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The sense of safety was shattered for the residents of the small town of Columbia, Illinois in May 2009 after a mother & her two young sons were found brutally murdered in their home.
It all began with a frantic phone call that came through at 6:43 am on the morning of Tuesday, May 5, 2009. When Justin Barlow answered his phone, he heard the panicked voice of his neighbor of five years, Chris Coleman. Chris was someone that Justin knew, but not well; a neighbor you would wave to as you climbed in or out of your car.
Chris explained that he was on his way home from the gym & he was concerned about his wife Sheri since she wasn’t answering the phone despite the fact that she was normally awake by that time. Not only was Justin Barlow the Coleman’s neighbor, but he was also a detective sergeant with the Columbia Police Department & aware that Chris had been receiving threatening messages over the past six months.
Chris had gotten up & left for his gym in South County, Missouri at about 5:40 am & despite the fact that he’d been calling & texting Sheri, she hadn’t answered or responded. In 2009, the Coleman family of four consisted of 32-year-old Chris, his wife of twelve years, 31-year-old Sheri & the couple’s two boys, 11-year-old Garrett & 9-year-old Gavin. They lived in a charming, two-story white house in the small town of Columbia, Illinois, a farm town where violent crime was a rarity, 15 miles south of St. Louis.
The Colemans seemed to be the perfect, all-American family; Sheri was a doting mother to her polite, well behaved boys while Chris was the son of a preacher who used his Marine & security experience to get a job at Joyce Meyer Ministries, a Christian, non-profit organization. Joyce Meyer is known throughout the world as a voice for the evangelical movement that with TV & radio programs, earned upwards of $100 million annually.
Chris had known Joyce Meyer since he was a child since his parents often attended her conferences that were held in Illinois. It wasn’t long before Chris began working as her personal bodyguard, earning a comfortable six figure salary while Sheri focused on raising their two boys, but had since began working.
In November 2008, Chris began receiving death threats to his work email account. The first threatening email read, Tell Joyce to stop preaching the bulls-it if I can’t get to Joyce, then I will get to someone closer to her. Chris decided to go to the police department to report the threat & in response, additional patrols were instructed to monitor the Coleman house.
Two months after the first threat, a letter appeared in the Coleman’s mailbox in January 2009 that read, F– You! Deny your God publicly or else. No more opportunities. Time is running out for you & your family!
Each message that followed only escalated in its threatening tone & on April 27, 2009, less than one week before Chris headed out to the gym & became concerned of his wife’s lack of response, a final message was received: Stop today or else. I know your schedule! You can’t hide from me forever. I’m always watching. I know when you leave in the morning & I know when you stay home. Some messages specifically threatened that Chris’ family would be murdered in their sleep.
Since Detective Barlow lived just across the street from the Colemans, he was growing concerned for even his own family’s safety so he decided to mount a camera in his 5-year-old’s bedroom & point it in the direction of the mailbox at the Coleman house which sat 214 feet away. With this, Barlow hoped he would be able to capture the person responsible for leaving the threatening messages.
After Detective Barlow hung up the phone with Chris on that Tuesday morning in May, he walked across the street & peered through the narrow windows that framed the Coleman’s front door, but saw nothing but darkness.
His knocks & repeated ringing of the doorbell went unanswered & meanwhile, another officer arrived & began to walk around the house & came upon an open basement window at the back of the home with the screen removed & propped up against the patio table. As Barlow & the responding officer entered the home through the window, they immediately noted a chemical, paint smell in the air, but found nothing concerning inside the finished basement. When they made their way up to the main floor of the home, they found the source of the paint smell; threatening words were scrawled across the walls in red spray paint that read: Punished, I am always watching.
As the officers made their way up to the second floor of the home where the three bedrooms were situated with the primary bedroom to the left & two boy’s bedrooms to the right, there was another message up the stairway that read, You have paid.
The scene they came upon upstairs will forever haunt Justin & his colleague.
