Never See Them Again (21 page)
Read Never See Them Again Online
Authors: M. William Phelps
CHAPTER 40
T
HERE CAME A
time when Christine Paolilla sat her husband down and decided to come clean about what had happened in Clear Lake. She wanted to admit everything she could remember (or, rather, her first version of the events). By this time they were doing so much heroin and cocaine (speedballing) that the simple daily ritual of taking care of themselves hygienically became an impossible chore. They were sleeping and shooting dope, eating enough to stay alive, and not doing anything other than making sure the curtains in whatever hotel room they stayed in were drawn and there was enough dope on tap to last days or even a week at a time.
HERE CAME A
time when Christine Paolilla sat her husband down and decided to come clean about what had happened in Clear Lake. She wanted to admit everything she could remember (or, rather, her first version of the events). By this time they were doing so much heroin and cocaine (speedballing) that the simple daily ritual of taking care of themselves hygienically became an impossible chore. They were sleeping and shooting dope, eating enough to stay alive, and not doing anything other than making sure the curtains in whatever hotel room they stayed in were drawn and there was enough dope on tap to last days or even a week at a time.
Christine looked like one of those big-eyed aliens common in Area 51 popular culture. She had no eyebrows. Her hair (what was left) was generally propped up in a bun. Her skin was white as the dope she shot. Her eyes were bulging and sad and tired. Her lips were red as a heart. She was skinnier than an anorexic: a nineteen-year-old heroin/cocaine addict shooting enough dope for three junkies. It was incredible that she was still alive.
Christine said she and Chris Snider had gone to the Millbridge Drive house with “no intentions of anybody getting killed.” As the evidence later proved, though, they had brought along enough firepower to wage a small war.
Anyway, they parked on the side of the road down the street from Tiffany's and “walked up to the house.” This, so far, boded well when placed against the Lackners' description of seeing a male and female dressed in black approaching the Rowell residence from the road, walking up the driveway.
As they advanced toward the outside foyer of the front door, Chris Snider stopped and turned to his girl, according to what Christine told Justin Rott: “Take this,” he said, handing Christine a gun.
“It wasn't even planned,” Justin later told police, “you know, Chris and her. Chris got the guns, which were his father's guns, as far as I know.”
Christine placed the weapon in her purse. She did not fight with Chris or question him:
Why do you have a gun? What the hell is going on here? Why do I need a gun?
Instead, she took the weapon, saying, “Okay.” They were there, said Christine, to rob the four of any money and drugs they had in the house. Christine mentioned “marijuana, [a] bunch of prescription pills, some cash, just like an assortment of drugs, Ecstasy. . . .”
Why do you have a gun? What the hell is going on here? Why do I need a gun?
Instead, she took the weapon, saying, “Okay.” They were there, said Christine, to rob the four of any money and drugs they had in the house. Christine mentioned “marijuana, [a] bunch of prescription pills, some cash, just like an assortment of drugs, Ecstasy. . . .”
One of them knocked on the door. Christine didn't say who.
Rachael or Tiffanyâ“one of the girls”âanswered the door, Christine explained to her husband. Then she said that Chris knew everyone in the house, yet he was not “friends” with any of them. Acquaintances. They had seen each other out partying and said “what up,” but did not necessarily hang out together on a regular basis.
Chris and Christine walked into the house. Rachael, Tiffany, Marcus, and D appeared to have been watching television together.
“Tiff,” Christine said as they walked in, “can you take me upstairs?” (Because the living room was sunken, they referred to the main level of the house as “upstairs.”) Christine made it clear she wanted Tiffany to take her to her room.
“Sure,” Tiffany said. She popped up off the couch and told Christine to “come on.” Christine explained that Tiffany thought she knew what she wanted, why they were there: to buy drugs. Tiffany and Marcus kept “it” in their bedroom inside the dresser. Christine knew this.
According to what Christine told Justin, before she and Chris had walked into the house, he had told her, “We're just going to take the drugs.” None of the kids were drug dealers, Christine added. “They're just some kids that, I guess, have extra, and sometimes they'd sell it to friends. . . .”
