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 Resendiz 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 [Resendiz], 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.

CHAPTER 5.

BY 11:14 P.M. a canvass of the neighborhood had turned up a few witnesses. There was a couple, Craig and Michelle Lackner, who lived next door and reported seeing two people near the Rowell house earlier that afternoon. But what did that mean? Without names or recognizing who these people were, what could this tell police?

A detective was assigned to interview the couple, to see what they knew.

The Lackners had been living in the Millbridge development since January 2003, or about six months. They both recalled the day quite well. They had just gotten back from an extended, fourteen-day vacation in Mexico and were taking some time to relax before going back to work on that Monday. Craig was watching television in the living room, lying comfortably on the couch, when he was approached by his wife, Michelle, who had just gotten out of the shower. It was 3:15 P.M., Michelle later remembered. She knew the time because she had checked.

"Come here, come here," Michelle said. "I want to show you something."

Craig begrudgingly got up from the couch. Michelle was trying to be sly and get Craig into the bedroom.

At that moment the Lackners' dog started "going nuts," Michelle later explained.

Odd, the dog had never barked like that, Michelle noticed. "Go get him," she told Craig.

Craig went outside and let the dog in.

He returned to the bedroom. Their kitten was over by the window. When Craig looked over at the cat, he noticed two people outside the bedroom window, which looked out over toward the Rowell house, directly next door.

"Hey, honey," Craig said jokingly, "you're going to give these two kids a show!" Michelle was half dressed, just out of the shower, standing there in a towel. Craig stood in the doorway between his bedroom and the living room. Michelle was over by the window.

Michelle said something to Craig.

He responded, "Okay . . . but you just flashed two people walking down the street." He laughed.

There were two people outside the Lackners' window, both dressed in black. This was strange, considering it was hotter than hell outside, with humidity making temps appallingly uncomfortable.

Craig walked toward the window to get a closer look. He was about "thirty feet," he later estimated, away from where the two in black stood outside his window. He could see them fairly clearly, same as Michelle.

They stopped at Tiffany's truck and looked in the side window at the back of her vehicle. Craig continued watching them because they looked sketchy, like maybe they were going to burgle the vehicle. Michelle went and got dressed.

When Michelle returned, she stared at the girl. She "stood out to me, because she was a white female, sandy blond straight hair, fair skin, and clear complexion. She was cute. Maybe eighteen to twenty, five feet seven or so, one hundred fifteen to one hundred twenty pounds."

Women notice other women. Those were numbers police could work with.

Upon a closer look, Michelle noticed the girl was wearing a black top, white shorts, black platform sandals, and a black bandana around the top of her head. She also had a black purse slung around her right shoulder. It appeared to be weighty on her boney build.

"She was carrying the purse as if it was heavy. And she had her hand in her mouth looking around."

The boy with her, Michelle and Craig agreed, was a white male, fair complexion, sandy blond hair. He was actually shorter, they recalled, than the female. They guessed his age to be about eighteen to twenty, same as the girl. He was thin.

Michelle and Craig Lackner had never seen these people before. After they headed toward Tiffany Rowell's house from the truck, up the driveway, and disappeared out of view, the Lackners didn't think anything about them. That would come later, they explained to the detective, when they returned home near seven that night to find utter chaos outside Tiffany's house.

The Lackners ultimately went downtown and sat with a sketch artist, who made two drawings of the male and female. Those composites, along with the Lackners' interview reports, would be put into a growing file. Tom Ladd and Phil Yochum were gathering so much material as the first twenty-four hours after the murders passed, they would be unable to keep up with it all.

Just how important would these statements by the Lackners and subsequent drawings turn out to be in the years to come?

"[Those kids] were walking toward this house," the prosecutor who would get the case would later say, "as if they didn't have a care in the world. Had [Michelle Lackner] not gotten out of the shower [when she did] . . . this case would have never been solved."

A YOUNG WOMAN, scared but willing and courageous enough to talk, walked into HPD late that same night and informed the desk sergeant that she might have information relevant to the Millbridge Drive murders. Turned out the twenty-four-year-old, Nicola Baldwin (pseudonym), was a friend of Tiffany Rowell's.

Nicola sat down in an interview room and started talking. She was the first of what was going to be an ambush of people to talk to, Tom Ladd and his team knew.

Nicola explained that she worked as a waitress for an Italian restaurant downtown. It was around two forty-five on the morning of the murders when Nicola showed up at Tiffany's Millbridge Drive house. Marcus Precella was there, too. So was Adelbert Snchez and Nicola's brother. They were hanging out, partying. Marcus received a call from Tiffany at some point.

