Read Never See Them Again Online

Authors: M. William Phelps

Never See Them Again (36 page)

BOOK: Never See Them Again
9.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“What did she say she said to the girl?”
“She said she was sorry. She started crying.”
“Did she say why she said that?”
“I guess. I don't know.”
“Did she say whether or not this girl that she said she was sorry to had any kind of response?”
“She just asked her, ‘What are you talking about?' ”
“And what did she say she said in response to that?”
“She just said she was sorry and started crying. And at that time, that's when Chris yelled for Christine to come back in the room.”
“And what happened after that?” Freyer asked.
“When she came in the room with Tiffany, Chris already had a gun pulled.”
“And what did she say she did after that?”
“That she did?” Rott asked, confused.
“Yes. Not Tiffany, but Christine.”
“Chris—she said that Chris told them all to get by the couch, and that's when he did tell her to take out the gun.”
“What did she do? What did she say she did in response to that?”
“She took out the gun.”
“Did she indicate that she did that voluntarily? Was she scared? Why did she say she took the gun out?”
“She didn't say she was scared. . . .”
Shocking many in the courtroom, Justin Rott talked about what happened when Christine “voluntarily” went back into the house to make sure they were all dead.
“Did she tell you whether or not Rachael said anything to her or asked her any questions?”
“Yeah. She said Rachael . . . just kept asking ‘why?' ”
“Okay. And did she tell you . . . that—after hearing that—what she did after?”
“She beat her to death.”
Gasps could be heard from every corner of the room. The images this exchange conjured were horrifying: a teen girl beating her so-called friend to death, and that girl asking why she was doing it. It was harrowing to listen to, and a few people got up and walked out of the courtroom.
“How?” Freyer asked.
“With the gun.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Yeah. Because she told me that she kept
hitting
her and
hitting
her, and she [Christine] was crying the whole time she was doing it.”
“Okay. Did she tell you how many times that she hit Rachael with the gun?”
“No. She just said she . . . When she started hitting her, she just kept hitting her until she was dead.”
CHAPTER 70
J
USTIN ROTT CONTINUED
to tell the jury his story the following day as Mike DeGeurin did his best to smear Rott's reputation and prove him to be the liar that he was known to be. Still, those snapshots of Christine Paolilla pounding the back of Rachael Koloroutis's head were hard to dismiss.
DeGeurin was able to get Rott to admit that he had met a few women since he and Christine last saw each other. In fact, these were women to whom Rott had lied to, the lawyer said, “for their attention.”
Quite shocking, one female Rott had befriended turned out to be Nichole Sánchez, Adelbert's sister. Rott had gotten together with Nichole on several occasions, although both said it was nothing more than a friendship. Nichole wanted answers. Justin had known her brother's killer, Nichole believed. Perhaps he could offer some insight into why Christine had taken Adelbert away from her.
If nothing else, Justin Rott's cross-examination made clear that the guy was unafraid of admitting his faults—be it lying, cheating, stealing, using heroin, or turning other people on to the drug. He was open and honest about everything.
Mike DeGeurin made Justin Rott sound as though he was a predator, out in the world seeking women to turn into drug users with him. According to Rott and several people who knew him, this was totally untrue. Yet the one topic DeGeurin stayed away from was Rott's inside knowledge of the murders.
The state called firearms expert Kim Downs next, who gave additional details about the murder weapons, tying them even closer to the murders.
The next morning, October 9, the state called assistant medical examiner Morna Gonsoulin. The judge warned the gallery before Morna began that there would be gruesome photos coming up and that anyone was welcome to step out now.
Freyer and Goodhart made a classic move here. By concluding their case with the reality and totality of the murders, those photographs of the victims, as they appeared during autopsy, were setting those images in the jury's minds.
When DeGeurin passed the witness back to the state after his cross-examination, Goodhart stood and spoke, “Nothing further, Judge.”
“You may step down, Doctor,” Ellis told the ME. “What says the state?”
“Judge, at this time, the state of Texas will rest,” Goodhart acknowledged.
The judge asked that the jury retire to the jury room.
 