Sheri was lying naked & facedown on her bed with her head hanging over the side of the bed. She had no pulse, her body was stiff with rigor mortis, she had deep bruising across her chest where the blood had pooled after her heart stopped. Two marks ran across her throat likely from where a ligature shifted as she tried to fight her attacker.
The officers then found 11-year-old Garett deceased in his bed. There were disturbing words spray paint on a sheet that was laid over his body that had also transferred to his hand & arm. The skin around the young boy’s eyes & mouth were purple & blue.
9-year-old Gavin was also deceased in his bed in the next bedroom over with vulgar words spray painted across his bedroom walls.
When the officers heard the garage door open, they realized that it was Chris arriving home from the gym. When they met him on the driveway, they instructed him to stay outside & when he was given the devastating news that his family was dead, he sat down, began sobbing & curled into the fetal position.
All three victims’ bodies were in rigor mortis at the time they were discovered; something that begins within two hours & peaks at about twelve hours after death. The color changes to their bodies suggested lividity which results from blood pooling following death which normally happens within hours after death.
Each victim had been strangled to death while they slept by some sort of wire, rope or cord which has never been found. Their toxicology test proved that none of the victims had been given drugs prior to their deaths, thus making them submissive to a killer.
Long strands of hair found on Gavin’s body were consistent with Sheri’s hair which indicated that Sheri was strangled first & the hair was transferred to his body while he was strangled. According to the medical examiner, the ligature would have been applied to the victims for about four to five minutes before brain death occured.
As word of the murders spread, neighbors were left both devastated & terrified. Columbia, Illinois had always been a safe haven for its residents, the type of place where neighbor’s knew each other, where doors were oftentimes left unlocked overnight & where violent crime was a rarity. The community was stunned with the sudden violent loss of Sheri & her two young boys who were a constant figure within the town. The boys could often be seen tossing a football around in the front lawn with their dad.
According to Sheri’s mom, Angela, her daughter grew up to be a beautiful person on both the outside as well as the inside. Her two boys were her entire world. She’d met Chris during a K-9 training seminar at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas while Sheri was in the Air Force & Chris was a Marine. They were both 20-years-old & despite their young ages, they were immediately connected & married within months. Soon after, their son, Garett was born & two years later, Gavin was born. Following the birth of her sons, Sheri became a stay-at-home mom. 11-year-old Garrett was more of a quiet thinker while 9-year-old Gavin was an outgoing, social butterfly like Sheri.
As the house was being processed for evidence, a very distraught Chris was brought to the station while investigators combed through the family’s phones & computers hoping to find the person who had been sending the threatening messages in the months leading up to the deaths of his family.
During their conversation, detectives couldn’t ignore the fact that Chris hadn’t once asked how his family died. As investigators spoke with Chris, trying to get some insight as to his relationship with Sheri, Chris admitted that they sometimes had issues communicating, but denied that he’d been unfaithful to his wife.
However, as he continued to talk, he began to mention a woman named Tara who lived in Florida who he’d been talking to a lot lately. Tara Lintz was a cocktail waitress & an old high school friend of Sheri’s, but Chris insisted that their relationship was nothing more than a close friendship. The two met in November 2008 when the Coleman family was in Orlando for a family vacation, the same month he incidentally began receiving death threats. Almost immediately, Chris & Tara began texting & calling each other constantly.
While Illinois detectives were speaking with Chris, Detective Shannon Halstead from St. Petersburg, Florida made contact with Tara to verify Chris’ story & came to find that Tara’s versions of events were far different than the story Chris was telling. After she handed over her electronic devices, it was very clear that Chris & Tara were in a romantic relationship.
It was in December 2008 when their relationship became physical after Chris dropped Joyce off in Florida for a cruise, he met up with Tara at a hotel in Orlando. Moving forward, they also met up in Arizona & Hawaii while Chris was traveling for work. Despite all of this information, Chris told detectives that he didn’t view his relationship with Tara as an affair since in his mind, an affair is when you’re like living with them & you plan to get married & everything.
