Secrets. Not a good thing, Justin knew from experience, for a drug addict trying to stay sober to keep stuffed.

  He was curious, but he decided to let his girl talk. It was the best thing to do. Justin Rott was a good listener; he truly cared about what a person had to say and made the person feel that while she spoke. There can be no doubt that Justin consoled Christine with sincerity, not having any idea that what she was talking about had to do with her murdering four people. He was staring into the face of pure evil, the pure machinery behind psychopathic behavior, trying to help this young woman as much as he could.

  “It was an ex-boyfriend of mine,” Christine said. She kept pausing. Crying and sniffling.

  The pain was immense, Justin believed.

  “I was involved . . . ,” she continued.

  Justin didn’t know the ex-boyfriend’s name then. Christine kept referring to him as “Chris.” Chris this, Chris that.

  “It was at the house,” Christine said in vague descriptions of that day, not making too much sense. Justin didn’t push the matter, for fear of turning Christine away.

  “It’s okay, Christine.”

  “Chris and me, we were at my friend’s house, going in there, looking. We were going to buy drugs, get high, and some things, you know, like, some things . . . happened, and some people ended up dead.”

  “And some things I didn’t understand,” Justin said later, referring to this moment. “And I really didn’t question her much. I really didn’t believe it. . . .”

  Justin wondered who Christine was talking about.

  “Two males,” she said at one point. They were still sitting in her car outside the halfway house where Justin was staying. “Two females, Rachael . . . Rachael. We were really good friends.” He presumed she meant her and Rachael. “We all went to school together. We were all friends.”

  Justin sat inside the halfway house after Christine took off that night and thought about the conversation. It was strange, sure. She was upset, definitely. But what was she actually saying? He had no idea.

  “I thought maybe she knew of something that happened,” he explained later. “I really didn’t believe that she was involved in anything. You know, people say stories—and she was so vague about it all. And, you know, I thought maybe something had happened to one of her friends and she knew something and she didn’t go to the police.”

  What Justin was certain of when later asked about this moment was that not once during the conversation, as Christine tried to explain to him that she was there on the day her friends had been murdered, did she ever give any indication that she had been brought to the house against her will, or that she was forced to go into the house and kill. Furthermore, she never said that anyone, specifically Chris Snider, had threatened her on that day or anytime afterward.

  CHAPTER 39

  AS THE END of the year approached, Justin Rott was doing drugs with his wife—at times they had done so much dope in a day that they were hardly ever in the moment—and he was thinking back to the strange things his wife had told him about the Clear Lake murders. The situation was compromising for him. He was pandering to a murderer, if he knew what she had done and did not turn her in. There could be some charges involved. At times he would stop, think about calling the cops, but then would convince himself that he loved his wife and maybe she was making it all up. Perhaps she had been there, but was not part of it? So many excuses darted through his heroin-brined mind that Justin didn’t know what to think anymore. And whenever things became too much, all he had to do was shoot more drugs, thus making it all dissolve into a hazy fog of being perpetually high.

  Near Christmas 2005, Justin and Christine had managed to get their act together enough to go visit Christine’s mother and Tom Dick. During that week they were in Friendswood, they went out shopping one afternoon by themselves.

  “I want to show you something,” Christine said. Justin was driving. They were on the I-45, near the 2351, close to the Baybrook Mall. Only about five to ten minutes away from Christine’s parents’ house.

  Christine was in the passenger seat, giving him directions: Turn here. Turn there. Drive over there and park the car near that building. She looked around as if someone might be following them, obviously paranoid.

  Finally, after all that turning, Christine told Justin to get out of the car and follow her. They needed to walk across the street toward a brick building and stand in this one particular spot she had picked out.

  There, above them, stood one of the billboards with the sketches and Crime Stoppers info staring down.

  “I didn’t think anything of it,” Justin said later, “until we pulled up and she asked me to park on the side. There was some building in front of it.” She demanded Justin “park on the side of it.” She wanted to make sure the car was hidden.

  Christine acted suspicious and jumpy. She didn’t want anybody to see her car near the billboard.

  After settling down, she turned to Justin, who was standing, staring up at the billboard, wondering why they were there. “Hey,” Christine said, “let me ask you. Does that look like me?”

  Before they had taken off to go shopping, Christine had pulled out a photograph of Chris Snider back at her parents’ house and showed it to him. It was part of a collection of photos her mother had around the house. “That’s him there,” Christine had said, referring to Snider, pointing to the photograph. “That’s Chris, my ex-boyfriend.” In fact, Christine was still talking to Chris Snider. He was gone, back in Kentucky, sometimes hanging around Houston, but she was still in contact with him. There was one time when Christine had spoken to Chris in front of Justin. Chris had just gotten out of jail and Christine wanted to get him into a halfway house in Kerrville. She turned and asked Justin if she should help him out as an old friend.

  “No way,” Justin said. “I don’t want your ex-boyfriend near us.” (“I was jealous,” Justin said later.)

  Out of respect for her husband, Christine left Chris alone after that.

