Never See Them Again (35 page)

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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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CHAPTER 68
M
IKE DEGEURIN NEEDED
to go after Brian Harris. He needed to question the guy's tactics, his skills as an interrogator, his tenacity, his cockiness, and his ability to treat Christine, on that first night she was brought in, not with kid gloves, but with the rough, bare hands of a cop looking to get a confession and close a case that had been cold for years. It was DeGeurin's job to dig, press Harris on the hard issues, and see if he could expose a mistake or two Harris had made.
The way to begin this assault was to go after what was one of the more pejorative pieces of evidence the state had in its arsenal: Michelle and Craig Lackner's interviews and descriptions of those two people outside their window. It was their statements that had led to those now-infamous sketches, and the Lackners picking Snider and Christine out of a photo lineup. If the Lackners had seen sketches of the suspects before looking at the photo lineup, their testimony, which Rob Freyer had planned to bring in last, would register as questionable.
“You had with you the—in your offense report—the description that the Lackners had given back . . . on July 18, 2003, is that correct?” DeGeurin began.
“Yes,” Harris said, looking up.
“And when you decided to go to them with a photo array, you had obtained a picture of Christine Paolilla and also one of Mr. Snider, correct?”
“Yes.”
It would be stupid to go to them
without
a photo of both suspects. What would have been the purpose?
“Did you call the Lackners up and tell them to come somewhere, or did you go to their house?”
“We went to their office. . . . That address, it's an office complex. We went to their place of employment.”
“You say ‘we.' Who was with you?”
“Myself and Investigator Tom McCorvey,” Harris said.
“Anyone else?”
Where was DeGeurin going with this?
“No.”
“And when you went, did you have these two exhibits that we're talking about now—the photo arrays—with you?”
“Yes.”
“When you got there, did you tell them,” DeGeurin stopped himself and thought a moment. Changing the question, he asked, “First of all, did you tell them on the phone why you were coming by to see them?”
“Yes.”
“By the way, was that recorded?”
Why would a cop record such a routine call?
“No.”
“Did you make a notation of what you told them on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. You had selected and showed me a few pages that relate to your notes of this happening. Can you show them to me again? Let me look at them?” DeGeurin asked.
“Yes.” Harris showed the lawyer what he wanted.
DeGeurin was smart in the sense that he was breaking down the day Harris spoke to the Lackners into single beats, having the detective talk through every step. In there somewhere, perhaps, was a trip.
“Just give me a start [page] . . . stop. It's not too many pages, as I recall.”
“Right here,” Harris said, pointing to what DeGeurin was looking for.
“Do you mind if I take this over where I can . . . ?” DeGeurin started to ask, but then interrupted himself. “Did you take with you, when you went to meet the Lackners, a copy of the sketch?”
“The case files, yes.”
“Which included the sketch?”
“Yes.”
“Did you show them the sketch?”
“After the identification . . . we discussed the sketches, showed them the sketches and, basically, reaffirmed their decision.”
“Are you saying you did
not
show them the sketches
before
you showed them the photo array?”
“I had them recall what they put on the sketch, what the features were, et cetera.”
“And are you saying you did
not
show them the sketch when—”
This time Harris interrupted: “As far as examining the sketch, no, no.” He shook his head. “No.”
“No, no,” DeGeurin clarified, repeating himself, “not
examining,
but just
showing
them the sketch?”
In other words, did you show them the sketches and the photos
together
—did you
help
these people come to a conclusion?
“I don't think I did. I know we talked about the description. I had the sketches there. It's now in the file, but as far as saying, ‘Hey, look at this sketch,' no.”
“No. But laying there for them to look at, if they wanted to?” (Was the sketch on a table somewhere, maybe in view, so they could compare it to the photo lineup?)
“They could have. I don't know. I don't know if they did or didn't.”
“You don't know whether you had . . . the sketches in a spot where they could look at them before they looked at the—”
“Correct,” Harris said, not letting him finish.
“You don't remember?”
“Correct.”
“But you think they may have looked at them?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't know whether you offered it to them? Or you don't know whether they even looked at them?”
