“No, no, no,” Yochum said, “go right ahead. Take it all. Whatever you need.”

  Solving murders involved passion. Yochum and Ladd had run out of gas long ago. It needed a hungry detective with a fiery spirit.

  Going through the reports, Harris came to the same conclusion that Ladd had, and he understood more clearly why Ladd had always come back to JU. The dope dealer’s name kept popping up in all the right places. There was no way to deny it, or overlook the obvious, unless you had a solid reason to write off JU. And at this point Harris had more evidence pointing to JU than he did leading away from JU.

  “You have to follow the evidence,” Harris remarked. “That clichéd statement is true.”

  HARRIS GOT WORD of a suspect arrested for burglary who wanted to speak with someone in the Homicide Division about the Clear Lake murders.

  Here we go again. . . .

  The guy was in county lockup. Harris went over to see him. It was May 10, 2004, near ten-thirty in the morning.

  Harris waited inside a room at the 174th District Court in Houston. The guy’s attorney sat down. This particular witness, Harris learned, was thirty-nine years old; he was a big dude, tough as nails, and hailed from the local Houston area. He was being held on a no-bond charge, serious stuff. He first talked about the number of the cell he had been in, something that would become important. He said he worked in the kitchen inside the jail. He talked about a big guy he had met on the inside. The guy wore glasses and a beard. He was being held in the cell next to him.

  “How did you get to know him?” Harris asked.

  “Well, you know, white boys in a predominantly black atmosphere.”

  Simple answer.

  “You know, you kind of ride together. We played volleyball on, you know, a self-formed team.”

  Small talk. Harris understood it was part of building rapport.

  The guy explained how he and this guy had gotten “pretty close,” as they basically slept in the same pod, ate together, and hung out most days, talking most nights.

  “Tell me what happens,” Harris said as the guy’s lawyer looked on, “how you’re watching TV one time, so I hear, and what’s on TV?”

  “Well, it’s either the news or a recording of the news. I wasn’t really paying much attention . . . because it’s, like, at six o’clock every day they put the Crime Toppers [sic] thing on TV, and it lasts thirty minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “And, you know, we’re playing a game of dominoes or checkers at the table and then you glance back and forth, catch the headlines, or, you know, and that’s how I saw the”—he hesitated, looked at his lawyer—“I saw the . . . what we’ve been talking about.”

  So far Harris was half impressed. He kept responding “uh-huh” and “okay,” so as not to plant anything in the guy’s head. He wanted this informant to tell him what was going on. Lots of guys liked to waste the time of law enforcement and tell stories—boy, had Harris learned that the hard way during this case. Every inmate who came forward, Harris knew, wanted something, some sort of a deal for himself. This guy was no different. He sounded sincere and vague enough in the way he told his stories that he might be believable, yet that unavoidable “but” was coming somewhere down the line.

  “When that came on,” he continued, referring to the Crime Stoppers nightly report on television, “he said, ‘I know. . . .’ ”

  “What came on the news, though? We’re on tape here: what comes on the news?”

  “They show the reward. They show all the different rewards for all these unsolved crimes, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And so they show one for four people that was killed in, like, toward Galveston, Pearland, or, I mean, not Pearland, Friendswood.”

  Close enough.

  “Okay.”

  “He says, ‘I know these people.’ ”

  Nothing else was said at that time. It was two weeks later, the informant explained, when his cellmate began to talk about Clear Lake and what he actually knew.

  “We’re lying in bed, you know, talking. . . . And he said the stuff they showed on TV about the four people . . . he said, ‘We went in there and Rachael was sitting in the chair watching TV and we pistol-whipped her.’ And the reason that brought it to my attention was because he had said ‘we.’ ”

  Harris was interested. Details. Somewhat off. But details of the crime scene, nonetheless.

  “And then there are two other people sitting on the couch,” the informant added.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He said they didn’t beat them all, but he specifically said, ‘We beat Rachael with the pistol,’ and he carries the pistol under his arm, you know, and he told me that on three or four occasions.”

  “What kind of pistol?” Harris asked.

  “I don’t know. . . . Like, he says, he goes [over there] to deliver weed or something, to somebody’s house, this girl that he knows in Pasadena, and he’ll leave his pistol in the car. . . .”

  They discussed the notion that he sold weed and was, in fact, a dealer.

  “What else did he say about this thing?” Harris asked.

  “Well, he said that this girl, Rachael, was staying there. It’s like her house or her mom’s house, and she left town and left the house on the market, and this girl apparently wasn’t even out of school or something, ’cause he said she was supposed to be finishing school.”

  He had a few things wrong, Harris noted, but the detective was impressed with the fact that the information wasn’t exact and the guy was in the neighborhood of what the living conditions actually were. He was obviously mixing Rachael up with Tiffany.

  They talked about the girl, Rachael, having a boyfriend in the house—he meant Tiffany Rowell, of course.

  “[He] was selling dope for a cousin.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I assume it’s speed they’re talking about, because they do speed.”

  “Okay.”

