# 12: The Clear Lake Murders (Christine Paolilla)

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 25 May 2023, 30 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880326/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851616-44100-2-6c3bc38d638ccd2e.mp3

Today's episode is on Christine Paolilla from Clear Lake Trigger Warning: mass murder Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] So today's case is going to be the Christine Paolilla case.
[0:42] And before we get into it, I just want to give my usual
[0:44] disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:47] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:49] This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
[0:52] about to say is just information that I have found on the
[0:54] Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
[0:57] S Christine Marie Paolilla was born on March 31st, 1986 in Long
[1:02] Island, New York. Her parents were Charles, a
[1:05] construction worker and Laurie, a stay at home.
[1:08] When Christine was just two years old, her father Charles
[1:11] was out at work and sadly died in a tragic accident on the
[1:15] construction site and this changed Christine's life
[1:19] forever. Her mother Laurie began abusing
[1:22] drugs and became addicted to a bunch of different drugs which
[1:25] eventually meant that she got her children taken off of her,
[1:27] Christine and her older brother and they were sent to live with
[1:31] their grandparents. When Christine was around 5
[1:34] years old, so she's still very, very young, her hair started
[1:38] coming out in clumps during the night.
[1:40] And so her grandparents took her to the doctors and she was
[1:43] diagnosed with alopecia aged 5 years old.
[1:46] She lost quite a bit of the hair on her head, like in chunks, so
[1:50] she had like bald spots. She lost her eyebrows, she lost
[1:53] her eyelashes. And as you can imagine on a 5
[1:56] year old girl, this really took a toll on like herself, esteem
[2:00] and just her general happiness. She wasn't quite as happy and
[2:04] all the other kids obviously didn't really understand it.
[2:06] And they started making fun of her for it.
[2:09] And Christine got really sad. She didn't feel girly anymore.
[2:13] And so her grandparents began buying her wigs so that she
[2:16] could have like a full head of hair.
[2:18] But this only made it worse because the kids would like,
[2:21] come up behind her and pull a wig off.
[2:22] And they were horrible to Christine.
[2:24] And Christine wasn't only bullied for her hair loss and
[2:27] her wigs, she was also bullied because she had really bad
[2:30] vision. And so the glasses that she had
[2:33] to wear were really thick, really goofy, for lack of a
[2:36] better term. And the kids would make fun for
[2:38] that as well. Christine had a really tough
[2:41] time in school. She was very insecure.
[2:43] She was very shy. She didn't like putting herself
[2:46] out there. So that just made her loneliness
[2:48] even worse because she couldn't really make friends.
[2:51] And this continued into her early teenage years.
[2:55] Christine never really made friends.
[2:56] She had kids that she would talk to at school, but she never had
[3:01] like a group of friends or a best friend.
[3:04] And then when Christine was in her early teenage years, her
[3:07] mother actually got over all of her drug addictions.
[3:10] She remarried. She really got her life back on
[3:12] track. And so she was able to have
[3:14] Christine and her older brother back.
[3:16] When Christine was 17 years old, her and her family moved to
[3:20] Clear Lake in Houston in Texas, and she enrolled at Clear Lake
[3:24] High School. Clear Lake was a very nice area.
[3:28] It was very upscale. It was quite wealthy.
[3:31] Well, it had, it certainly had wealthy parts to it.
[3:33] It was very safe. It was just a lovely
[3:36] neighborhood that a lot of people wanted to let raise a
[3:39] family in. So Christine went to Clear Lake
[3:41] High. She had her first day and
[3:43] everything, and as soon as she came home, her mother saw a
[3:46] complete shift in her. She was so happy, she was so
[3:50] excited. She ran straight up to her mum
[3:52] and she was saying, I've made two friends.
[3:54] They're the sweetest girls I've ever met.
[3:56] Their names were Rachel Collarutis and Tiffany Rowell,
[3:59] and they were kind of like the normal popular girl stereotype,
[4:03] but without the meanness. Rachel was known for being one
[4:06] of the kindest and most generous girls in the school.
[4:09] She was very artistic, she loved creative writing, she loved to
[4:13] help the underdog. Tiffany loved acting, she had a
[4:16] real talent for it. She was always in school plays,
[4:19] although her dream career was actually to be a social worker.
[4:22] And the three of them just clicked and they began spending
[4:25] more and more time with each other.