“I don't know if they saw it on the desk or a file or something like that.”
“If it was on a desk, it would be on
their
desk, right, because you're in their—”
“In their office,” Harris interrupted. “It was some kind of office with, like, a round coffee-table type of thing.”
“You would have had to take them out of your file and put them on their desk, correct?”
“Much like I'm carrying this now, yes.”
“Spread out?”
“Correct.”
DeGeurin made a good point, asking pointedly: “For them to look at it if they
wanted
to?”
“I don't know. I don't know if they did.”
“You don't know why you had it out on the desk?”
“For the case file! I had them out because of the case file. It's part of a case file. And finding their statements that they had already made, and for reference for ourselves in getting them to recall the descriptions [they had previously given]. Because in an oral interview, both of them recalled the physical descriptions of the people they saw.”
“So . . . the sketches were to help them remember what their description was?”
DeGeurin was doing his best to make Harris stumble.
“No. The sketches were as a reference for us as they're describing the descriptions of the two people. It's reaffirmation to me that these were good sketches.”
“In other words, you . . . had the sketches there for your own benefit, not for them. Is that what you're saying?”
“Correct. Correct.” Harris nodded his head.
They could have gone on forever, back and forth, discussing this subjective topic until jurors fell asleep and became so confused that Harris's testimony meant nothing.
In the end DeGeurin was able to get Harris to admit that he had explained to the Lackners that they now had a few suspects and their help identifying them was going to be crucial to the case.
DeGeurin then began to question Harris about a report he had handed the lawyer during his testimony, asking if that was the actual report he had been referring to during his testimony. They argued about this for several minutes. It was rather inconsequential, actually, seeing that Harris had made his point that the Lackners identified Christine and Chris from a photo lineup and there really wasn't much DeGeurin could do to deny or dispute that simple, detrimental fact of the case.
For the next thirty minutes or so, DeGeurin keyed in on every particular aspect regarding the Lackners' identification of the photo lineups. By the time the witness and the lawyer finished talking about the Lackners, all the jury could do was anticipate the Lackners' testimony even more. In a sense DeGeurin's cross-examination of Harris gave the Lackners more credibility.
Finally Mike DeGeurin passed the witness back to ADA Tom Goodhart.
Goodhart said, “Nothing further.”
The judge recessed until the following morning.
CHAPTER 69
I
T WOULD HAVE
been a mistake for Rob Freyer not to capitalize on Mike DeGeurin's obsession, truthfully, with the Lackners' descriptions of the defendant and Chris Snider. So, on the morning of October 2, 2008, Freyer called Michelle Lackner as his first witness.
The pretty Texan, who had seen two murderers outside her window, walked in and sat down.
Michelle Lackner introduced herself to the judge and jury. She had been at her accounting job thirteen years, married to Craig for ten, and had lived in the Millbridge Drive neighborhood for the past six years.
She then told her tale of seeing two people walk up the driveway toward the Rowell house on July 18, 2003. And beyond all that they would discuss over the next twenty minutes, including how she identified Christine and Chris in a photo lineup, the most important part of Michelle Lackner's testimony came almost right away, after Freyer asked, “Right now . . . when it comes to the people that you observed, do you happen to see one of the two people that you observed, here, sitting here in the courtroom?”
“Yes.”
“And for the benefit of Judge Ellis, can you identify her by pointing to something that she's wearing, or a physical trait?”
“A pink headband.”
Christine looked down and away.
Michelle Lackner's testimony had the impact of an eyewitness placing Christine at the scene of the crime.
Craig Lackner walked in next and backed up his wife, saying almost the same thing, verbatim.
DeGeurin tried, but could not crack the happy couple. One of the only questionable aspects of the Lackners' testimony came from Craig Lackner, when DeGeurin asked him if Harris and McCorvey had “told them” that their suspects would be in the photo lineup before they looked at the images.
“We were told that—that they were—they were like suspects, but they wanted to show us a lineup. That's all they said.”
