"Are you in love with this person?" a family member asked him. "Or are you just using her?" It didn't seem right, Chris using the woman and not loving her.

He shrugged.

"Well?"

"Hey, she gives me money, okay," he said. "Whatever."

Near the end of June, about six weeks into the relationship, Haley found herself nestled comfortably in the seat of a plane once again on her way to Houston. Chris had been in Kentucky staying with family since the murders (on and off), spent some time in jail late in 2005 until early 2006, but he had gone back to Houston because of his probation.

Not long after touching down in Texas, Haley and Chris were driving back to South Carolina, arm in arm, on their way to living together. The only problem with this plan for Haley was that she had no idea she had fallen for a man whose mind, essentially, was as twisted as the quadruple murder he had helped commit.

When she stepped off the plane and met Chris Snider in person that first time, Haley realized almost immediately she was dealing with a different person from whom she had met on Myspace. Snider was "very paranoid," Haley noticed as soon as she was around him. Haley had tried to arrange several jobs for him when they got back to South Carolina. But he said no way, refusing to take any of them. "They will turn in my Social Security number and realize that my transfer of probation has not been approved."

Chris wasn't allowed, under the law, to move to South Carolina, but he went, anyway-and Haley was about to find out that the guy she'd scooped up via a website was anything but her knight.

CHRIS SNIDER LIKED to draw; it was one of his passions. He was not bad, either. Chris was no wordsmith, as his writings later proved, but the guy didn't have any trouble putting his feelings and the dark nature swirling about his soul, and inside his head, into an art form on paper. For example, in a drawing he titled "I won't become the thing I hate," a promise he intended to keep, Snider sketched a truly scary demon-faced character (in the same fashion popular culture depicts Satan-only much darker) with dragon wings and a scorpion's tail with a sharp pointer. Snider's Demon Man was crucified on a cross, blood dripping from where the demon's hands were nailed to the cross. In its totality and simplicity, this drawing screamed of a man whose life had come down to a series of demonic deeds he believed he would be punished for one day.

In a similar drawing, with a similar creature crucified to a wooden cross like the Christ, a second Demon Man, with the same scorpion's body, was secured to the cross, but by the bodies of two large snakes, whose heads pointed directly away from the demon's head at the top of the cross. The image itself was disturbing enough. Yet the additions Snider had made to it would make one wonder just what was going on inside his head: Facing drops of blood protruding from the demon's crucified palms were two large flies, both of whom had long tails-akin to umbilical cords-with two strange-looking, naked, chubby babies attached to the ends. At the top of the cross, walking down toward the head of the Demon Man (unbeknownst to the demon, apparently), was a dragonfly, two pinchers poking out in the front of its body, a three-pronged devil's pitchfork tail curled upward.

"Disturbing" is the word that comes to mind when looking at this particular drawing. And yet, as you worked your way through Chris Snider's portfolio, what he was feeling-or maybe suffering from-became obvious. There is an emotional torment and torture apparent in every drawing.

In one drawing Chris depicted himself as a standing man, looking straight ahead, a single bullet hole through the center of his head. The man looked very much like Chris. In two pictures accompanying the standing man on the same page, off to the right of the man, a barrel of a gun was placed up against a head, the top of the head blown off (bits of flesh and brain matter flying through the air) by a bullet protruding from the barrel; the picture on the lower right side of the same page showed a head, a bullet entering below the chin, splitting the face in two.

All of these drawings were done in jail, on the back of Snider's monthly inmate account's receipts.

The next two drawings spoke to the true disorder (and perhaps chaos) swirling around Snider's idea of his life, up until that point. The first showed a fat man who looked to be dressed in a leather mask and leather pants, who had been electrocuted and tacked to a cross (that religious theme again). Although Snider failed to depict how he was placed on the cross, the fat man's arms were stretched out in a come-to-me gesture that a parent might use when teaching a child to walk for the first time. The electrocuted man's stomach was torn open and snakes with long forked tongues exited from his insides. Beside him was an abnormally large-headed snake, a solitary demon head above it, another demon head with a scorpion's tail to its right, the pointed end of the tail emitting a single drop of blood like a tear coming out of a syringe that was about to stick into a large fuzzy fly. The right arm of the cross seemed to be connected to a line, which led down to a fire or series of lightning bolts (it's not clear which). In several other similar drawings of scorpions, Snider made their tails out of syringes, obviously trying to say how lethal getting involved with a needle was.

