They had not spoken to Chris Snider. In fact, HPD had no idea where he was.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said in a high-pitched voice, nodding.

  “Okay. What happened?”

  Christine sat still for a brief moment. “He can’t have contact with me, right?”

  “Excuse me?” Harris asked. “He cannot contact you. . . .”

  “I don’t want him to hurt my family. . . ,” she said, crying harder, “or anybody to hurt my family.”

  “Has he threatened your family in the past?”

  Christine looked off to her right, as if the question hurt her.

  “Let me ask you. Tell me what kind of person Chris was?”

  “Um . . . he was very . . . just . . . um . . . very”—she looked at the floor, thinking, going back, or maybe trying to come up with something that would suffice—“um . . . hopeless. Just a hopeless person.” Then she broke out of her shell a bit: “He was begging me for all that pity, you know. I am the type of person . . . you know . . . I have always dated, you know, stupid guys, just because, you know, I think that I can help them. Get them back on their feet. You know, all the wonderful stuff that I could never do.” She reached across the table (startling Harris) to grab a tissue. “But then . . . like . . . you know . . . but then . . . there was times, you know, when I meant everything to him. But that was when, you know, whenever I was giving him whatever he wanted. You know, towing him when he wanted . . . sticking up for him, lying to him, or lying for him. . . .”

  She carried on about how she had always felt alone and that everyone was against her and out to get her, and that Chris Snider had made her feel special for the first time in her life.

  Harris explained that they needed to talk about her family, Chris Snider, her entire life, why she had been estranged from her mother for so long, and all things Christine; but first, before they could get into any of that, Harris stressed, they needed to go back to July 18, 2003, and get that out in the open.

  “So tell me?” Harris asked.

  Christine slumped. This was the classic tell suspects gave when they were ready to confess. Her body curled into a question mark. She stared at the ground, this time intently. She did not cry.

  Christine was focused. Thinking. She was back in the Rowell house on that day. In the moment.

  Then it came out: “We were at my house,” she began, “and it was just . . . me and him there.” They were hanging out. Dating at the time. She talked about Chris smoking some weed at the house. She didn’t want him to. “Put that out,” she had told him. “I don’t want that stuff in the house. Listen,” she then said to Harris, as if it was some sort of admission, “I am not going to lie. I smoked some, too. But I would never bring it into my parents’ house.”

  Next she talked about the fight she and Chris had on that day.

  “I was nagging at him and yelling at him,” she said. “He was like, ‘Fine, I’m gonna leave then. Take me home.’ I was like, ‘No, no. . . .’ I finally just gave in, whatever, and, you know, and . . .” She couldn’t finish.

  The tears came back.

  The horror.

  Memories of murder.

  “You were seventeen and thought you were in love,” Harris said.

  Christine took a moment to regroup. Then explained—finally—how she and Chris had left her house and driven to his house. Snider was acting crazy by then, she said, referring to him as “psycho guy,” and she didn’t want to know what was going to happen next, so she went along with whatever he said. Part of dealing with Snider on that day, Christine suggested, was going along with a plan he had to steal some drugs from Marcus and Tiffany. It was a plan, she explained, that she neither knew about beforehand, or had any role in developing.

  CHAPTER 49

  THE WAY SHE described the murders to Harris on this day, you’d have to believe that Christine Paolilla was in a state of panic, fear, and under the Manson-like control of a madman who was going kill her and her family if she didn’t go along with him and keep this terrible secret.

  Christine was in Chris Snider’s room, inside his parents’ house, about an hour from Clear Lake. She thought he was in the kitchen, searching for another joint to smoke. He became increasingly hostile and angry because she had made him douse his last bit of weed, and now he wanted more.

  According to Christine’s first “official” version of the murders, Chris came out of his father’s bedroom (not the kitchen) and said, “Take me to Seabrook.”

  “For what?” Christine asked him.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why, Chris?” she said. “Because you ain’t got no more dope here and you need to get over there and get some?”

  “Just take me,” he said.

  “We were kind of, like, talking about normal stuff,” Christine explained to Harris. “But it still seemed like, you know, something was on his mind.”

  Christine did not want to fight with her boyfriend, so she jumped into her Geo Prizm and told Chris she’d take him to Seabrook, if that’s what he wanted.

  As they drove, he said, “You know what, um, don’t go over to Seabrook. Take me to your homegirl’s house or whatever, and I’ll see if, uh, Marcus is there.”

  “Why? Why do you have to go there?”

  “You know, I heard Marcus got some good shit.”

  Christine claimed that this statement upset her. They had been over at Marcus and Tiffany’s a few weeks before that for Tiffany’s birthday party. There was some indication here that Christine didn’t appreciate Chris going over there, talking to Marcus and Tiffany, or, especially, Rachael, without her. She was jealous. Chris had admitted that he had hooked up with Marcus a few times after that party without her knowledge, and the thought of them together without her had infuriated Christine.

  “Are you on that [stuff] now?” Christine asked Snider in the car. She assumed he had taken some pills back at the house—some of that “good shit,” he was referring to—and she didn’t like it.

