful he was for, one, being alive, and, two, being able to give back.
Justin knew from past experience that the way to
stay
clean was to keep busyâany addict in recovery, serious about his or her sobriety, will tell you this. Another prerequisite that many sobriety programs, sponsors, and all 12-step programs recommend is that a person stay out of relationships for the first year of sobriety. A recovering addict needs a year sober to be able to slog through the fog of addiction and realize who he or she is as a new and clean human being. Before a person can make the choices a relationship requires, he or she needs to be able to think with a clear mind. Most recovering addicts, however, don't listen to this solid, useful piece of proven, practical advice. Many addicts feel that in order to stay clean they need to hook up with another recovering addict. More often than not, this decision backfires. The results are generally disastrous, more in line with a wick lighting not one stick of dynamite, but a fistful. Two addicts falling off the wagon togetherâsomething that routinely happens in this situationâis double the trouble, as they say. An eruption of chaos.
stay
clean was to keep busyâany addict in recovery, serious about his or her sobriety, will tell you this. Another prerequisite that many sobriety programs, sponsors, and all 12-step programs recommend is that a person stay out of relationships for the first year of sobriety. A recovering addict needs a year sober to be able to slog through the fog of addiction and realize who he or she is as a new and clean human being. Before a person can make the choices a relationship requires, he or she needs to be able to think with a clear mind. Most recovering addicts, however, don't listen to this solid, useful piece of proven, practical advice. Many addicts feel that in order to stay clean they need to hook up with another recovering addict. More often than not, this decision backfires. The results are generally disastrous, more in line with a wick lighting not one stick of dynamite, but a fistful. Two addicts falling off the wagon togetherâsomething that routinely happens in this situationâis double the trouble, as they say. An eruption of chaos.
Which was where, for Christine Paolilla, fateâor maybe its opposite: free willâjust happened to walk into her life in the form of a drug addictâarguably like herâwho knew nothing about staying sober for any length of time. Here was another manâsitting next to her at a 12-step meeting, smiling, giving her a shimmering, if not lustful, eyeâfor Christine to fix. Someone for her to latch on to and try to shape and mold into the man she had been looking for all her life.
After the 12-step meeting, Christine and Justin talked. They introduced themselves and exchanged pleasantries, surely discussing where they were living. Out in the world of recovery, especially in the same general county, the circle is quite small. People run into each other all the time: in church basements, at sober dances, in meetings at hospitals and treatment centers. Justin and Christine had exchanged glances and swapped a few stories; yet it didn't seem as though Cupid was going to allow them to move past this initial meeting. Justin was some years older (Christine liked that). He probably had other things on his mind. He didn't seem to be interested in some young chick, newly sober, confused, and just out of high school.
But then, a week or so later, there was a belated Halloween party at a local treatment center, and, lo and behold, Justin Rott and Christine Paolilla bumped into each other. Christine had just gotten out of actual treatment, she told him, and was staying at a nearby halfway house, biding her time before stepping back out into the real world for a go at sobriety alone. She was trying to do the right thing by attending sober events and staying connected to the people she had met in “the program.”
Justin still had some time left in the halfway house he was staying at, he said, but he was slated to get out soon enough.
What a coincidence.
It was the older man who had spotted Christine standing with some friends at the Halloween party. There was that familiar girl who wore all that makeup, smiling and talking. The music thumped. People stood around drinking coffee and punch. Justin didn't give warning; he walked up with a smile, grabbed Christine by the hand, and said, “You're
going
to dance with me!” And he wasn't taking no for an answer, apparently.
going
to dance with me!” And he wasn't taking no for an answer, apparently.
Describing this moment later, he sounded like a smitten boy who was shocked that the girl of his dreams had answered his call: “She danced with me. I took a chance, and she danced.”
They spent the night talking and “getting to know each other.” There was definitely a connection. Some sort of common ground they shared. Music. TV. Books. No matter what they brought up, the other was into it. They were alike on so many different levels. Despite the age difference of seven years, Christine liked what she saw. Rott sported a redneck beer gut (pear-shaped torso, more Kid Rock than Larry the Cable Guy). He had an Inspector Jacques Clouseau pencil mustache, a bit of black peach fuzz on his chin, and a calming way about him that spoke to Christine's need to be comforted, loved, controlled, and taken care of. There's no doubt Justin Rott made Christine Paolilla feel warm and fuzzy. He was her new protector. And there's no doubt, additionally, that Christine made Justin feel as though he had found his soul mate.
From there the relationship soared into hyperspeed. Justin went into a halfway house “not too far down the road from where she was at.” He saw her again after that Halloween party at a 12-step meeting. That encounter turned into them seeing each other every day. They talked, too, on the phone a few times a day. Hung out, Justin said, every night.
“There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't see her or talk to her.”
By Texas standards, Kerrville is a small town, population-wise. Justin and Christine were convinced that wherever they went, “people” (those in the program) would see them and gossipâabout what, exactly, he never said. The idea was that with a man and a young girl getting together every day, both of whom were living in halfway houses after being in treatment for drug addiction, maybe some would suspect that they were getting together too soon in their sobriety and they would eventually turn back to drugs. If there is one thing many recovering addicts will admit, it's that the recovery scene can become a muddled world of judging and nattering busybodies. Some addicts love nothing better than to go to meetings and then hang out after, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, talking smack about everyone else.
“There's not too many places a person can get away [in Kerrville] where the whole town is not talking about it,” Justin explained.
Christine and Justin, however, found such a place: an area of town that he later called “the lake.”
“It's a place,” he said, “where . . . it's almost like back in the days, a place where couples go.” Lovers' Lane. Not necessarily for fornicating, Justin noted, but just to get away from what was a nosey small town of big mouths.
As much as Justin Rott wanted to diminish the idea that the lake was a place where he and Christine chose to consummate their relationship, it took him but two weeks to get her pants off. And he couldn't get enough. That aside, Justin said he viewed the relationship as more than a fleeting bed partner to get him from one stage of his recovery to the next. He saw Christine as someone he wanted to be with all the time. He could not stop thinking about her. He could not stop a desire to be with her. And he could not stop considering that he had never before met someone with whom he seemed to have so much in common.
“We would talk for hours,” he explained later, describing how the relationship evolved rather quickly from dating to obsessing over being with each other. “We never argued. We never fought. We had the same interests. [We liked] the same music. I've never had that before.”
For all intents and purposes, they were addicted to one another.
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