The next two drawings explained a lot about how Chris Snider felt toward Christine Paolilla. On the left side of one page, he depicted himself as a tall man with short, military-style, buzz-cut hair shooting straight up like inverted icicles, a goatee, and one arm-his left-reaching out toward a female on the right side of the page (a caricature of Christine). With his right hand, the man held on to the center of his chest (his heart), which was drawn as a missing puzzle piece. The female, all the way on the right-hand side of the picture, far away from the male, held that missing puzzle piece in her hands, but she was lighting it on fire. Both the male and female in the picture are looking straight ahead.

Regarding these puzzle piece drawings, family members said this was Christopher Snider's way of showing how Christine Paolilla had held him hostage after the murders. There was one day, a Snider family source noted, when Christine told him, "Look, if you ever try to leave me, don't forget that all I have to do is get a gun, come up and knock on your front door, and blow your entire family away."

In the next picture, the man is standing in the same position, his arm stretched out toward the female (like in the previous picture), but she is facing him now, with a look of utter hatred on her face. She is holding the puzzle piece in front of him, with that lighter in her hand, and the puzzle piece is almost entirely engulfed in flames.

Snider's drawings speak to a part of him that felt a close connection to the evil side of his life. Anybody who could walk into a house and kill four people for drugs and cash truly had no appreciation (or conception, honestly) of the importance and meaningfulness of a human life. There was no value there for family, for self, for the impact that killing one person would have on the community and the victim's family, better yet four. Some would categorize this person as a sociopath/psychopath, and might be spot-on with that assessment. Yet, there is much more at work here. Paranoia, coupled with the chronic use of drugs and alcohol, on top of an upbringing steeped in dysfunction and loss (most of which Snider talked about at one time or another), creates an unpredictable adult capable of things that others cannot imagine. Risk taking becomes a daily part of life for this person. The stakes are not as high. There's no conscience, essentially. Morality is not something measured in a way of life. This person develops an intense dislike for not being able to move forward in life under his own standards of living and begins to blame others and harness and suppress an intense rage for those not aiding him, which builds up to a point where an explosion of emotion (in the form of rage) occurs. At the time Snider and Paolilla committed these murders, their drug use was on the rise, while their self-esteem and self-worth were on the decline. In this situation the person has trouble controlling impulses, good or bad.

According to some estimates, drugs (and alcohol) are factors in up to 70 percent of homicides.1 Chris wrote to "M" in January 2006 (M is likely his mother, if you look at the way he addressed similar letters to a woman he said was his "only motivation to do anything good!"), shortly before he was released from jail and met Haley Dawkins. In that letter it's clear he was not in a good place-mentally-and also that the murders he had committed weren't necessarily the source of his anger and confusion in the days after (he was, one could easily discern from reading his writing during this period, obviously beyond the murders by then). As time went on, it became clear that he was learning how to live with what he had done.

He started off by saying how the price of stamps was going up and he needed extra money in order to keep writing. He wanted to thank his dad for sending a money order. Then he broke into a rant: Let's see, just some of the things wrong with me. It was a poor-me pity party that seemed to be directed toward drawing sympathy, which inmates, generally speaking, look to do. Chris was pouring it on, trying hard to guilt those on the outside into thinking that he had it bad, taking no responsibility for the behavior that had put him behind bars to begin with.

He talked about an ear infection in both of his ears, which "ached all day and night." He was pissed off because the nurses weren't giving him antibiotics every day and the infection kept coming back and wouldn't go away. He had some sort of rash on his stomach that looked like spots or blotches. The doctor whom Chris had seen for his shoulder, which was hurting him lately, was an "idiot." He said the doctor told him it was nothing more than a few "ripped tendons," but the bone was sticking out and it hurt, so he was certain there was a conspiracy against him to see that he was in the most pain possible. He was worried that he looked "deformed." However, he didn't want to show the doctor the injury again, because the prison would restrict him from the gym, and lifting weights had become one of the only outlets in the joint Chris had during those days.

All told, he complained that there was a lot of "bullshit" to deal with in that nasty place.