  Christine pulled her Prizm into the subdivision opposite the Millbridge Drive neighborhood where Tiffany lived, she told Harris. She parked down the street, sort of in back of Tiffany’s house (although she never said why she did this).

  “And he was like, ‘Come on, come on.’ Just like rushing me.”

  “What the hell, you know, what the hell have you got there. . . ?” Christine asked Snider as they sat in her car. He was in some sort of a daze, she claimed. “I thought, honestly, I know it sounds real stupid, I thought that maybe he had, you know, messed around with one of the girls or something, you know, and he wanted to see them or something.”

  So he’d ask his girlfriend, a good friend of both girls, to drive him over there? That didn’t seem like too likely a scenario to Harris as he sat and listened. However, he allowed Christine to talk her way through her version of the day.

  Christine wanted to start the car, do a K-turn, and hightail it out of the neighborhood.

  “I’m late for work already,” she told Snider.

  Her shift had started at three o’clock. It was just after that hour.

  Snider screamed “at me, you know, like messed-up crap.”

  “Get out,” she yelled back. “Get out of this car! Go do what you want.”

  Snider slammed the door and started walking.

  Christine said she sat and waited. “I just wanted to leave him there and go to work.”

  But she didn’t. Instead, she waited.

  At some point, though, she claimed she started the car, turned around, and started driving out of the neighborhood. Her home was a mere two miles away. Yet, instead of driving home, Christine said she pulled down Tiffany’s street for some (unknown) reason and drove toward Tiffany’s house, eventually parking her car nearby, a few houses down the block from it. The idea she was obviously trying to convey here to Harris was that Snider had gone into the house by himself, apparently to cop some drugs or to visit one of the girls he had a thing for, and she had decided to wait for him.

  “And then I saw him, like, walking in the opposite direction of the house.”

  So she pulled up. Beeped the horn.

  Chris hopped in. “Just drive, just drive! Come on . . . just drive,” he said frantically. There was something different about him now, Christine claimed. He was all hyped up and anxious, more than usual. Totally flipping out, according to Christine’s version.

  “He looked at me with this look.”

  He pulled out a bag of drugs from his pocket, she said. “I was like, good. I thought he had hooked us up. But I know he didn’t have the money for [the amount] that was there.”

  “I jacked dem fools! I jacked dem fools,” Snider said as Christine drove. He flashed the drugs at her inside the car.

  (“I started freaking out, you know, because they knew me,” Christine editorialized to Harris.)

  “Why did you do this?” Christine asked. “Why, Chris?”

  Her boyfriend reached over and turned on the radio “really loud.” Then he started screaming the lyrics to a song by the band Nine Inch Nails, yelling at the top of his lungs.

  Christine turned the radio off, letting him know she didn’t approve. She had never seen him like this.

  He reached down and felt his leg near his shin. He uttered a stream of expletives and then said, “You gotta go back. Go back right now!”

  “What?” she asked, startled.

  “You gotta go back.”

  “No way.”

  “You don’t know what happened. . . . Go back!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I forgot something. . . . I forgot something. You gotta go back. Right now!”

  Why would he want to go back if he just jacked those people? Christine thought.

  Against her better judgment, she turned around and drove back to Tiffany’s house. “I was gonna, you know, just pull over in front of the house. ’Cause if I had to, you know, apologize for him, you know, he’s gonna get his butt whooped.”

  “No, no, no,” he said as she pulled up in front of the house. “What are you doing?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t pull up in front of the house. I just jacked these mofos, you know. Are you . . . stupid?”

  “No! I’m not fucking stupid!” Christine yelled. That comment pissed her off.

  She screamed some more at him.

  He yelled back.

  “I’ll go right in there now and tell them you’re right here!” Christine threatened.

  She got out of the car.

  “Get back in here,” he said from the window. “Or you’re going to . . . regret it.”

  Christine hopped back into the car, turned the key, and prepared to drive away.

  But Snider jumped out, she claimed, as she started the car, and ran into the house.

  She turned the car off and watched him.

  Brian Harris pleaded with Christine at this point. She had broken down during this part of the interview and didn’t want to continue. Harris said, “Okay, be the voice of justice for [Jesus] Christ, give him (Snider) what he deserves—what happened?”

  Snider came running back out, Christine continued. At first she didn’t know why, she said. “And he came running out with the gun—with one of the guns in his hand.”

  This had been the first time Christine Paolilla had ever mentioned a gun was involved—and Harris knew, right away, from the way she had said it (first gun, then guns) that Christine Paolilla was implicating her boyfriend and extricating herself. She was placing the burden of the murders entirely on Snider by working this weapon into the mix.

  But she had made a Freudian slip.

  Guns.

  They both sat inside the car. “I didn’t say anything to him.”

  Total silence. They both sat still as stone.

  “I need to go to work,” Christine said, breaking the silence.

  (“I was so scared,” she told Harris, “to say anything.”)

  “Some people,” Snider told her in a soft, cautious voice, “are just at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He emphasized that word, “wrong.”

  “What is going on? What the hell are you taking about?”

