Latest / Crime Incident / He Wrote the Threats Himself: The Chris Coleman Case

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He Wrote the Threats Himself: The Chris Coleman Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of May 5th, 2009, the chief of
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: security for one of the largest televangelist organizations in America
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: called his next-door neighbor with a strange request. He said
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: he had been phoning home from the gym and nobody
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: was answering, and he asked the neighbor to walk over
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: and check on his wife and two sons. The neighbor
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: he chose was a police detective, and what that detective
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: found inside the house on Robert Drive would take two years,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: one courtroom, and a laptop's hard drive to fully explain.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: This is a story about a countdown. Not the kind
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: anyone recognized at the time, but the kind you can
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: only see once you lay the calendar flat on a
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: table and look at it the way a jury eventually did.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: A threatening email in November. A threatening letter in January.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: A threatening note in April. And then, in the first
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: week of May, three people dead in their beds. Four
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: ticks of a clock, spaced across six months. And the
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: question that will sit underneath this entire episode, the question
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: I want you to hold on to, is a simple one.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Who wound that clock? But before the clock, the people.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Because this case gets told when it gets told at all,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: as the story of a man with a secret life
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and the three people that framing shoves to the margins
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: are the only three who matter. Sherry Coleman was 31
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: years old. She had been Sherry Weiss once, a 21-year-old
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: military police officer in the United States Air Force. And
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: in May of 1997, she was at a canine training
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: seminar at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. when
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: she met a 22-year-old Marine named Chris Coleman. That is
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: how they began. Two young people in uniform, in Texas,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: in their early 20s. The people who knew Cherie describe
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: her the way you would want to be described. Outgoing,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: full of energy, devoted, above everything, to her boys. St.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Louis Magazine, which later published the deepest reconstruction of this
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: family anyone has written, portrays a woman who had built
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: her whole life around her sons even as the marriage
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: around her was quietly coming apart. And in the months
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: before she died, Cherie told her closest friends something that
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: should stop you cold, knowing what you know from the
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: first minute of this episode. She told them the marriage
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: was in trouble. Her friends would later say she was
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: afraid of her husband. Garrett Coleman was 11. Gavin Coleman
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: was 9. They went to school in Columbia, Illinois, and
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: every account from the coverage of their funeral says the
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: same ordinary unbearable things. They were regular kids, well-liked, two
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: brothers in a two-story house in a commuter town of
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: about 10,000 people across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Columbia is the kind of place people move to precisely
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: because nothing happens there. Hold those two boys in your mind,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: 11 and 9, because everything else in this story is
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: just machinery, and they are the reason the machinery matters.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: The father in that house was Christopher Coleman, 32 years old,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: a former Marine who had climbed to a position most
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: security professionals never reach, Chief of Security for Joyce Meyer Ministries,
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the multi-million dollar ministry based in Fenton, Missouri. He was
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Joyce Meyer's personal bodyguard, earning about $ 100, 000 a year. His
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: own father was a pastor in Chester, a short drive
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: from Columbia. The family's public identity was openly, conspicuously Christian,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: and the job came with an expectation that will become
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: the hinge of this entire case. Prosecutors would later argue
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that Coleman believed a divorce would cost him that position,
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: that salary, and that status. Keep that in your pocket.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: We will need it. I want to be careful and
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: factual about that hinge, because it is easy to caricature
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and the record does not need caricature Nobody has ever
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: suggested the ministry wanted anyone harmed. Its offense here is
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: only that it existed, and that its employee valued his
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: standing inside it. But the prosecution's motive theory rested on
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a specific piece of arithmetic that the jury was asked
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: to accept. In Chris Coleman's world, a divorce was not
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: just the end of a marriage. It was, in his
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: own calculation as the state described it, a threat to
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: a $ 100, 000 salary, and to an identity, the bodyguard of
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: a famous Christian teacher, the pastor's son, the protecter. Prosecutor
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Ed Parkinson would eventually compress the whole theory into one
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: sentence at trial. This crime was about greed, sex, selfishness,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: and narcissism. Chris Coleman decided he wanted a new life,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: and his family was in the way. Notice what is
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: missing from that sentence. Rage is missing. Impulse is missing.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: What the state alleged was not an explosion. It was
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: an accounting decision. Now, the countdown. Tick 1. Mid-November 2008.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: A threatening email arrives. and notice the distribution list, because
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: it is doing a lot of work. It goes to
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Joyce Meyer, to her son Danny Meyer, and to Chris
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: Coleman himself. It claims to come from an enemy of
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the ministry, and it warns that Coleman's family would pay.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Read that again from the ministry's side of the desk.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Their head of security, the man whose job is to
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: see threats coming, is now personally targeted by one. The
