Christine Paolilla: Clear Lake Murders, Trial, and Appeal

Christine Paolilla is a Texas woman serving a life sentence for the capital murders of four young people shot to death inside a Clear Lake home on July 18, 2003. She was 17 at the time of the killings, 22 when arrested, and 23 when a Harris County jury convicted her in October 2008. She remains incarcerated at the Christina Melton Crain Unit and will not be eligible for parole until July 22, 2046.¹

The Clear Lake Murders

On the afternoon of July 18, 2003, Paolilla and her boyfriend, Christopher Lee Snider, went to Tiffany Rowell’s home in the Clear Lake area of Houston. Investigators determined they were there for drugs and money. Two of the four people inside, Marcus Precella and Adelbert Sanchez, had been identified by investigators as drug dealers. The other two, Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis, were close friends of Paolilla from Clear Lake High School.²

According to Paolilla’s later husband, Stanley Justin Rott, she told him the plan was “to take some drugs and money, but not hurt anyone.” Inside the house, a confrontation broke out and Snider began shooting. More than 40 rounds were fired from two separate handguns.³ Sanchez and Rowell were shot while seated on a couch. Koloroutis was struck by gunfire and tried to crawl away. Trial testimony established that Paolilla returned to the room to make sure the victims were dead, found Koloroutis still alive and choking on her own blood, and beat her with a gun until she died. A medical examiner testified that Koloroutis had both gunshot wounds and skull fractures consistent with blunt force trauma.⁴

Who Christine Paolilla Was Before the Killings

Paolilla’s father, Charles, was killed in a construction accident when she was two. Her mother struggled with drug addiction, and by age seven she was living with her grandparents. In kindergarten she was diagnosed with alopecia, an irreversible hair-loss condition that required her to wear wigs. She also needed thick glasses. Classmates bullied her, sometimes pulling off her wigs.⁵

At Clear Lake High School, Rachael Koloroutis and Tiffany Rowell befriended her. The two reportedly took Paolilla “under their wing,” offered beauty advice, and gave her a kind of acceptance she had not experienced before. She felt comfortable enough around them to go without her wig. Her classmates later voted her “Miss Irresistible.”³

She also began dating Christopher Snider, whom she had met in eighth grade. Snider already had a criminal record, having been charged with robbery in Kentucky at age 15 and incarcerated for roughly three years. He was described as emotionally abusive and worked to isolate Paolilla from her friends and family. In one incident, he reportedly pulled her wig off in public to humiliate her.⁵

How the Case Was Solved

The murders went unsolved for three years. Houston police received hundreds of tips that produced no arrests, and the victims’ families mounted a long public campaign to keep the case alive, including a reward fund of more than $100,000 and composite-sketch billboards along Houston freeways.⁶

The break came from inside Paolilla’s own home. She had married Stanley Justin Rott in March 2005, after meeting him at a drug treatment center in Kerrville around November 2004. Over the course of the marriage she told him what she had done. Rott later testified that when she first mentioned the crime, “it was so overwhelming. I couldn’t believe she was the person I married.”⁷ He contacted Crime Stoppers with details that had never been made public, including the fact that Koloroutis had tried to crawl away after being shot.²

Houston homicide investigators arrested Paolilla on July 19, 2006, in a San Antonio hotel room with help from the San Antonio Police Department. The arrest was made without incident.⁸ Officers found hundreds of used syringes in the room and needle marks on her body, and she was wearing a blood-stained t-shirt. Neighbors Michelle and Craig Lackner later identified her and Snider as the couple they had seen walking to the victims’ home on the day of the killings. The two handguns used in the murders were recovered from a safe at the home of Snider’s stepfather in Louisville, Kentucky.⁴

What She Told Police

Over the two days after her arrest, Paolilla gave three recorded statements. Her account shifted each time.

In her first statement on July 19, 2006, she admitted driving Snider to the house but claimed he went inside alone on both trips while she waited in the car. She said she saw him come back with a gun but denied hearing gunshots.
In a second statement that same day at Santa Rosa Hospital, she again denied entering the home but acknowledged Snider had admitted shooting all four victims.
In her third statement, on July 20–21, 2006, at Houston Police headquarters, she admitted Snider forced her into the house on their second trip. She said she held one of his two guns while he “pulled the trigger a number of times,” though she denied aiming at anyone.

