Up next, high-profile
threats terrify a community.
And there was nothing like this
in living memory.
The source
of the threats can't be found.
They're chasing a ghost
at this point.
Then, to everyone's horror,
a family is brutally m*rder*d.
They were found
strangled in their beds.
They had ligature marks
around their necks.
Detectives employ
an unusual tactic.
They target the k*ller's use of
language as a way to expose him.
We are able to analyze
and demonstrate what's going on
in language evidence,
and that's really
an advance for justice.
I said the Bible says
if we chase God,
seek ye first
the kingdom of god,
and his righteousness and all
of these things will be added.
Joyce Meyer is one of
the best-known televangelists
in America,
the head of
an international empire
that generates more
than $100 million a year.
She's an important leader
in the evangelical movement.
She connects particularly
with women
and people who come from
difficult backgrounds
and teaches them
to build themselves up,
and she uses Christianity
as part of her message.
Like many public figures,
Joyce Meyer
has personal security,
and her team was headed up
by ex-Marine Chris Coleman.
It was a six-figure job
and a perfect fit
for the 32-year-old
married father
of two young boys.
His dad was
an evangelical minister.
It was a born-again ministry.
Growing up through Christ
was a very big part
of Chris Coleman's life.
But Chris' dream job
took a scary detour
in the fall of 2008.
He and other members of
Joyce Meyer's staff
began receiving
threatening e-mails.
These were directed
not only at Joyce Meyer
but at Chris Coleman
and his family.
Five hateful e-mails
appeared in the inbox of people
at Joyce Meyer Ministry.
These e-mails
were so frightening.
There's a line I'll never forget
in one of them...
"I will k*ll them all
in their sleep."
Chris immediately told superiors
of the threats to his family.
He also told a neighbor,
Justin Barlow.
He was a local police officer.
He knew this family,
so when the threats came in,
he wanted to help them.
He was somebody who knew
where their house was.
He watched the house.
Joyce Meyer ministries
stepped up security,
but the e-mail threats
kept coming.
In April of 2009, about six
months after the first thr*at,
the Coleman family found
a message in their mailbox.
And it says,
"This is your last warning.
Your worst nightmare
is about to happen!"
And it ends that way
in all caps.
The thr*at letter
had no postmark,
meaning it was dropped off
in person.
That would be a dangerous person
who would show up in person
at your mailbox.
That would be somebody
who would be stalking you.
That would be somebody
who should be in jail.
The Coleman family was on edge
but attempted to live
a normal life.
Before dawn on May 5th,
Chris followed
his usual routine.
He went to the gym
for his early-morning workout.
About an hour later, he made
a frantic call to his neighbor,
Detective Justin Barlow.
Chris was all panicky,
saying that
he had been working out
and he hadn't been able
to reach his wife.
Could Barlow go over
and check things out?
Barlow called for backup,
strapped on his g*n,
and went across the street
to the Colemans' house.
The detective could not
enter the house.
He found an open window
in the back of the house.
Alarmed, Detective Barlow
waited for backup to arrive.
A few minutes later,
Barlow and another officer
entered through the open window.
The house was silent,
but something was clearly wrong.
And they saw lurid
red painted words on the walls,
and it was like,
"Bitch, you are punished,"
"You have paid,"
things like that.
The team made its way
to the upstairs bedrooms
and soon realized
that whoever promised to harm
the Coleman family had
gone through with the thr*at.
What they found
was the most chilling thing
any police officer
would ever find,
which would be two dead children
and a dead wife.
The story was
shocking enough to everybody.
I mean, just having to deal with
the images of those kids,
I've never gotten over of it.
Columbia, Illinois,
sits on the Mississippi River,
across from St. Louis.
Despite its proximity
to the big city,
it doesn't have a history
of major crimes,
so no one anticipated
anything like the brutal murders
of 31-year-old Sheri Coleman
and her two sons,
and his 9-year-old brother, Gavin.
Not only were
the home's walls spray-painted
with ominous messages,
little Gavin's bed spray-
painted with profanity, as well,
with the 9-year-old
lying there in the bed.
It was obvious that all three
had been strangled.
They all had the same
kind of ligature marks.
I think the thinking was
that Sheri went first,
and she did struggle.
Sheri had a black eye
and extensive defensive wounds.
It was clear
she fought for her life.
There was no sign of a struggle
with either of the boys.
Chris Coleman,
who had been at the gym
for an early-morning workout,
arrived at his home
to find police
and first responders
already there.
Chris Coleman tried
to get into the house,
and he was kept
out of the house.
And he was told there in the
front yard that it was too late.
They just said,
"They didn't make it, Chris,"
and he kind of sank down
and was sitting on the floor.
And he sobbed for a while,
and then he called his dad.
And that always hit me hard
because this man
called his dad for comfort.
Inside the house,
police examined the messages
spray-painted on the walls.
They were lurid, threatening,
loaded with profanity,
and were clearly linked
to the threatening messages
sent to the Coleman family
and to Joyce Meyer Ministries.
So it looked like
there was some maniacal person
who was out
to k*ll her bodyguard.
He was the person in charge
of protecting her.
He was the person in charge
of her entire security.