Investigators believed that Chris’ affair was a very strong motive for murder, but with evidence lacking at this point, Chris was allowed to leave the station after six hours of conversation.
Investigators later came to learn that Chris had taken the time to text Tara from his wife & sons’ funeral to tell her that he missed her & loved her. Tara fully believed that Chris planned to leave his marriage in order to marry her.
Chris’ parents, Pastor Ron Coleman & Connie were stunned that their son had strayed from his marriage but insisted that it had nothing to do with the murders. Connie was adamant that her son was a gentle, quiet man who would never have been capable of harming his own children & wife.
Meanwhile, neighbors within the Columbia community came together & created a memorial within the subdivision to honor Sheri, Garett & Gavin by planting trees & placing a bench in their honor. As news began to spread around town of Chris’ affair, sympathy faded away for the once perceived grieving father & husband.
Police found it very odd that despite the fact that Chris had been receiving death threats directed at his family for six months, he’d left the basement window unlocked. Had a killer actually entered the home, they would have done so through the window since there was no sign of forced entry. The DNA found under Sheri’s nails was a partial profile that could have belonged to Chris as well as another male with a similar DNA pattern. None of the DNA found at the home conclusively pointed to a killer.
When Detective Barlow’s cameras were reviewed, there were no strange cars or people seen going down the street during the timeframe in which the murders occurred. Chris failed to mention that he installed his own security camera at his house, but when investigators checked them, the recorder was missing.
Barlow’s camera depicted Chris leaving for the gym at 5:43 am, Barlow arriving at the Coleman home at 6:51 am after receiving the call from Chis & Chris returning from the gym at 6:56 am. When Chris spoke with Barlow on the phone at 6:43 am, he told him he was crossing the Jefferson Barracks Bridge from Missouri into Illinois & he would be home in five minutes. However, it took Chris 13 minutes to get home despite the fact that the drive should have taken no more than seven minutes.
Investigators found it odd that Chris placed the first call to Sheri to wake her up at 5:43 am as he was pulling out of the driveway & wondered why he wouldn’t have just woken her up before leaving. They found no pattern to suggest he routinely called to wake her up while he was on his way or at the gym.
Sheri’s autopsy proved that she’d fought her attacker that left her with two black eyes while the boys had no defensive wounds. Detectives noted scratches on Chris’ arms, something he was trying to hide with a blanket under the guise that he was cold despite the fact that the interview room was very warm. When asked about them, Chris said he may have gotten them that morning while he was on the gurney in the ambulance since he was hitting a pillow in grief.
When Chris’ phone was inspected, investigators found x-rated photos & videos that Chris & Tara sent each other. He’d also made note of all of her measurements & the things she liked so he would be able to buy her gifts. He even noted the name of their first child if it were a girl, Zoe Lynn Coleman. Chris also made a notation on his computer that November 5, 2008 was the date that Tara changed his life & only nine days later the suspicious, threatening messages began appearing.
After Chris submitted a sample of his handwriting for experts to compare to what was written on the walls of the home in spray paint, the crime scene lab came back & proved that they were a match.
With the evidence gathered, Chris Coleman was arrested two weeks after his family was murdered & charged with three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of his wife & two sons.
As the case moved toward the trial which began in April 2011, Prosecutor Ed Parkinson believed that after Chris Coleman met & started his relationship with Tara he decided he wanted a new life. Because of the pre-trial publicity, jury members were bussed in from a county an hour & a half away.
Prosecutor Parkinson felt that the most difficult thing to get jurors to accept was that parents sometimes kill their kids. Chris Coleman gave the impression that he was a good guy, a family man; how could he be capable of murdering his own children?
Chris attempted to maintain that after he & Sheri began seeing a counselor, their relationship was in a good place while Sheri’s friends painted an entirely different picture. Sheri had cried to her friends after Chris said hurtful things like, I never loved you. He told her that he wanted to leave her because she & the boys were hindering his career.