[4:27] They'd go to each other's houses and Christine's mother noticed
[4:30] that when they would be rounded the house, Christine wouldn't
[4:33] stop laughing. She was so happy.
[4:35] And she noticed a real shift in Christine's personal She was no
[4:39] longer shy and insecure and depressed.
[4:41] She was confident, she was happy, she was laughing, she was
[4:45] creative again. She was making things.
[4:48] She was hard working in school again.
[4:50] Christine had confided in Rachel and Tiffany about her
[4:53] insecurities, about her hair, about her glasses, just about
[4:58] everything. About how people used to bully
[5:00] her. And of course Tiffany and Rachel
[5:03] being as generous as they were, they wanted to help their new
[5:06] friend. And so the girls gave Christine
[5:09] a complete makeover. They went and bought her a new
[5:12] wig, one that kind of suited her a little bit better.
[5:15] They taught her how to do makeup for her kind of face shape.
[5:19] They taught her how to wear contacts instead of glasses.
[5:22] And this improved Christine's confidence by a mile.
[5:26] And it was noticeable to anyone and everyone that had ever met
[5:29] her. She was like a complete new
[5:31] woman, so much so that in 2003, Christine Paolilla was actually
[5:36] voted Miss Irresistible by her classmates because she was so
[5:39] beautiful, because she was so confident.
[5:41] And it was around that time in 2003 where Christine met who
[5:45] would soon become her boyfriend, a man named Chris Snyder.
[5:49] Chris was 21 and Christine was 17 at the time that they met.
[5:54] And Christine's mom and stepdad didn't really approve of him,
[5:57] not because of his age so much, but because he was a known.
[6:01] He had a lot of violence charges.
[6:04] He had a lot of just kind of smaller charges.
[6:08] And then he was known to experiment with drugs very
[6:12] often. I don't know if he had any kind
[6:14] of addictions at this point, but he certainly did later on in his
[6:18] life. And he did drugs a lot.
[6:21] And Christine wasn't like that at all.
[6:23] And Tiffany and Rachel didn't approve of Chris either.
[6:27] He was nothing like their group. Their group didn't do drugs.
[6:30] They weren't criminal. They were good kids.
[6:33] And then Christine was kind of bringing him in, and the girls
[6:36] didn't really like that. And before long, Christine began
[6:39] experimenting with drugs with her new boyfriend, Chris.
[6:42] And she was kind of isolating herself from everyone, her
[6:46] family, her friends, whether that was because Chris was
[6:49] telling her to do so or just because Christine felt like she
[6:52] didn't fit in with them anymore, because she didn't.
[6:55] And Christine's mother believes that that relationship between
[6:58] Christine and Chris was mutually abusive.
[7:01] Christine was very, very jealous.
[7:03] And after one particular fight that they had one day, she
[7:07] refused to leave his house and she went and slept on his front
[7:12] lawn of his house and claimed that if he tried to make her
[7:15] leave or if he called the police or anything, she would kill his
[7:18] whole family. And through this relationship
[7:20] again, Christine completely transformed.
[7:23] She became a complete new person, a whole new personality.
[7:26] She no longer fit in with her friend group, although they
[7:29] didn't like kick her out, they didn't refuse to speak to her
[7:32] because they still loved her and they were still so kind and
[7:35] generous. But she wasn't like them
[7:37] anymore. And she couldn't really fit in
[7:39] with her family either. And the only person Christine
[7:43] really had that she could relate to her and that she could talk
[7:46] to her was Chris, her abusive boyfriend that she was also
[7:50] abusive to. So the group kind of carried on
[7:53] as normal, just without Christine most of the time.
[7:56] I mean, they'd invite her every now and again, but they knew
[7:59] she'd probably bring Chris. And so they kind of started
[8:01] distancing themselves a little bit, but they did still see her.
[8:04] So at this point, the group was Rachel and Tiffany as always.
[8:08] And Tiffany had a boyfriend named Marcus and he, he would
[8:11] spend time with them and Marcus's cousin Adelebert
[8:15] recently moved to that neighborhood and so he would
[8:18] hang out with them as well. On July 18th, 2003, the group
[8:21] that I just mentioned were all hanging out at Tiffany's house.
[8:25] Tiffany's house used to be her family home.
[8:27] That was where she lived all her life.
[8:29] However now she lived there by herself because her dad had
[8:32] actually moved out to go and live with a woman that he met.
