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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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Sure enough, near nine in the morning, Nichole's parents' telephone rang. There were two lines in the house.
“Hello?” Nichole said, still a bit groggy from just having woken up.
It was her aunt. She was asking for Nichole's mother's cell phone number, or a number for the house they were staying at.
“Let me look it up for you. . . .”
“I'll call back.”
Nichole started cooking herself some breakfast. She didn't figure it was that urgent for her to find the number, but the telephone rang again.
This time it was Marcus's sister.
“Is this Melissa (Nichole and Adelbert's older sister)?”
“No.”
“Is this Nona?”
“Yes.” Nichole's radar went up. She could sense the urgency in Marcus's sister's voice, a definite panic. It woke Nichole right up. This heightened sense of anxiety on the other end of the line even scared her.
“Where's Melissa?”
“She's out of town fishing right now.”
“Where's your mom?”
“She's there . . . too. What's going on?”
“I need to speak to them.”
“Why? What's happening? What's going on?” Nichole was getting nervous, more concerned by each word; that thumping in the chest when you know—you just
know
—bad news is forthcoming.
“You need to have them call me.”
“Why? . . .” She paused. “Where's my brother?” Holding it together best she could, Nichole's cousin lost it. She started crying. Then she handed the phone off to Nichole's aunt.
“What is going on?” Nichole demanded.
“Marcus and Adelbert were shot last night.”
“Okay . . . okay. Well,
where
is he? I need to see him
right
now. Where's he at?” She thought D was in the hospital somewhere, fighting, needing his family by his side.
“You need to have your mother call me right away.”
“Why?
Where
is my brother?”
Worry. Dread. Fear. All there. It was beginning to consume Nichole.
There was a brief silence, just the buzz of the static on the telephone line between them.
“Marcus and Adelbert were . . . shot . . . and
killed
last night,” the aunt finally said.
They hung up.
Nichole had just turned seventeen. She was home alone. This news, this horrible pain, which would change her family for the rest of their lives, was all on her. She didn't know what to do with it, how to immediately react, or if what she had just heard was real.
She found her mom's number and called. As she did this, Nichole remembered that at some point between the calls she had started breakfast. She went back into the kitchen to find that the stove was on fire. The smoke alarm was going off—same as her insides. There was chaos in the house, and she was all alone.
Getting the fire under control, Nichole phoned her mother. Before she even spoke, Adelbert's mother knew something was wrong.
“Nichole, what's going on there?”
Not long after she got the words out of her mouth, Nichole could hear her father and mother screaming and wailing in the background. The worst news a parent could be given had ripped their hearts open.
Life was never going to be the same for the Sánchez family.
CHAPTER 7
L
ATER THAT MORNING,
the Seabrook Police Department (SPD) responded to a burglary call. Seabrook is a workingman's waterfront community comprised of shrimpers and oil rig workers. It's located on the northeast corner of Clear Lake, about a ten-minute ride from the murder scene. The woman claimed she'd been robbed while she was out the previous day.
“What time?” the responding officer asked.
“Oh, between six
P.M.
and three
A.M.
,” she said.
“What's missing?”
“A rifle and a pistol.”
The red flag here was that there was no sign of damage to the back door of the single-family dwelling. The front door faced a busy street, so the woman and the police believed the thief must have entered the house through the back. But there was no indication of a break-in.
Strange.
The cop asked the woman if she could describe what type of weapons had been stolen. A teletype had gone out the previous night to all the local police departments, spelling out the murders in Clear Lake City, asking for any information. If two weapons had been lifted from a home shortly before the murders, and they knew the caliber, HPD could figure out relatively quickly if it was a possible match. Cases are sometimes solved by these random acts of crime. Could the HPD be that lucky?
“They were my father's rifle and pistol,” the woman said.
“Taken right from his bedroom. My dad is out of town.”
“Why do you think the intruder came in through the back door?”
“The last time I went to take the dog out,” the woman explained, “the chain on the back door was not on, and I always put the chain on the back door when I lock it.”
The officer asked, “Do you usually lock the back door
and
the screen door?”
“I do.”
