Too Young to Kill (44 page)

Four bloodied bodies . . . a dark secret.

M. William Phelps

Coming in March in hardcover from Kensington Books

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PROLOGUE

It was just after six o’clock on the evening of July 18, 2003. Eighteen-year-old Brittney Vikko (pseudonym) had been calling Tiffany Rowell, her BFF since middle school, for the past ninety minutes. Something was wrong, Brittney knew. She could sense it. She kept dialing Tiffany’s number, but she wasn’t getting a response.

Brittney had spoken to Tiffany’s boyfriend, Marcus Precella, earlier that day, after Marcus had answered Tiffany’s cell phone, saying, “She’s in the bathroom.” It was close to four o’clock then.

“I’ll call back,” Brittney said.

Thirty minutes later, Brittney began phoning.

But no one—not even Marcus—picked up.

“I was in the area, so I drove over to Tiffany’s house,” Brittney recalled. Brittney’s boyfriend, her nephew, and her boyfriend’s cousin went with her.

Brittney drove. They stopped at a McDonald’s after leaving an appointment Brittney had downtown, at 4:10
P.M.
A few minutes after six o’clock, Brittney pulled into Tiffany Rowell’s driveway in the stylish suburban neighborhood of Millbridge Drive, Clear Lake City, Texas. She noticed immediately that Marcus and Tiffany’s vehicles were there. Tiffany’s truck was parked in front of the house, its back wheel up on top of the curb. Marcus’s car was parked next to the garage in the driveway.

Brittney pulled in behind Marcus’s vehicle.

Odd,
she considered, looking at both vehicles.
They must be here....

Brittney got out and rang the doorbell.

No answer.

She rang it again.

Nothing.

She knocked. Then she tried to look through a nearby window with both her hands cupped over the sides of her eyes to block the light.

But again, not a peep out of anyone inside.

Brittney kept banging, harder and louder, eventually forcing the door to creak open.

Brittney’s boyfriend and the others watched from inside Brittney’s vehicle as she carefully—and slowly—walked into the house.

“Tiff? . . . You here?”

Something seemed peculiar about the situation. It was eerily quiet inside the house, a steely, metallic smell in the air.

The door left unlocked and open? Both cars in the driveway and no one around? This was so unlike Tiffany.

Where was everyone?

There was a short foyer Brittney had to walk through before she entered the living room.

She took five steps and found herself standing, staring at a scene that, at first, didn’t register.

Then, as Brittney’s boyfriend got out of her vehicle, he saw Brittney come running like hell back out the same door she had just walked through.

Brittney Vikko was screaming, a look of terror on her face.

“Call the cops!”

Out of breath, approaching her boyfriend, who was now looking toward the house, “Call . . . the . . . cops!” Brittney yelled again. She was hysterical.

So her boyfriend walked up to the doorway and approached the inside of the house.

Then he came barreling out the door, screaming.

Brittney was on the ground by then, yelling, crying, smashing her fists into the grass. Her boyfriend noticed a neighbor across the street talking on his cell phone.

He ran toward the guy. “Call the police! Call the police!”

The man dialed 911.

“There was blood everywhere,” Brittney’s boyfriend later said, describing what he had seen inside Tiffany Rowell’s house.

1

It happens when your life is static. Nothing is happening. Just out of high school, you’re still running on teen angst. To think about college seems overwhelming. Your parents are getting on you. Life is not something you want to think about right now. You want to go with the flow. Take the summer and
discern
. And yet, that’s when a good dose of reality—in all of its ugliness—grabs hold and shakes you.

When you’re least expecting it.

In the second largest city in the south central portion of the United States, the atmosphere was volatile on this day. The three
H
’s were present: hazy, hot, humid—a fourth counting the city of Houston, the largest in Texas, fourth in the country. The dew point was near seventy-five. “Oppressive,” they call stickiness in those numbers, about as high as it can get without rain. In addition to the stuffy air, it was almost ninety degrees. The kind of day when a “severe storm,” the talking heads on the Weather Channel like to get excited about, could roll in at any time, darken the skies as if it were night, turn on the torrential downpours, kick up damaging winds, and drop hail the size of Ping-Pong balls.

Ah, yes, summertime in the Bay Area of Greater Houston. Sunny out one minute, and the next you’re running for the nearest storm shelter.

As the skies decided what to do, yellow
POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS
tape fenced off Tiffany Rowell’s house from the road and swelling crowd. Strands of the familiar crime scene ribbon fluttered in mild gusts of wind, slapping and whipping, making a noise of a playing card flapping in a child’s bicycle spokes. Lights of blue and red flashed against the sides of the house, pulsating a warning to the residents of this exclusive community just outside Houston, where some say “the city’s wealthiest and best educated” lived, that something horrific had happened inside the one-story contemporary. Brittney Vikko running out the door screaming, neighbors heading inside to have a look, only added to talk circulating around the block that evil had reared its nasty face in an otherwise quiet residential district.