The only solace Snider had found in jail was his music, which consisted of bands to the tune of Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Marilyn Manson, and the Deftones-that dark, thumping, and thrashing heavy metal with evil and gloomy themes involving child abuse and rape and murder and torture and many other negative things. He liked to sit and copy the lyrics of the songs he liked most. He also asked his mother to send him lyrics from several songs he named. He needed to have these lyrics, he said more than once. They were important to him. All of this music obliged that inner hatred Chris had for not only himself but for the world around him. The music allowed him to make sense of the tremendous noise inside his head; it was all one big theme song to a life mired in crime and murder and drugs and anarchy, which he had been involved in since junior high. The lyrics fed an appetite he had to hate himself and the life he had led up to that point. The music certainly wasn't to blame. It was more akin to a man finding a pair of shoes that fit him as though they had been designed and stitched together just for him. One recurring phrase Chris used often when he tried his hand at writing songs and poetry, which he looked at after writing and thought little of, was an idea that there was "no love in me." He went back to this theme again and again: He considered himself "shallow" and empty and without a desire to care for his fellows. He wondered where it came from. He was trying to understand it. He was a man who could not "find his way" in life and had no reason or purpose to go on. Becoming a murderer, in the fundamental essence of what it had done for his sense of himself, solidified the person Snider had thought he was before he committed the murders. In firing that weapon into the bodies of the four, Chris Snider was acting out on the thing he had seen himself turn into long before that day-or, as he put it himself, he was a "disease" with "no cure."

HALEY DAWKINS AND Chris Snider were living together in Greenville, South Carolina. Snider felt good about being so far away from a place where he had committed a crime that could ultimately put the type of needle in his arm, administered by the state of Texas, that wasn't going to get him high. Now he had Haley, who was, by standards Chris Snider had placed on himself regarding girlfriends of his past, a homecoming queen-the woman who could make him, he was certain, a better man.

"I knew that he was on probation," Haley later told police. Chris had shown her a newspaper clipping written about him that previous January, when he was in jail on burglary charges. "Texas won't leave me alone," he had told her, playing it up as though he had a bull's-eye on his back with the Texas law enforcement symbol in the center. He was convinced-and maybe he truly believed it-that he could do nothing right in the eyes of Texas law enforcement. He felt HPD was out to get him.

"He would never drive a car," Haley recalled.

He also didn't have any friends, Haley said, besides a Vietnamese guy he called "Tommy."

Chris's troubles, according to an interview a sibling family member later gave police, began when he was thirteen: marijuana and gasoline. He smoked one and sniffed the other. From there he developed a serious dislike for school and homework; and his mother had to continually discipline him about his lack of desire to get up and go.

Things never really got any better as he grew. Chris despised school. By the time he was fifteen, Snider had graduated to smoking marijuana cigarettes dipped in formaldehyde or embalming fluid. This drug wreaked havoc on the teenage mind, especially the developing brain of a fifteen-year-old. When Chris couldn't find wet joints, he settled for acid and mushrooms, sometimes all three. The one constant in his life, besides the use of drugs and his getting into trouble with the law, was a gradual desire to end his own life, a suicidal tendency. One of the more recent times he had been arrested (while trying to steal a car), he had left home that day saying he wanted to get caught committing a crime so the cops would shoot him: suicide by cop. Instead, he was pinched and put in jail.

But now he was out of jail, spending his days with Haley Dawkins, his Internet romantic interest.

Meanwhile, a team of police officers was preparing a nationwide search for the guy.

CHAPTER 47.

IT WAS THREE years to the day when the search warrants came through, signed, sealed, and ready to be served. Brian Harris, Tom McCorvey, and Detective Breck McDaniel were ready to jump into a car and head west for San Antonio.

Harris needed to make one phone call before they hit the road, however. It was something, Harris knew, that had to be done. The guy had been there all along, praising the Homicide Division when they were on the right track and screaming through a bullhorn when they weren't. George Koloroutis needed to be brought up to speed.

George had been in Washington, D.C., attending a meeting. On this particular day George stood at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport waiting for his flight back home to Kansas. His cell phone rang. George looked down.

Harris?

"Hey, listen, you gotta promise me you won't say a word about this to anyone," Harris began. "I need that promise from you." Harris hated to have to say it, but business was business; George was a guy who understood that-maybe more than most.

"Course, Brian, what's up? What's going on?" George could feel that pulse rise inside him. He could not recall hearing Harris sound so different. "We know who did it," Harris said. Was there any other way to put it?

"You're kidding me!" George responded.

"Yup . . . it's this girl named Christine Paolilla."

The name did not ring a bell with George as he stood in the airport, people shuffling by, going about their lives, hurrying from one experience to the next.

"Do you know who she is?" Harris asked.

"No. But let me call Ann and find out if she does."

