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‘Psycho’ 17-year-old shot, beat classmates to death

Tiffany Rowell (right) and Rachael Koloroutis had crotch wounds, perhaps from the jealous Paolilla over her beau Chris Snider

Tiffany Rowell (right) and Rachael Koloroutis had crotch wounds, perhaps from the jealous Paolilla over her beau Chris Snider (
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Chris Snider

Chris Snider (
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WHY? Christine Paolilla was 17 when she bludgeoned a friend with this gun.

WHY? Christine Paolilla was 17 when she bludgeoned a friend with this gun.

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When she was a teenager, Rachael Koloroutis, who lived in a suburb outside of Houston, used to keep a photo of her close friend Christine Paolilla in her handbag.

On the back of the picture, Paolilla had written, “Damn, we’ve had some crazy memories. I love you.”

One night in the summer of 2003, Paolilla, along with a boyfriend accomplice, shot Koloroutis and three other young people for no discernible reason.

Upon realizing that Koloroutis was still alive, Paolilla bashed her skull with the butt of her gun, striking her over and over as the dying girl, choking on her own blood, asked, over and over, “Why?”

“Never See Them Again,” the riveting new book from veteran true-crime author M. William Phelps, examines one of the most horrific murders in recent American history, a case that took the Houston Police Department three years to solve.

That’s because the perpetrator was their least likely suspect — a 17-year-old girl.

When she was 2 years old, Christine Paolilla lost her heroin-addicted father to a construction accident. Soon after, she was diagnosed with alopecia, a disease that results in the loss of all body hair.

Growing up, she tried to compensate, wearing “bulky, Halloween-like” wigs, drawing eyebrows that would easily smudge with sweat.

She was teased relentlessly at school, other kids whipping off Paolilla’s wigs as she tried to make her way to class.

Rachael Koloroutis, however, seemed different. She and her best friend, Tiffany Rowell, were among the most popular and pretty girls at Clear Lake HS, and they decided to befriend the bullied girl — a decision that Paolilla surely found confusing. After all, teen girls being mean to each other is the linchpin of pop culture: think “Carrie,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Heathers,” “Clueless,” “Mean Girls,” etc.

Yet Koloroutis and Rowell, one year ahead of Paolilla, seemed well-intentioned. They taught her how to “dress and buy wigs and wear her makeup so she didn’t look like Tammy Faye Bakker,” and helped her so reverse her fortunes that she was eventually voted “Miss Irresistible.”

The three were so close that Rowell and Koloroutis were the only friends Paolilla would let see her without her wig on.

Other things, however, she kept hidden.

Paolilla had a boyfriend named Chris Snider, a “pushy and aggressive” kid with a criminal record and a hard-drug habit.

Snider scared Paolilla’s mother, who later told ABC that there was “something in [his] eyes.” Even Koloroutis and Rowell, Phelps writes, told Paolilla that “she could do better,” and that “there was another guy out there for her who would treat her with dignity, respect and kindness.”

Sources told Phelps that every fight Paolilla and Snider had was caused by a “crushing jealousy” on her part that resulted in “a crazy rage.” If Snider so much as looked at another girl, Paolilla would hit him.

Yet a part of her also enjoyed feeling humiliated and degraded by Snider, and she demanded such rough sex that it almost seemed “as if she wanted him to punish her.”

Around the Snider home, Paolilla — who also had the police called on her several times by her own parents — was known as “the psycho.”

After particularly nasty fights, “she’d spend the night on the front lawn, sleeping, trying to get into the house, yelling, going nuts, rattling the screen door,” writes Phelps. Snider’s sister, Brandee, is quoted as saying, that Paolilla “threatened to kill my mom, my dad and even me! She was an absolute cancer to us.”

The abusive nature of their relationship reached its apex one night when an enraged Paolilla, without warning, stopped yelling at Snider, stared him down and “licked his face from his chin up.” She then spat on the ground before walking away.

Snider had told his family, more than once, that only two things frightened him: the cops and Christine.

The murders took place at around 3:30 p.m. on July 18, 2003, when a teenage couple, calling on friends in Clear Lake City, Texas, found four bodies in a blood-soaked living room.

In addition to Koloroutis and Rowell, both 18, the dead included Rowell’s boyfriend, Marcus Ray Precella, 19, and his cousin, Adelbert Nicholas Sanchez, 21.

All four had been shot multiple times, and Precella had “blunt-force head injuries.”

