CRIME HUNTER: Behind the shocking Ugly Betty murders
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As she repeatedly rang her daughter’s phone, Ann Koloroutis started to worry.
It wasn’t like Rachael not to pick up the phone. She had been going to her pal Tiffany’s house to hang out.
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Later that night, on July 18, 2003, at her home in Clear Lake City, Texas, her world was shattered. Two cops were standing on her doorstep – and the news wasn’t good.
Rachael and her best friend Tiffany Rowell had been massacred in a hail of bullets. Her living room had been turned into a slaughterhouse.
Alongside the two dead girls lay Tiffany’s boyfriend Marcus Ray Precella, 19, and his cousin Adelbert Nicholas Sanchez, 21.
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After hundreds of man-hours, an outpouring of community support and a $100,000 reward, homicide detectives were getting nowhere. And the victims made the probe more of a mystery.
They were good kids without enemies or skeletons in their closets.
There was just one clue: The lock on the door had not been forced, indicating the killer knew at least one of the victims.
“There was a lot of rage and anger behind these killings, and so, therefore, we thought … perhaps there was a personal relationship between the victims in the home and the killer,” Houston Police Sgt. Brian Harris told ABC News.
The case went cold.
But three years after the heinous murders, an anonymous tip blew the doors off the investigation.
***
Christine Paolilla was not only a fellow Clear Lake High School Student, she was also best friends with Rachel and Tiffany. They had changed her life.
Christine was an awkward outsider who struggled to fit in. Making matters worse, she had been diagnosed with the hair loss condition Alopecia as a young girl.
Bullying by classmates left the gawky teen shy, retiring and desperately unconfident. Some kids called her Ugly Betty after America Ferrera’s TV character.
Rachael and Tiffany were beautiful, bright, and popular – everything Christine wasn’t. But they took the ugly duckling under their wing.
A makeover made the high school misfit disappear, transforming her into a swan. Her confidence grew. At the 2003 school ball, she was voted ‘Miss Irresistible.’ And she snagged a bad boy boyfriend named Chris Snider.
“She was voted by the school, 2003, Miss Irresistible at Clear Lake High School,” Paolilla’s mother told ABC News 20/20. “They did it because they felt that she was the person who they just loved, because of the way she was, the person she was.”
***
Shockingly, the tipster pointed the finger at Christine Paolilla. No longer Cinderella, she was now a hopeless junkie, blowing through her trust fund of $360,000.
During a jolt in rehab, she met fellow junkie Justin Rott. They married and went on a heroin-fueled jolly for months.
And when cops finally came knocking, their dingy motel room was littered with needles with more syringes loaded and ready to roll. For nine months, she and Rott had done little more than shoot up and eat.
Miss Irresistible, indeed.
***
The fink who dropped the dime on Miss Irresistible told cops the murder weapon belonged to her ex-boyfriend’s father. Detectives found the murder weapon in the man’s safe – and they found Chris Snider dead in the woods.
Cops said he had killed himself with an overdose of pills.
When cops arrested Paolilla, she blamed her ex. They wanted to score drugs from Marcus Precella, but they argued. She claimed Chris Snider grabbed the gun and started shooting.
But her hubby, Justin Rott, was ready to flip. He testified she joined in on the slaughter.
“She told me that she told Chris that they had to go back,” Rott testified. “She said when she went back in and Rachael was there and she was still alive. She was choking on her own blood.”
“She was gagging,” he recalled. “She said that Rachael just kept asking, ‘Why?'”
Paolilla then finished the job on her one-time benefactor by beating her to death.
At trial, she confessed to being involved in the crime, but a defence psychiatrist testified that her confession was a result of the heroin withdrawals she was enduring while being questioned by detectives.
The jury deliberated just three hours to find Paolilla guilty in 2008.
Paolilla was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. She only avoided a date with death because she was just 17 years old at the time.
Now 38, Paolilla remains incarcerated in a Texas prison, according to jail records. She is eligible for parole in 2046 when she is 59.
For the families, it is scant consolation.
“There is always an absence, always a silence,” George Koloroutis, Rachael’s father, told the court.
For the 2003 Miss Irresistible, life will always be the same – inside four lonely prison walls.
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