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Authors: M. William Phelps

BOOK: Never See Them Again
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CHAPTER 57
T
HE IMAGE CHRISTINE
was trying to paint as she told the story was of a scared teenage girl, her boyfriend's prisoner, who was now being forced to become an enforcer. She claimed Chris Snider made her take the second gun and point it at the four, all of whom were gathered in the living room. (The crime scene evidence left behind, though, disputes this claim. It is clear from the way in which the bodies were found that Marcus was walking away from his murderer and Rachael had her back to her murderer.)
Christine grabbed the gun. “I just felt like, ‘Oh, my God, I am going to die. . . . I am going to die if I don't follow his directions.' ”
She watched Snider take Marcus and walk out of the living room. Both of them walked into a bedroom, where Marcus, under Snider's watchful eye, shuffled through drawers, looking for his money and any additional drugs. As they did this (out of sight from the others), Christine essentially held Tiffany, Rachael, and Adelbert at bay with the second weapon—that is, instead of running out of the house with them (after all, she was armed), or handing the weapon to Adelbert, who was sitting on the couch.
Christine next described a strange circumstance. She said she tried to hide. She was crying and kneeling and standing behind a wall in the kitchen. She felt as if there was going to be, “Like, you know, like,” this big fight. She heard “Marcus . . . talking [stuff] . . . you know, like, real bad [stuff] to Chris.”
The two of them were getting louder and louder, and then Snider yelled, “Are you getting scared? Are you getting scared?” The girls broke out into fits of tears. “I just started praying,” Christine explained, “you know, like, ‘God, please, please, please,' you know, just ‘God,' that's all I could say in my head . . . and that's when I heard the first gunshot, and I don't think it hit anybody.”
By now Chris and Marcus had walked back into the living room.
Then a second shot rang out.
The girls “started screaming.”
“Shut up. . . . Shut up. . . . Shut . . . up,” Snider screamed. “I'll get you, too. . . . I'll get you! You better
shut
up.”
After that, Snider turned to Christine: “You, bitch. Get out here.” She was standing behind that wall in the kitchen.
“What was, like, going through my head, you know, just out the other ear, and then—and then, uh, when I heard the . . . shot . . . I heard, like, you know, Marcus and the other guy, um, was just like, ‘[Damn] . . .' you know, like that. Then I heard the other gunshot and then that's when, like, the girls, like, they started, like, you know, like, not screaming, screaming, but like, ‘Oh, my God' . . . and then . . . I—I keep hearing, you know, kind of like, you know, the bubble wrap stuff, like
pop, pop, pop.
Like that.”
She claimed Chris walked over to her after those first shots shattered the silence of the room, pointed his gun in her face, and said, “You get out here. Get out here . . . you bitch, you bitch.”
“Well,” a source close to Chris Snider later said, “I certainly don't think he would have pointed a gun at her. . . . If he would have, he wouldn't have had any problem shooting her, too, so as to have
no
witnesses. Secondly, he wouldn't have spoken to her that way. He was forever teetering on the fine line of her bipolar moods, and calling her a bitch would have inflamed Christine quite a bit.”
Christine said Snider broke into a diatribe whereby he had made her feel “like a piece of [crap].” She wanted to leave, but “I was glued down to the spot where I was at,” she said.
Frozen.
Snider said he wanted her gun if she wasn't going to use it. “[Hey], give me the gun,” she claimed he said. Then he called her the
B
-word several times. He said it “over and over—that's all I kept hearing in my head. Then he took the gun and he ran into the room [where everyone else was] for something, I don't know what, but I heard like a
pop
noise . . . and he ran back up, and he was like, ‘Come on. You're . . . getting me out of this place. You're getting me out.' ”
Christine said he helped her stand up, but her “body felt very weak . . . like, you know, like I was passing out or something, and kind of like, you know, when you, like, run out of breath. . . . And he kept yanking me up, yanking me up, and then he made, like, another . . . and my eyes were closed . . . [but] I could hear [additional shots being fired].”
She was now by the doorway in the foyer. She heard voices (some of them her own). Crying. Pleading.
Stop. Stop. Stop it.
She claimed she couldn't see anyone because she kept her eyes closed.