“I was thinking maybe I didn't ask the question clear enough,” DeGeurin pressed. “In your mind, when you were looking at the pictures before you determined which one you recognized, were you of the impression from whatever the officers told you that their suspect was going to be one of those photographs?”
“Yes.”
“And do you recall what they told you that led you to that conclusion?”
“They said they had a lineup of people they wanted us to look at. And I think they maybe even said that they had received a tip, I think, and that they had a lineup they wanted us to look at to try to see if we saw the people that we saw.”
“In other words, they didn't . . . tell you, ‘Our suspect is not even in this group'?”
“They didn't tell us that.”
IT WAS OCTOBER
6, 2008, Monday. Brian Harris had been recalled the previous Friday to conclude his testimony. He had walked the jury through every nuance and beat of the case as he saw it. Harris's second round of testimony allowed the state to put into the record several pieces of evidence, as well as scores of additional photographs and witness/suspect statements.
Before the day began, the judge told the jury that the state would be “wrapping its case on Thursday or Friday.”
This was a great relief to many.
With that out of the way, Detective Breck McDaniel took the stand and explained how he interviewed Christine two days after she was apprehended in San Antonio, after she had placed herself at the murder scene. It was certainly implicit in McDaniel's testimony that Christine had had some time before this particular interview to think about what she was going to tell police. By then she believed they had evidence placing her at the scene, so she had to come up with some sort of explanation for being there.
The only jabs DeGeurin could take at McDaniel, which turned out to be weak on merit alone, included questions about Christine's medication and how well she was able to answer questions while under the duress of withdrawal.
But Christine had been checked by doctors and nurses at a hospital and allowed to leave. She had been discharged, McDaniel noted.
The day ended after DeGeurin finished his cross and the state passed on any additional questioning. The judge had something else to do that day, but promised they'd work a full eight hours tomorrow.
At the start of the next morning, Craig and Michelle Lackner were recalled to answer a few additional questions.
Then Nancy Vernau told her tale of hearing the gunshots ring throughout that afternoon, somewhere around three-seventeen.
Prosecutors sometimes refer to this portion of a trial as “coasting,” whereby Rob Freyer and Tom Goodhart were crossing their
t
's and dotting their
i
's, rolling into the station with plenty of fuel in the tank.
An eighteen-year veteran officer, Guillermo “Will” Gonzales, a sergeant in the Homicide Division, sat down next. Will had spoken to Lori Paolilla about Christine during the investigation at the behest of Brian Harris. It was Will Gonzales who tracked Christine and Justin down in San Antonio through bank and credit card records. It was also Will Gonzales and his partner, Detective Richard Martinez, who flew to Louisville to conduct a search for Chris Snider and to look for the weapons used in the murders.
And so now the weapons were entered into evidence.
Next up was DNA specialist Laura Gahn, who had examined most of the DNA in the case.
Quite interesting, Christine's prints or her DNA were not recovered from either of the weapons.
“There was a good reason for that,” a source later said.
“Chris [Snider] had wiped off the weapons, and he also was caught once in the backyard of [his] home, holding the gun up to his head, ready to kill himself, but was talked out of it. These are good reasons why you'd never find Christine's prints on either of the guns.”
What Gahn did make clear was that the guns found at Snider's house were, in fact, the weapons used to commit the murders.
When DeGeurin finished cross-examining Gahn, Freyer passed on further questioning.
With that, the state called Justin Rott.
Rott had some credibility issues; there was no getting around them. The guy was a convicted felon, dope addict, known liar, and convicted thief. And yet, Rob Freyer explained, “The thing that people lose sight of when speaking of Justin Rott's testimony is that he knew details about the crime . . . that had never been released to the public. He knew because
she
told him. We knew she had gone to work at Walgreens after the murders because she had told Rott. The officers followed up on that, and it turned out to be true.”
It had been Freyer's job—and what a task it had been—to keep Justin Rott on his toes as the delays before trial turned into months of waiting. For a recovering drug addict, prone to relapse, downtime is the enemy.
“Rott was good and bad for us,” said one victim's family member. “For months leading up to trial, we never thought he would make it. The guy OD'd, he was using, he would take off and not be heard from. So Freyer literally had to call Rott every day, visit him, and, basically, take care of him as if he was a child.”