The spray-painted
threats all over the house
indicated a k*ller
staging the scene
or a fanatic intent sending
a message... or both.
There was even spray-paint
on one of the boys.
The spray-painting
was so haphazard
that some of it ended up
on glass encasing a photograph
on one of the walls.
When you have spray-paint
on the wall,
it's hard to extract
that spray-paint,
but when spray-paint
is on glass,
which it was on this case
because it was on a picture,
it's easier to take
that spray-paint
that's on that glass
and analyze it.
Chris Coleman, as part
of standard operating procedure,
was brought in for questioning.
He said he left his sleeping
family before 6:00 that morning.
Chris' departure was recorded
by a neighbor's security camera.
He left the house at 5:43.
Since he was apparently
the last person
to see his family
before the murders,
his police interrogation
lasted hours.
Detectives searched
his phone and computers
and got some information
they hadn't expected.
As the hours unfolded
at the police station,
it was revealed to Chris that
they knew that he had an affair.
While they were
interviewing Chris,
they actually had detectives
going to Florida
to interview his mistress.
She was 31-year-old Tara Lintz,
someone the Colemans
had known for years.
Tara Lintz was Sheri's really,
really close friend
in high school,
and they even looked alike.
They were pretty.
They both had dark long hair.
Chris met Tara through Sheri.
They had stayed close,
and she was still flirty.
She was still single.
When told of the murders,
Tara Lintz immediately asked
if she needed a lawyer,
which investigators
found suspicious.
They found out
very little from Tara, actually.
They track her down in Florida,
where she was
a cocktail waitress
at a dog track racing park.
She didn't speak a lot, was not
all that helpful to the case.
A lot of information was coming
into this case very quickly,
but a major question
remained unanswered.
If the Colemans were the target,
why had one member
of the family,
presumably the primary target, survived?
In the aftermath
of his family's murders,
a routine background check
on Chris Coleman showed
he had been having
a passionate extramarital affair
with a family friend
named Tara Lintz.
The most important discovery
about their affair
was on Chris' own work laptop.
They found in the trash
a note that had all of
Tara's likes and dislikes.
He wrote November 5th as
"the day Tara changed my life."
When confronted with
evidence of the affair,
Chris attempted to deny it.
Chris Coleman starts
to admit to this affair,
but he refuses
to call it an affair.
He goes, "It's not an affair.
An affair is when you want
to live together
and you get married."
But that's not the
story Tara Lintz told police.
She said Chris told her
his marriage was over.
He was promising her that he was
going to get his vasectomy
reversed so they could have
a child together.
They had a very torrid
love affair.
It was something very intense
and passionate.
The problem for Chris was that
if an extramarital affair
ended his marriage,
it would also end
the job he loved.
People had been saying
that Chris was forced to do this
because Joyce Meyer would have
fired him for getting a divorce.
That wouldn't have been
the problem.
The adultery would have.
The possibility
that Chris Coleman,
a deeply religious,
high-ranking member
of Joyce Meyer's staff,
had k*lled his own family was
impossible for many to believe.
But people who study what are
known as family annihilators
say that while it might not make
sense to the general population,
it makes perfect sense
to the K*llers.
In the
family-annihilation situation,
there is a logic to that
in and of itself.
People are motivated by trying
to get to a place that they view
as less uncomfortable
than the place they're in now,
even if the road they take
isn't one
that the average person
would have thought
was the rational
or more comfortable way to go.
Those who study this phenomenon
say many family annihilators
have convinced themselves
that murdering their family
is a more loving
or humane option
than the collapse of the family.
Sometimes, when we
see parents k*lling children,
the thought is that they're
doing something for the kids.
There are many instances where
parents authentically believe
that the kids will actually
be better off not alive.
And, of course,
some family annihilators
simply think
they can get away with m*rder.
I think there is
a lot of, you know,
potential ego involved there,
because without
that assuredness,
you'd imagine one would not even
attempt something like this,
even if you had
thought about it.
Meanwhile, back in Illinois,
the initial examination
of the victims' bodies
raised a host of questions.
The bodies appeared to be
in rigor mortis
when they were found,
according to the police.
Rigor mortis,
or post-mortem rigidity,
starts soon after
a person stops breathing.
The lack of oxygen
causes the muscles to stiffen.
Depending on
a number of factors,
including ambient temperature,
the stiffening generally begins
about two hours after death.
If Chris Coleman last saw
his wife alive
when he left the house at 5:43
and she was found
in the beginning stages
of rigor mortis
about an hour later,
then something appeared
to be wrong with his story.
People wondered,
did Chris Coleman
k*ll his family?
People seemed to believe
that it's always the husband.
People seem to believe
that Chris Coleman was the guy,
but we didn't have
the evidence yet.
But some
crucial evidence was provided
by Chris Coleman himself.
He stuck to his timeline
for the morning of the murders.
By now, the victims' bodies had
undergone further examination,
and the times of death
were estimated
at about 3:00 in the morning,
which put Chris,
by his own account,
in the house
at the time of the murders.
Since times of death
would almost certainly
be disputed at trial,
detectives turn
to other potential evidence,
the spray-paint at the scene.
