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Authors: M. William Phelps

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BOOK: Never See Them Again
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The photographer snapped a photo of the cell phone, as he did the remainder of the house, inside and out. So many rounds had been fired that several had even gone through the window in the back of the house and found a place in the wooden fence.
One cop walked into the kitchen. There on the counter was a plate of spaghetti, a fork poked into a mound of pasta. Next to it was an opened Tupperware container, pieces of garlic bread inside, crumbs on the counter next to it. Someone had been eating—likely Rachael—when whoever walked into the house, or some time before, unloaded.
Inside the living room, the ME reached inside Rachael's back pocket and found her driver's license and a business card. Rachael's license had a bullet hole through her date of birth.
As they stood and looked over the scene, blood all around them, police realized that the most they could do now was shake their heads and begin to consider what a scene of this magnitude told them. There certainly was going to be many secrets within the context of it all. All they could do now was search for any trace evidence left behind by the killer; maybe a cigarette butt or a hair, a fiber of some sort. Anything that could help point in a direction. Anywhere, essentially. Because the way it looked at this moment, the evidence spoke to someone who had beamed down out of thin air and fired at these kids until the clips and chambers of the weapons they had come in with, and had taken with them, were empty. Then the shooter quickly disappeared back into whatever dimension he or she had emerged from.
Middle of the day and no one saw a thing?
Didn't make sense.
Then again, four dead kids, for no obvious reason, wasn't computing well, either.
Houston is home to approximately 2.3 million. The suburb of Clear Lake City had never seen a mass murder of this nature. Nor had any other region of the city and its surrounding counties. Four kids mowed down in cold blood with enough firepower to stage a small war. Who could have done such a thing? Maybe more important to solving the crime at this point, why?
What George Koloroutis, or anybody else—including detectives showing up, patrol officers minding the scene, and crime scene techs searching room by room—knew then was that the answers to this mystery would take years of old-fashioned gumshoe police work; some of it done by George Koloroutis himself. Little did anyone know at this point it was going to be three years—almost to the day—before a suspect worth considering was brought in. Or that it would turn into a case that would take investigators through nearly a dozen states, halfway across the country, and involve one of the most intense and puzzling murder investigations the HPD had ever probed. And when all was said and done, wouldn't you know it, the murderer had been right under everyone's nose the entire time, there, within reach. The least likely suspect imaginable.
CHAPTER 4
T
HE EXISTENTIAL QUESTION
every police officer inevitably faces at the beginning of a murder investigation comes down to this: Is one piece of evidence any more significant than the other? Sure, DNA uncovered at the scene might be a bit more exciting than a witness who thinks she saw something, or, rather,
might
have seen something.
That's not what we're talking about here.
What a murder victim has done throughout his or her life, which is pertinent to any investigation of the magnitude HPD encountered on Millbridge Drive, became the focal point immediately. The fact that HPD found out the kids were into drugs turned out to be extremely relevant. Yet, a crime victim's life is not something that should blemish an investigator's sense of where to go with a case. You don't solve murders with blinders on, in other words. You don't track down killers by denying the obvious or looking the other way, either. You simply check your judgment at the door and follow the trail.
No matter
where
it leads.
It was no secret that the four murder victims found in Clear Lake City had been dabbling in an active and highly energized Houston drug culture—some more than others. Tiffany and Rachael had just started working at Club Exotica, a topless strip joint on the Gulf Freeway. And on the surface, if that's all you looked at, you'd be inclined to draw some conclusions about these girls. Strippers and blow (cocaine) went together like bulimia and runway modeling. Indeed, you could probably scrape up a few residue lines of coke on the back counter of any stripper's dressing room. But digging deeper into Tiffany and Rachael's lives, you'd see that neither danced, although they had been asked to do so more than once. They waitressed and bartended; two gorgeous teenagers who fought the guys off with clubs, and could have made a bundle exposing what they had been born with. However, they chose to keep their clothes
on
. That said something about Rachael and Tiffany; it spoke to the kind of people they were at heart. And let's face it: the difference in the tips waitressing at a strip joint as compared to the local Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is tenfold.
“People might get the wrong impression of my daughter,” George Koloroutis later said. “But she was involved in church activities and taught vacation Bible school. She was a
good
kid. There are parts of her life that bear no relevance to her murder.”