 
“YOUR HONOR, NOW
that the state has rested,” DeGeurin began, “and outside the presence of the jury, I move for an instructed—for the court to instruct the jury to return a verdict of not guilty because the evidence is not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, to a reasonable juror, each and every element of the offense, which is set out in the indictment in three separate paragraphs.”
Without hesitation the judge said, “That will be denied.”
The jury was asked to return.
DeGeurin's first witness was the father of a girl whom Justin Rott had lived with for a brief period of time after he and Christine separated. The guy's daughter was one of the women into whom Rott had supposedly shot bags of heroin. Her father was there to qualify that Rott was a lying thug who took women under his wing and turned them into dopers.
Mike DeGeurin made a strong point with his witness to let the jury know that Justin Rott had not only turned the guy's daughter on to heroin, but had injected her on several occasions and was using dope at a time when Rott had told Freyer—during that lull in the case when Freyer was babysitting him—that he wasn't using.
DeGeurin next brought in the girl in question, and she—guess what?—verified everything that had been said by her dad before her.
As it turned out, the girl knew Rachael, Tiffany, and Christine from high school, and her locker was, incredibly, right next to Christine's.
She said she met Justin Rott in the same place Rott had met most of his women: recovery meetings.
Rott had found out that the girl's mother had committed suicide, so he told her his mother had done the same, in order to build a bond between them. To gain more sympathy, he told her his father had died in a car wreck. Rott had even proposed marriage to the girl, according to her testimony. But the ring he had placed on her finger, when he asked for her hand, had been stolen from another girl's house, she later learned.
After the girl buried Rott, DeGeurin brought in another, who sat and told an almost identical story. Would any of it help Christine Paolilla? That was anybody's guess.
 
