"Don't pull up in front of the house. I just jacked these mofos, you know. Are you . . . stupid?"

"No! I'm not fucking stupid!" Christine yelled. That comment pissed her off.

She screamed some more at him.

He yelled back.

"I'll go right in there now and tell them you're right here!" Christine threatened.

She got out of the car.

"Get back in here," he said from the window. "Or you're going to . . . regret it."

Christine hopped back into the car, turned the key, and prepared to drive away.

But Snider jumped out, she claimed, as she started the car, and ran into the house.

She turned the car off and watched him.

Brian Harris pleaded with Christine at this point. She had broken down during this part of the interview and didn't want to continue. Harris said, "Okay, be the voice of justice for [Jesus] Christ, give him (Snider) what he deserves-what happened?"

Snider came running back out, Christine continued. At first she didn't know why, she said. "And he came running out with the gun-with one of the guns in his hand."

This had been the first time Christine Paolilla had ever mentioned a gun was involved-and Harris knew, right away, from the way she had said it (first gun, then guns) that Christine Paolilla was implicating her boyfriend and extricating herself. She was placing the burden of the murders entirely on Snider by working this weapon into the mix.

But she had made a Freudian slip.

Guns.

They both sat inside the car. "I didn't say anything to him."

Total silence. They both sat still as stone.

"I need to go to work," Christine said, breaking the silence.

("I was so scared," she told Harris, "to say anything.") "Some people," Snider told her in a soft, cautious voice, "are just at the wrong place at the wrong time." He emphasized that word, "wrong."

"What is going on? What the hell are you taking about?"

Christine said she thought about calling Tiffany on her cell to see what was up inside the house and if she "would talk about it."

"Are you . . . stupid?" Snider said when Christine expressed a desire to call Tiffany.

Silence again.

"I am in so much trouble," he said, repeating it a few times.

"What? Why? What did you do?"

"I took all of Marcus's [stuff]."

"What did you do?"

"If I tell you, don't be mad at me. Promise me that."

"Okay, okay," she said.

"I shot them."

During this first interview, Christine said, "I was not in the house. I've been thinking that I was not in that house."

Harris asked if she was ever in the driveway, not telling her that the next-door neighbors had placed her and Snider together in the driveway. "Yes," she said, "I wasn't in the driveway. The only time I was close to the house was when I drove up because I was gonna-he had to go back for something, I don't know, then . . . And then I got out and I started walking toward the house 'cause I was gonna tell, uh, Tiffany and Rachael that I had nothing to do with, you know, him jacking them."

Christine explained what happened inside her car next as she and Chris sat, talking about what he ("alone") had done inside the house. "He had no sympathy at all for what happened and what he told me he did, explain like, you know, what happened. He told me he was, like, you know, say this if the cops are, like, asking you anything. You tell them that you did this, or whatever."

All Snider said about what had happened inside the house was "I shot them," according to Christine. She made it sound as though she was in no position to press him for details. She claimed that she slept with her mother for a week after he murdered her four friends. But that she never told her mom anything. Never told friends. Never told anyone.

"Christine," Harris asked, "you were with him for at least three months after that, so within that three months he tells you details, okay? You saw news clips. You saw things. What were the details he told you that happened?"

"Nothing was really said after it happened, but there was times when the news came on and, like, they did say that, um, like, they weren't just beat or something. You know, I always asked him questions and stuff, you know. It made me feel real . . . I couldn't tell anybody. I felt I didn't think it was real, you know. I thought usually he was trying to show off, and I didn't want to . . . He always checked my phone."

The truth was that Christine Paolilla called Chris Snider incessantly after the murders, at all times of the day and night. It got so bad, Chris's mother later said, "I had to keep buying phones, because our phone was drained so much it wouldn't recharge." And the idea that Christine was scared of Snider was further quashed by a statement Snider's mother later gave in reference to their relationship before and after the murders: "Chris was so sick to death of Christine, but would always answer her calls, and meet with her. I asked him one day, 'What does she have over/on you? That Christine is crazy.' "

Chris responded, "Mom, you have no idea."