An analysis
of the chemical structure
and the color dyes
yielded an identification.
The brand was Rust-Oleum.
Rust-Oleum was able to look
at the binders
and the resins in this paint
and determine,
"Oh, this Candy Apple Red.
This is the type of paint it is
based on that unique formula."
Investigator were able to track
credit-card purchases
right down to the time.
They found Chris Coleman
bought a particular brand
of spray-paint
at a south county hardware store
on February 9th,
at exactly 1:46 p.m.
But, of course,
lots of other people
bought this paint.
Investigators wanted something
more definitive
and found it buried
deep in the messages
that threatened
the Coleman family with m*rder.
The Coleman family
murders had a set of clues
not seen in many homicides,
the words
in the thr*at messages.
Detectives turned
to Robert Leonard,
a highly regarded
forensic linguist.
Forensic linguistics is simply
a term that we use
when we apply
the science of linguistics,
which is a very
well-established science,
to matters of the law,
so typically,
this could be anything
in which language
is the evidence.
Leonard got into
linguistics in an unusual way.
He was an original member
of the rock band Sha Na Na...
an opening act at Woodstock...
and became fascinated
by the language used
in the band's contracts.
We got signed
to a record company,
but we weren't getting the money
that we thought our contract
said we should.
So I went to our lawyers
and to my father, and they said,
"Read the contract.
Read the contract."
For the Coleman case,
Leonard did what's known
as a KQ analysis.
"K" stands for documents
for which the writer is known.
"Q" stands for documents
where authorship is in question.
In Chris Coleman's writing
before the murders,
he regularly misplaced the
apostrophe in numerous words.
Whoever wrote the threats did
the exact same thing repeatedly.
Analysts call this
"apostrophe reversal."
This is exceedingly rare,
yet we find it in both
the Q document and the K.
Another common feature
between Chris Coleman's writings
and the question samples
were the misspellings
of what are called
"fused words."
Something like "book tour"
is formed
as one word instead of two.
The writer did the same thing
with the words "good time"
and a variety of other words
that in context
would normally be separated.
The writer
of the question documents
and Chris Coleman
both had a lot of trouble
with fused and unfused words.
But perhaps most telling,
in both sets of writings,
the writer always misspelled
the word "opportunity."
The suspected k*ller
had misspelled "opportunities"
in the death threats
that the family had received,
and they had gone back
and looked at writings
from Chris Coleman
and found that Chris also
spelled "opportunities"
in the same way
that the k*ller had.
In may of 2009,
Chris Coleman went to trial.
A horrifying but very real tale
of sex, lies,
and m*rder in suburbia.
The married Chris wanted
to start a new life
with his mistress,
but he was afraid
of losing his job.
The jury was told a
story that nearly defied belief.
If Chris Coleman sent
the threatening messages,
that meant he'd spent six months
planning to k*ll his family.
This video was sh*t by
his neighbor's security camera
the day before the murders.
Chris Coleman
played catch with his sons.
Thinking back at the timeline
of that, it's just haunting.
In fact, prosecutors believe
Chris took off work
the day before the murders
to spend
one final day with his children,
knowing that within hours,
he would k*ll them.
Joyce Meyer testified
that Chris Coleman
was such a dedicated employee
that he did not miss
a day of work for 11 years,
until May 4th,
the day before the m*rder.
Chris Coleman called in sick.
Joyce Meyer said that was
the only time
she could ever remember
Chris Coleman calling in sick.
According to prosecutors,
Chris waited
until everyone was asleep.
They believe he k*lled
his wife first.
The evidence shows
she fought for her life.
Once she was out of the way,
he strangled his sons.
As one of the newspapers said,
the wife fought back.
The little boys did not,
but why should they?
It was just their father.
In an attempt
to throw off police,
Chris spray-painted the threats
all over the house
with paint later tied back
directly to his credit card.
He opened the back window
to create a fake way
for the k*ller
to enter the house,
then he left for the gym in
an attempt to create an alibi.
What he failed to realize
was that in all the time it took
for him to stage the scene,
rigor mortis began
to take hold of his victims,
and that, say prosecutors,
exposed his story as a lie.
Chris Coleman never
thought anything through.
Having had all that ego swelled
by being
Joyce Meyer's bodyguard,
I think that was why he thought
he could pull this off
and thought it was okay.
It's like you end one world,
one life,
and that includes the people
in it, to start a new one.
Chris, do you have any comment?
was found guilty of three counts
of first-degree m*rder
and sentenced to life in prison.
Tara Lintz was found to have
no connection to the murders.
Despite
the overwhelming evidence,
Chris Coleman still claims
he's not the k*ller.
It serves the purpose
to maintain his innocence.
Perhaps if he's
going to be in jail
no matter what, playing the card
of the innocent victim,
which is essentially
the role he's played
since this happened,
he's been the victim.
You know, his family was k*lled.
He's the poor husband and father
who lost everybody he loved.
It was not one single thing
that convicted him.
It was a death
by a thousand blows.
This was a case of why good
police work is so important,
and good police work
really happened in this case.
Every single police investigator
in this case
found one thing
that helped lead back to Chris.