Still, what if some whacko strip club patron developed an obsession with one of the girls and decided to take out Marcus and Adelbert after following the girls home from the club and knocking on the door?
Collateral damage: Marcus and Adelbert.
Investigators had to consider this.
Or what if Rachael and Tiffany had been mistaken for someone else? Maybe one of the two boys at the house had been a target?
Those scenarios had to be looked into.
In fact, there were so many different avenues the investigation could take in its initial stage, HPD realized, to start developing theories now would be absurd and purely inconsiderate to the memories of these kids. It would stifle progress. Slow the natural evolution of the investigation and what the evidence was about to bear out.
The job of juggling all of these questions was given to Detective Tom Ladd, a seasoned cop nearing the end of nearly three decades of work in HPD's Homicide Division. Ladd spoke like a character out of
The Last Picture Show
or
Lonesome Dove,
Larry McMurtry's Texas masterpieces. Ladd had an unshakable Western accent, a slight lisp, and a scratchy throttle from too many cigarettes.
It was 1969 when Tom arrived at the police academy in Texas, where he spent four months. Then, as Tom later put it, he “was put there on patrol in one of the black areas, here in Houston, called the Third Ward.”
Ladd spent three years patrolling one of the highest-crime districts in the city at the time. He was moved down by the docks, the Harrisburg Canal region, and made a decision while there that would ultimately change the person he became.
“I decided to study for detective,” Tom recalled. “And I scored high enough to qualify, and they put me into Homicide.”
It was 1975.
Ladd never left.
This Clear Lake City case, the massacre of the four out on Millbridge, was Detective Tom Ladd and his partner Phil Yochum's case. Not because Ladd had some sort of long-lost wish to solve a case of this magnitude, but because of the time of day that the murders had been discovered. Ladd was one of the night men on HPD's Homicide Division, the “skeleton crew” chief, as he put it, working the three-to-eleven or four-to-midnight watch. When this Clear Lake case came in, Ladd was busy finishing work up on a serial killer case. The problem, he said, with taking cases on the evening shift: “We didn't have the luxury, because there was so few of us on the evening shift, to work just
one
case. A lot of times we would get assigned another case and it forced us to decide, ‘Okay, do we work
this
case, or do we work
that
case?' It made us selective in the cases we followed through on.”
Tom was born in the Midwest, a little town in Missouri. When he was seven, his family moved to Houston. He played college football for Barry Switzer's University of Oklahoma Sooners, and took that Johnny Unitas brush cut of his youth into adulthood. The days that Tom spent at the University of Oklahoma playing for the Sooners schooled him in humility, you could say. Tom stood about six feet four inches, had some bulk on him, at just over two hundred pounds, but he was by no means heavy. He was perfect for the football field of his day. But not once did Tom ever kid himself into thinking that he had the potential to play professionally. He suffered an injury then that he still feels to this day. Or, as he liked to put it, “I got my knee ripped up.” Tom also realized as he looked around at the other kids coming into training camp as he was heading into his final years of college, he just wasn't big enough to make a play for the NFL. “My playing weight at OU was two hundred seven. I was what they call a ‘weak guard.' While I was there, guys were coming in who were two hundred seventy-five to two hundred eighty pounds—but who moved just as quickly as I could!”
His days on the HPD Homicide Squad began on October 25, 1975, and Tom's weathered eyes told a familiar story, showing the wear that the years of being a witness to the sickness of society can take on a human being. Surely, Tom had seen things that the public thought happened only in movies. He'd been inside places most people didn't think existed. Ladd was a cop who thought long and hard about what he said before opening his mouth, an attribute he learned from his years behind the badge. It was those times—and Tom admitted to plenty of them—when he didn't keep his tongue tied, that he got in trouble. There was no middle ground with Tom Ladd. He was polarizing; people liked him or hated him (many more coming on the side of the latter). He'd been called a “bigot” and a “racist,” as if the two were different somehow by saying both words in the same breath. But Tom himself would tell you, he spoke his mind. Period. If you didn't like that, there's not much he could do. Moreover, Ladd had investigated some high-profile cases throughout his career. The “Railroad Killer” was part of Tom's past. Angel Maturino Reséndiz was a vicious psychopath (executed in 2006 for his crimes) who murdered fifteen people along the railroad tracks of Texas.