[8:36] And naturally, this kind of led to Tiffany's house being the
[8:39] party house or like the hangout house.
[8:41] Everyone would always meet at Tiffany's because there were no
[8:44] parents. They were all around 18 to early
[8:47] 20s with this group. So it was ideal.
[8:50] And this was one of those days. It started out being just that
[8:54] group of four, Tiffany, Rachel, Marcus and Adelebert.
[8:57] And later that day, they were going to have a party.
[8:59] Tiffany had already invited loads of people and told them to
[9:02] be there later. But at this point in time, it
[9:05] was around 3:00 PM and it was just them four.
[9:07] They were watching movies, they were eating pizza.
[9:10] It was just a normal day, so the rest of the party was due to be
[9:14] coming at around 6:00 that evening.
[9:17] And one of the people in particular that Tiffany had
[9:19] invited round was a girl that goes by the name Brittany.
[9:22] That's not her real name. I don't know why her name is
[9:25] protected, but Brittany. So Brittany called Tiffany at
[9:28] around 3:00 PM just to double check the plans, make sure they
[9:32] were still on for that night. However, when she did call
[9:35] Tiffany, Tiffany was actually in the bathroom.
[9:37] And so her boyfriend Marcus answered the phone.
[9:40] And so Brittany just said, oh, it's OK, I'll call her later.
[9:43] And so she called her an hour later at around 4:00 PM.
[9:46] But there was number answer this time, not even just Marcus, like
[9:50] no one answered the phone. And so Brittany just thought
[9:52] that Tiffany was a bit busy. And so she just thought she'd
[9:55] turn up anywhere at 6:30 PM as normal.
[9:58] Those were the plans. So Brittany and a bunch of other
[10:01] people turn up at Tiffany's house at 6:30 PM and they knock
[10:05] on the door, but there's no answer.
[10:07] And they keep knocking and keep knocking, but they can hear the
[10:10] TV on in the house but no ones talking, no ones even laughing.
[10:14] It's not even like they're not letting them in on purpose.
[10:16] There's just no noise in the house.
[10:18] So eventually, one of these teenagers, after knocking for
[10:21] however long, they decided to just try the door and see if it
[10:24] was unlocked. And it was.
[10:26] So they walked in and there they saw the bodies of all four
[10:30] teenagers. It seemed as though all four of
[10:33] them had been shot to death and there was blood absolutely
[10:37] everywhere. And so the group that found them
[10:39] ran straight back outside to a neighbor and they called the
[10:42] police. So police arrived and they began
[10:45] examining the crime scene. And immediately they knew that
[10:48] this attack had caught the teenagers off guard.
[10:51] They weren't prepared. There was little to no struggle.
[10:54] Tiffany and her boyfriend Mark were both still sat on the couch
[10:58] with their feet reclined like as if they were watching the movie,
[11:02] so they must have been killed as they were still sat there.
[11:05] Adelebert was laid on the floor in front of the sofa so he could
[11:09] have potentially gotten up as the attack started or he could
[11:12] have been down there the whole time.
[11:14] Rachel seemed to be the only one that had moved during the
[11:16] attack. She was actually laid behind the
[11:18] sofa and there was a blood trail behind her as if she'd like
[11:22] dragged herself after she'd been shot.
[11:24] And right by Rachel on the floor, there was a phone found.
[11:28] And when police looked on this phone, they found that she'd
[11:31] actually dialled 9 and one before she was killed.
[11:35] So she was trying to call 911. And as I said, there was blood
[11:39] absolutely everywhere in this room.
[11:41] There must have been so many shots fired.
[11:43] It was all over the walls. There was spatter on the
[11:46] ceiling, on every piece of furniture.
[11:48] It was in pools on the floor. There were bullet holes in the
[11:52] walls as well, some of them even where the bullets had gone into
[11:56] one of the teenagers and then came out again and gone into one
[12:00] of the walls. So as police continued
[12:02] searching, they found that 24 total bullets had been shot that
[12:06] day, and seventeen of those 24 had actually hit their intended
[12:11] targets, one of the teenagers. And all that was really left at
[12:14] the crime scene were bullet casings.
[12:16] There were no weapons. There was, there was absolutely
[12:19] no evidence at all of who this could have been.
