“My mother had a history of drug addiction and, also, some depression, and things like that.” He thought she had “changed,” Justin added, when he met her for what was the first time in 2004. But there was no denying that she had passed down the addict gene—if we can agree that the body produces one—to him.

  Stanley Justin Rott had been in the U.S. Marine Corps for about a year and a half as a young man just out of high school. The reason he was forced out of what was the best opportunity he’d ever had in life turned out to be a failed urinalysis. They called it an “other than honorable [discharge], with separation,” but there was no hiding the fact that the guy had messed up. He had done some cocaine while on leave and couldn’t pass a drug test. So the military gave him the boot.

  Justin said he had started using heavy drugs in junior high. In fact, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, he admitted, he didn’t mess with simple drugs. Maybe weed in the woods behind school, or a few lines of coke here and there at a party with his mates? No. During that time Justin had been a full-blown heroin addict. A damn junkie. In and out of treatment centers and halfway houses for years, falling victim to that revolving-door syndrome many drug addicts can’t seem to escape once they get caught in it. Justin later put part of the onus on his family, saying his parents (a father and stepmother) “looked down [on drugs] very strongly.” The first time he asked his dad for help, Justin claimed, “he just wouldn’t, because it was drugs. You know, a lot of people today will at least give someone a chance. . . . I understand his position . . . [but] it was difficult, at nineteen years old, you know, it was just hard” to accept that his own father wouldn’t help him.

  When Justin left his mother’s in San Antonio, after their little reunion in 2004 didn’t go over so well, he fell back into his old behavior. This happened after having been sober for a time while staying with his mother.

  “I was using,” he said. “She was using. . . . I ended up homeless.”

  He was on the street, a dope addict, with nowhere to live. That was Justin Rott’s life then. No money. No job. No future. The guy who loved to play pool, draw, hit the beach, listen to David Sides, watch House on television, sit back and put on one of his favorite movies, GoodFellas or A Bronx Tale, had nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to. Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch, Justin Rott’s favorite book, full of practical and spiritual advice, didn’t have the answers this time. Justin knew what to do, but he didn’t have the willpower or drive to do it.

  Beaten by the needle again, seemingly no hope in sight, Justin called on a friend, who picked him up and took him to the Serenity House, a detox center in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he spent twenty-eight days drying out, trying to get his act—best he could—together. From there he was shipped to the Norman Turner House, a halfway house in Kerrville, where he worked at his sobriety while living with twelve other men.

  Life inside a halfway house is not a slacker’s ride of smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee until his heart explodes and the enamel on his teeth is stained yellow. Nor is it a couch potato’s orgy of watching reruns of Sanford and Son and The Beverly Hillbillies, while talking all things 12-step. A resident is required to work, pay rent, attend addiction meetings regularly, do certain chores around the house, stay sober (of course), and participate in community events. It would be nice, too, if a resident went out and volunteered his time at a soup kitchen or at a homeless shelter. Maybe showed by example how grateful he was for, one, being alive, and, two, being able to give back.

  Justin knew from past experience that the way to stay clean was to keep busy—any addict in recovery, serious about his or her sobriety, will tell you this. Another prerequisite that many sobriety programs, sponsors, and all 12-step programs recommend is that a person stay out of relationships for the first year of sobriety. A recovering addict needs a year sober to be able to slog through the fog of addiction and realize who he or she is as a new and clean human being. Before a person can make the choices a relationship requires, he or she needs to be able to think with a clear mind. Most recovering addicts, however, don’t listen to this solid, useful piece of proven, practical advice. Many addicts feel that in order to stay clean they need to hook up with another recovering addict. More often than not, this decision backfires. The results are generally disastrous, more in line with a wick lighting not one stick of dynamite, but a fistful. Two addicts falling off the wagon together—something that routinely happens in this situation—is double the trouble, as they say. An eruption of chaos.

  Which was where, for Christine Paolilla, fate—or maybe its opposite: free will—just happened to walk into her life in the form of a drug addict—arguably like her—who knew nothing about staying sober for any length of time. Here was another man—sitting next to her at a 12-step meeting, smiling, giving her a shimmering, if not lustful, eye—for Christine to fix. Someone for her to latch on to and try to shape and mold into the man she had been looking for all her life.

  After the 12-step meeting, Christine and Justin talked. They introduced themselves and exchanged pleasantries, surely discussing where they were living. Out in the world of recovery, especially in the same general county, the circle is quite small. People run into each other all the time: in church basements, at sober dances, in meetings at hospitals and treatment centers. Justin and Christine had exchanged glances and swapped a few stories; yet it didn’t seem as though Cupid was going to allow them to move past this initial meeting. Justin was some years older (Christine liked that). He probably had other things on his mind. He didn’t seem to be interested in some young chick, newly sober, confused, and just out of high school.

  But then, a week or so later, there was a belated Halloween party at a local treatment center, and, lo and behold, Justin Rott and Christine Paolilla bumped into each other. Christine had just gotten out of actual treatment, she told him, and was staying at a nearby halfway house, biding her time before stepping back out into the real world for a go at sobriety alone. She was trying to do the right thing by attending sober events and staying connected to the people she had met in “the program.”