"Okay. But again, not a word. Tell Ann and [Lelah] not to say anything to anyone. We still have not arrested her yet. We're about to go get her. We understand she's in a hotel."

Harris explained that there was another person involved, a man named Chris Snider. George said he had no idea who that was and had never heard the name before.

"We're going to get her first-and then we're heading to Kentucky, where we think he is."

George stood stunned, his legs numb, standing in the airport with this immense burden being slowly lifted from his heart. It was as if the world stopped for that moment.

They got 'em!

All that work. The interviews. The misinformed tips. The lies. The red herrings.

JU.

It was all over and done with now. Homicide had figured it out.

"Ann," George said, the elation and the pain equally prevalent in his voice, "they got 'em!"

George explained all he knew. He told Ann not to say a word.

Ann understood.

Then: "Do you recognize the names?" George asked.

"Oh, my God . . . that [animal]," Ann said, referring to Christine. "There's a picture of her in Rachael's wallet!"

"Take out that picture. Go get it. Read to me what it says on the back."

Ann went to get the photo. As she pulled it from Rachael's wallet, a memory hit her: that dream she'd had long ago. Rachael had come to her and told her about a pocketbook. Ann had called Harris in the middle of the night to explain the dream.

Chill bumps.

Rachael had spoken to her mother in a scene right out of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

George waited. He needed to hear what his daughter's killer-at least one of them-had written to her months before taking her life. "Only a demented person would write something sincere and then murder that person," George said later. It was important for this father to get to know who the person was in reference to Rachael. It was part of a process on the road toward healing, toward quelling that anger George had built up all these years, that frustration and pain that at one time had been driving him in his desire to kill the people who had killed his little girl.

Any delight about their daughter's killer being found was now gone. Anger settled on George and Ann, the people who had loved this dead child. As they talked, the hate for their daughter's killer rose inside them.

"We spoke for a short time about what we would love to do to Christine Paolilla, had we the opportunity to be alone with her," George said later.

Then it was back to business: "I have never heard the other name," Ann said, speaking of Chris Snider. Lelah, who was in the background with Ann during the call, said she had never heard of him, either. But she did know Christine.

And now that phone call from Harris asking her to identify the girl in the photo made sense to Lelah.

This was not another one of those get-your-hopes-up moments they had all gone through so many times throughout the investigation; this was the real deal.

CHAPTER 48.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2006. Noon. Room 111. La Quinta motel. San Antonio, Texas. Just off Interstate 10, at the intersection of Vance Jackson. It sounded like the dateline to a news story, but that was the information Harris had bouncing around inside his head as he stepped from the car. He, Tom McCorvey and Breck McDaniel were here, together with their counterparts-the local tactical unit-in San Antonio. Christine was in room 111 with her husband, Justin Rott. The search warrant they were going into that room under was actually for "the body of Justin Rott."

San Antonio's tactical unit had already set up on room 111 and had surveillance set up around the entire perimeter of the hotel, not to mention a bead on the only door in and out of the room.

Harris, McCorvey, and McDaniel stood with the team and watched. There was no movement for quite some time. Justin and Christine were sleeping off their high, getting high, or preparing to get high. Either way, Harris had that warrant for Justin, who had an outstanding charge of theft pending. The warrant, essentially, was also for the room itself, a way for them to legally search for the body of Justin Rott. It was a slick move by law enforcement to get inside the room and take Christine Paolilla and Justin Rott into custody to see what they knew about the murders. Heck, for all the detectives knew, Chris Snider and Justin Rott could have easily been mixed up-perhaps it was Justin who had committed the murders with Christine. Perhaps neither had done anything and this was one more dead end! Harris had put his money on the case being solved here, but one never knew what was beyond a door.

The plan, which Harris had designed with his San Antonio colleagues, was to bust in while screaming, Homicide, Homicide, Homicide-Houston PD! Yell that, over and over, to see what type of reaction they got. Homicide and drug busts were two different things. Even hard-core drug addicts knew that much.

And that's exactly what they did.

Boom.

The door was kicked open. And in went the troops screaming and yelling and pointing their weapons, flak jackets, goggles, gloves, the works. Just like on television. It was designed this way to intimidate and make it known that this wasn't some sort of drill or a simple drug bust going on here.