  “So, does it look like me, or what?” Christine asked again as her husband stared at the billboard.

  “No,” Justin said. “I don’t think so.” (And it didn’t.)

  “Okay,” Christine said, “but does that look like Chris?” She was referring to the male sketch.

  Justin studied it. He thought back to the photographs she had shown him at the house.

  “Matter of fact,” he said, “it does. That looks like him.” Thinking about it more, he said, it looked “exactly like him.”

  Definitely. The sketch was a spot-on representation of Christopher Snider.

  Christine had a concerned look, shocked by Justin’s response.

  “I’m worried,” she said as they walked away from the billboard, “that it looks like me, and people are going to think it is me.”

  But it was her.

  “Look,” Justin said, “don’t talk about it to anybody and don’t bring anybody over here.”

  Justin didn’t want to believe—although all the cards had been turned over in front of him—that his wife had anything to do with such a horrible crime. It was easy to deny it. He loved her. He was in the throes of a double addiction: the drugs and Christine.

  Christine started to say something more about it.

  “Just be quiet,” he snapped.

  She thought about what he said. “Okay. Okay.”

  There was a time after this when Christine pulled Justin aside and admitted, “You know, God is going to punish me one day for this by taking you away.”

  Believers would say God had others things on His mind where it pertained to Christine Paolilla and her involvement in the murder of four human beings.

  CHAPTER 40

  THERE CAME A time when Christine Paolilla sat her husband down and decided to come clean about what had happened in Clear Lake. She wanted to admit everything she could remember (or, rather, her first version of the events). By this time they were doing so much heroin and cocaine (speedballing) that the simple daily ritual of taking care of themselves hygienically became an impossible chore. They were sleeping and shooting dope, eating enough to stay alive, and not doing anything other than making sure the curtains in whatever hotel room they stayed in were drawn and there was enough dope on tap to last days or even a week at a time.

  Christine looked like one of those big-eyed aliens common in Area 51 popular culture. She had no eyebrows. Her hair (what was left) was generally propped up in a bun. Her skin was white as the dope she shot. Her eyes were bulging and sad and tired. Her lips were red as a heart. She was skinnier than an anorexic: a nineteen-year-old heroin/cocaine addict shooting enough dope for three junkies. It was incredible that she was still alive.

  Christine said she and Chris Snider had gone to the Millbridge Drive house with “no intentions of anybody getting killed.” As the evidence later proved, though, they had brought along enough firepower to wage a small war.

  Anyway, they parked on the side of the road down the street from Tiffany’s and “walked up to the house.” This, so far, boded well when placed against the Lackners’ description of seeing a male and female dressed in black approaching the Rowell residence from the road, walking up the driveway.

  As they advanced toward the outside foyer of the front door, Chris Snider stopped and turned to his girl, according to what Christine told Justin Rott: “Take this,” he said, handing Christine a gun.

  “It wasn’t even planned,” Justin later told police, “you know, Chris and her. Chris got the guns, which were his father’s guns, as far as I know.”

  Christine placed the weapon in her purse. She did not fight with Chris or question him: Why do you have a gun? What the hell is going on here? Why do I need a gun? Instead, she took the weapon, saying, “Okay.” They were there, said Christine, to rob the four of any money and drugs they had in the house. Christine mentioned “marijuana, [a] bunch of prescription pills, some cash, just like an assortment of drugs, Ecstasy. . . .”

  One of them knocked on the door. Christine didn’t say who.

  Rachael or Tiffany—“one of the girls”—answered the door, Christine explained to her husband. Then she said that Chris knew everyone in the house, yet he was not “friends” with any of them. Acquaintances. They had seen each other out partying and said “what up,” but did not necessarily hang out together on a regular basis.

  Chris and Christine walked into the house. Rachael, Tiffany, Marcus, and D appeared to have been watching television together.

  “Tiff,” Christine said as they walked in, “can you take me upstairs?” (Because the living room was sunken, they referred to the main level of the house as “upstairs.”) Christine made it clear she wanted Tiffany to take her to her room.

  “Sure,” Tiffany said. She popped up off the couch and told Christine to “come on.” Christine explained that Tiffany thought she knew what she wanted, why they were there: to buy drugs. Tiffany and Marcus kept “it” in their bedroom inside the dresser. Christine knew this.

  According to what Christine told Justin, before she and Chris had walked into the house, he had told her, “We’re just going to take the drugs.” None of the kids were drug dealers, Christine added. “They’re just some kids that, I guess, have extra, and sometimes they’d sell it to friends. . . .”

  “Okay,” Christine said to her boyfriend, going along.

  “And any money, too,” Chris added.

  Christine apparently nodded in agreement with this also.

  While they were inside Tiffany’s bedroom, Christine made it clear that they were there to take the drugs.

  With Christine and Tiffany out of earshot and sight of the others, Chris was alone in the living room with D, Marcus, and Rachael, who was sitting on the floor in front of the television.

  Back in Tiffany’s room, Christine started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tiffany asked, opening the dresser.

  “I’m . . . so . . . sorry,” Christine repeated, crying harder.