  Justin still had some time left in the halfway house he was staying at, he said, but he was slated to get out soon enough.

  What a coincidence.

  It was the older man who had spotted Christine standing with some friends at the Halloween party. There was that familiar girl who wore all that makeup, smiling and talking. The music thumped. People stood around drinking coffee and punch. Justin didn’t give warning; he walked up with a smile, grabbed Christine by the hand, and said, “You’re going to dance with me!” And he wasn’t taking no for an answer, apparently.

  Describing this moment later, he sounded like a smitten boy who was shocked that the girl of his dreams had answered his call: “She danced with me. I took a chance, and she danced.”

  They spent the night talking and “getting to know each other.” There was definitely a connection. Some sort of common ground they shared. Music. TV. Books. No matter what they brought up, the other was into it. They were alike on so many different levels. Despite the age difference of seven years, Christine liked what she saw. Rott sported a redneck beer gut (pear-shaped torso, more Kid Rock than Larry the Cable Guy). He had an Inspector Jacques Clouseau pencil mustache, a bit of black peach fuzz on his chin, and a calming way about him that spoke to Christine’s need to be comforted, loved, controlled, and taken care of. There’s no doubt Justin Rott made Christine Paolilla feel warm and fuzzy. He was her new protector. And there’s no doubt, additionally, that Christine made Justin feel as though he had found his soul mate.

  From there the relationship soared into hyperspeed. Justin went into a halfway house “not too far down the road from where she was at.” He saw her again after that Halloween party at a 12-step meeting. That encounter turned into them seeing each other every day. They talked, too, on the phone a few times a day. Hung out, Justin said, every night.

  “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t see her or talk to her.”

  By Texas standards, Kerrville is a small town, population-wise. Justin and Christine were convinced that wherever they went, “people” (those in the program) would see them and gossip—about what, exactly, he never said. The idea was that with a man and a young girl getting together every day, both of whom were living in halfway houses after being in treatment for drug addiction, maybe some would suspect that they were getting together too soon in their sobriety and they would eventually turn back to drugs. If there is one thing many recovering addicts will admit, it’s that the recovery scene can become a muddled world of judging and nattering busybodies. Some addicts love nothing better than to go to meetings and then hang out after, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, talking smack about everyone else.

  “There’s not too many places a person can get away [in Kerrville] where the whole town is not talking about it,” Justin explained.

  Christine and Justin, however, found such a place: an area of town that he later called “the lake.”

  “It’s a place,” he said, “where . . . it’s almost like back in the days, a place where couples go.” Lovers’ Lane. Not necessarily for fornicating, Justin noted, but just to get away from what was a nosey small town of big mouths.

  As much as Justin Rott wanted to diminish the idea that the lake was a place where he and Christine chose to consummate their relationship, it took him but two weeks to get her pants off. And he couldn’t get enough. That aside, Justin said he viewed the relationship as more than a fleeting bed partner to get him from one stage of his recovery to the next. He saw Christine as someone he wanted to be with all the time. He could not stop thinking about her. He could not stop a desire to be with her. And he could not stop considering that he had never before met someone with whom he seemed to have so much in common.

  “We would talk for hours,” he explained later, describing how the relationship evolved rather quickly from dating to obsessing over being with each other. “We never argued. We never fought. We had the same interests. [We liked] the same music. I’ve never had that before.”

  For all intents and purposes, they were addicted to one another.

  CHAPTER 29

  GEORGE KOLOROUTIS TOOK a call on November 15, 2004. The woman explained that she was Abby Strickland’s (pseudonym) mother. Mrs. Strickland (pseudonym) was frantic. Abby, her daughter, had said she’d been friends with Rachael, though George and Ann had never heard of her.

  Still, Abby had been acting very strangely, Mrs. Strickland explained. “Her behavior has been spiraling downhill. She moved in with two male friends and is now working at Exotica.” It wasn’t until after the murders that Abby had moved in with her friends, who wouldn’t, Mrs. Strickland explained to George, “let her out of their sight. They are the ones who kept pressuring her to leave the house and go to work at Exotica.”

  “What can we do?” George asked.

  “Can you go talk to her?”

  Abby’s father was a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent in Boston, Mrs. Strickland said. Abby’s mother had called him and he was back in town to help out. There was a swell of concern emerging from the public about the Houston drug culture being involved in the Clear Lake murders, and fear of a possible swarm of potential murders forthcoming. A DEA agent whose daughter was on the forefront of that line was not going to stay put and allow his own daughter to become a target.

  George grabbed Ann and drove to where Abby now lived with her two friends. Her DEA agent father was there as well.

  “Come on in,” he said. “I want to warn you that there is a gun in the house.”

  Ann, who was with George, looked at her husband. Okay. . . , she thought.

  They sat with Abby and talked. “Pleading with her to move back home” was how this part of the conversation was framed in one report.

