Woman convicted in Clear Lake quadruple murder case

The fucked-up suburb where I lived and went to high school is in the news again today. Last time it was because it got the shit knocked out of it by Hurricane Ike. The infrastructure having sufficiently recovered to stage a murder trial, a jury yesterday convicted a graduate of said Clear Lake High School in the quadruple murder in 2003 of several other youths, some of them her classmates, in a disastrous home-invasion robbery.

The so-called Clear Lake Area, a suburb of Houston, had a real run of infamy around that time, starting with the day in 2001 Andrea Yates killed all her children, following up with the day a year later when Clara Harris ran over her husband in the parking lot of the same Hilton hotel that all the weather reporters stay in when hurricanes hit. I prophetically set several of my short stories in the suburb, stories written a few years before these incidents, in which I proposed that the Clear Lake Area is actually a pit of violence and horror just waiting to erupt. Clearly I was correct.

technorati: Clear Lake City, Clear Lake High School, murder, Christine Paolilla, suburbs, Houston