[12:23] So the four victims were taken for an autopsy, and while it was
[12:26] found that Tiffany, Marcus, and Adelbert had all died from
[12:29] gunshot wounds, it was found that that wasn't actually
[12:33] Rachel's cause of death. Rachel Colerutis had been shot 6
[12:37] times, mainly in the kind of genital lower abdomen area, but
[12:41] her actual cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head
[12:45] where she'd been hit with a gun. So she'd been shot so many times
[12:48] but was still alive, dragging herself to this phone to try and
[12:52] call 911, and then one of the killers probably found her and
[12:57] hit her over the head to finish it off.
[12:59] So the bullet casings found at the scene were actually found to
[13:02] be from two different bullets from two different guns, meaning
[13:06] potentially two different shooters.
[13:08] And Rachel and Tiffany's gunshots, as I said, tended to
[13:11] be more focused around the lower abdomen genital area, which
[13:15] could mean a few different things.
[13:17] That kind of attack, whether it's done by a man or a woman,
[13:20] can tend to mean a different thing.
[13:22] So from a man, it tends to be like a crime of passion or
[13:26] hatred. So he's either in love with this
[13:28] woman and she's like cheated or something.
[13:31] And so he's trying to attack like her femininity or it's out
[13:35] of hatred for women and he's trying to attack her femininity.
[13:38] Or if it was a female shooter, then that tends to be a little
[13:42] bit more deep rooted. So this woman could feel like
[13:45] Rachel and Tiffany are better than her.
[13:47] She feels like she's less than them, and so that could be why a
[13:50] female shooter tends to attack feminine regions, you know what
[13:54] I mean? Does that make sense?
[13:55] So due to the lack of evidence at this scene, like I said,
[13:58] there was pretty much nothing. It meant that it was going to be
[14:02] really hard to obviously find the killers, but also to find a
[14:05] motive for these crimes because these were good kids.
[14:09] Like I said, they did nothing wrong or they seemed to do
[14:12] nothing wrong. The community loved them and the
[14:14] community was in a huge shock at this.
[14:17] The group weren't in gangs. Like I said, the girls wouldn't
[14:20] known for their kindness and their generosity.
[14:22] They weren't mean. Adelebert had only just moved to
[14:25] Clear Lake City from somewhere else, somewhere a lot more
[14:28] dangerous. There was a lot of crime where
[14:31] he used to live and he was trying to get away from that.
[14:33] And he'd only been in Clear Lake for like 2 weeks before he was
[14:37] murdered. And Christine Pawelila, even
[14:40] though she'd been distancing herself from the girls for a
[14:42] while, she still took the news really, really hard.
[14:45] She was so depressed. She was so overwhelmed by the
[14:49] loss of of her friends. A picture of Christine was even
[14:52] found in Rachel Cholarutis's wallet when she was killed.
[14:56] So the girls, even though they weren't super close anymore,
[14:59] they were still friends and they still cared about each other.
[15:01] Christine couldn't go out to work, she couldn't do anything.
[15:05] She was just constantly crying. For the first three nights after
[15:09] the murders, she actually had to sleep in her mum and stepdad's
[15:12] bed because she couldn't bear to be alone.
[15:22] Meanwhile, police were doing absolutely everything they could
[15:25] to get some kind of lead because they had absolutely none, and so
[15:30] they started with Tiffany's neighbors to see if they'd seen
[15:33] or heard anything that day. One neighbor said that they
[15:36] heard banging around 3:30 PM, but they just kind of thought it
[15:39] was some hammering or some work going on in the neighborhood and
[15:42] so they didn't think much of it, but in retrospect, that was
[15:45] probably the gunshots. Another neighbor, however, did
[15:49] say that they saw two people, a man and a woman dressed in all
[15:53] black, heading towards Tiffany's house at around 3:00 PM.
[15:57] And again, this neighbor didn't really think much of it.
[16:00] It was two people walking down the street like, so they didn't
[16:03] pay much attention. They didn't analyze their faces.
[16:06] All this neighbor could really remember was that they were both
[16:08] wearing all black. The girl had a bandana over her
[16:12] hair, so they couldn't really see what kind of hair she had.
[16:15] And the girl had abnormally large eyes.
[16:18] And that was the only kind of out feature that they
[16:20] remembered. So this neighbor cooperated with
[16:23] police to make some composite sketches.
[16:26] And this neighbor even admitted themselves that they didn't
[16:28] think it was going to be of much use because, like I said, they
[16:32] didn't really pay much attention to these two people.
[16:34] So how accurate are the sketches going to be?
[16:37] So these composite sketches were made.