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: threat does not just menace a family. It authenticates itself
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: by arriving through the front door of a famous organization.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Tick 2. Early January 2009. A threatening letter appears. Not
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: in an inbox this time, but in the family's mailbox
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: on Robert Drive. Whoever the stalker is, he is no
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: longer only in cyberspace. He knows the house. Tick 3.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Late April 2009. A third threatening note surfaces. Three incidents
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: in roughly six months. An escalating pattern. And this is
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: the point where I need you to see what the
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: town of Columbia did. because it is the detail that
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: makes this case almost unlike any other. The police took
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: the threat seriously, so seriously that they placed a surveillance
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: camera on the Coleman house, watching for the stalker. And
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: the neighbor directly next door, a man named Justin Barlow,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: was a Columbia police detective who knew all about the
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: threat campaign. By the spring of 2009, in other words
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: this family was living inside a protective perimeter, a camera
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: on the house, a detective next door. If you wanted
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: to design a home in America where a stranger could
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: not creep in unseen at night, you would design something
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: very close to this. And there is a fourth tick
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: on this clock, but almost nobody could hear it because
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: it was ticking 600 miles away in St. Petersburg, Florida.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Since late 2008, Chris Coleman had been conducting a secret
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: affair with a woman named Tara Lentz. And here is
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: a detail that tells you something about the shape of
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: this betrayal. Lentz was not a stranger. She was a
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: friend of Sherry's. The affair ran on constant texts and
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: calls and explicit messages, and it ran on promises, and
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: one promise in particular had a date attached. Coleman told
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Tara Lentz he was going to serve Sherry with divorce
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: papers on May 4th or May 5th, 2009. And underneath
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: both calendars, there was a third record being written, one
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: that would only be read out loud after it was
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: too late. Sherry was talking, not to the police, but
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: to her friends, in the fragmentary, deniable way that frightened
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: people talk. The marriage was in trouble. She was scared
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: of her husband. Her friends would carry those conversations to
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: reporters and to jurors after her death. And if you
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: have ever wondered what researchers mean when they talk about
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the warning signs that precede intimate partner homicide, this is
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: what they look like in the wild. Not a police report,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: not a bruise, but a woman quietly telling the people
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: she trusts that she is afraid of the man she
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: lives with. while the official version of her life, the church,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: the beautiful house, the successful husband, tells everyone else that
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: nothing could possibly be wrong. The threats gave the town
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: a stranger to fear. Cherie's fear had a shorter address,
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: and nobody had a system for hearing it. Hold the
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: two calendars side by side now. The stalker's calendar. November, January, April, escalating.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: The lover's calendar. Divorce papers promised for the 4th or
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: 5th of May. On the morning of May 5th, 2009,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: those two calendars arrived at the same square. What is
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: known about that night is limited, and I'm going to
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: respect the limits, because the honest record here is narrower
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: than the dramatized versions you may have seen. Overnight, or
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: in the early morning hours of May 5th, Cherie, Garrett,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: and Gavin were strangled with a ligature, each in their
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: own bed. No court record establishes the order in which
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: it happened, and I will not invent one for you.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: What the scene did contain was writing. The killer spray-painted
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: messages on the walls of the house, You have paid. Punished.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: The stalker, it seemed, had finally kept his promise. At
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: about 5.43 in the morning, Chris Coleman left the house, headed,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: he said, to his regular workout at a gym in
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: South St. Louis County. From the gym, he phoned home repeatedly.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: No answer. And then he made the call this episode
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: opened with. He did not call 911. He called his neighbor,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Detective Justin Barlow, and asked him to go check on
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: the family. I want you to sit inside that choice
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: for a moment, because it is one of the strangest
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: and least examined decisions in modern American true crime. If
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Coleman is innocent, it is perfectly natural. You cannot reach
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: your family. There is a stalker on the loose, and
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: the most capable person on earth to check on them
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: happens to live next door. But if he is guilty,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: then something almost unfathomable is happening on that phone line.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: A man is personally selecting the detective who will discover
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: the scene he built. He is choosing his own witness
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: to the window. Barlow and another officer entered the house
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: through a window that morning. They found the spray paint.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Then they found Cherie. Then they found the boys. Think
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: about Justin Barlow's position in this story, because it is
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: nearly unique in the annals of American crime. He is
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: the institutional angle made flesh. As a detective, he had
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: been read into the stalker threat for months. As a neighbor,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: his own window looked out at the Coleman house, and
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: on the morning of May 5th, he was converted. by
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a single phone call from the suspect himself into the
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: discovering witness. The same man occupied all three seats, the
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: protector who had watched the house, the friend next door,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: and the first officer through the window. When this case