But here he was, not looking half bad, ready to do his duty and talk about what his wife had said to him. And that was where the impact of Rott's testimony would strike hardest. Only Christine could have given Justin this information. It was so simple when pared down and looked at objectively. She had confided in her husband, never expecting that he would one day turn around and testify against her.
“The things that he told us in San Antonio,” said one law enforcement officer, “all matched up. We would not have known the guns were in a safe, in Kentucky, hundreds of miles away from Texas, if Rott had not told us that fact.”
Rott hadn't changed much since he and Christine split up. He still walked with that lanky, wayward shuffle.
Freyer had Rott state his full name: “Stanley Justin Rott,” he said, telling the jury where he was from and how long—four years—he had lived in the Houston area.
Christine wore her black overcoat snuggly, as if she was cold. She sat and stared at her husband with a serious gaze that said:
How dare you! We shared secrets.
Rott didn't mince words when it came time to talk about his problems with drugs. He explained that although he was “in recovery” at the time and a member of NA, Narcotics Anonymous, he had also been going to Cocaine Anonymous meetings, as well. The end of the month of October, he claimed, would mark a year of sobriety for him.
Then Rott talked about his “home group” and his “sponsor” in the drug and alcohol abuse programs he had been attending. He said his sponsor was there, in the courtroom, supporting him.
Freyer asked Rott if drugs had caused him problems in the past.
“Of course, yeah, family problems,” he answered, “and all kinds of things.”
It was the understatement of the trial. The amount of drugs he and Christine had done would have killed many addicts not accustomed to the potency and sheer bulk. They had lived like animals inside a hotel room, feces and blood all over the place, needles everywhere.
Rott next admitted that he had been arrested for theft and other misdemeanor crimes associated with being a drug addict and having to support his habit. Currently, Rott told jurors, he was on probation for theft and habitation. Five years, in fact. He had been following his probation standards “so well,” Rott said, he was a “VIP speaker for the district felony courts in Fort Bend County.” He had been asked “to speak to the courts, the drug courts, misdemeanor courts, and speak to families about drug addiction.” Thus, as far as recovering drug addicts go, Rott was the poster boy—the man who could speak from the dark end of a tunnel about the evil spewing from the tip of a needle.
Freyer was doing his best to polish the witness.
DeGeurin allowed it to go on for a brief period and then objected. “Relevancy, Your Honor?”
“Sustained.”
Rott talked about meeting Christine and falling in love.
He spoke of how their life together was great—in the beginning.
He told how he liked Lori and Tom.
He shared how he proposed marriage to Christine.
And how, during Hurricane Rita, they drove down to San Antonio and began the ultimate drug bender.
Before he knew Christine, he said, he had never heard about the murders in Clear Lake.
One of the most important parts of Rott's testimony included an exchange shortly before Freyer concluded his direct questioning. It had to do with Christine's story of being forced into helping Chris Snider.
“Did she ever indicate to you that she was—in the description that she gave you—that she was ever
forced
to do anything? That anybody else
forced
her to do anything?”
“No.”
“Or threatened her?”
“No.”
“Pointed a gun at her, or anything like that?”
“No.”
Freyer brought up the billboard and how Christine reacted that day she had brought Rott out to see it, telling her then-husband, while pointing to the billboard, “That's the Chris that I said that was with me that day.”
Freyer didn't need the Lackners' identification of the sketches. Here was Christine herself doing it for him.
Rott said he didn't leave her and turn her in when he realized she was a murderer because he “loved her.”
Then Freyer had Rott tell jurors the version of the murders Christine had given him after he pressed her for details.
“Christine walked in,” Rott explained. Jurors listened intensely. This was it, the reason why Rott was on the stand. “Chris followed. They walked in the house. She went around with one of the girls. What she told me was they said they were—they were asking for drugs, and I think one of the girls was taking her to go get some. That's how they got separated, her and Chris, from what she told me. But then she told me she started crying when she was with the girl, with Tiffany.”

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