Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At about a quarter to seven on the morning of May 5, 2009, Detective Sergeant Justin Barlow’s phone rang. It was his neighbor from across the street, Chris Coleman.
Chris said he was driving home from the gym and was crossing the JB Bridge over the Mississippi. He had been calling his wife, Sheri, and she wasn’t picking up. She should have been up by now. The boys had school.
Could Barlow go over and check on them?
Barlow said he would. He knew why Chris was worried. For six months, someone had been threatening to kill Chris Coleman’s family.
The perfect family
The Colemans lived in a two-story house on a quiet street in Columbia, Illinois, a small town just south of St. Louis. Chris, 32, was a former Marine and the son of a preacher. Sheri, 31, was a stay-at-home mom. They had met during military training in a K-9 unit and had been married for twelve years.
Their sons were Garett, 11, and Gavin, 9. Garett was the quiet one. Gavin was outgoing, “a social butterfly,” like his mother.
“I always thought of them as the American family,” one neighbor said later. “The perfect family.”
Chris was head of security for Joyce Meyer, the TV evangelist whose ministry near St. Louis reaches millions around the world. He traveled with her and made more than $100,000 a year.
The threats
In November 2008, the threats started.
The first ones came by email to Chris’s work account at the ministry. They attacked Joyce Meyer and her preaching. Then they turned to Chris’s family. “If I can’t get to Joyce,” one read, “then I will get to someone close to her.” Another, a detective remembered later, was very specific: the writer would kill Chris’s wife and children in their sleep.
Chris took the emails to the Columbia Police Department. The department put extra patrols on the Colemans’ street.
In January 2009, the threats came to the house. A typed note turned up in the family’s mailbox.
On April 27, 2009, a final note arrived. “Stop today or else,” it said. “I know your schedule. You can’t hide from me forever.”
That was when Detective Barlow decided to do more than drive by. He mounted a camera in his own five-year-old’s bedroom window and pointed it straight at the Colemans’ mailbox, about 214 feet away. If someone came to leave another note, he wanted their face on tape.
May 5, 2009
The camera was running on the morning Chris called.
Barlow and another officer went over. Nobody answered the front door. Around the side of the house, they found a basement window open, with the screen out. They climbed in.
“The first thing I remember was the smell of spray paint,” Barlow said.
Just inside, someone had sprayed words across the walls in red paint. One message said “Punished.” Going up the stairs to the bedrooms, there was more, in big dripping letters above the banister: “U have paid.”
Upstairs, in three bedrooms, they found Sheri, Garett and Gavin. All three were in their beds. All three had been strangled.
Chris pulled into the driveway a few minutes later. Officers stopped him outside. When Barlow told him his family hadn’t made it, Chris sat down on the driveway and started sobbing. He said he felt like he was going to throw up. Then, Barlow said, he curled up on the ground.
A team of 25 detectives from the regional Major Case Squad moved in. They started tracking down people across the country who hated Joyce Meyer.
“You guys haven’t told me”
That same day, Chris sat down in an interview room at the police station. He was there for about six hours. The camera in the corner recorded all of it.
He walked the detectives through his morning: up at 5:30, out the door around 5:40, texts to Sheri from the gym. “Time to get the kids up.”
A detective asked if anyone in all those threatening emails stood out to him.
“I don’t have any clue,” Chris said. “I wish I knew. If I had just been there this morning.”
Asked how he thought his family had died, he answered: “No idea. You guys haven’t told me.” The detectives noticed something else. In all those hours, he never asked.
They noticed his arms, too. There were scratches on them. At one point Chris said he was cold and asked for a blanket. Detectives said later the room was warm. The only part of his body he covered with it was his arms. He would later say he got the scratches taking down a satellite dish.
Then they asked about other women.
Chris said there was nobody. He mentioned a friend in Florida he had been talking to “a ton lately.” Her name was Tara Lintz, a cocktail waitress in St. Petersburg. She was one of Sheri’s old friends from high school. “Just a friend,” Chris said. “Someone to talk to.”
While he was still in that room, St. Petersburg police knocked on Tara’s door. She handed over her BlackBerry and her laptop. They were full of photos, videos and emails. She had a wedding to Chris Coleman on her calendar.
Detectives went back in and told Chris they knew about the affair. He admitted some of their conversations “probably” wouldn’t have been approved by his wife.
It was a motive. It wasn’t proof. After six hours, Chris Coleman walked out of the police station a free man.
Meanwhile, the warrants were already signed. Investigators had seized the family’s computers, including Chris’s laptop. The hunt for the person behind the threats was about to lead somewhere nobody in that town expected.
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