Parkinson believed that Chris was hoping that he could push Sheri far enough so she would leave him so he wouldn’t lose his successful career with Joyce Meyer Ministries who frown on divorce & have a zero tolerance policy for adultery.
Sheri confided in a friend that Chris was cheating on her with her best friend from high school, but regardless, she refused to get a divorce. She also told another close friend that if anything ever happened to her, Chris was responsible & only months later, Sheri & the boys were gone.
Some wonder what the tipping point was on May 5 that led to Chris to potentially act out in such violence toward his own family. They learned that only the night before their murders, he told Tara that he planned to serve his wife divorce papers the following day. He’d actually intended to give them to her on Monday, but they needed to be fixed after Sheri’s name had been spelled incorrectly.
Tara & Chris planned to go on a Caribbean cruise on June 14 & had gone as far as to set a tentative wedding date for January 2010. Tara had been shopping around for engagement rings, registering for wedding gifts & house hunting for homes in the St. Louis area that they would share after they got married.
Tara Lintz testified that she & Chris were constantly in touch, often professing their love to one another. Prosecutor Parkinson believed that Tara had nothing to do with the murders & based on the evidence, she had no idea that his family was in danger, but the divorce clearly had to happen before they could officially be together.
A major factor in the case was Shari, Garett & Gavin’s time of death. Chris told investigators that his wife was alive when he left for the gym that morning while evidence indicated that they’d been dead for some time. According to their autopsies, they were likely killed between 11 pm on May 4 & 3 am on May 5 & were absolutely dead before Chris left for the gym.
When they referenced the threatening messages he’d been receiving, the prosecution’s computer experts determined that they’d been typed on Chris’ laptop from an account called destroychris@gmail.com. In the threatening letters, the word opportunities was frequently misspelled as oppurtunities the experts found several documents on Chris’ computer with the same misspelling. There were also similarities in grammatical errors in Chris’ other writings such as misplacing apostrophes in words (wont’, dont’, doesnt’).
A can of red spray paint that was used to write the threatening messages on the walls of the home had been purchased at a local hardware store months before on February 9, 2009 with a computerized signature by Christopher Coleman. However, no trace of paint was found on his body & no cans were found in the home.
The forensic pathologist testified that the violence that led to the death of Sheri, Garett & Gavin would have been intimate. The ligature would have been held tightly around each of their necks for about four to five minutes.
As the jurors were making their deliberations, they began looking more closely at a photo that depicted Chris & Tara kissing & noticed the photo was taken on October 21, 2008. They realized that this date did not match the date that Chris said their affair began in December. That proved that if he lied about this, he was capable of lying about anything.
After fifteen hours of deliberations, the jury found Chris Coleman guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. The crowd that was gathered outside the courthouse erupted in cheers. The verdict was handed down on the second anniversary of Sheri, Garett & Gavin’s murders, May 5, 2011. Chris was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, something that he maintained he was innocent of.
The community of Columbia, Illinois, where violent crime had been virtually non-existent, was forever changed after the murders of three innocent victims by their own husband & father. The family home has since been sold & renovated. Sheri’s friends & family wanted her & the boys to be remembered for how they lived rather than how they died. Garett was an energetic boy who loved video games & sports while Gavin was creative, thoughtful & always smiling. Sheri was known to be a devoted mother who always put her boys’ needs in front of her own.
The murders of the Coleman is a tragic reminder that even the most picture-perfect lives can be hiding the deepest darkness.
References:
- CBS News: The writing on the wall
- CBS News: Man accused of killing family texts girlfriend from wife’s funeral
- Illinois Official Reports: People v. Coleman
- Merriam-Webster: Lividity
- Medium: A perfect life shattered: How a secret affair led to family murder
- St. Louis: A family erased: The Chris Coleman story
- MedicineNet: Occurrence of rigor mortis
- Cult Education Institute: Meyer received millions, records show
- YouTube: 48 Hours: The writing on the wall
