- Christine Paolilla was bullied, until she was befriended by popular girls Tiffany Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis
- The friendship made Christine so popular she was voted “Miss Irresistable”
- Things took a dark turn when Christine’s jealousy lead to murder…
Life got off to a rough start for Christine Paolilla.
Her father, Charles, a construction worker, died in a workplace accident in 1988 when she was two and Christine’s mother, Lori, struggled to cope with the loss.
Lori battled a drug addiction and temporarily lost custody of her daughter and son, John, when Christine was seven.
As a young girl, Christine was diagnosed with alopecia. She lost clumps of hair from her head as well as her eyebrows and eyelashes.
Despite trying to cover up her hair loss by wearing wigs and drawing on her eyebrows, Christine was bullied about her condition at her high school.
“She became extremely self-conscious about it,” Lori told ABC News. “Classmates would come up behind her and pull her wig off.”
After years of suffering, Christine’s life took a turn for the better in 2003 when she was befriended by Tiffany Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis – two of the most popular girls at Clear Lake High School.
“Christine came home one day very happy,” Lori recalled. “She said: ‘Mum, I made two new friends who are the sweetest two girls I’ve ever met’.”
Despite being in the grade above her, Tiffany and Rachael made great efforts to help Christine fit in better at school.
They taught her how to dress, do her make-up and helped her find better wigs.
According to Rachael’s father, George Koloroutis, this was typical of his daughter.
“Rachael was the kind of person that always looked out for the underdog, always tried to help others. And because of this affliction that Paolilla had… Rachael felt sorry for her,” he told ABC News.
Lori was so pleased to see a positive change in her daughter’s personality after Tiffany and Rachael came into her life.
Christine’s popularity at her high school dramatically shifted, too.
That year, the 17-year-old was voted Miss Irresistible by her classmates.
She also began a relationship with Christopher Lee Snider, another student a couple of years older than her whom she’d first met in high school, that year.
Tiffany and Rachael graduated from high school in May 2003, but remained close with Christine.
Two months later, on July 18, 2003, shockwaves went through the suburban town, Clear Lake City when a gruesome crime scene was discovered in Tiffany’s home.
The bodies of Tiffany, 18, Rachael, 18, Tiffany’s boyfriend, Marcus Ray Precella, 19, and Marcus’s cousin, Adelbert Nicholas Sanchez, 21, were discovered by friends in the living room. Each of them had multiple gunshot wounds.
Lori said Christine took the news of the death of her friends hard.
“She slept in our bed for three nights,” she said.
“She was afraid.”
Police had no idea who was behind the murders. There were no DNA matches or useful fingerprints left behind. But they were sure these brutal killings were done by somebody with a personal hatred.
Tiffany and Rachael had the most gunshot wounds, including in the crotch, which was believed to be a sign of sexual envy.
Rachael’s head had also been smashed in by the butt of a pistol.
The case remained unsolved for years.
Meanwhile, Christine broke up with her boyfriend, Chris, after he was jailed for car theft in 2004.
She ended up in drug rehab where she met heroin addict, Justin Rott, who she married.
While watching a news report about the anniversary of her best friends’ murders, Christine saw police sketches she was worried looked like her.
She then confessed to her husband that she and her ex-boyfriend, Chris, were responsible for their deaths. She claimed it had been his idea to go to Tiffany’s house to steal money and drugs and she was surprised when he handed her a gun before they entered.
She said Chris was the first to open fire, and that her pistol went off on its own, causing her to blindly fire around the room.
Justin stuck by Christine, and the two went on the run, hiding away in a hotel room and binging on heroin and cocaine every day.
In June 2006, police received an anonymous tip from a man who said he’d met Christine in rehab and she’d told him she and her ex-boyfriend had committed the murders.
Police tracked Christine down in her hotel room by monitoring her ATM activity and arrested her two days later.
Christine denied having anything to do with the murders, but Justin told police about her confession during his interrogation.
When Christopher Snider, 21, got wind that the cops were on his tail, he took his life.
The fact that Christine could have murdered Tiffany and Rachael, her two best friends, shocked the whole community.
But police’s theory that she’d been driven by envy came as no surprise to Snider’s sister, Brandee.
In M. William Phelps book Never See Them Again, which investigates Christine’s murders, Brandee is quoted as saying she remembers her as being “intensely jealous” and said Christine had threatened to kill her and her parents.
“She’d spend the night on the front lawn, sleeping, trying to get into the house, yelling, going nuts, rattling the screen door,” she said.
With the help of testimony from Justin, a jury convicted Christine Paolilla of four counts of capital murder on October 13, 2008. She was sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2046.
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