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Authors: M. William Phelps

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He pointed at the defendant. “Got it. Hers!” He paused. “She goes on with her life. The evidence will show.”
CHAPTER 65
M
IKE DEGEURIN WAS
not some sort of nimble ambulance chaser, pimping himself on late-night local television, dabbling in felonious criminal waters from time to time. Christine Paolilla had spared no expense in hiring DeGeurin, and the man's résumé proved that she had chosen herself a class act all the way. Since joining the Percy Foreman firm in 1977—Foreman being an iconic Texan criminal defense attorney—DeGeurin had earned, according to the now Foreman/DeGeurin/Nugent firm's website:
international acclaim by proving Clarence Brandley's innocence, freeing him from ten years on Texas Death Row.
DeGeurin had also successfully defended Paul Fatta against murder charges arising from the government raid on Waco's Branch Davidians; and, in a case featured on
60 Minutes,
he had exonerated Kelley Koch from murder charges by proving that her confession was “false and coerced.”
The guy had some notoriety and certainly several successes behind him. He was no stoolie who was in the courtroom just collecting a paycheck. Mike DeGeurin, with his wispy white-blond hair and serious gaze, was a fighter.
“Mike was a very formidable opponent,” Rob Freyer later said. “His hands were tied in a way because his client had confessed and put herself at the scene. Her doing that really limited his options of putting on a defense.”
This was the first time Freyer and DeGeurin had met inside a courtroom.
DeGeurin started his opening argument by thanking the jury for sitting on the case. Jury service alone was hard enough, he commended. With a trial expected to go a month, and the horror that jurors would have to see and listen to vis-à-vis crime scene photos, videotape, and testimony, DeGeurin made a point to say how grateful he and his partner, Paul Nugent, the younger of the two, were for each juror's service.
It did not take the veteran defense attorney long to play what was, essentially, his only card: the sympathy argument. Within minutes of beginning, DeGeurin said, “You might imagine that there's another view of what happened. And it's stark reality that you're going to be faced with throughout this trial. That's not easy. You like to think that awful things
don't
happen. If they do, they happen to someone else. We like to think that way. It's easier to live. But terrible things happen. And there are
bad
people out there. [But] what the evidence is going to show is that . . . when [Christine] was about two and a half years old, going on three . . . her dad was killed in an accident. . . .”
Setting that idea in motion, he then talked about how a court had awarded custody of Christine and her brother—whom DeGeurin misnamed and Christine had to openly, quite embarrassingly, correct him—to her grandparents. But they persevered and became a family.
Next he ladled on the poor-me tale of Christine having been diagnosed with alopecia on top of being fatherless at such a young age.
Then he talked about the “special classes” she had to take in school.
All the teasing she had endured.
How she wanted nothing more than to be “normal.”
He spoke of Lori Paolilla getting custody of Christine and her brother and heading off to Texas.
And then, after all that, here was Christine, a fragile and broken youth, who just happened to run into a monster.
“And that's what happened here. At age fifteen, maybe around sixteen, she runs into a guy out there named Chris Snider. Snider is described by the police in their psychological unit, or however they get their information together, as a ward psychopathic killer. Weirdo. Predator. That's the way they describe him. And satanic! This is the—this
is
Chris Snider. . . .”
Nobody was denying those opinions. Yet, ADA Freyer interrupted the defense attorney: “I respectfully object to him referring to something that is
not
in evidence.”
“Sustained.”
“It
is
evidence, Your Honor,” DeGeurin argued.
“I sustained the objection.”
DeGeurin wouldn't let up. He pushed.
The judge unleashed on him: “Mr. DeGeurin, I sustained the objection. That means you're
not
going to talk about it during opening statement. Is that clear?” Ellis gave DeGeurin what would become one of his trademark stares that he would project whenever he became frustrated and impatient with the lawyers.
“Yes, Your Honor.” DeGeurin paused and collected his thoughts. Then he carried on, adding, “So, you have a
predator
coming into her life. And the parents see it and they try to prevent it. . . . He wanted her under his control and the parents tried to
prevent
it. They called the cops on him. The cops arrested him out in front of their house because he wasn't supposed to be there, wasn't supposed to be around their daughter.”