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: went to trial, the defense had to consider not with
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: an anonymous patrol officer's report, but with a witness who
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: could tell the jury what the protective perimeter around that
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: house actually looked like from inside it, and how completely
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: the physical evidence failed to show any stranger breaching it.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: The town broke open. Remember what Columbia was? 10,000 people, quiet, safe, church-going,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: And now a triple murder dressed in the language of
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: religious persecution, aimed at the family of a pastor's son
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: who guarded one of the most famous Christian figures in
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: the country. The stalker narrative was not just plausible. It
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: was pre-installed. The police had been surveilling the house because
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: of it. The neighbor detective had been briefed on it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: For months, the entire apparatus of local law enforcement had
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: been oriented toward an external enemy of this family. It
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: took days for that story to die. And this is
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: the middle of our episode. So let me give you
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: this spring that snaps the whole case into a different shape.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: When forensic examiners traced the threatening emails, the ones sent
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: to Joyce Meyer, to her son and to Chris Coleman himself,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: the trail did not lead to an enemy of the ministry.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: It led to Coleman's own laptop. The head of security
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: had been threatening himself. Police announced that both the email
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: evidence and handwriting analysis tied Coleman to the threat campaign
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: and handwriting analysis linked him to something else too. The
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: spray painted messages on the walls of his own house.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: You have paid. Punished. Written, the state would argue, by
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the man who lived there, over the beds of his
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: own family. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: And the countdown flips. Those were never warnings from a stalker.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Prosecutors argued they were installments in a manuscript, months of authorship,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: a villain being written into existence one message at a time,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: so that when May came, the town would already know
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: whom to blame. The camera the police put on the house,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: the detective next door, all of it was the audience
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: the author himself had assembled. And that is also, in
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: the end, what helped destroy him, because the protective perimeter
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: around the house meant investigators knew, with unusual precision, that
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: no stranger had come. The rest of the case assembled
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: with terrible speed. Fourteen days. That is all it took
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: from the discovery of the bodies to the morning of
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: May 19th, 2009, when Chris Coleman was arrested at his
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: parents' home in Chester and charged with three counts of
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: first-degree murder. In between, the funerals had already happened. May 9th.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: at Evergreen Cemetery in Chester, four days after the bodies
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: were found. Here is what the state had built. The threats,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: traced to his laptop and matched to his hand. The
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: affair with Tara Lentz, sitting in his phone records. The
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: explicit messages, a promise ring he had given her, and
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: that promise of divorce papers dated to the very window
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: when the murders happened. The alibi, and this may be
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: the quietest, most devastating piece of all, The prosecution's forensic pathologist, Dr.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: Michael Baden, testified that Cherie and the boys were likely
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: killed hours before Coleman left the house at 5.43. Not
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: after he went to the gym. Before. Which would mean
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: the gym trip was not an alibi at all. It
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: was a performance staged after the fact. The phone calls
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: home ringing into a house where, by the state's theory,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: he already knew no one could answer. And one more thread.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Cell phone tracking showed that on the morning of May 5th,
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Coleman drove home from the gym by a longer route
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: than usual. His normal route ran along Interstate 255, past
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: the Jefferson Barracks Bridge over the Mississippi. Investigators went out
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: and searched that stretch of highway for discarded evidence. No
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: murder weapon was ever definitively recovered and presented as such.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: The route anomaly remained, a man who drove the same
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: roads every day, choosing a different way home on the
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: one morning that mattered. The trial opened on April 25, 2011,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: in Waterloo, Illinois, and the county had a problem you
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: can probably guess. Everyone knew this case. So the jury
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: was bussed in from Perry County, ten women and two
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: men who had not marinated in two years of local coverage.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: For nine days, the state laid out the laptop forensics,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the handwriting matches, Baden's time of death testimony, the cell
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: phone data. And then, it produced Tara Lintz herself, ordered
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: up from Florida to testify. She took the stand wearing
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: the promise ring Coleman had given her, and she told
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the jury about the affair and about the divorce papers
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: promised for May 4th or May 5th. She testified the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: affair began in November 2008, remember that date, because the
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: jury is about to have something to say about it.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Chris Coleman did not testify in his own defense. The
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: deliberations took 15 hours across two days, and inside that
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: room something happened that I find genuinely haunting. Juror Kim
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Ferrari later described it. Most of the jury was convinced,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: but four holdouts wanted more proof. They found it almost
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: by accident, in evidence that had been sitting in the
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: jury room the entire time. Photographs of Coleman and Lentz
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: with printed date stamps reading October 2008. One month before
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: the affair supposedly began. To those four jurors, the photos