  “And he said they owed somebody money. Apparently, they turned the house into a dope house.” But he didn’t know how much, exactly, they owed.

  “Did he say they went over there to collect the money?” Harris asked.

  “I assume that’s what they went to do.”

  “Okay, but he never told you that?”

  “He never told me that.”

  “Okay, what else did he tell you?”

  “Uh, I mean, that’s really, that’s about it.”

  Harris wasn’t biting. “Well, see, I might have been sitting in the bed going, ‘Why did you kill them all?’ ”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I really wanted to keep talking, so I acted a little disinterested.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And then when I asked him questions, he didn’t say any more.”

  They went back and forth, but the informant could not offer anything more in the form of details pertaining to the murders. This alone gave his statement a bit more credibility—the fact that he wasn’t laying out the entire scenario.

  Turned out the guy who had admitted all of this was someone by the name of “Bear,” or “Big Bear.”

  Brian Harris and Phil Yochum busted Bear out of the county lockup. They sat him down and asked him to take a polygraph.

  Bear, they soon learned, had a familiar friend and business partner.

  JU.

  Bear passed the polygraph.

  “That just opened up that whole JU thing even bigger,” Harris said.

  CHAPTER 24

  FRUSTRATED, DETECTIVE BRIAN Harris sat down and wrote a letter to his lieutenant on June 7, 2004. Harris wasn’t so much concerned that the case hadn’t been solved, but more along the line of information coming in and there weren’t enough resources or cops to wade through it all. On top of that, he wanted to let his boss know—officially—that he was interested in taking control of the case. He wanted permission, essentially, to run with it, wherever it led.

  This is a solvable case, Harris kept telling himself.

  Harris had gone through all of the documents and broke the case down into groups of similar information. He wanted to do this, he wrote in the letter, so that whoever ended up investigating the case and working on it—even for a day—could easily sift through an index and become acquainted with all of the ins and outs of the case. This way, nothing would be overlooked.

  One of Harris’s main issues was that he believed there were still “numerous people” who needed to be interviewed. He warned that the families had been calling and had become “concerned about the lack of attention on this case.” Those family members, Harris noted, wanted to know “how many” investigators were assigned, and what “the latest” had been. George had called a media consultant who had worked for the city promoting events, Harris wrote. The woman knew the chief personally and had already related the families’ frustration to him and the need to draw attention back onto the case.

  Harris said the families had requested a meeting with whoever was in charge. They had gotten together and were going to be placing billboards up around the Clear Lake area, announcing again the reward and the Crime Stoppers tip line. There was some talk that George wanted those sketches to be put up on the billboards. The message here was going to be that the sketches weren’t necessarily the murderers, but the two people depicted in the drawings could maybe clear up a lot of unanswered questions.

  That was the idea, anyway. But one had to listen to the music beneath the noise. If those sketches were on billboards, there was no telling what would happen.

  Harris wrote that the families wanted to do this before July 18, the one-year anniversary. The idea was to place the billboards up within two weeks and “launch,” as Harris put it, the first series of media coverage. Harris finished his thought by explaining how he believed, from speaking with the families, that this case might “generate negative coverage” for the Homicide Division if family members thought they were being “neglected.”

  Harris concluded that “exhaustive” work had been done on the case, and Tom Ladd and Phil Yochum had done a fantastic job. But more needed to be done. The sooner, the better.

  Harris concluded that the obvious motive was dope, saying how he believed he had already “talked to the killers” during his interviews.

  “I was basically trying to get the blessing from my superiors to go forth and dig into this case my way,” Harris said later. “Look, the families were calling, and nobody had any answers for them. I wanted the case assigned to me officially, so I could begin to get some things done.”

  Harris has always been known in HPD circles as a cop who voiced his opinions. In that respect, Harris was maybe too outspoken for some of his Texas counterparts, who believed in the more traditional old boys’ club. Part of that, of course, or at least the part that his adversaries mentioned more often than not, was the fact that Harris was a tried-and-true Yankee; he had grown up back east, on the doorstep of New England. He wasn’t from the Texas belt of deep-seated Lone Star cowboys. He might have had a slight Southwestern twang in his voice from all his years living in Texas, but you could never take that East Coast attitude out of the guy.

  Regardless of how anybody felt about Harris, most agreed there was one thing that his competitors (and detractors) could not take away: this cop got things done. Most of his colleagues knew it. His boss knew it. And most of the family members of the slain kids knew it. Heck, it was one of the reasons why Tom Ladd, a Texas cop to the core, had recommended Harris to begin with; Ladd knew Harris would not stop until he found out what had happened to those kids.

  Upon reading the letter, Lieutenant Nelson Zoch, a man who, Harris said, “deserves two hundred percent credit, got behind me all the way and told me, ‘Whatever you need, let me know. I’ll clear the way for you.’ ”

  That was all Harris needed to hear.

