On July 18, 2003, four young people were shot to death in a house in the Clear Lake City neighborhood of Houston: Tiffany Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis, both eighteen, Rowell's boyfriend Marcus Precella, nineteen, and his cousin Adelbert Sanchez, twenty-one. Sanchez had moved to Clear Lake only a week or two earlier to get away from violence on the north side of the city. Neighbors had seen two people walking to and from the house, and their descriptions were almost all the police had. The case went unsolved for three years. The two people were Christine Paolilla, seventeen, a friend of the two girls from Clear Lake High School, and her boyfriend, Christopher Snider.
Paolilla was born on March 31, 1986, on Long Island. Her father died when she was two, and she had alopecia and wore wigs from childhood; she had been badly bullied before Rowell and Koloroutis, part of a popular circle at school, took her up. After the killings she and Snider went into hiding, living out of a motel room in San Antonio. She married Justin Rott in 2005 and became addicted to prescription painkillers.
The break came from a tip. A caller told the police that he had met Paolilla in rehab and that she had told him she had killed the four people in Clear Lake. She was arrested on July 19, 2006, three years and a day after the murders. Questioned by detectives, she put the blame on Snider, saying he had come up with the idea of robbing her friends and that the plan had gone wrong. Both were charged with capital murder. Snider, told that there was a warrant for his arrest, fled to Greenville, South Carolina, and killed himself there that month.
At her trial in 2008 before State District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, her lawyer, Mike DeGeurin, said that Snider had fired the fatal shots, had jammed a .38 revolver against her stomach to make her help, and had held her hand on the handle of the gun she was carrying as it went off. The prosecutor, Rob Freyer, called that a tired and pathetic tactic. Could it have happened without her, he asked the jury; of course not. On October 13, 2008, the jury convicted her of capital murder. Because she had been seventeen, she could not be sentenced to death, and on October 14 she received the automatic life sentence, with forty years to serve before she could be considered for parole. Rachael Koloroutis's father, George, said outside the courtroom that justice had been served.
Her lawyers appealed, and her later appeals have not changed the sentence. She is held at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, and her parole eligibility date is given as 2046. What drove the killings has never been settled. Prosecutors spoke of robbery, commentators of jealousy of the girls who had befriended her, and her own account put everything on Snider.