"I gave my keys to a stripper who works here," Tiffany said. Apparently, she had been drinking and didn't want to drive.

Nicola could not recall the stripper's name, but "Tiffany wanted us to come to the club and get her." She had no other way home.

Marcus and Nicola got into Nicola's vehicle and headed out to Club Exotica. Adelbert and Nicola's brother stayed behind.

Tiffany stood by the front door into the club with a blond dancer. A bouncer from the club kept an eye on them. Nicola and Marcus got out and hugged Tiffany.

"What's up?" Nicola offered.

"She needs a ride, too," Tiffany explained, nodding at her dancer friend. "She lives near Jersey Village."

A bedroom community, Jersey Village is north of Houston, heading toward Weiser Airpark on Highway 290, or about an hour's drive one way from Clear Lake City.

"No problem," Marcus said. He took out a set of keys he had brought from Tiffany's house so he and Tiffany could take her truck. They could drop off Tiffany's friend first and then head back to Clear Lake. The others could return to the house in Nicola's car.

Nicola drove straight to Tiffany's. When she arrived, Adelbert and her brother were still up partying. Now, though, there were two strippers at the house, who had shown up while Nicola and the others were out picking up Tiffany. They were all sitting around, laughing, smoking some weed, getting their drunk on.

According to Nicola, it was another typical night at Tiffany's house.

Nothing seemed to be out of whack, Nicola explained. Things seemed to be going all right throughout the early-morning hours.

"Is there anything else you can tell us?" the interviewing officer asked Nicola. She seemed scared, frightened to think that a good friend had been murdered in such a choreographed, concerted way, and she had been at the same house hours before. As far as the public knew then, someone had walked into the house and mowed them all down. No warning. No explanation. It wasn't hard to tell that perhaps someone the kids knew had been invited into the house and decided, for some reason, to open fire on everyone.

Later on that night (after the murders), Nicola told police, she was at a friend's house when her manager called and asked if she knew how to get ahold of Tiffany Rowell's father. This was a strange request. Nicola could not ever recall her boss phoning for this reason.

"Why?" Nicola asked him.

"I think Tiffany was shot and killed inside her house."

"I don't know . . . ," Nicola said.

"Try to get ahold of Tiffany, okay?" her manager said before hanging up.

Nicola said she would.

And that was about all Nicola knew. Yet through that interview, Nicola had given cops her brother's contact information. He might know a bit more, she said. He had been at the house partying with Adelbert while Nicola was out. Nicola said her brother had stayed behind, too, after she left to go home as the sun came up.

Detectives caught up with Nicola's brother.

"I left about nine-fifteen A.M.," he said, adding that he had been at Tiffany's house since two forty-five in the morning, and arrived with Nicola, as she had claimed. One of the strippers whom he and Adelbert had partied with gave him a ride to his grandparents' house later that morning because Nicola had left. "We had a good time, and there were no problems. Marcus and Tiffany went to bed [at some point] and we [the stripper and I] just sat there in the living room smoking and drinking. . . . During my time there, I did not hear or see anything out of the ordinary."

The officer pressed for more information. Was there anything he thought might have contributed to the murders? Strange phone calls? Maybe someone lurking about the yard? An unexpected visitor?

There had to be something.

Nicola's brother said he did not know Marcus, Tiffany, or Adelbert that well. In fact, it was the first time he had ever been over to the house.

CHAPTER 6.

IF SOMEONE WOULD have taken time-lapse video of the scene outside the front of Tiffany Rowell's house, a subtle, yet awfully sad picture would have emerged on the morning following the murders. As the midnight hour approached, then one, two, and three in the morning, that time-lapse photography would have shown the crowd growing increasingly sparse. People were disappearing, walking away like at the end of a rally, as the morning came to pass-that is, all but three individuals: George, Ann and Lelah Koloroutis. The three of them had stayed all night, waiting, praying, hoping against their better (gut) judgment and that sinking feeling that at some point a detective would come out and tell them it wasn't Rachael inside, after all. There had been a terrible mistake. She wasn't there. It was another girl. Some other family would have to suffer the loss.

At certain points throughout the night, a cop would come out and speak to George, dancing around the reality that Rachael was one of the victims.

"Does your daughter have long reddish hair?"

George would drop his head in his hands. "Yes, sir, she does."