[16:39] They were put out on the news and on posters and everything,
[16:42] but nothing came of them. So police went to Clear Lake
[16:46] High School to go and talk with the kids classmates because they
[16:49] needed to find some kind of motive, any kind of enemies,
[16:53] anyone that might want to get rid of these four people.
[16:56] And they actually found out a few things about this group that
[17:00] they didn't know before. They actually found out that
[17:02] Marcus Tiffany's boyfriend who used to deal drugs, which of
[17:07] course is a huge red flag. This could have been a drug deal
[17:10] gone wrong. It leads to a lot of unsavory
[17:13] relationships, but not only that, Adelebert, his cousin,
[17:17] actually had connections to the Mexican Mafia, which is also
[17:21] equally as terrifying. Police couldn't find any
[17:24] connections between the murders and the Mexican mafia.
[17:28] However, that drug deal gone wrong type theory was looking
[17:32] like the most promising one at this point because they didn't
[17:35] know of anyone in particular that hated these people or
[17:39] wanted them gone. That was the only thing that
[17:42] they could think could have happened.
[17:44] So that was the motive that police settled on.
[17:46] And so they began looking for suspects, but they couldn't
[17:49] really find any. They couldn't find any promising
[17:51] ones anywhere. They kept looking for years.
[17:54] But obviously, as time goes on, in any case, the kind of
[17:57] momentum of it all just slows down.
[18:00] And eventually it came to a halt and this case went cold.
[18:04] But Rachel's father would not let that happen.
[18:07] He was going to find who did this to his daughter and his
[18:09] daughter's friends. And so he began raising money to
[18:13] do this himself, to solve this case himself.
[18:15] In the space of four years he raised £100,000 and he used most
[18:21] of this money to get those two composite sketches of that boy
[18:24] and that girl out there, like in the world.
[18:27] He was putting them on posters, on news channels, on adverts.
[18:31] He hired out pretty much every single billboard in the whole of
[18:35] Clear Lake City and put these two sketches on them.
[18:38] They were on every entrance and exit of the whole city.
[18:42] So you couldn't go in or out without seeing these two huge
[18:45] sketches of these two suspects. So this huge sudden reappeal
[18:50] really helped to, like, kick this case back into people's
[18:53] memories. Everyone was talking about it.
[18:55] Everyone was talking about these sketches.
[18:57] And police were getting hundreds of calls, and a lot of them
[19:00] weren't really leading anywhere. But then they got this one call
[19:04] that helped to shine a light on a lead that no one had really
[19:08] considered so far. And this huge sudden reappeal
[19:12] really helped to, like, kick this case back into people's
[19:15] memories. Everyone was talking about it.
[19:16] Everyone was talking about these sketches.
[19:18] And police were getting hundreds of calls, and a lot of them
[19:22] weren't really leading anywhere. A lot of them were just people
[19:24] thinking that they recognized the sketch.
[19:26] But then they got one that helped to shine a light on a
[19:29] lead that no one had really considered yet.
[19:32] In this whole case, a man called Crime Stoppers anonymously and
[19:36] said that he thought he recognized the woman in the
[19:39] sketch. He thought it was a woman that
[19:41] he once met in drug. He said that this woman had told
[19:44] him a really in depth, detailed story about how she was involved
[19:50] in a quadruple murder. And some of the things that this
[19:53] woman told him aligned perfectly with this case.
[19:57] She said that she ran out of bullets, so she had to hit one
[20:00] of them over the head to kill them.
[20:02] She said that one of them was killed while they were trying to
[20:04] dial 911. So police were immediately
[20:07] intrigued because this sounded like a really promising lead.
[20:10] And so they asked this man who? This person in the sketch was,
[20:14] they asked to identify her, and this man said that he thought it
[20:17] was 20 year old Christine Powellilla.
[20:20] So police pulled up Christine Powellilla on the database to
[20:23] look at her picture, look at her information, everything.
[20:26] And when they did, they realized how eerily similar she looked to
[20:30] the police sketch. So police ran a background check
[20:34] on Christine Powellilla just to see, like, where she was now,
[20:37] where she lived, where she worked.
[20:39] And they found an extensive criminal history from about the
[20:43] time of the murders until the present.
[20:45] Christine had a lot of drug charges, possession charges,
[20:49] other things, random criminal charges.
[20:52] And she was known to have a very severe heroin addiction.