As Snider stood there, his gun going off, the four of his victims screaming, Christine said she fell into him and grabbed at his shirt, pulling, yelling, and begging for him to stop.
“ ‘Stop, stop, stop,' that's what I was saying in my head, but I couldn't, like, nothing could come out, but just tears, whatever, and then—and then he took—he took my gun, and he was trying to put it in my hand, and I had it in my hand and then . . .”
“One, two, three,” Snider said, over and over, counting down. “One, two, three . . .”
She felt as if he was forcing her to shoot one of them. Demanding that she take the gun and become part of this massacre.
“I just shot, but I didn't shoot anybody, 'cause I, like, I was . . . at the time I remember I was, like, you know, I was trying to, like, move and, you know, it was, like, toward, uh, I think it was just the back of the room or something, I don't know. But then he kept, like, you know, he had my hand, like, like, on the, oh, the handle of it. And he was just . . . God, I can't. Please, can I take another break? I'm sorry. . . .”
She was out of the moment.
Breck McDaniel allowed a break.
“I'm sorry I'm freaking out.”
“Okay.”
“Like—”
“But you know we need to get to this. This is an important part, okay?”
They talked about various brands of cigarettes. But when McDaniel asked Christine to get back into the narrative of what had happened, Christine said, “I feel like I am going to throw up.”
Then she started again. “He was on to it, too (the gun).”
“Okay, like on the top of your hand, or something?”
“Yes!”
Christine Paolilla was saying that Chris Snider had placed the gun in her hand, put his hands over hers, and was effectively forcing her to pull the trigger.
“I was scared and I was crying, and then I, uh, I had made the gun go off—not purposely, though”—of course not!—“but, like, it went to the back room 'cause I was just, like, screaming, just, like, shaking.”
“So somehow,” McDaniel asked, “
you
pulled the trigger?”
“Yes.”
There it was: the admission. All they needed.
Christine claimed Chris noticed how awkwardly she was handling the weapon. “You bitch,” he allegedly said, “what are you doing? You bitch. You bitch. You bitch.” Then he “jerked” her toward him.
McDaniel stopped her there, asking, “How many times do you think it went off in your hand?”
“A million times.”
This was a confession of murder.
“So you were pulling the trigger somehow?” McDaniel asked.
She stopped him: “No, no. Like”—she was trying to explain with her hands—“it's like he has his hand, my hand was like, I can't even tell you how, like, it was, it was—”
“Okay.”
“But it was his force that was making—”
“Making it go off?” the detective offered.
“Yes!”
“Okay. Were you hitting anyone?” McDaniel asked.
“I don't—I don't know. I, anyway . . .”
According to her, Snider put the gun in her hand, placed his fingers over hers, and pulled the trigger. The question that might have broken Christine needed to be asked:
What were the four victims doing at this time?
If Snider and Christine were struggling with each other to point the gun, pull the trigger, jerking back and forth, why didn't one of the boys or girls run up and confront the situation? Christine hadn't made the claim that they were all dead by then. The only claim she made was that this entire scenario with Snider forcing her to fire the gun took place in a matter of seconds. She even described the moment as a “blackout,” but somehow she had no problem recalling that he had made her fire that weapon.
“You know, hypnotized, kind of like . . . all I can remember was just, like, you know, I was screaming and . . . I kept trying to . . . pull, pull away, but . . . I couldn't 'cause, like, I felt like spaghetti almost.”
She heard shots throughout this entire time. “But it wasn't from my gun. . . .”
How could she know that?
Then, after a short time, “everything got, you know, like, quiet, like . . . in the movie
Saving Private Ryan.
”
The slaughter had come to an end. Each of the four bloodied and bullet-ridden victims lay dead in front of them.
CHAPTER
58
A
S SHE DESCRIBED
these bloody scenes, Christine recalled, “I'm still hearing [Chris's] voice and seeing his face, in my head, every time I speak to you.”
Then she followed this statement with a blatant lie, which was later disproved by phone records.
McDaniel asked Christine when she had spoken to Chris Snider last: “He called, um, it was while me and my husband, we were engaged, and he called and acted like, you know, nothing ever happened, you know, 'cause I swore I'd . . . have nothing to do with him after that.”