Clueing everyone else in were all the cops roaming around. The coroners’ vans parked along the street. The detectives huddled together, talking things over: pointing, measuring, comparing notes. Flashbulbs inside the house made lightning strikes in the dusk. Whatever was beyond the slightly ajar front door into Tiffany Rowell’s house was surely going to be big news in the coming hours and days. Anybody standing, staring, wandering about the scene, was well aware of this. Still, this neighborhood in Clear Lake City, Texas, “a pretty peaceful area,” according to one resident, was used to the sort of high-profile crime—especially murders—the discovery inside the Rowell house was going to reveal. Who could forget that homely-looking woman who wore those large-framed glasses, a dazed look of nothingness in her eyes, Andrea Yates? While her husband was at his NASA engineering job nearby one afternoon in June 2001, Andrea chased their five kids through the house and, one by one, held each one underwater in the family’s bathtub. Then she calmly called police and reported how she’d just killed them. And what about the infamous astronaut, Lisa Nowak, who, in February 2007, donned an adult diaper and drove from Clear Lake City to Florida—some nine hundred miles—to confront her romantic rival at the airport, the tools of a sinister plot to do her opponent harm later found inside Nowak’s vehicle. And lest we forget the dentist’s wife, Clara Harris, who would run her cheating husband down with her Mercedes-Benz after catching him with his receptionist, whom Harris had gotten into a hair-pulling catfight with only moments before the homicide.

Those notorious crimes, on top of all the murder and rape and violence that
doesn’t
make headlines and “breaking news” reports, all happened here, within the city limits of this plush Houston suburb, just around the corner from this quiet neighborhood, where all the attention was being thrust. In fact, inside the Rowell house, some were already saying, was a tragedy of proportions that would dwarf anything Nowak, Yates, or Harris had done: if not for the severity and violence connected with the crime, the point that, among the four dead bodies the cops were stepping over, taking photos of and studying, not one of the victims had reached the age of twenty-two, and three of them were teenagers.

Neighbors, reporters, and bystanders gathered on the opposite side of the crime scene tape as cops did their best to hold back the crowd.

Some cried openly, their hands over their mouths.

Oh, my God. . . .

Others asked questions, shook their heads, wondered what was happening. After all, this was Brook Forest, a “master-planned community.” Panning 180 degrees, street level, you’d find well-groomed lawns (green as Play-Doh), edged sidewalks, expensive cars, boats on trailers propped up by cinder blocks waiting for the weekend, kids playing in the streets. Brook Forest certainly isn’t the typical place where violence is a recurring theme. Not to mention, it was just after seven o’clock on a Friday evening, the scent of barbeque still wafting in the air, and the murders had occurred, by the best guesstimates available, somewhere between 3:14 and 3:30
P.M.

That was the middle of the day, for crying out loud. A mass murder had taken place, and no one had seen or heard anything?

It seemed so unimaginable.

Investigators were talking to Brittney Vikko, getting her version. But she had walked in
after
the fact. As far as the neighbors standing around could see, nobody had noticed anything suspicious in the neighborhood or at the Rowell house all day long. The Rowell place was located on Millbridge Drive, a cul-de-sac in a cookie-cutter farm full of them, a neighborhood sandwiched between the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center and Ellington Air Force Base, Galveston Bay a ten-minute drive east, Clear Lake just to the south, ultimately spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. This is suburban bliss, likely created in a civics lab somewhere, maybe by a former NASA engineer (the region is full of them) or some city planner driven to construct middle-class perfection; but certainly not a haven for a crime on this scale.

“I walked inside and saw Tiffany and a guy on the couch,” Brittney Vikko told police, “and another girl on the floor in front of the television. At first, I thought they had been partying too much—and then I saw all the blood.”

With the sight of carnage in front of her, Brittney Vikko bolted out the door and screamed for her boyfriend to call the police. Neighbors, cops, fire trucks, EMTs, started to arrive shortly thereafter.

Consoling the community best he could, Houston Police Department (HPD) homicide investigator Phil Yochum released a statement, hoping to calm things:
“I think it happened very quickly; but it was very,
very
violent. It looks like some type of confrontation happened at the front door, then moved into the living room.”

There had been no sign of forced entry—that familiar set of words cops use when they don’t have a damn clue as to what the hell went on. A news release gave the concerned and worried community a bit more detail, but was still vague:
The bodies of four people were discovered . . . two males, two females . . . shot multiple times, and two of the victims had sustained blunt trauma to the head.

The last part of the release was an understatement—two of the victims had been beaten savagely. And the blood. My goodness. From one end of the living room to the other. Two of the victims were found on the couch, facing the television. Looked like neither had moved in reaction to what had happened. One of them had a bullet hole—execution style—straight through the center of his forehead. Looked like some powder burns on the side of his head, ringed around another hole, which meant someone put the barrel of a weapon up to his skin and pulled the trigger.

As patrol officers did their best to hold back the swelling mob, a woman pulled up, parked her car sharply with a shriek of rubber, jumped out, and limboed underneath the crime scene tape as if ducking under a wooden farm fence.

Police stopped her before she could get close to the front door.

“Tell me that it’s
not
the Rowell house,” she said. “Tell me . . . please tell me it’s not the Rowell house. Please!”

The police officers looked at each other.

Of course, it was.

The woman doubled over. Fell to the ground, then began sobbing in loud bursts of guttural pain. An officer went over and helped her up, eventually walking her off toward a private area of the yard, out of sight and earshot of the crowd.

Earlier that day, George Koloroutis had taken off on his Harley from his home a few miles away from this Brook Forest neighborhood in Friendswood. George was in a meeting at work. It was around 3:30
P.M.
when he got this “sinking feeling” in his gut—
Something’s wrong.
George wasn’t a believer in the paranormal or ESP, but this sudden rotten sensation nagged at him.

“Something was out of order,” George recalled. “My perfect little family unit was in a funky state. My girl is somewhere where I don’t want her to be.” He was talking about Rachael Koloroutis; she had been staying at the Rowell house with her best friend, Tiffany. George believed Rachael belonged at home.