“Okay,” Christine said to her boyfriend, going along.
“And any money, too,” Chris added.
Christine apparently nodded in agreement with this also.
While they were inside Tiffany's bedroom, Christine made it clear that they were there to take the drugs.
With Christine and Tiffany out of earshot and sight of the others, Chris was alone in the living room with D, Marcus, and Rachael, who was sitting on the floor in front of the television.
Back in Tiffany's room, Christine started to cry. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry.”
“What are you talking about?” Tiffany asked, opening the dresser.
“I'm . . . so . . . sorry,” Christine repeated, crying harder.
Tiffany was confused; she had no idea what her friend was talking about.
Meanwhile, Chris brandished his weapon and held the three of themâall of whom were relaxing comfortably, unafraid of this guy they had seen Christine with beforeâdown on the couch and chair. He stood and pointed his gun at them all, going from one to the other, telling them “not to move.” It was now clear that Christine and Christopher were there to rob the kids.
Christine and Tiffany returned to the living room, and Tiffany saw what was happening.
“Why?” Tiffany asked.
Rachael and the others echoed Tiffany's sentiment. “Why are you doing this?”
“Get over by the couch!” Chris said to Tiffany, waving at her with his gun. “You,” he said to Christine, “take out your gun.”
According to Christine, she did as she was told.
Chris and Christine stood in front of the four, holding them at bay.
“The first time she explained it to me,” Justin later said, “she said . . . Chris shot first.”
Per Christine's first version of this mass murder (there would be several varying accounts of the same story in the coming months), Chris Snider pointed his gun directly at Marcus as he stood by the fireplace. D sat on the couch; Marcus was to D's right.
Marcus pleaded with Chris. “Please, man, take whatever you want and leave. Take it all. Go ahead. Take it.” He was sincere, nonthreatening.
The others said the same thing, essentially begging for their lives.
Chris wasn't hearing any of it, though, according to Christine. As Marcus pleaded, Christine told Justin, Snider shot him.
As D went to stand, Snider popped him in the head, sending D backward.
This seemed to be what a male might be thinking at the time: take out the biggest threats firstâthe two males. Chris Snider was not ignorant with regard to the rules of the street.
As he shot D, Christine claimed, it was almost as if that second shot initiated hellfire. “They both started shooting,” Justin said Christine told him. The way she explained it, she seemed to say that the gun in her hand had gone off by itself; she didn't have any control over it. She claimed to be crying as she shot both the girls and put more bullets into the boys, firing blindly in the direction of the three of them. (Marcus was already on the ground, probably dead.) Meanwhile, Rachael was trying to run out of the room.
Rachael
. . .
. . .
Justin explained how that name alone would later haunt Christine. “She brought it up all the time. . . . 'Cause that was the last one she remembers . . . she had nightmares all the time about her.”
Before they opened fire, “both of the girls, they were asking why, why are you doing this, just pleading. . . .”
Justin said Christine couldn't recall exactly, but she thought she had shot Rachael and Tiffany, while Chris Snider continued to fire rounds into the boys.
“I don't really think she paid attention to who she was hitting.”
Maybe so. But there were not many misses. So somebody was paying attention to where he or she was firing.
As Christine told the story, she went “back and forth,” Justin later said, “between hysterically crying, to just having no emotion.”
Imagine, admitting to killing four people, and there were times when she showed
no emotion. . . .
no emotion. . . .
Christine had never come out and said it, but it was clear that she and Snider kept firing until they ran out of ammo.
“Then they left the house.”
Outside, they hopped into her purple Geo Prizm. Christine got into the passenger seat; Chris drove. This was part of the plan.
Why? Because Christine had to go to work.
Before Chris started the car, however, Christine said: “We have to go back.”
“What?”
“I have to make sure they're all dead.” Christine was under the impression that one or maybe two of them had lived through the barrage of gunfire. She was concerned about this.