[20:56] And at this point, she was actually married and living in a
[20:59] motel room in San Antonio. So police tracked her down,
[21:03] tracked down this motel room that she was now living in, and
[21:06] they went there to arrest her. And as soon as they walked in,
[21:09] they saw her and Justin Rot. And this motel room was one of
[21:14] the worst scenes that some of the police had ever seen, worse
[21:18] than like dead body scenes. It was filthy.
[21:21] It smelt horrendous. There was blood everywhere from
[21:24] like where they'd injected into needles and just from these
[21:27] needles, there was spatter everywhere, moldy food, dirty
[21:31] clothes. It was one of the worst smelling
[21:34] things a lot of the police officers said they'd ever smell.
[21:37] They also said that there was upwards of 100 needles in that
[21:41] room, used unused, some of them still in packets, some of them
[21:44] with blood on them, and it was horrendous.
[21:48] At this point, Christine had barely left the motel room in
[21:51] the last eight months. She no longer had a job.
[21:54] Obviously, she was so addicted to heroin she couldn't really
[21:57] work, and she estimated that she was spending around $1000 on
[22:01] heroin every single day. She actually inherited $300,000
[22:06] from her father's life insurance.
[22:08] Of course, he had that tragic death at work.
[22:10] So she got a really big payout once she turned 18.
[22:13] And so instead of like, investing that or buying a house
[22:17] or, you know, whatever, she and her husband Justin, would just
[22:20] spend that money on heroin every year.
[22:22] So the two of them, Justin and Christine, were taken for
[22:25] questioning because all police knew at this point was that it
[22:28] was possibly Christine and a man that committed these murders
[22:32] because the sketches were of a woman and a man.
[22:34] So they just assumed it was Christine and Justin.
[22:37] And so they were taken for questioning.
[22:38] And Christine obviously stood quiet.
[22:40] She wouldn't say anything. She refused to speak without a
[22:43] lawyer. But Justin didn't really have
[22:45] any reason to. He knew that he didn't commit
[22:48] those murders. And so he told them everything
[22:50] Christine had ever said to him about these murders.
[22:53] Justin said that Christine had told him that she committed the
[22:57] murders with her boyfriend at the time, Chris Snyder.
[23:01] And the two of them, like I said, they experimented with a
[23:04] lot of drugs. I don't know if they were
[23:06] addicted at that point, but they definitely did a lot of drugs.
[23:09] And on this specific day in 2003, the two of them, Chris and
[23:13] Christine, decided that they wanted some drugs, but they
[23:16] didn't have any drugs and they didn't have any money to get the
[23:19] drugs. And so they came up with a plan
[23:21] to go and rob Christine's friends, Tiffany and Rachel,
[23:25] because they knew that they were all hanging out that day.
[23:28] So Chris and Christine head straight to Tiffany's house, and
[23:31] Rachel goes to the door and lets them in with no question.
[23:34] This was Christine, who had been her friend for the past couple
[23:37] of years. Nothing seemed off about this
[23:39] situation. Tiffany, Marcus, and Adelebert
[23:42] were all still sat down watching the movie.
[23:43] Rachel was still stood up from when she just let them in and
[23:46] they were all talking. It was normal.
[23:49] And then Chris pulled out a gun and Christine quickly followed
[23:52] with her own gun and the two of them were demanding that all
[23:56] four of the people in the room give them money and drugs and
[23:59] whatever they've got. So like I said, Rachel
[24:02] Cholerutis was still stood up at this point from where she just
[24:05] let them in. And so Christine decided to
[24:07] focus on her. She was the only one stood up,
[24:10] so Chris held the other three at gunpoint on the sofa and made
[24:14] them stay sat down while Christine took Rachel around
[24:18] Tiffany's house to look for money and drugs.
[24:20] I don't know how much, if any money or drugs they found
[24:25] because obviously this wasn't Rachel's house.
[24:27] She wouldn't know where to find anything like that.
[24:30] But when they were done, Chris and Christine realized that they
[24:33] couldn't leave any witnesses because these were Christine's
[24:36] friends. They knew exactly who they were.
[24:38] They could identify them, and Chris and Christine would get
[24:41] into a lot of trouble for armed robbery.
[24:43] Christine claims that it was just Chris that shot at all four
[24:47] victims. She never shot at anyone.
[24:49] However, the two different types of bullet casings suggest that
[24:53] both of them shot all four teenagers.
