On the afternoon of July 18, 2003, four young people were shot to death in Tiffany Rowell's house in the Clear Lake City neighborhood of Houston: 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. Koloroutis had been shot and then beaten; the medical examiner found skull fractures from blunt force. Bullets from two different guns were recovered, and bullets from both were in the bodies of Rowell and Precella.
The next-door neighbors, Michelle and Craig Lackner, had watched a young man and woman walk casually down the street and up to the house. The woman carried a purse. That description was almost all the police had, and the case went unsolved for three years. The two were Christine Paolilla, seventeen, a friend of the two girls from Clear Lake High School, and her boyfriend, Christopher Lee 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 became a heavy heroin user. In November 2004, at a drug treatment center in Kerrville, she met Stanley Justin Rott, and they married about four months later.
Rott later testified that she told him, vaguely at first, about an incident with a former boyfriend in which four people died, and then in more detail, and that he called Crime Stoppers. (One published account says the tipster was a different man who had met her in rehab; the appeals court's summary of the trial testimony names Rott.) A warrant was issued, and at 11:55 a.m. on July 19, 2006, three years and a day after the murders, police entered the San Antonio hotel room where she was staying with Rott. Hundreds of used syringes littered the room. She was wearing a bloodstained T-shirt and had needle marks over her body; she told doctors later that day that she was used to injecting heroin every ten to fifteen minutes.
Her account changed as the questioning went on. In a videotaped interview in San Antonio that afternoon she said she had driven Snider to Rowell's house to buy drugs, waited in the car while he went in twice, and seen him come out running with a gun, and she denied hearing any shots. That evening in a hospital, recorded on audio, she said Snider had told her he shot all four. Close to midnight on July 20, in Houston, she said Snider had forced her into the house and made her hold one of his two guns, and that he pulled the trigger several times while the gun was in her hand.
Snider, told that there was a warrant for his arrest, fled to Greenville, South Carolina, and died there that month; by one account he ran into the woods with a bottle of pills and a soda and took a deliberate overdose. The two handguns were later found in Louisville, Kentucky, in a safe at the home of Snider's stepfather. In 2007 a court refused to set bail for her, citing the nature of the offense and the clear evidence that she was a flight risk.
She went to trial in 2008 before State District Judge Mark Kent Ellis. The defense asked the court to throw out all three statements, arguing that she had been in heroin withdrawal or under the morphine, methadone and Librium given to her in custody; the judge found the officers credible and the defense expert's opinions unsupported, and the jury heard all three recordings. The Lackners identified her in court. Rott testified that she had told him Snider handed her a gun to carry in her purse, that the plan was to take drugs and money without hurting anyone, that the two started shooting once they were inside, and that she went back to make sure the victims were dead, found Koloroutis choking on her own blood, and beat her with the gun until she died. The defense attacked Rott as a man after reward money and a deal on the heroin in the hotel room.
Her lawyer, Mike DeGeurin, argued that Snider fired the fatal shots, jammed a .38 revolver against her stomach to make her help, and held her hand on the gun she carried as it went off. The prosecutor, Rob Freyer, called that a tired and pathetic tactic, and asked whether it could have happened without her; of course not, he said. The jury was instructed on the law of parties, and on October 13, 2008, it convicted her of capital murder. Because she had been seventeen, she could not be sentenced to death. She cried as a bailiff led her out. "I feel justice was served," Rachael's father, George Koloroutis, said outside the courtroom. "It's a good first step toward closure."
What she received has been described two ways. Prosecutors told reporters she must serve forty years before she could be considered for parole, and her parole eligibility date is given as 2046. The Fourteenth Court of Appeals, affirming the conviction on March 3, 2011, described the sentence as mandatory life without parole and rejected her argument that such a sentence for a juvenile was cruel and unusual; it also upheld the admission of her statements and the denial of a mistrial over the prosecutor's closing argument. The Texas prison system's inmate records list her today at the Christina Melton Crain Unit in Gatesville, serving a life sentence, with a parole eligibility date of July 22, 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.
March 31, 1986: born on Long Island.
July 18, 2003: Tiffany Rowell, Rachael Koloroutis, Marcus Precella and Adelbert Sanchez are shot to death in Rowell's house in Clear Lake City, Houston.
November 2004: she meets Stanley Justin Rott at a drug treatment center in Kerrville.
July 19, 2006: arrested in a San Antonio hotel room.
July 20, 2006: in her third statement she says Christopher Lee Snider forced her into the house.
July 2006: Snider dies in Greenville, South Carolina.
2007: a court refuses to set bail.
October 13, 2008: a jury convicts her of capital murder.
March 3, 2011: the Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.
July 22, 2046: her parole eligibility date in Texas prison records.