  Abby said she didn’t want to go home. She was scared. This apartment, with these two guys, was the best place for her to live right now.

  It sounded to them as if Abby believed her two roommates would protect her.

  Ann got up and walked around the apartment. She looked at several photos of Rachael that Abby had on the walls. They were not the kind of images Ann wanted her daughter to be remembered by. So Ann took them off the wall.

  “What are you doing?” Abby asked. “Come on . . . those are mine.”

  “You can come to our house anytime and pick out a photo of Rachael,” George said.

  Abby was crying. She was confused. Although they didn’t know her, they could tell something was wrong.

  Abby said she would go to George and Ann’s house the following day and meet with them, and would talk about things a bit more. The situation, to put it mildly, seemed weird.

  The next day Abby brought one of the two guys she lived with to George and Ann’s house. Almost immediately George and Ann were “creeped out” by the guy, who walked into the house with a cocky chip on his shoulder.

  Lelah, Rachael’s sister, was also home.

  “You had no right taking those photos off the walls of my apartment,” the guy said sternly. He looked at Ann and George.

  George stepped in front of the kid, his bulky chest pumped out, a look of take it easy there, big fella about his face. “Just relax, buddy,” George said. “Cool your jets. As a mother, Ann had every right to confiscate those pictures of her daughter.”

  After that, the man calmed down. Meanwhile, Lelah was in her room talking to Abby about Rachael—and getting a strange vibe from the girl. Then they walked back into the living room, where George and Ann were with the kid.

  “It became obvious to us,” George said later, “that [Abby] didn’t really know Rachael that well. [Lelah] got a really bad feeling about her and sensed she was a liar and was faking her closeness to Rachael.”

  Why, though?

  During the conversation with Lelah, Ann and George, Abby tried to play up how great a place Exotica was to work. The guy she brought to George’s house worked at the club, too. In fact, it became clear that he and Abby’s other roommate were quasi recruiters for the club, looking for girls to turn into strippers.

  “They’re really nice people,” Abby said of both guys.

  “The management is great,” Abby continued, trying to convince herself it was the right choice in life. “It’s the perfect place to work.”

  George wondered where this was going.

  After a few more insincere words, Abby mentioned that she had spoken to HPD and told them everything she knew.

  George didn’t believe her.

  The other guy Abby lived with was worried, the guy with Abby explained to George and Ann. “He thinks he gave HPD too much information and that the killers may come after him.”

  “What else did he say?” George asked.

  “He told us Adelbert told him that he owed the Voo Crew money.”

  “The Voo Crew is a group of Vietnamese from the Seabrook region,” one law enforcement source said, “that raced cars and sold a little dope. This idea that they were involved turned out to be a rumor fueled by the likes of [Abby Strickland],” who was trying to push the investigation as far away from her doorstep as possible.

  Why are they sitting here telling us this? George wondered, staring at Abby and her friend. He wanted to hear what they had to say, but he also wanted them out of his house.

  But then it hit George as he stared at them: They look just like the people in the sketches.

  CHAPTER 30

  AFTER ABBY AND her friend left his house, George sat down and wrote out everything that had been said, on top of everything else he knew about Abby and her two roommates. George, Ann and Lelah had a bad feeling. At the end of his note, which was addressed to a detective in the Homicide Unit, George added: This is all we can think of . . . . We are not sure of the knowledge they have, but believe they know more than they’ve admitted to. We continue to have concerns about JU, [a few others], and Miranda Baxter (pseudonym) as well. One thing seems very evident: Whoever committed this heinous act knows the kids were at the house at that time.

  George went on to ask HPD about phone records. He wanted to know if all of them “had been scrubbed”? He was concerned that the media wasn’t taking the sketches by the horns and running—very little had been said in the media about the sketches since HPD had released them. Why hadn’t there been more media play?

  From what I understand, the two in the composite were seen by a neighbor walking by wearing black clothes, George wrote. They stopped and looked in Tiffany’s truck!?!? This [was] all around the time the murders were committed. . . . Were they the killers? Who are they? Shouldn’t an effort be made to find out?

  The Koloroutis family’s frustrations, much the same as the other families, were there, implicit in every word George wrote to HPD. He thanked those members of the Homicide Division for all their efforts, but at the same time, he wanted something more to be done.

  The last thing the police needed now, any of the detectives investigating the Clear Lake case knew, was George Koloroutis becoming impatient and pushy. This was an incredibly protean investigation; it was constantly changing its shape, its feel, and its profile of a suspect.

  ABBY STRICKLAND CALLED George at work. The last time they spoke, Abby was at George’s house arguing with Ann about the picture of Rachael that Ann had taken from the wall of Abby’s apartment. Abby and her roommate didn’t much appreciate it.

  “How are things going?” Abby asked. George could sense in her tone that she had other things on her mind besides small talk.

  “You know,” he said, to oblige her.

  “I heard you guys know who did it.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My mom.”

  “The police have a very good idea and are investigating accordingly. That’s about all I can say at this point.”