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: were proof that even the story of the affair, as
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Coleman had framed it, was a lie, and the exact
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: start of that relationship remains contested in the record to
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: this day. The holdouts came over, and the calendar delivered
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: its final symmetry. The verdict, guilty on all three counts,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: came down on May 5, 2011. Two years to the day.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: The clock that started with an email in November 2008
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: stopped in a courtroom on the second anniversary of the
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: morning Justin Barlow climbed through that window. Outside the courthouse,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: about 150 people from the community had gathered, and when
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the sheriff's car drove Coleman away that evening, they cheered.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Motorists honked their horns. A town that had spent months
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: praying for this family's protection from an invented enemy had
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: come to say goodbye to the man who invented him.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Four days later, on May 9, 2011, Judge Milton Wharton
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: sentenced Chris Coleman to three life sentences without the possibility
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: of parole. And there is a legal footnote here that
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: still stings the prosecutors who work this case. The death
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: penalty was off the table, because Illinois had just abolished
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: capital punishment, effective that July. At sentencing, Prosecutor Chris Reitz
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: asked the question out loud, if not the death penalty
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: for this defendant, then who? The answer, as a matter
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: of Illinois law, was no one, ever again. Let me
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: be precise here, because sloppy retellings get this wrong constantly.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Chris Coleman was never sentenced to death, never sat on
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: death row, Free life terms, no parole. That is the sentence,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: and it has never moved. It has not moved for
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: lack of trying. In January 2015, an Illinois appellate court
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: upheld the conviction and the sentence. In March 2019, a
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: judge granted an evidentiary hearing on Coleman's post-conviction petition, which
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: argued about photo metadata and claimed his trial lawyers were ineffective.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: The judge ruled the metadata was not prejudicial, but let
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the ineffective counsel claim be heard. In July 2020, the
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: court denied the request for a new trial. Coleman appealed
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: that too, and in 2023 the Illinois Appellate Court resolved
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: it against him. He has continued filing motions on his
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: own behalf, without a lawyer, and everyone has failed. No
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: court has ever disturbed the verdict, and Coleman himself has
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: never confessed, not once. In 2018 he gave his only
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: sit-down interview from prison and said he was set up.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: You now know the full record, you can weigh that
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: claim against the laptop, the handwriting, the photographs and the calendar,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: and decide what it is worth. Two coders, and then
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: the ledger. The first belongs to Cherie's family. In December 2012,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: they had the bodies of Cherie, Garette, and Gavin exhumed
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: from Evergreen Cemetery in Chester, where they had been buried
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: among Coleman's and reburied near Cherie's hometown outside Chicago. Think
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: about what that act says. A family so determined to
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: sever their dead from the man who killed them that
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: they moved them across a state. It is the quietest
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: verdict in this story, and maybe the most complete. The
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: second coder is where the man himself is tonight. Coleman
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: was first sent to Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois, and
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: then transferred, for his own safety, out of state entirely,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: to Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin, where he remains
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: under an interstate arrangement. Even among convicts, there is a
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: hierarchy of the unforgivable, and a man who strangled two
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: children sits at the bottom of it. As of today,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the ledger reads, three life sentences without parole, all appeals exhausted,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: All post-conviction claims denied, no retrial pending, no parole possible.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: He is 50 years old this year. The state of
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Illinois expects him to die in custody. Here is what
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: I keep returning to, and it is the thing I
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: want to leave with you. Most murders are failures of control,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: a moment when something breaks. This one was the opposite.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: The state's case described six months of composition, emails drafted
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: and sent to his own employer, a letter mailed to
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: his own house, threats calibrated to build a monster on
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: a schedule, while the woman who slept beside him told
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: her friends she was afraid, and nobody could name the
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: thing she was afraid of, because the thing had spent
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: half a year writing itself an alibi. Sherry Coleman read
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: those threats believing someone out there hated her family. She
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: was wrong only about the distance. And when it was over,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: the author reached for the telephone and, with the scene
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: still sealed behind him, calmly assigned a detective to go
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: find it. The countdown was never a warning. It was
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: a script, and everyone in Columbia had been cast without
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: knowing it. Garrett was eleven. Gavin was nine, Cherie was 31,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: and she had built her life around those boys. They
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: are buried together near Chicago now, under her family's watch,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: far from the name Coleman. He is a number in
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: a Wisconsin prison. They are the story. Next time, we
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: leave the quiet cul-de-sacs entirely and step into a case
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: where the crime was not hidden behind a manufactured enemy,
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: but broadcast in plain sight, where the warnings were public, repeated.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: and ignored by the very institutions built to act on them,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: and where the question is not who wound the clock,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: but why nobody in the room would look at it.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.