  Tiffany was confused; she had no idea what her friend was talking about.

  Meanwhile, Chris brandished his weapon and held the three of them—all of whom were relaxing comfortably, unafraid of this guy they had seen Christine with before—down on the couch and chair. He stood and pointed his gun at them all, going from one to the other, telling them “not to move.” It was now clear that Christine and Christopher were there to rob the kids.

  Christine and Tiffany returned to the living room, and Tiffany saw what was happening.

  “Why?” Tiffany asked.

  Rachael and the others echoed Tiffany’s sentiment. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Get over by the couch!” Chris said to Tiffany, waving at her with his gun. “You,” he said to Christine, “take out your gun.”

  According to Christine, she did as she was told.

  Chris and Christine stood in front of the four, holding them at bay.

  “The first time she explained it to me,” Justin later said, “she said . . . Chris shot first.”

  Per Christine’s first version of this mass murder (there would be several varying accounts of the same story in the coming months), Chris Snider pointed his gun directly at Marcus as he stood by the fireplace. D sat on the couch; Marcus was to D’s right.

  Marcus pleaded with Chris. “Please, man, take whatever you want and leave. Take it all. Go ahead. Take it.” He was sincere, nonthreatening.

  The others said the same thing, essentially begging for their lives.

  Chris wasn’t hearing any of it, though, according to Christine. As Marcus pleaded, Christine told Justin, Snider shot him.

  As D went to stand, Snider popped him in the head, sending D backward.

  This seemed to be what a male might be thinking at the time: take out the biggest threats first—the two males. Chris Snider was not ignorant with regard to the rules of the street.

  As he shot D, Christine claimed, it was almost as if that second shot initiated hellfire. “They both started shooting,” Justin said Christine told him. The way she explained it, she seemed to say that the gun in her hand had gone off by itself; she didn’t have any control over it. She claimed to be crying as she shot both the girls and put more bullets into the boys, firing blindly in the direction of the three of them. (Marcus was already on the ground, probably dead.) Meanwhile, Rachael was trying to run out of the room.

  Rachael . . .

  Justin explained how that name alone would later haunt Christine. “She brought it up all the time. . . . ’Cause that was the last one she remembers . . . she had nightmares all the time about her.”

  Before they opened fire, “both of the girls, they were asking why, why are you doing this, just pleading. . . .”

  Justin said Christine couldn’t recall exactly, but she thought she had shot Rachael and Tiffany, while Chris Snider continued to fire rounds into the boys.

  “I don’t really think she paid attention to who she was hitting.”

  Maybe so. But there were not many misses. So somebody was paying attention to where he or she was firing.

  As Christine told the story, she went “back and forth,” Justin later said, “between hysterically crying, to just having no emotion.”

  Imagine, admitting to killing four people, and there were times when she showed no emotion. . . .

  Christine had never come out and said it, but it was clear that she and Snider kept firing until they ran out of ammo.

  “Then they left the house.”

  Outside, they hopped into her purple Geo Prizm. Christine got into the passenger seat; Chris drove. This was part of the plan.

  Why? Because Christine had to go to work.

  Before Chris started the car, however, Christine said: “We have to go back.”

  “What?”

  “I have to make sure they’re all dead.” Christine was under the impression that one or maybe two of them had lived through the barrage of gunfire. She was concerned about this.

  Snider said no way.

  Christine got out of the car and ran back into the house.

  Walking in the front door, seeing blood everywhere, she spied Rachael on the floor in front of the television. Still alive, Rachael was crawling.

  Christine stood over Rachael, staring down. As the evidence later proved, Rachael was reaching for her cell phone or had it in her hand and was trying to dial 911.

  “And [Rachael] was choking on her own blood,” Justin said later, describing how Christine told it to him, “She was gagging.”

  Christine stood stunned. Rachael is still breathing.

  “Why?” Rachael repeated over and over. “Why would you?”

  Christine took out her pistol. She leveled it over her head, holding it by the barrel like a hammer, and began, in a whipping motion, pounding on the back of Rachael’s head, bashing her skull in, making sure she was dead, no chance of coming back. As she did this, Rachael “was crying the whole time.” One of the two girls who had taken Christine under her wing, and had taught her how to dress and buy wigs and wear her makeup so she didn’t look like Tammy Faye Bakker, was pleading for her life, wondering why her friend was killing her. Christine continued to pound the butt of that weapon into Rachael’s skull repeatedly.

  Over and over.

  Spattering blood all over the walls, the carpet, and even up toward the ceiling.

  Satisfied that Rachael was dead, Christine Paolilla ran back out that same front door and jumped into her waiting car. With Snider at the wheel, they took off.

  From there, Christine didn’t run out and do a bunch of drugs to forget about the vicious quadruple murder she had just committed with her boyfriend. She didn’t look to drench those bloody memories—so fresh in her mind—in a pool of booze and sex inside a seedy hotel room. She didn’t demand that Chris take her somewhere so they could talk about it and get the heck out of Clear Lake City. Instead, Christine turned to her boyfriend and demanded, “Take me to work.”