This was Christine's one and only way to paint a picture of Chris Snider in the jury's mind, and then use the trial to build on that image. DeGeurin had to make sure the jury came out of the trial thinking that Snider was the bad guy here all the way, and Christine was simply too young, naïve, and delicate to make up her own mind, not to mention too weak to disobey him.
And so, on that note, DeGeurin continued bashing Snider.
After explaining how Christine and Snider lost touch for a while, DeGeurin worked in the friendship Christine began with Tiffany and Rachael.
“In this interim she had become friends with—through, I think, a church group and school—Tiffany Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis. They were her friends.”
Not true.
He talked about how important her job at Walgreens was to Christine because it had taught her about cosmetics, which helped bolster her self-esteem and allow her to make herself look pretty—something Tiffany and Rachael had helped her get started with.
He mentioned how great Christine's life was going, with friends like Rachael and Tiffany by her side.
How Christine was excelling in school.
How her social life was on fire at one time.
But then that one-eyed monster returned—and things began to change.
“So,” DeGeurin said, “Snider comes back and there is a party at Rachael's and Tiffany's house. There were teenagers there. It was a nice—I mean, it was a party of friends. And Christine takes Chris Snider to that party. They're not there long because Chris Snider doesn't know any of these people, didn't like her having friends, doesn't like those people, but Chris Snider learns that Marcus is living there and maybe Adelbert can hook him up with drugs.”
From there, DeGeurin told the jury the same story Christine had tried to snowball Detective Breck McDaniel with on that night she ate a Happy Meal. Chris Snider killed these people on his own and made her a part of his crimes, forcing her to participate.
DeGeurin's next hurdle was Justin Rott. How was he going to explain away Rott's damaging testimony, which placed his wife at the scene of the crime, and had actually put a pistol in her hand as she beat Rachael Koloroutis to death?
The only way to accomplish this was to call Justin Rott a predator, too, adding how he sought Christine out and married her for all that money she would be coming into.
“So, Justin Rott marries her. They elope, contrary—against the wishes of Christine's parents—because it's her money, her life. She apparently loves this guy and they elope. She immediately buys a condo for him, a car . . . [a] big-screen TV. All with
her
money. And for a little while . . . she starts using heavy drugs.”
He failed to say that her drug use was an escalation. She had started to dabble in hard drugs long before meeting Justin Rott.
DeGeurin next keyed on the fact that Christine was suffering from withdrawal during that time frame when she was interrogated, and was no less than bullied by the police and not given proper medical treatment. So, of course, she was going to admit to anything to get out of there. He went as far as to say that her statements to police were not given voluntarily.
Finally, after carrying on too long, DeGeurin concluded, saying, “So, I think I've given you enough information that I expect the evidence to show. You've been sitting here quite a long time. I appreciate that. As you can see, this is not going to be an easy case. It's going to be a very difficult case. I have great sympathy for some of the people here that are relatives of the people that were killed, but I also have a great interest and a great desire to protect Christine Paolilla from a
rush
to judgment and for something that she
never
intended—she never intended and thought would happen. Thank you very much for your attention.”
CHAPTER 66
R
OB FREYER CALLED
his first witness not long after Mike DeGeurin finished his opening statement. Sergeant Richard Pitts was the first responder on the scene.
Pitts laid the crime scene out in graphic detail. When asked what he saw inside the house when he arrived, Pitts uttered that familiar mantra: “Carnage.”
“All right,” Freyer said.
“Death,” Pitts added, and then spoke of what the inside of the Rowell “house of horrors” looked like.
DeGeurin didn't have much for the officer.
The idea was for Pitts to set the scene for the man, Freyer said later, who was his most important witness.
Andrew Taravella had been with HPD for sixteen years. The officer, a member of the Homicide Division Crime Scene Unit, talked about what he saw when he arrived. For Freyer, this was going to be the most damaging testimony for the defendant because Taravella had been in charge of deconstructing and documenting the crime scene. He had spent upward of eight hours at the house.