[24:56] So the two of them then fled Tiffany's house and ran to
[25:00] Chris's car. Chris was going to drive the two
[25:02] of them away and everything, but then Christine started
[25:05] panicking. She was thinking, what if one of
[25:06] them's still alive? Like they can't leave a witness.
[25:10] So Christine ran back in with her gun and shot Marcus,
[25:14] Adelebert and Tiffany one more time each.
[25:16] But then she couldn't find Rachel.
[25:18] Rachel was no longer there. That was until Christine heard
[25:21] noises coming from behind the couch and realized that Rachel
[25:24] was still alive and she was trying to dial 911 on this
[25:28] phone. So Christine tried to shoot her
[25:30] again one more time but then realized she was out of bullets
[25:34] and so instead she just beat her to death with the gun.
[25:37] So Christine then once again flees the house, gets into to
[25:40] the car with Chris. Chris drives them to Christina
[25:43] house where they both wash up. They get the blood off them and
[25:46] everything. And then Chris then takes
[25:49] Christine to her work. She worked at Walgreens, she
[25:52] worked at a makeup counter at Walgreens, and Christine works a
[25:56] full shift. And after committing 4 murders,
[25:59] as I said before, police found barely any evidence at the crime
[26:03] scene, which is how Chris and Christine got away with this for
[26:06] so long. The two of them stayed together,
[26:08] stayed in a relationship after the murders for a full year
[26:11] until 2004. Chris was actually caught
[26:14] stealing a car and so he was sent to prison for a few years.
[26:17] And so Christine decided that without him, she was going to
[26:20] try and get her life back on track.
[26:22] She split up with him. She went to rehab to try and get
[26:25] over all of her addictions and it was working for a while.
[26:29] And while she was in rehab, she met Justin Rot.
[26:32] The two of them got married, they finished rehab, and then
[26:35] once they were out, they both relapsed.
[26:37] And Christine had a kind of PTSD about the whole thing.
[26:42] She hadn't talked about the murders for years.
[26:46] And then one day she sat down with Justin and told him
[26:48] everything. She told him the full story.
[26:51] And then after that moment, she couldn't leave the house.
[26:54] And so the two of them got a motel room to kind of go under
[26:58] the radar. They sold the house because
[27:00] Christine had bought a house with the money that she
[27:02] inherited from her father, but she no longer wanted to live in
[27:05] Clear Lake. So they sold that and they got a
[27:07] motel room and Christine locked herself in that motel room for
[27:11] eight months, eight whole months.
[27:14] She didn't leave. So police ran a background check
[27:16] on Chris Snyder and found that he actually now lived in Florida
[27:20] with a woman that he met online. So in June of 2006, police
[27:24] issued a warrant for Chris Snyders arrest and somehow word
[27:29] of this got round to Chris that he was a wanted man and so he
[27:32] disappeared quickly. A very, very intense missing
[27:35] person search began because not only was he a missing person, he
[27:39] was a potential danger to other people and himself.
[27:43] And then a month later in August a tip came in that Chris Snyder
[27:47] was seen a month earlier. So around the time that he
[27:50] disappeared in a wooded area, and so police went there and
[27:55] found his decomposing body, Chris Snyder had committed
[27:59] suicide by overdosing on prescription drugs.
[28:02] And so he would never be brought to justice for the murders of
[28:05] those four teenagers. On a search of Chris's home,
[28:08] police found two guns consistent with the two guns that they
[28:13] believe were the murder weapons back in 2003.
[28:16] And unbelievably, on one of these guns specifically, there
[28:20] was Chris Snyder's DNA and and also Rachel Cholerutus's DNA,
[28:25] and this was still on it after three years.
[28:27] Christine Powellilla eventually admitted to her part in all four
[28:31] murders. However, because she was a
[28:33] juvenile at the time of the killings, she actually couldn't
[28:37] be put up for the death penalty. In October of 2008, Christine
[28:40] Powellilla was found guilty of all four murders and sentenced
[28:44] to life in prison. She's actually tried to appeal
[28:47] her sentence multiple times, but every single time she was
[28:50] rejected. And her first parole here will
[28:53] be in 2046 when she is 60 years old.
[28:56] So that is it for the Christine Power.
[28:59] Lillikis, thank you so much for listening to usual disclaimer.
[29:06] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[29:08] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[29:11] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[29:14] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
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[29:26] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[29:29] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[29:32] See you next time.

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