“Does anyone else have access to the house, ma'am?” She thought about it. “Yeah. . . .” She gave the cops the girl's name, then mentioned a little bit about the girl's checkered history with law enforcement.
“Do you still associate with these ‘friends' who engage in criminal activity?” the officer asked.
It was clear to the cop that the woman who had been robbed had a past herself. She'd been friends with people who had been in trouble.
“I don't hang around with them anymore,” she said. “I hang with people at my work.”
“Show me where the items were taken from.”
They walked into a room she described as her “father's bedroom.” She pointed to a gun rack. There was a weapon missing. Then she opened the nightstand next to her father's bed.
“There was a pistol in here, too.” She closed the drawer. “It's gone.”
There were plenty of other guns in the closet, the cop noticed. But it did not appear that anything was disturbed throughout the room. Nor did it look like a thief had rummaged through the bedroom searching for other things—besides the guns—to steal. It was as if the thief knew what to search for and where the weapons were.
The woman said she had no idea what type of weapons had been lifted.
The officer handed the woman his business card. “Listen,” he said, pointing to the telephone number on the card. “When your father returns, have him call us . . . so that I can get the rest of the information from him.”
CHAPTER 8
B
RITTNEY VIKKO WAS
still talking, only now she was ruminating on the lives of her friend Tiffany and Tiff's boyfriend, Marcus Precella.
HPD ran Tiffany's name through the system and it came back clean. She had a few vehicular violations and accidents, but nothing that raised any concerns. Same with Rachael Koloroutis. Marcus and Adelbert had no criminal records whatsoever. Neither had been arrested. HPD had no background on either of them. If one or both was a big-time dealer, as some witnesses were saying, there was no history of it anywhere HPD could find.
“I knew Tiffany and her boyfriend, Marcus, used to go to the Club Exotica on Forty-five and Fuqua and party a lot,” Brittney told HPD. It was late, near midnight, when they interviewed Brittney. It was Saturday, July 19. She said it had been a long day and a half. Her friend was dead. Her friend's boyfriend was dead. Two others she really didn't know all that well were dead. Where was the sense in any of it?
“They had asked me to go with them [to the strip club] two or three times,” she continued, “but I told them no. I knew that they had occasionally done cocaine together because I had seen them doing it at their house before.”
This piqued Tom Ladd's interest when he heard about it later. Ladd was one of those investigators who liked to sit back and listen to witnesses talk. He'd ask questions, but one of Ladd's strengths was pulling out of a witness exactly what he or she knew, without coming across as pushy. There would be a time for that good cop/bad cop nonsense, but not now. Not in the midst of what was looking to be an investigation that was going to include interviews with scores of people these kids knew.
“Anything else you can recall?” Detective Phil Yochum asked Brittney.
She thought about it. Now was not the time to hold back information, thinking you were protecting a friend.
“Yeah . . . about a week or so ago, my boyfriend and I were going to Clear Lake and we passed by the [strip] club. I saw Tiffany's car parked there and I remembered her saying that she might go to work there. I called Marcus right after that. He told me she was working there as a waitress. I knew she had been working at the Flying Dutchman in Kemah as a hostess, so I guess she must have quit. . . .”
Yochum and Ladd looked at each other. This was great background information, but in the scope of the murders, it meant squat.
“What else, miss?”
Brittney shuffled in her seat. She seemed uncomfortable. She continued to speak, however. “I was already aware that Marcus was dealing Ecstasy and cocaine, because he had called me and offered to sell me some,” she said, quickly following up by adding, “Which I declined! My boyfriend and I were at Tiffany's . . . about two weeks ago. While I was at the house, I asked [Marcus] if he had gotten rid of the cocaine, and he told me that they had done a lot of it themselves and sold some of it. About a week or so ago, I called Tiffany's cell phone and Marcus answered. He told me he was in Northeast Houston, in the ‘Four-Four' with his cousin, and they were about to pick up some cocaine.”