 
BY FAR, MIKE
DeGeurin's most important witness was Dr. George Glass, a “paid,” according to Rob Freyer, medical doctor and psychiatrist with decades of experience. Glass talked for the remainder of the day about Christine's state of mind during those days when she gave HPD what amounted to a confession of being at the scene of the crime as it occurred. The topic of addiction came up routinely during Glass's direct testimony, the doctor offering his opinion whether Christine was treated properly when she went to the ER that first night HPD had interviewed her in San Antonio.
“So . . . the hospital people, when they make notations about what they observe, is there some . . . Is there any reason they would write something wrong, or is it . . . when they're writing something in the hospital record, what's it for that they're writing?”
“It's to document what's happening at the time,” Glass answered, “as well as to lay the foundation for a treatment plan from there on out. And usually the treatment plan is because, you know, hospital emergency rooms work in shifts, and when the next shift comes in, they need to know, you know, at four o'clock, whenever somebody leaves, what the last person thought and why they did what they did, because they may not have the opportunity to talk with them. So that's why it's written and documented in some detail.”
“So, did they give her drugs?”
“Yes, they did.”
“What did they give her?”
“They gave her . . . at approximately six-fifteen at night they gave her twenty milligrams of methadone by mouth. Methadone is a long-acting narcotic. Unlike heroin, which has a four- to six-hour half-life, or in that frame, methadone has a, you know, eighteen- to twenty-four-, thirty-six-hour half-life, which means you go through withdrawal much [longer] if you take it. Twenty milligrams of methadone is relatively . . . [for] someone who doesn't normally take any narcotics, that would be enough to, if not put you to sleep, really tranquilize you for a time. An hour later they gave her six milligrams of morphine sulfate in a shot by IV. They had an IV running. The normal dose, if you were to go to the hospital with a heart attack, the first treatment is they give you a shot of morphine sulfate, the normal dose is four to eight milligrams. So, she got approximately what would have been the dose for a fifty-year-old guy with a heart attack—on top of the methadone. And then a couple hours later, before she leaves the hospital at nine o'clock, they give her another twenty milligrams of methadone and they give her another shot of morphine two or three hours later.”
The point Glass left out, which would have been critical for jurors to hear, was that for a junkie of Christine's caliber, these narcotics would have brought her to a normal state, calmed her down and leveled her out.
This argument by Glass went on and on. The point he was trying to make was that Christine had not been in her right frame of mind to have been questioned for as long or as vigorously as she had been by police.
He talked about Christine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of her father's death. He mentioned that she had low self-esteem because of her alopecia. She was “susceptible to what are called . . . codependent abusive relationships.”
Late into the day, as Tom Goodhart began his cross-examination, DeGeurin needed to leave the room for some reason.
“Doctor,” Goodhart began anyway, “we've met once before, correct?”
“Yes.”
“May I be excused, Your Honor?” DeGeurin stood and said. “I've got co-counsel—I've got to find out . . .”
“Okay,” the judge said.
“Judge, may I approach?” Goodhart asked.
“Yes.”
“Considering this is the foundation of their defensive argument, the fact he just left the courtroom, I think, is a bad thing for the record. I trust him completely in his capabilities, but I don't want to take this chance.”
“This is ridiculous,” the judge said in frustration. He sent the jury out of the room.
Moments later the judge called them back and got the trial going again.
Drama. Every trial had its share.
One of Goodhart's main points was to show the jury that Glass was walking into this situation after the fact, and his comments and opinions should be taken as such. For example, Goodhart questioned whether Christine was addicted to heroin and how the doctor would know if he had not treated her at the time, asking, “Doctor, were there any medical tests run at either hospital to verify the presence of opiate heroin inside of her system?”
“No.”
“There were not.”
Well into his cross, Goodhart pressed the doctor for his professional opinion of Christine at the time of her arrest.
“Is she a liar?”
Dr. Glass gave the prosecutor a dragged-out version of yes, stating: “She's distorting, as do most addicts. When they go somewhere and they want to get something, to a doctor's office, emergency room, they usually bump up what they're taking when they tell somebody, in the hope that they'll get more rather than less.”
“They lie about it, don't they?” Goodhart clarified.
“Yeah. Lie, distort, whatever.”
“Addicts are liars—”
“Judge,” interrupted DeGeurin, who had not left the room after all, “I'm going to—I can't let that question go. I object to it.”
The judge leaned toward the gallery: “Overruled. Answer the question, sir.”
“Are you asking me a philosophical question, or are you making a moral statement?” Glass wanted to know.
“No, sir. I'm flat asking you—what you just said a little while ago in your direct testimony—they will do just about
anything
to get more drugs?”
“That's true.”
“Okay. That means they're liars, manipulators, fabricators. Would that not be a fair statement?”
“They may do all those things.”
“Would you say that's indicative of just about every junkie you've ever known?”
“At different times, yes.”
“Sometimes we have to pick the kernels of truth from the lies,” Goodhart concluded his point, “. . . when we talk to junkies?”
“Depends on whether they're using or whether they're clean.”
The doctor finished earlier than expected. With that, DeGeurin whispered a few words to his co-counsel, said something to Christine, and then addressed the court.
“We'll rest.”
Rob Freyer called one more witness, Rachael's sister, Lelah Koloroutis. It took Lelah about thirty seconds to say she recognized Rachael, Tiffany, Adelbert, and Marcus in a photograph that Freyer wanted placed into the record.
Here was a smart prosecutor, once again reminding jurors what the trial was about: the victims.
After that, the day was concluded by the judge, who promised closing arguments from both sides next.
BOOK: Never See Them Again
9.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

I Am God by Giorgio Faletti
Dakota Blues by Spreen, Lynne
Postmark Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The Swallows of Kabul by Khadra, Yasmina
Mayday by Thomas H. Block, Nelson Demille
Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles
Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt
Beginning to Believe by Sean Michael