But the worst appeared to be saved for Koloroutis — her head bashed in, a clump of clotted hair in her right hand. She was shot at least 12 times, including once in the left buttock, an indication that she was trying to run from her killer. She had also been shot in the crotch.

The nature and precision of the shots — over 40 bullets were fired, with police marveling at their accuracy — indicated a possible execution-style slaying. But the personal anger directed toward Koloroutis — known among investigators as “overkill” — suggested that the murderer had a personal relationship with at least this victim. The shot to the crotch alone was a strong indicator of sexual jealousy or competition.

Yet police quickly formulated a theory that the murders were most likely drug-related, and they stuck to it. Koloroutis and Rowell had just graduated, and the former pretty girls of Clear Lake High were now pulling waitressing shifts at a local strip club. Precella dealt ecstasy and cocaine.

Despite over 400 leads in the early months, most leading back to Precella’s drug associations, the investigation went nowhere.

No one thought to suspect Paolilla, in large part because few women — let alone teenage girls — commit murder. Of the 1,190 juveniles arrested for murder or manslaughter in the United States in 2009, only 7 percent were female.

And so a couple years passed, and life went on. Snider wound up in a Kentucky jail on an old car-theft warrant and Paolilla in drug rehab in Kerrville, Texas, where she met a longtime heroin addict named Justin Rott.

It was love.

The two got married and, using a $360,000 trust left by her late father, bought a condo. Their nesting period was short-lived.

Soon after moving in, Paolilla saw a news story on TV about the anniversary of her best friends’ unsolved murders. She called Rott in to watch, and as police sketches were thrown up on screen, Paolilla unraveled.

She paced the living room, saying “Oh my! Oh my!” over and over. Then she stopped and stared at her new husband.

“Does that,” she asked, “look like me?”

Having offered this semi-confession, Paolilla soon told her husband what happened that afternoon — a version of events in which she was surprisingly passive.

She and Snider went to the house to steal money and drugs — his idea, she said — and Snider surprised her by handing her a gun just before entering the house.

He then shot Precella — another surprise. And then, she claimed, the gun she was carrying just went off on its own, and she lost control of it as she fired “blindly” around the room, crying the whole time.

After they left the crime scene, she told Snider she had to go back inside to “make sure they’re all dead.” Back inside, she saw Koloroutis crawling on the floor, trying to dial 911 on her cellphone while gagging on her own blood.

At that point, Phelps writes, “Christine took out her pistol . . . leveled it over her head, holding it by the barrel like a hammer, and began, in a whipping motion, pounding on the back of Rachael’s head, bashing her skull in, making sure she was dead.”

Finished, Paolilla then ordered Snider to drive her to work— she needed to clock-in for her shift behind the makeup counter at Walgreens.

Rott moved through a version of the stages of grief: shock, anger, denial, acceptance.

The couple stuck together, going on the run. They moved into a room at a La Quinta Inn and embarked on a drug binge as epic in its volume as its squalor.

They shot $500 worth of heroin and cocaine daily while living on Cheez-Its, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and soda. They never left the room and never allowed housekeeping in, and as the weeks accumulated, it was strewn with blood, vomit, their dog’s feces and over a hundred needles.

They lived in that room for seven months.

Ten days before the third anniversary of the murders, Houston police received an anonymous tip from a man — later confirmed not to be Rott — who said he’d met Paolilla in rehab and she’d had told him how she and her boyfriend committed the Clear Lake murders.

Cops tracked her down through her ATM activity, and within two days of that tip, they arrested her.

Paolilla gave varying accounts of what happened the afternoon of the murders, but eventually gave away enough that, combined with Rott’s testimony and other evidence, prosecutors were able to convict her of first-degree capital murder.

She was given a mandatory life sentence, leaving her ineligible for parole for 40 years.

Her accomplice and former boyfriend, Chris Snider, ran into the woods with a bottle of soda and a collection of pills once he heard the cops were on his tail. He killed himself.

As to the question of why a 17-year-old girl would turn so violently on “the only people who wouldn’t stab me in the back,” as she once said, the most plausible explanation may have come from Snider’s sister Brandee.

“I remember her being intensely jealous,” Brandee said. “There must have been some underlying jealousy between her [Christine] and [Rachael]. When I saw photos of [Rachael], I knew instantly. She was very beautiful.”

Rowell, too, had been shot in the crotch. The two young men were not.

Ultimately, though, only Paolilla knows why she did what she did. And, she continues to exhibit no interest in apologizing or explaining.