  Christine said she thought about calling Tiffany on her cell to see what was up inside the house and if she “would talk about it.”

  “Are you . . . stupid?” Snider said when Christine expressed a desire to call Tiffany.

  Silence again.

  “I am in so much trouble,” he said, repeating it a few times.

  “What? Why? What did you do?”

  “I took all of Marcus’s [stuff].”

  “What did you do?”

  “If I tell you, don’t be mad at me. Promise me that.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said.

  “I shot them.”

  During this first interview, Christine said, “I was not in the house. I’ve been thinking that I was not in that house.”

  Harris asked if she was ever in the driveway, not telling her that the next-door neighbors had placed her and Snider together in the driveway. “Yes,” she said, “I wasn’t in the driveway. The only time I was close to the house was when I drove up because I was gonna—he had to go back for something, I don’t know, then . . . And then I got out and I started walking toward the house ’cause I was gonna tell, uh, Tiffany and Rachael that I had nothing to do with, you know, him jacking them.”

  Christine explained what happened inside her car next as she and Chris sat, talking about what he (“alone”) had done inside the house. “He had no sympathy at all for what happened and what he told me he did, explain like, you know, what happened. He told me he was, like, you know, say this if the cops are, like, asking you anything. You tell them that you did this, or whatever.”

  All Snider said about what had happened inside the house was “I shot them,” according to Christine. She made it sound as though she was in no position to press him for details. She claimed that she slept with her mother for a week after he murdered her four friends. But that she never told her mom anything. Never told friends. Never told anyone.

  “Christine,” Harris asked, “you were with him for at least three months after that, so within that three months he tells you details, okay? You saw news clips. You saw things. What were the details he told you that happened?”

  “Nothing was really said after it happened, but there was times when the news came on and, like, they did say that, um, like, they weren’t just beat or something. You know, I always asked him questions and stuff, you know. It made me feel real . . . I couldn’t tell anybody. I felt I didn’t think it was real, you know. I thought usually he was trying to show off, and I didn’t want to . . . He always checked my phone.”

  The truth was that Christine Paolilla called Chris Snider incessantly after the murders, at all times of the day and night. It got so bad, Chris’s mother later said, “I had to keep buying phones, because our phone was drained so much it wouldn’t recharge.” And the idea that Christine was scared of Snider was further quashed by a statement Snider’s mother later gave in reference to their relationship before and after the murders: “Chris was so sick to death of Christine, but would always answer her calls, and meet with her. I asked him one day, ‘What does she have over/on you? That Christine is crazy.’ ”

  Chris responded, “Mom, you have no idea.”

  Harris wasn’t buying this version, either. He was beginning to press Christine for more detail, hoping to pin her down to a version HPD could later tear apart.

  “In order for that road toward mercy,” Harris said, going back to his original (spiritual) plea, “I need complete honesty.”

  “I am! God, I’m telling you,” she said.

  “And sometimes that’s some of the bad with the good, okay?”

  “I’m being honest with you.”

  Harris went into some of what Justin Rott had told HPD (in the adjacent room), without giving Christine too much detail. “Why would your husband tell us . . . that one of them was crawling on the ground and that you admitted to striking Rachael?”

  “I never said that. I’ve talked to my husband about the situation. . . and all I ever told my husband was that I’d tell [him] what had, what the news had said, that they did say she was on the ground.”

  “When you went in there?” Harris asked, trying to catch Christine in one of her lies.

  “Went in where?”

  “When you went there, when you went in the house, your husband is telling us that you pulled Rachael out, okay, initially?”

  “I did not go into that house.”

  After they discussed blood under Christine’s fingernails that someone had reported (Christine denying that also), Harris lied: “Now, you understand that Chris is saying that this was all your idea and that you had a lot of pent-up frustration toward Rachael that he thought that you thought that he was having an affair with her and that’s why—”

  But Christine wouldn’t let him finish, butting in: “I would have never.”

  Harris explained that if she was telling the truth, she would have to be much more specific about what had happened and what Chris Snider had told her he did inside the house.

  “I’m trying so hard,” Christine said.

  “And try to remember what happened to the gun afterward.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  CHAPTER 50

  BRANDEE SNIDER WAS at her aunt’s house in Pasadena, Texas, when she heard that her mother and father’s house was being “raided” by police. Chris Snider had been staying with Brandee before he made that move to South Carolina. Snider’s mother and father were living in Louisville, Kentucky, where they had moved about two months before. It was close to noon on July 20, 2006, when she (Chris and Brandee Snider’s mother) stepped into the shower inside her Kentucky home.

  With the help of Louisville police, HPD went into the Sniders’ house while Mrs. Snider was in the shower. As they filed in, detectives and tactical officers yelled and screamed pretty much the same thing the officers had back down in San Antonio a day before.

  After realizing that Chris Snider was not inside the house, they produced the paperwork for their search warrants and proceeded to get busy searching the house. The main mission here was to find Snider himself, whom his mother, after getting dressed, explained was not living with her. Still, as they worked their way into the bedroom and started snooping around, a safe was uncovered inside a closet, and then a pistol in a dresser drawer.