This neighborhood, often dubbed the “fo-fo,” is an urban inner-city community northwest of Houston. It got the name “Four-Four” or “Forty-Four” supposedly because of the metro bus line #44 running through the district; yet others claim the name originates from the .44 Magnum. The low-income apartments in the area are hangouts for denizens of crime. What makes the neighborhood different is that within the district there is a largely wooded area intermingled within the projects. If you were looking for cocaine, and/or any other hardcore drug, for that matter, the fo-fo is a good place to begin that search, or so claimed a few who were familiar with this particular 'hood.
Brittney Vikko explained how she and Tiffany had met and where they had gone to school. She said they had lost touch for a time, then hooked back up again over the past few years.
Other than that, she didn't know anything else. But if something came up, she'd be sure to call.
Tom Ladd and Phil Yochum had Brittney sign her statement. Told her she was free to leave. Thanked her for coming in.
 
 
TOM LADD CARRIED
a Smith & Wesson .45-caliber automatic weapon on his hip: a big gun for a big guy. Yet this case, at least from where Ladd stood with all those years of police work behind him, nagged at the detective. He sensed something bigger going on here. Something out of the norm. Good homicide cops never pigeonhole themselves, or lock into a theory this early on in an investigation. That would be detrimental to the case and any potential progress. Still, when he sat back and thought about it more thoroughly, Ladd considered a few things that the crime scene screamed at him.
“Well, I guess probably the fact that, look, there's four bodies in there. We got a little girl that's apparently injured or shot dead right there in the living room in front of the TV. And then the thing that stuck out most to me was the one boy and the one girl just sitting there on the couch. Marcus was between the couch and the wall. And you had to move around to see him. But you go in and you see two people just sitting there, like they're watching TV, but dead from gunshot, that made me think it was real quick. Whoever came in there was really deadly and did everything real quick.”
It was as if professionals were involved—which fed more into the theory of a drug deal gone badly, or maybe a drug cartel sending a message. HPD had seen those types of brazen homicides. The same pockmarks were there in Clear Lake. And yet, if one of the boys had reneged on a deal, a better business model for a doper would be to pull him out of the house and shoot him in the head in front of the other dealers and users. That would send more of a direct message to the drug community. The other problem, in looking at the murders being drug related, became the idea that if Marcus was dealing, he was dealing without the security of owning a weapon himself.
When Ladd looked closer, he figured the body in front of the television (Rachael Koloroutis) was the person who answered the door; and the way she had been found pointed to a theory:
A knock or the doorbell . . . Rachael walks over and opens the door. She lets the person in. Turns, begins walking back to the part of the house where she had come from—the hallway leading to the bedrooms, or the kitchen, where she could have been preparing a meal—and is shot as she passes by the television set just as Tiffany and Marcus, on the couch, are shot.
This indicated two shooters instead of one; and it also told police (if the theory was somewhat accurate) that someone in the house knew the shooter(s). Or that Rachael was comfortable with opening the door and letting the shooters in.
Ladd and Yochum didn't need Brittney Vikko, or anyone else, to convince them that they were dealing with a drug-related killing. To them, this seemed obvious “right away,” Ladd said. It could not be overlooked.
“Through [Brittney] and everyone we began talking to, all they could tell us,” Ladd recalled, “was how Marcus was selling drugs. So we had to
assume
it was because of that, that the murders occurred.”
The other factor became the idea that not a lot of drugs had been found in the house. This could mean two things: they were barking up the wrong tree entirely; or the shooter cleaned the house out before he left. Yet, both Marcus and Adelbert had money on them.
So . . . the goal was murder all along?
The one thing Ladd saw as interesting was the fact that everyone they talked to thus far had provided names, as if passing the buck. It didn't take shining a light in anybody's face to reveal names and drug dealers and people they believed might have been involved.
“We'd end up with close to four hundred names,” Ladd recalled, “when all of it was said and done.”
On Sunday, July 20, a tipster—one of soon-to-be dozens—called in. She said her son had been “running his mouth” and talking about how awful it was that the four kids had been “killed execution style, beaten and shot.”
“I'm concerned,” the boy's mother reported to a hotline operator, “that my son knows too much information, more than the media was putting out on the news, so I asked him how he knew so much.”
“What did he say, ma'am?”