  CREATING A BILLBOARD was not the same as sitting down and sketching out an idea. George Koloroutis felt he needed to get Clear Channel, who owned all the billboard locations in and around the Clear Lake City region, to donate the space. George figured that if he could get billboards of the sketches and the Crime Stoppers tip line phone number, with the $100,000 reward, out there in front of the community, day in and day out, something would happen. The drawings alone would generate some sort of tip that would ultimately solve the case, George hoped. David Gronewold, Marcus Precella’s stepdad, helped George with creating the billboard posters and was able to get his employer to donate some money toward the artwork.

  Also, Clear Channel agreed to donate the space. George was grateful. The company provided fifteen locations for billboards. Strategically speaking, George wanted to place the billboard images on every road heading in and out of the Clear Lake region. The hope was that a motorist could not enter the community where the kids were murdered without seeing the sketches or reading about the $100,000 reward.

  “It was clear to us by then that the male and female were from this area, and they were seen walking up to the house that day,” George said.

  So even if the two people in the drawings were not the murderers, tracking them down and speaking to each could prove to be the missing link.

  George wanted HPD’s blessing to put the billboards up. He didn’t want to step out and begin doing things on his own, making enemies of the people who had been helping him find his daughter’s killer. Talking to Detective Harris, George understood that there was going to come a time for the billboards, but it would be prudent to wait a little longer.

  Patience was key, Harris promised.

  Eager to go ahead with the billboards, George listened, though, and waited.

  THE KOLOROUTISES WERE distraught. Same as all the families, the Christmas 2004 holiday had not been a celebration or time to relax and enjoy family functions.

  “Our little girl was murdered,” George said. “My wife has a hole in her heart. It is the worst pain life can throw at you.”

  Through all of this, now was not the time, George knew, to begin butting heads with HPD. He needed them as much as they—perhaps without coming out and saying it—needed him.

  CHAPTER 25

  CHRISTINE PAOLILLA WALKED out with the Clear Lake High School graduating class of 2004, but she did not have enough credits to earn a diploma. Back then, if you were a few credits shy of graduating, you could stroll proudly with your class, gown and all, under the assumption that you were going to return that summer, finish your credits, and earn your diploma officially—which was Christine’s plan.

  Nonetheless, Christine Paolilla looked good on that June day, smiling in a photo with her mother, Lori Paolilla. They hugged each other, shoulder to shoulder. Christine held a red rose and an official high-school diploma booklet, which was actually empty. The “Coke bottle” glasses, which had so much saddled Christine throughout her youth and caused her so much grief from the mean kids—a second aesthetic obstacle she had to overcome along with the loss of hair—were gone. Christine wore contacts. The gaudy wigs of her younger days were also a memory, as she had learned from Tiffany and Rachael that there were more appealing wigs she could wear with a smile. And on that day, the sun shined on her back, the sky the same shade of blue as the most beautiful robin’s egg, and Christine’s auburn hair glistened in the spring sunlight. Her arrest for shoplifting and problems with Christopher Snider were behind her, and it seemed Christine Paolilla was on her way to better days. Her two best friends had been murdered, sure, but she was going to overcome it all and do something with her life. The determination on her face—at least if you look at that photo and try to predict how she’s feeling—showed a girl looking to go on to bigger and better things, leaving a past shrouded in chaos and death behind her.

  The road Lori and Christine had traveled to Clear Lake was a tumultuous one. They had lived in Long Island, New York, according to an interview Lori gave to ABC News, while Charles Paolilla, Christine’s biological father, worked construction in Manhattan. Lori stayed home with Christine and her brother. As Lori told the story years later, “[Christine’s] father got up and went to work [one day] and never came home.”

  It was after that, Lori admitted, that she fell into a life of drug addiction; the emotional pain of losing her husband, in such a tragic, untimely way, was a wound too big to contend with; she found the burden of caring for two kids and the sudden loss of her husband a hurdle she could only jump, with the help of drugs. The numbing effect helped her cope. Helped her grieve. Helped her get through the toughest that life had to offer at the time. Yet, as the drugs took hold of her life, Lori lost custody of Christine to Christine’s grandparents. But then they, too, died. Just a toddler, Christine was said to have asked Lori one day not long after: “Why is it that the people I love go away?”

  Some experts might speculate that this overwhelming series of losses in Christine’s life set up a fear of rejection. This was said to be something Christine carried with her to Texas years later. Rejection (or maybe an expectation of loss), it would seem, became something Christine considered to be a part of life she would have to continually endure. For Christine, one expert later noted, she internalized those early losses, so that whenever she got close to someone, she automatically expected that person to exit her life at some point. Christine could have viewed the situation—subconsciously or consciously—as a way to feel sorry for the life she had been dealt, as though any authority figure in her life would ultimately abandon her and did not care for her. This type of trauma is easily absorbed into the psyche as a child. Let’s say you then add the fact that Christine woke up one day in kindergarten to find clumps of her hair on her pillow, bald spots all over her head like a chemo patient, and her view of herself began to diminish.

  On top of all that, Lori Paolilla said, Christine had “poor vision” from a very young age, and she was forced to wear thick glasses—the kind that kids made fun of. Most of these personal (albeit social) issues centered on image—and this can devastate a young girl whose life, essentially, is focused on how she looks.