Discover Top Posts Tagged with #chris coleman

ANA POPOVIC @anapopovic #TurnMyLuck #Power #NewAlbum #ArtisteXclusiveRecords #ButhelBurns #BluesGuitar #FemaleGuitarPlayer #UKDates

Widely regarded as one of the worlds most viable female guitarists ANA POPOVIC has built her career on defining and describing, on her own terms, the essence of American music, simultaneously pushing limits, bending genres, and reinventing her music and herself with each new record. Back in 2015 we listed Ana as one of our Five Fabulous Women of the Blues… Not unexpectedly, she has received…

View On WordPress

#Ana Popovic #Ana Popovic Power #anapopovic #ArtisteXclusive #best female blues players #Buthel Burns #Chris Coleman #contemporary blues #Fabulous Women of the Blues #female blues player #Jeremy Bishop Hicks #neil mach #propulsatory #raw ramp #rawramp #Turn My Luck

The Murder of the Colemans

At 6:43 am of May 5, 2009, Chris Coleman called a neighbor, who was a police officer, asking him to check on his wife, Sheri, and his two sons, Garrett (11) and Gavin (9). Chris told him he’d left an hour ago to go to the gym and had been calling Sheri to wake her up, but no one was answering the phone.

The neighbor, Detective Sergeant Justin Barlow, understood why Chris was worried. Chris worked as the bodyguard of popular but controversial TV evangelist Joyce Meyer, and since November 2008 he’d been receiving increasingly threatening emails against him and his family and one letter delivered directly at his house. The anonymous sender claimed he would kill Chris’ family in their sleep if Meyer didn’t stop spreading her message.

By the time Sergeant Barlow arrived to the Colemans’ house in Columbia, Illinois, other policemen had arrived, and they encountered a horrific scene. Sheri and the boys were all dead in their beds. The cause of death was determined to be ligature strangulation. Messages were spray painted in red all over the house, including on Gavin’s bed, which read things like “Punished”, “I am always watching” and “Fuck you”.

Chris arrived shortly after the police entered the house. When he was told his family hadn’t make it, he started sobbing, but didn’t ask how they’d died. He followed the cops to the police station to give a statement, and was fully cooperative. He claimed that Sheri had been alive by the time he left for the gym, which meant that the killer had to have been waiting for him to leave the house to go in and strangle the Coleman’s.

As you can probably guess, cops were instantly suspicious of Chris Coleman. They noticed red marks on his arms, which he claimed he didn’t know how he’d get. The officers who saw the bodies believed they were too cold and rigid to have died in the past hour. Chris’ story was full of strange details too. For example, he said he’d started calling his wife right after driving out of the house that morning, why not just wake her up before leaving the house? He’d called his neighbor when he was only 5 minutes away from the house, which suggested to the cops that he’d wanted them to find the bodies before he did to strengthen his alibi. Could it be that he’d been writing those threatening emails himself in an elaborate setup to get rid of his family?

Other evidence started piling up against Chris. Although initially he denied it, it was revealed that he’d been having an affair with a friend of Sheri called Tara Lintz. Tara told cops that they had started their relationship in November 2008 (same month the emails started coming) and that Chris had told her he would present divorce papers to Sheri the same day she ended up getting murdered. In fact, the couple had even decided the date of their future marriage (January 2010) and the name they would give to their future child, among other things. The cherry on top was Chris’ classy move of texting his lover during his wife and kids’ funeral, telling her how much he missed her.

Friends of Sheri would later say that she’d told them Chris had been talking about divorce but was afraid that it would cost him his high paying job with Joyce Meyer. They also claimed that Sheri had said if something happened to her to look at Chris as the responsible one, and that he had accused her and the kids of ruining his career. There was at least one testimony of potential abuse, even though the Colemans had gone through counseling set up by Joyce and seemed to be getting along better.

Investigators were able to confirm that the account [email protected], which had been used to send the emails, had been created on Chris’ laptop. Another telling sign to them that he was the author was his tendency to misspell the word “opportunities” as “oppurtunites,” which also appeared in the letters.

Chris Coleman was charged with three counts of first degree murder on May 2009. At trial, several witnesses testified to the state of the bodies when found, saying they had been clearly dead for several hours. Only the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsies, Dr. Raj Nanduri, declined to give an estimated time of death, but then said she thought it could have been from 3 to 5 am (Chris had left home at around 5:43 am). Another pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden who had investigated the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, testified that they had to have died before 5:43 am because of the lividity and rigor mortis of the bodies.

Through video testimony, Joyce Meyer confirmed that if she’d found out Chris was in an adulterous affair while still married, his job would have been in trouble. The defense poked as much holes as they could in the theories, and insisted that Chris was innocent. When deliberations started, the jury was at first fairly divided but one little detail turned the tide. Although the defense had successfully blocked some explicit images of Chris with Tara, the thumbnails were still in the list of evidence provided to the jurors. With a magnifying glass they requested to the court, they noticed that the date stamp in some of the pictures was October 2008, meaning that both Chris and Tara had lied about when their relationship started. This ruined for them all the defense’s credibility and they found him guilty. He got three concurrent life sentences.

After having his appeals rejected, in April of 2018, Chris Coleman filed a petition for post conviction relief, which addresses violations of a defendant’s constitutional rights. He cited “ineffective counsel, denial of due process and actual innocence”, and said that the jury shouldn’t have had access to those pictures, since they weren’t in the allowed evidence. In March 2019, a judge granted Coleman the chance for a new evidentiary hearing but there hasn’t been any decisions made on whether he’ll get a new trial or not.

Sources and further information:

- Article “A Family Erased”.

- Book “One last Kiss”.

- Court Junkie Episode “A Tragedy in Columbia, Illinois”

- A former cop thinks Coleman is innocent and his family was killed by everyone’s usual suspect, serial killer Ed Edwards (please don’t believe this)

- Chris Coleman appeals conviction

- Earlier appeal denied