In the videotaped statement later played at trial, she called the events “surreal” and “very, like, foggy,” said she was afraid of Snider, and told detectives, “I had made the gun go off.”⁹ Those accounts conflicted sharply with what Rott testified she had told him in private: that she was an active participant, that Snider handed her a gun, and that she returned to the room and beat Koloroutis to death.⁷

Christopher Snider Never Stood Trial

Snider was charged with capital murder but died before he could be arrested. By the summer of 2006 he had relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, where he was living with a girlfriend he had met through MySpace.¹⁰ On July 20, 2006, a family member told him there was a warrant for his arrest in the Clear Lake case. That afternoon he left the home on foot, carrying only his girlfriend’s prescription painkillers, with no money and no car keys. Relatives told authorities he had made comments suggesting he was contemplating suicide.¹¹ Investigators found his decomposed body in a wooded area near North Main Street in Greenville on August 5, 2006. Police believe he died of an overdose of the stolen painkillers.¹²

The 2008 Trial

Paolilla’s capital murder trial began in September 2008 before State District Judge Mark Kent Ellis at the Harris County Criminal Courthouse. Because she was 17 at the time of the crime, she was ineligible for the death penalty and faced an automatic life sentence if convicted.¹³

Lead prosecutor Rob Freyer argued she was an equal participant, not a passive bystander. “Could this horrible event have happened without her?” he asked the jury in closing. “Of course not.”¹⁴ The state’s case rested on her contradictory recorded statements, Rott’s testimony about her detailed admissions, the neighbors’ identifications placing her at the scene, and forensic evidence linking two firearms to the victims. Prosecutors also noted that she reported to her job as a Walgreens cashier within an hour of the killings.⁷

Defense attorney Mike DeGeurin placed full responsibility on Snider, whom he called a “warped psychopath,” and told jurors Paolilla “never intended for anybody to be hurt.”⁹ According to the defense, Snider tricked Precella out of drugs, returned with Paolilla to prove he was not intimidated, opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, and then forced a .38-caliber revolver against her stomach to coerce her participation.¹⁵

DeGeurin also moved to suppress all three police statements, arguing heroin withdrawal and hospital medications had made her unable to voluntarily waive her rights. Defense psychiatrist Dr. George Glass testified she was a severe heroin addict who injected the drug every ten to fifteen minutes and would have entered serious opioid withdrawal during the interviews, and that she “would have told investigators anything as long as she thought it would help her get drugs.” Three officers countered that she was “clear,” “concise,” “lucid,” and “calculated” during questioning. The trial court denied suppression, finding the officers credible.⁴

On October 13, 2008, the jury found Paolilla guilty of capital murder. Judge Ellis imposed the mandatory sentence of life in prison, with parole eligibility after 40 years.²

The Appeal

Paolilla appealed to the Fourteenth Court of Appeals of Texas, raising three issues: that a mandatory life sentence for a juvenile offender was cruel and unusual, that her police statements should have been suppressed, and that the trial court should have granted a mistrial after certain prosecution remarks in closing argument. The court rejected each argument and affirmed her conviction and sentence in 2011. She then filed a petition for discretionary review with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.¹⁶

Where She Is Now

Paolilla is held at the Christina Melton Crain Unit, a women’s prison in Texas. Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show her serving a life sentence for capital murder with no scheduled release date. Her earliest parole eligibility date is July 22, 2046.¹

1
Texas Department of Criminal Justice. TDCJ Inmate Detail – Christine Marie Paolilla
2
People. Clear Lake Murders: Christine Paolilla and Boyfriend Killed Four Friends
3
ABC13. Texas True Crime: Miss Irresistible
4
FindLaw. Paolilla v. State, No. 14-08-00963-CR
5
Good Morning America. Miss Irresistible Gone Wrong
6
ABC News. Miss Irresistible: High School Murders
7
Houston Chronicle. Husband Shocked by Wife’s Tale of Killings
8
City of Houston. Houston Police Department News Release
9
ABC News. Miss Irresistible: High School Murder Trial
10
WIS TV. Officials Tentatively ID Greenville Body as Suspect in Murders
11
Houston Chronicle. Families Await ID of Possible Clear Killer
12
UPI. Body of Murder Suspect Found
13
Houston Chronicle. Officer Testifies Clear Lake Victim Was Fleeing
14
Houston Chronicle. Paolilla Gets Life in Four Clear Lake Slayings
15
Houston Chronicle. Defense: Heroin Withdrawal Hastened Confession
16
FindLaw. Paolilla v. State, No. 14-08-00963-CR (2011)