It had taken two solid hits with the boom to bust the door open, then a good kick. That provided a warning and enough time for Christine to realize that trouble was on the opposite side of the door and soon coming in. She had jumped out of bed and, nearly naked, nestled herself into a corner of the room on the floor. She was, of course, shaking and crying and shivering, mumbling to herself, "What's happening? Why are you doing this?" Lines very similar to what Rachael was pleading as Christine kept bashing her skull in.

The dog barked. Cops stepped in dog doo-doo and flanked around the bed. They had Justin Rott and his wife cornered. They were not going anywhere.

The room stunk of feces and body odor and garbage. It was disgusting. Drug paraphernalia was scattered everywhere: needles (used and unused), bags of dope (empty and full), soda cans and bottles, empty chip and snack bags, cigarette butts, you name it. There was also a large amount of blood spattered around the room (on the sheets, the rug, towels, on the damn walls, all over Christine's filthy nightshirt).

Harris took Rott, handcuffed him without allowing him a chance to put a shirt on; then he led him out the door toward a waiting patrol car.

"I know what this is about. . . . I know what this is about," Rott said, turning his head, whispering behind his back to Harris.

"Okay. Okay. Take it easy," Harris advised. "You play your cards right, man, everything will be okay."

Now was not the time to talk.

Harris called McCorvey over. "You take Rott and interview him. I'll grab her."

"Right."

The entire operation took a few short moments. By 12:38 P.M., Justin Rott was sitting inside the San Antonio Police Department. It took him no time at all to "summon" investigators, saying, "I wanna talk."

They knew why.

TJ McCorvey sat with Justin Rott inside an interview room at the San Antonio PD, in the Homicide Division headquarters. Rott was dressed in only pants and sneakers. He came across fidgety and nervous, more from using heroin and cocaine than anything else. He had no trouble dropping a dime on his wife. Within a few minutes of sitting down, right after giving McCorvey his vitals, Rott laid it out: "She told me that she was, uh, dating, like, uh, a guy by the name of Chris Snider and, uh, all . . . the whole group, I mean, four of 'em, you know, Rachael, and all of them were friends. . . ."

From that point on, it was hard to stop Justin Rott from talking. He told McCorvey everything Christine had related to him vis--vis the murders.

Detail after horrifying detail.

"Dude," Rott said at one point, "it was just so brutal, what she told me, you know, what they, it was all in close range, you know . . . and then, you know, just beating her over the head, over and over again, just, you know, I couldn't believe it."

McCorvey peppered Rott with inquiries concerning dates, times, names, all the essentials that would help them when Harris got his crack at Christine-an interview that was about to get under way in the room next door, a box that was being prepped as they spoke.

What Rott said was going to paint a picture of what had happened inside that house. Within that framework of stories, the truth would eventually emerge, without Justin Rott or Christine Paolilla realizing it.

Near one o'clock, Harris entered the interview room, where Christine sat on a chair, her legs crisscrossed, and her feet tucked underneath her butt. She hugged a bright yellow blanket around her shivering body. Christine came across as a chronic dope addict in the throes of an addiction that was potentially at its peak. She wore a white nightshirt stained with dried blood from all those times she or Justin had stuck a needle in her arm. All told, considering what she had been through, and how much dope she and Rott had shot over the past half year or more, she didn't look or sound half bad. She was coherent. She knew what was happening.

Donning a bright blue shirt, his sleeves rolled about elbow high, Harris sat in a chair with wheels. He came across a bit wired and anxious, likely because he was finally facing the yellow crime-scene tape at the end of the finish line, literally just around the last bend of a three-year-old marathon case. Christine was moving back and forth, hugging herself, yawning, staring at the floor. Her hair was up in a bun, her eyebrows gone, leaving these two white bumps jetting out from the bottom of her forehead. Her skin was as white as the Styrofoam coffee cup sitting on the table to her right. The room was rather bleak: gray, not too much light; a computer monitor turned off; a video camera facing the two of them, its red light letting them know Harris was recording every word and action.

It was close to two forty-five by the time Harris pulled out a card and Mirandized Christine, who kept responding rather politely, "Yes, sir," whenever Harris asked if she understood. It was clear from the video that Christine was not yet withdrawing from the massive amount of drugs she had injected that day, nor in a state of needing a fix-not yet. She was in junkie limbo. There is a period between bags of dope when the junkie is quite coherent. The point being that Christine knew exactly what she was doing and why she was sitting, speaking to an HPD Homicide Division detective; and once she got herself acclimated and worked up some tears, she had no trouble feeling comfortable and talking.