Harris wasn't buying this version, either. He was beginning to press Christine for more detail, hoping to pin her down to a version HPD could later tear apart.

"In order for that road toward mercy," Harris said, going back to his original (spiritual) plea, "I need complete honesty."

"I am! God, I'm telling you," she said.

"And sometimes that's some of the bad with the good, okay?"

"I'm being honest with you."

Harris went into some of what Justin Rott had told HPD (in the adjacent room), without giving Christine too much detail. "Why would your husband tell us . . . that one of them was crawling on the ground and that you admitted to striking Rachael?"

"I never said that. I've talked to my husband about the situation. . . and all I ever told my husband was that I'd tell [him] what had, what the news had said, that they did say she was on the ground."

"When you went in there?" Harris asked, trying to catch Christine in one of her lies.

"Went in where?"

"When you went there, when you went in the house, your husband is telling us that you pulled Rachael out, okay, initially?"

"I did not go into that house."

After they discussed blood under Christine's fingernails that someone had reported (Christine denying that also), Harris lied: "Now, you understand that Chris is saying that this was all your idea and that you had a lot of pent-up frustration toward Rachael that he thought that you thought that he was having an affair with her and that's why-"

But Christine wouldn't let him finish, butting in: "I would have never."

Harris explained that if she was telling the truth, she would have to be much more specific about what had happened and what Chris Snider had told her he did inside the house.

"I'm trying so hard," Christine said.

"And try to remember what happened to the gun afterward."

"I don't know what happened."

CHAPTER 50.

BRANDEE SNIDER WAS at her aunt's house in Pasadena, Texas, when she heard that her mother and father's house was being "raided" by police. Chris Snider had been staying with Brandee before he made that move to South Carolina. Snider's mother and father were living in Louisville, Kentucky, where they had moved about two months before. It was close to noon on July 20, 2006, when she (Chris and Brandee Snider's mother) stepped into the shower inside her Kentucky home.

With the help of Louisville police, HPD went into the Sniders' house while Mrs. Snider was in the shower. As they filed in, detectives and tactical officers yelled and screamed pretty much the same thing the officers had back down in San Antonio a day before.

After realizing that Chris Snider was not inside the house, they produced the paperwork for their search warrants and proceeded to get busy searching the house. The main mission here was to find Snider himself, whom his mother, after getting dressed, explained was not living with her. Still, as they worked their way into the bedroom and started snooping around, a safe was uncovered inside a closet, and then a pistol in a dresser drawer.

Inside the safe was a second weapon.

Both of these guns would soon be connected to the Clear Lake murders and proven to be the weapons that had killed Marcus, Tiffany, Adelbert, and Rachael.

"Do you think this has anything to do with the murders?" Snider's mother asked when she called Brandee in Texas and told her what was going on. The cops who had stormed into the house were somewhat vague in describing why they were actually there. It was quite obvious they were looking for Chris; but beyond that, nobody knew what was happening.

"What?" Brandee responded. She had no idea what her mother was talking about.

About three weeks prior, Brandee had gotten into some trouble attacking her boyfriend and tossing his computer into a public pool. In fact, it was the last time Brandee had seen Chris. The day before she was arrested and placed in lockup overnight, Brandee and Chris had gone shopping. They spent a great day together. But when Brandee got out of jail the following day and moved in with her aunt in Pasadena, Chris had already taken off with Haley for South Carolina. In speaking with her mother about the search of the Kettucky house, Brandee assumed that the Robocop assault unit busting into Mom and Dad's was in response to her throwing her boyfriend's computer into the water. She thought maybe her boyfriend had called the police and had made up a story.

But murder? What was her mom talking about?

"Yeah, the murders."