Snider said no way.
Christine got out of the car and ran back into the house.
Walking in the front door, seeing blood everywhere, she spied Rachael on the floor in front of the television. Still alive, Rachael was crawling.
Christine stood over Rachael, staring down. As the evidence later proved, Rachael was reaching for her cell phone or had it in her hand and was trying to dial 911.
“And [Rachael] was choking on her own blood,” Justin said later, describing how Christine told it to him, “She was gagging.”
Christine stood stunned.
Rachael is still breathing.
Rachael is still breathing.
“Why?” Rachael repeated over and over. “Why would you?”
Christine took out her pistol. She leveled it over her head, holding it by the barrel like a hammer, and began, in a whipping motion, pounding on the back of Rachael's head, bashing her skull in, making sure she was dead, no chance of coming back. As she did this, Rachael “was crying the whole time.” One of the two girls who had taken Christine under her wing, and had taught her how to dress and buy wigs and wear her makeup so she didn't look like Tammy Faye Bakker, was pleading for her life, wondering why her friend was killing her. Christine continued to pound the butt of that weapon into Rachael's skull repeatedly.
Over and over.
Spattering blood all over the walls, the carpet, and even up toward the ceiling.
Satisfied that Rachael was dead, Christine Paolilla ran back out that same front door and jumped into her waiting car. With Snider at the wheel, they took off.
From there, Christine didn't run out and do a bunch of drugs to forget about the vicious quadruple murder she had just committed with her boyfriend. She didn't look to drench those bloody memoriesâso fresh in her mindâin a pool of booze and sex inside a seedy hotel room. She didn't demand that Chris take her somewhere so they could talk about it and get the heck out of Clear Lake City. Instead, Christine turned to her boyfriend and demanded, “Take me to work.”
He drove to the Walgreens and dropped off his accomplice so she could make her shift.
Christine walked into Walgreens and clocked in at 4:23
P.M.
(she would clock out for a break at 6:59 and back in at 7:29
P.M.
, and clock out to go home at 10:35
P.M.
); she put on her work apron, washed up in the restroom, and then stood behind the makeup counter, waiting for her first customer of the evening. She was nervous. But okay, considering what had happened.
P.M.
(she would clock out for a break at 6:59 and back in at 7:29
P.M.
, and clock out to go home at 10:35
P.M.
); she put on her work apron, washed up in the restroom, and then stood behind the makeup counter, waiting for her first customer of the evening. She was nervous. But okay, considering what had happened.
As Christine got settled behind the counter, she happened to look down.
There were specks of blood underneath her fingernails.
CHAPTER 41
T
IME. DETECTIVE BRIAN
Harris knew all about it. Such an expressive word, something no one seemed to have enough of these days. Yet time, in its universal splendor, was about to take on new meaning for Harris as the winter of 2006 settled on Houston.
Time
magazine had interviewed Harris for an article about New Orleans transplants and the new (massive migratory) wave of crime HPD had contended with over the past six months post-Katrina. That article, in which Harris was quoted, on top of an award Harris had never asked or lobbied for but received, was about to cause the young, new sergeant a bit of a stir with some of his colleagues.
IME. DETECTIVE BRIAN
Harris knew all about it. Such an expressive word, something no one seemed to have enough of these days. Yet time, in its universal splendor, was about to take on new meaning for Harris as the winter of 2006 settled on Houston.
Time
magazine had interviewed Harris for an article about New Orleans transplants and the new (massive migratory) wave of crime HPD had contended with over the past six months post-Katrina. That article, in which Harris was quoted, on top of an award Harris had never asked or lobbied for but received, was about to cause the young, new sergeant a bit of a stir with some of his colleagues.
Harris had been part of a teamâthe newly formed Gang Murder Squadâthat had arrested eight men, all from New Orleans, suspects in eleven murders. It was a major accomplishmentâsomething the department could be proud of amid all the bloodshed that had been spilled since Katrina.