“My partner and I,” Tom said humbly, “were the ones who led to the identification of him [Reséndiz], and the Texas Rangers got involved and developed him as a serial murderer.”
Tom and his brother, Jim Ladd, a former HPD detective himself, were involved with the Carl Eugene Watts case. Watts was the notorious serial killer known as the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” a man who had confessed to, by some gross guesstimates, taking the lives of eighty females during a twenty-plus-year killing spree.
“I think he's probably done
more
than that,” Tom said of the man he called “Coral.” “His memory was amazing.” Coral showed Tom and Jim where he buried his victims, sometimes three to a single grave; but there was one day during a two-week period when Tom and his team interviewed Coral on a daily basis and Coral shocked Tom. The serial killer looked at the detective and, as calm as a Texas wave before a hurricane, said, “If I ever get out, I'll do it again.”
 
 
THE HOMICIDE DIVISION
lieutenant called Ladd on the night of July 18, 2003, and let him know what they had on Millbridge. Of course, the Patrol Division was the first to respond. Then HPD's Crime Scene Unit (CSU).
“We walked into that mess,” Ladd said of the night shift detective squad, “and they were all there, going through the scene.”
Word of a quadruple homicide got around quick.
Ladd found a patrol sergeant outside the Rowell house as soon as he arrived on the scene. The guy gave him the details they had at the time. Four bodies. Multiple gunshot wounds. Several people who had walked into the house but had run out (Brittney Vikko and several neighbors). No one in the neighborhood they had spoken to so far had seen or heard a thing.
“Looks like a drug deal gone bad,” someone at the scene said.
Sure did
, Ladd thought.
But what were these kids dealing in—pounds of dope?
The tall, soft-spoken detective found a CSU officer and asked what, exactly, they had inside the house. The layout. The gruesome reality beyond the front door.
The investigator explained.
Shell casings were everywhere. Blood was all over the place. Shots fired at close range and from a distance. Even looked like several of the victims had been pistol-whipped or beaten with a blunt object, something small and hard.
Tom Ladd and Phil Yochum had this in mind as they walked into the house.
First thing that hit Ladd was the shell casings right there as you crossed over the threshold of the front doorway.
Did the shooter start firing the moment one of the victims opened the door?
Yochum and Ladd remained quiet for a time and “gingerly,” as Ladd explained, walked around the bodies, looking things over.
What a mess, indeed. Such a damn tragedy. Four kids cut down like this—and for what?
Homicide had developed a system for murder investigations. They worked by what's called a “homicide card.” One side was responsible for the scene; the other locked onto witnesses.
“Phil,” Ladd said, “take the inside here, the scene.”
Yochum understood. He was young. He could take it. Yochum was not as experienced, Tom knew, but having the CSU there to help him was what Phil Yochum needed.
Ladd set out to develop witnesses. Talk to people. Run the periphery of the scene, which, experience told him, was where a cop could find his best perspective this early.
What were people in the neighborhood talking about?
Before walking out of the house, taking a look around, Ladd considered the drug-deal-gone-bad theory:
A drug killing?
He'd seen plenty of them.
Four kids. All shot
.
Not a hard sell.
“It wasn't
concrete
in my mind,” Ladd was quick to point out, “but it just
looked
like a drug killing.”
The telltale marks could not be ignored.
Thinking further, studying all the shots the CSU had identified on the victims thus far, Ladd came to a second conclusion, one that told him maybe they were looking at something else entirely.
Good shots.
Whoever had fired the rounds had hit his or her intended targets accurately.
It wasn't like there was a lot of misses.
“I used to be on an officer-involved shooting team,” Ladd recalled. “It was amazing how many times I showed up to a crime scene where officers had fired and not hit
anything.
Then I walk into that [Millbridge Drive] scene that night and everybody's got rounds in them! Yeah, that told me somethin', all right.”
Before finally leaving the house, Ladd walked over to the fireplace and bent down on one knee. He looked square into the rabbit cage sitting on the base of the hearth. The rabbit was jumpy. Wired and fired up. Little guy seemed to be anxious, as maybe all rabbits are.
Ladd looked at the furry creature for a few moments. Then he stood:
If only that rabbit could talk
, the detective told himself, shaking his head as he walked out the door.
BOOK: Never See Them Again
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