Brandee hadn't thought about the Clear Lake murders crime in years. Not since it was breaking news. She'd had no reason to.

But then Brandee put the thought into her mind and juxtaposed it with what had been going on with her brother and the conversations they'd had over the years. She then considered Chris's severe depression and total withdrawal from society, along with the increasing, monstrous appetite the guy had developed for getting as high as he could. Then there were those times (several of them) when Chris had tried to commit suicide over the past three years. Something had been bothering him, Brandee knew. No doubt about it.

"Oh my, I hope it's not that," she said.

"They took the guns," Brandee's mom said.

The other little factoid Brandee got from her mom was that the cops were on their way over to Brandee's aunt's home in Pasadena, and would be arriving anytime to interview her next. It seemed someone had said Brandee was involved in the murders, too.

Later that same afternoon, in Greenville, South Carolina, Chris Snider's aunt called him. This occurred after Brandee had explained to her what had happened in Kentucky.

Haley Dawkins felt this call was strange, she later said, from the first moment she saw the number on her cell phone and noticed the Texas area code.

His family never calls him, Haley thought as she stared at the number.

This was speculation on Haley's part. Brandee and her brother, along with their mother, had been in contact with Chris ever since he left Texas. Snider's father had given him $1,000, in fact, to help him get on his feet. The Sniders weren't the Waltons, but they held close ties.

Chris was outside playing basketball when Haley took the call. Haley distinctly recalled him wearing black tennis shoes, a black muscle shirt, and gray shorts. He seemed to be in a good mood. He had purchased the clothes during a shopping trip he and Brandee had taken shortly before he left for South Carolina. Brandee had picked out the sneakers for him.

Haley picked up the ringing phone. "Hello?"

"I need to speak with Chris," the aunt said. The urgency in her voice was clear.

Haley handed Chris the phone. He was out of breath, sweating. "What's going on?" he asked, wiping himself with a towel.

Haley shrugged. She had no clue.

"The cops are looking for you on murder charges," the aunt said.

"What? What? Stop joking with me," Chris said into the phone. Haley later said he used "a panic type of voice" while speaking to his aunt.

"I'm not joking around here, Chris-this is very serious," his aunt said.

"How could a murder be pinned on me? Don't call here," he said. "Don't call me back." He hung up.

The aunt called back.

"Don't call me here, I said!"

"This is serious, Chris." They talked for about fifteen minutes, according to one police report.

"No, I cannot call Mom," Chris said. "Look, the cops are going to come here and catch me. Every time you call, they could be closer to the house."

Snider's family was trying to tell him it was too late for all that. The police knew where he was, and they were on their way. There was nothing he could do now but tell the truth.

After he hung up, Chris ran over to the computer he was using inside Haley's house. He logged on to his Myspace account and searched frantically through the site links and icons for directions on how to delete his account.

Haley didn't know what was going on. She assumed it had something to do with Chris ducking out on his probation.

"How the hell . . . do . . . you do this?" Snider asked, tapping keys; he was frightened and nervous. "The police are going to find me through Myspace."

Brandee Snider called her brother after getting off the phone with her mother. By this point, Haley had left the house. Brandee was never told why. Regardless, Brandee needed to speak with Chris right away. She had been thinking about his Myspace account, too; that if the cops were smart, they'd log on to Myspace and see that he was in Greenville, South Carolina, living with this new girlfriend. Brandee needed to delete the account for him and, also, ask him point-blank what this was all about. They were close in age and had always been tight. She knew her brother-and the guy she knew was not a murderer. But Brandee also realized that Chris had changed over the past several years. Something wasn't right with him. She needed to know if he was involved in this vicious crime, or if it was all some sort of misunderstanding.

"Chris, Houston Homicide cops are looking for you, really? Come on. They pulled Mom out of the shower and were looking for the guns in Dad's bedroom. Did you kill anybody, Chris?"

"No," he said.

"Chris?"

"No," he screamed a second time.