“Of twenty-three Katrina-related homicides in Houston, we linked nine to just two groups from New Orleansâthe 3 'n' G and the Dooney Boys,” Harris told
Time
magazine. “You see a spike in homicides in New Orleans in July and August, then the hurricane comes and they are displaced to Houston and elsewhere.”
Time
magazine. “You see a spike in homicides in New Orleans in July and August, then the hurricane comes and they are displaced to Houston and elsewhere.”
Utter chaos was what the city of Houston had experienced. But Harris, along with scores of other good cops, had made an impact on the Katrina-related gang crime and murder, thwarting a solid portion of it all. In addition, many of the Katricians were heading back to where they lived, which was a blessing all by itself. Harris was proud of his men, himself, and anyone else who had helped. Why shouldn't he be? Most in the Homicide Division (Harris included) were hardworking, type A, go-getter investigators who didn't wait for an opportunity. This wave of crime had truly brought out the best in most everyone on the force.
Although HPD now had somewhat of a handle on the Katrina cases, more murders and crimes were coming in every day. Things would settle down, and boom! Another crack dealer beat a lady of the night; another gang member took revenge on a young user who owed a debt; another turf war turned into carnage. And then every so often, Harris looked over to the side of his desk and the Clear Lake case stared back up at him.
Oh, yeah . . . that
.
.
The case was continually poking at him. At this point he was by himself as far as investigating Clear Lake. Everyone else had been slammed with cases, on top of what had been that promised rash of Homicide Unit retirees. An additional blow weighing on Harris was that he had been voted supervisor of the year by the department in 2005. This did not sit well with some of the guys around him. One comment he heard from a particular cop was “A monkey could do this job” (meaning Homicide Division work).
“Really?” Harris said. “You gonna call that guy”âhe pointed to a Homicide cop with thirty-three years on the jobâ“a monkey after his three decades of service?” It was an insult. Personality reigned over principle, duty, and integrity. Some cops stood out on their own merits. Some jumped into the spotlight, brushing their hair first, shining their badge second. Some liked to voice their opinions. Harris was not one or the other; he did his job and let the chips fall.
Every time Harris had a success, that same copâthe monkey comment guyâapproached him and pointed to the Clear Lake boxes stacked up on the floor next to Harris's desk.
“If you're such a
hotshot,
why can't you solve
that
one?” the monkey comment guy said one day.
hotshot,
why can't you solve
that
one?” the monkey comment guy said one day.
“Buddy, if you think you're big enough,” Harris responded, “why don't you jump on board?”
But maybe the guy was right, Harris thought on those days when things seemed to be too much. Was this case, now heading toward its three-year anniversary, ever going to be closed? Did it even have the potential anymore?
The one positive the case had going for it was George Koloroutis; he was not going to allow his daughter's murder to fall by the wayside. George had called Harris's captain one day not too long after the second anniversary, when the Katrina crime exploded. “Look,” George had said, “the case has been bounced around, nobody taking any ownership. It's been passed from one group to another, and the only one who has shown any interest lately is Harris. Can you at least allow him to stay on it until there's some closure, or you guys know for sure that it just isn't going anywhere?”
A promotion within the ranks of law enforcement usually meant the guy or gal who received that promotion was transferred to a place in the department where he or she was going to be more useful. You didn't want to promote an officer to sergeant and then allow him to stay in the same unit he had been in, obviously, for fear that he or she would show favoritism to those officers he or she had befriended while one of them. It is almost unheard of that an officer stayed within the same unit after a supervisory advancement.
It was back at the promotion ceremony, Harris recalled, when one of the assistant chiefs from the department put into perspective how unique a situation Harris had found himself in. The assistant chief had made a comment to Harris regarding how rare it was in law enforcement circles that an officer who was promoted stayed in his unit. The assistant chief approached Harris after the ceremony concluded and stuck out his hand. “I need to shake the hand of the man who walks on water!”
Harris was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“All I'm saying is a man would have to walk on water before his superiors would ever allow him to stay in the division.”
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