She
swore
that she would have nothing to do with him after they had committed murder together—that she wanted to be as far away from him as possible. But between July 22, 2003, and August 2, 2003, a mere eleven days, the phone where Christine lived at the time (her mother's house) called Chris Snider's home eighty-four times for a total of 454 minutes of conversation—and that's not counting the dozens upon dozens of times Snider's phone called Lori Paolilla's phone. In fact, Lori Paolilla's phone had called Snider's house obsessively between July and December, thousands of times, logging thousands of minutes. The calls ranged from one minute to over sixty minutes. Now, we have to assume that Lori Paolilla was not calling Chris Snider, or vice versa. If it was Christine calling Chris, how could one believe that she was scared of this guy? There were times when she would call him ten times within a half hour. Twenty times per day, even. Was this a frightened girl who had been forced to shoot her friends?
“You never saw him again after that?” McDaniel asked Christine.
“No.”
(“She drove over to our house,” a Snider family member later said, “after the murders—an hour away, mind you—every chance she got.”)
“Did you talk to him after that?”
“Just, he was just, like, you know, ‘What are you doing? What's up?' ”
From there, perhaps to break McDaniel's momentum, Christine went into one of her classic “like, you know, like, yeah, um,” stumbling, ranting, raving, stammering speeches about how she and Snider had never spoken after the crime, but he had maybe called her a
few
times, and that she had felt safe then because she was engaged and Justin Rott was now protecting her.
Back into the narrative of what had happened, Christine explained how she ran out of the house after the shooting spree came to an end, bolting for her car. “I still had the gun in my hands.” She said she wanted to “throw it,” but “it was, like, glued to my hands.”
She sat in the car, asking herself:
Oh, my God, what just happened in there
? (“I wasn't even crying anymore.”)
Snider jumped into the car, pushed her aside, started the vehicle, and sped off. As he drove, according to Christine, Snider said, “Those [M-F-ers]” over and over, mocking Marcus and Adelbert.
She started screaming, calling Snider the
MF
-word and adding other obscenities.
“It's me and you now, baby. It's me and you.”
“Everybody's dead?” she asked, wanting to know if the barrage of bullets had actually killed everyone.
According to Christine, Chris answered, “Yeah . . . I beat 'em up to make sure.”
He drove off, “going all these different ways and stuff, and we just, like, parked, and then [I] started crying, and then, um, like this time, I, like, I, uh, I wasn't holding on to the gun when I got into the car, I just, like, put it down. . . .”
Chris picked up the gun then. “I'm not getting caught for that, you know,” he said. “You just better not say [anything] or I'll do to you what, you know, like what happened inside. . . . You'll regret it if you say anything. Anyway, I'm your man! I'm your man. I take charge. I take charge! You're my girl.”
“No, no, no. . . . I hate you. I hate you. I hate you!”
“You're gonna go to work now, and you're not gonna say anything. You got me?”
“I just want to go home. . . . I can't go to work. Take me home.”
“You are
not
going home. You're with me now. You're not doing anything. You're my girl.”
He kept saying that—“You're my girl!”—over and over, Christine claimed.
She said Chris drove toward Red Bluff. This was an odd choice of destinations, out and away from Clear Lake by 113 miles, a near two-and-a-half-hour drive. Christine's time card at Walgreens showed that she was at work by 4:23
P.M.
, not even an hour after the murders. Why would she say they drove toward Red Bluff? Why not downtown Houston, Sugar Land, Missouri City, even Wharton?
As Snider drove, Christine stared out the window while at first silently praying to God:
Please help me, God. . . . Please help me.
As she became more absorbed in these pious words, she began to say them out loud, which enlivened Snider's atheistic views.
“You know, God can't help you,” he said.
Ignoring him: “Help me, God. Please help me.”
“God won't help you.”
He grabbed her, she said. Yanked at her. Told her to stop it. Shut the hell up. “Get your [stuff] together!”
“Somebody's gonna know,” Christine said.
“You're going to work.”
McDaniel stopped her. Then he posed an important question: “When you were praying to God, I mean for yourself . . . were you worried about the people, if they were hurt?”
“Oh, of course.”
“You were?”
“Of course. Rachael and, you know, Tiffany, they were my good friends.”

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