“He said a girl came into the Starbucks and told [some people] working on Friday. . . . She couldn't even talk. She was so hysterical. . . .” The girl apparently knew what had happened at Tiffany Rowell's house and talked about details different from what any news organization had been reporting. She had gone to school with Rachael and Tiffany. “She said her boyfriend”—who also knew both girls—“was dealing heavy into drugs.”
There was that drug connection bell ringing again.
The woman had called from a pay phone. She wouldn't give names, only the Starbucks location. This was enough, of course, to send a few investigators to check it out.
Meanwhile, another woman telephoned. She was younger. She said her friend, whom she named, was riding a bus and heard two men talking about the murders. One of the men said he had been with Marcus earlier on the day he was murdered. Marcus had even asked the guy to go with him over to Tiffany's, but the guy turned him down—a decision that likely saved his life.
The conversation was overheard on a shuttle bus running employees to the Kemah Boardwalk. The Boardwalk is sandwiched between Clear Lake, with State Highway 146 running between Kemah and Seabrook (where those guns had been supposedly stolen from a private residence), and the Gulf of Mexico (Galveston Bay), and is directly on the ocean.
The man got off the bus and walked in the direction of a restaurant. The caller gave investigators the name of the establishment.
And this—all the phone calls coming in—Tom Ladd began to see was going to become a problem. The case was on the night shift's shoulders. Ladd had a skeleton crew to work with, as it was. Houston was a major metropolitan area. HPD had other homicides to deal with, more coming in; the Brook Forest murders couldn't take priority over cases they had been working on for months and even years, or new cases coming in.
“If we had the help,” Ladd said, “we could have put eight guys, full-time, on the [Clear Lake] investigation.”
Investigators, as several names turned into several
dozen
names, ran thin. Ladd could only do so much with Phil Yochum, who was looking to get out of the Homicide Division altogether. Ladd's shift didn't start until three or four in the afternoon. Because he was dedicated, and had no tolerance for upper management, and hated the idea that crimes went unsolved because of lack of resources, Ladd got up in the morning and started his shift before noon, heading out to interview witnesses and run down leads. Tom didn't want a pat on the back for going the extra mile—this guy was not about being rewarded for his work. He wanted to solve the case so he could move on to the next one.
The following day, July 21, Ladd and Yochum caught up with a dancer who worked with Tiffany at Club Exotica. Candy Apple (pseudonym) lived in Houston. She wrote her occupation on the witness statement as “entertainer.”
Interesting.
Frank Sinatra: entertainer.
Chris Rock: entertainer.
Candy Apple: stripper.
Candy told detectives she had left high school during her junior year and started dancing shortly after.
“I'd known Tiffany and Rachael about a week,” Candy said between drags of a cigarette. Both girls had just started working at Club Exotica. They were nice. Friendly. Willing to help the other girls. That much was clear within a few days of Tiffany and Rachael working at the club. Yet, there was something about Rachael, Candy mentioned, that she liked more than her run-of-the-mill friends. She saw something special in Rachael.
Ladd and Yochum explained to Candy that she had been sworn under oath to tell the truth about what she knew. If there was something she had been holding back, it was going to come back and bite her in that ass she used to make money.
Candy understood. She had nothing to hide. She wanted to help any way she could. All the dancers did. Everyone at the club was devastated by Tiffany and Rachael's deaths.
Last time she saw Tiffany, Candy explained, was on the Thursday night before the murders. On that night, Candy danced; Tiffany waitressed. Rachael had not been scheduled to work, but she was hanging out at the club. She was helping. (And that was the type of person Rachael was, Candy added.)
Candy soon brought up something interesting, explaining that, as she understood it, “I knew Tiffany and Rachael and Tiffany's boyfriend Marcus and Marcus's friend were staying together at the house on Millbridge.”
The indication from Candy was that Adelbert was living there. But no one in Adelbert's family could agree with this. Adelbert, although he had left his house and would be gone for days sometimes, always came back home, where he had a bedroom. True, he and his father were at an impasse about what Adelbert was doing with his life, but Adelbert certainly had a bed at home to slip into every night, according to his family.

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