“It was a bloodbath,” Freyer said later. “And Andrew's job was to make some sense out of it all. It took the concept of a crime scene to levels where it had never been before—at least in my experience. . . . It showed that the minute they walked into that house, they started shooting.”
More than all of that, Taravella introduced the all-important crime scene photographs. The public viewing of these photos was going to put the trial into perspective, showing graphically and horrifically just how violent the deaths of these kids had been. The photos were so striking, in fact, that many of them were shown only on the jury's monitors and not on the overhead courtroom video screens, for fear that family members would cry out, or maybe run out of the courtroom. If that happened, Freyer knew, it could be grounds for a mistrial.
Taravella talked the jury through one horrendous photo after the next, almost one hundred in total. Whenever they got to a photo that had been significant to the evidence of tracking the killers, Taravella explained it in detail, keying in on why he and the ADA believed the photo was important to uncovering the killers' identities.
Taravella's comments over the display of photos was gruesome. In fact, a friend of George Koloroutis's had been at the trial since it started, supporting his friend. As the photos were shown inside the courtroom, the guy stood, walked out, and then collapsed in the hallway. Meanwhile, Christine Paolilla stared at each of the exhibits intently as they passed over the monitors.
“She did not gasp, she didn't cry, she didn't look away,” a source in the courtroom sitting in back of Christine said. “She stared at those images like, ‘Yeah, this is what I did.' ”
Taravella continued, and didn't miss a beat. He talked jurors through the house.
Room by room.
He talked about where the bodies had been found, spending time on each of the four.
He focused on where the shell casings had been uncovered.
The type of weapons used in the murders.
Blood spatter.
Muscle tissue.
How each body at the scene “entails an extensive, detailed investigation of its own.”
Fingerprints.
Ballistics tests.
Bullet fragments.
Drug paraphernalia.
The “small amount of money” they found in one of the bedrooms.
The fact that the photos—and ADA Rob Freyer brought each one up as Taravella talked about it—showed how Tiffany Rowell was “caught off guard” and “shot multiple times” as she sat next to Adelbert “watching television.”
The terrible reality of this crime went on and on. The bottom line was that Andrew Taravella was there at the murder scene. It would have been nearly impossible for Chris Snider to have walked in and surprised those kids by himself. Marcus and Rachael “were in motion” at the time they were murdered, Taravella said.
“All right,” Freyer asked, “what kind of injuries do you note here on State's Exhibit Number forty-nine (a photo of Marcus's body)?”
“In addition to gunshot wounds, Mr. Precella also had blunt-force trauma to the head and to the face. Now, looking at State's Exhibit Number fifty-one, you notice some dots and other items over here, by the back of the center of Mr. Precella's head.”
“What do you draw from that?”
“Again, those are just—it's blood spatter that was fed by gravity. Those are drops that impacted the carpet in what appeared to be ninety degrees. Likely just dripped from his head, from his hair onto the carpet.”
“Could it be consistent with somebody standing over him holding an object that's dripping blood?”
“It could be.”
Marcus Precella, ADA Freyer suggested with his questioning, had been beaten and shot.
Well into the morning, Freyer was up to State's Exhibit Number 269.
Freyer had Taravella describe Rachael's body and how she was found. The phone next to her head. Her arm reaching for it. And the fact that a lock of hair found at the scene in Rachael's hand was different from hers.
“It actually appeared to us to be a different color,” Taravella explained. “It had some blood in it. We didn't think at the time that it was her
own
hair. We suspected at that time it was possibly pulled from a suspect during a struggle, and that was the reason for that photograph and the collection of that hair.”
As Taravella gave the jury a tutorial focused on “castoff,” or the blood spatter on the walls up toward the ceiling above Rachael's body, it became clear that two of the victims were not dead upon being shot. Someone had gone back into the house to finish the job, and that someone, Freyer would argue with additional witnesses, was Christine Paolilla.
Taravella testified all day long. By the time Freyer “passed the witness” off to DeGeurin, Judge Ellis closed out proceedings for the day.

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