 Police in Columbia, Illinois, walked into a house of horrors on the morning of May 5, 2009. 31-year-old Sherri Coleman and her son's 11-year-old Garrett and 9-year-old Gavin have been strangled to death in their beds. It would take two years and thousands of hours of police work before they would have justice. When the crime scene was discovered, all eyes were on Chris Coleman, the father of the family. But could a father really strangle his wife and both of his young sons in order to hang on to a high-paying job and a new mistress? Stick around to find out. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Ty Nott. Here on True Crime Stories, I do my best to cover true crime cases, many of which you've never heard of, and share the stories of some of the world's most disturbing killers. But more importantly, it's my goal to share the stories of the victims and their families and their search for closure after being subjected to some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. So if you'd like to support my work here on True Crime Stories, all I ask is that you hit the like button and subscribe. It's totally free and helps spread awareness for these cases. But with that, let's get started. Sherri Weiss was just 21-years-old back in 1997. She had been enjoying her single life, living in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is obviously a town that doesn't need much of an introduction. As one of the largest cities in Texas and certainly one of the largest in the United States, San Antonio is home to around 1.5 million people. Out of those 1.5 million people, Sherri happened to meet her future husband, Chris Coleman, while he was training at the Lackland Air Force Base back in May of 1997. During their time at the base, the two attended the same canine training seminar and hit it off immediately. The two began dating soon after and the relationship picked up the pace shockingly fast. Within just a few months of dating, Sherri learned that she was pregnant with her first son, Garrett. Considering the two planned on spending the rest of their lives together, they didn't hesitate to get married after hearing about their upcoming child. Chris Coleman had grown up halfway across the country in Monroe County, Illinois. He was the son of Ron and Connie Coleman, both of whom were avid members of their local church and served as pastors there. Joyce Meyer also lived in the area and worked as a televangelist, basically a preacher who works almost exclusively on television. Joyce was also the head of an international religious organization who knew the Coleman family personally. She learned that Chris had been in search of a job within the business and she offered to hire him to work for her security team. Before long, the two had developed a great working relationship and Chris was promoted to her personal bodyguard, earning a substantial salary of $100,000 a year. It was around this same time that Chris and Sherri welcomed their second son into the world named Gavin. Thanks to Chris's work life taking off, the two were able to afford a beautiful home on the 2,800 block of Robert Drive in Columbia, Illinois. Now, maybe this just shows my naivety of US geography, but I've never heard of Columbia, Illinois until just now. But as it turns out, it is a beautiful little town that rests on the border of Illinois and Missouri, about five hours south of Chicago. The town is home to about 11,000 people as of 2022 and it's only about 12 miles away from St. Louis, Missouri, yet another major city in the United States. Columbia is a predominantly Caucasian community with the typical family income being around $90,000 a year. So needless to say, it's certainly an upper class community in terms of income. Crime in Columbia is shockingly low and it ranks in the top 30% of the safest cities in America. Clearly, it was a great place to raise a family or so Sherri thought. Around November of 2008, life for the Coleman family started to take a strange and dark turn. A threatening email had come into Chris's inbox, as well as the inbox of Joyce Meyer and her son. Chris let the email sit for just a while, but by January of 2009, he decided to reach out to a close friend who worked at the Columbia Police Department. Detective Justin Barlow read the email and was obviously concerned. But considering it had been just two months since the email had come in and nothing had happened, he felt that Chris and his family were relatively safe. Police catalogued this email and stored it away as evidence in files that had just recently been released to the public. According to police records, the email was sent on November 14th, 2008 at about 8pm in the evening. The email was fairly poorly written, but the message was clear. I've cleaned up the grammar a bit, leading the email to read as follows. I'm sure this will make it to someone in Joyce Meyer's company. If you're like any other companies, then this email will make it to someone's account, so pass it on to Chris Coleman. Tell Joyce to stop preaching or Chris's family will die. If I can't get to Joyce, then I'll get someone close to her. I will kill Chris's wife and kids. I know Joyce's schedule, so I know Chris's schedule as well. If Joyce doesn't stop preaching, they will die. During the Houston conference, I will kill them all as they sleep. I know where Chris lives and I know when his family is alone. Joyce needs to hear what I have to say and now she will. After reading the letter, Detective Justin Barlow decided that the family needed to be placed under surveillance. Barlow decided to install a CCTV system that pointed towards the family's mailbox, hoping to catch the perpetrator if he or she dropped off any future letters. But I'll be honest with you, I don't understand what this was supposed to accomplish. The letter that was sent to Chris and his family was sent to Chris's personal email, not to his physical address. So it doesn't make any sense that security cameras were installed on the family's mailbox unless Detective Barlow had reason to believe that the stalker might escalate and begin delivering physical mail. But regardless, the security system never yielded any results. And the CCTV footage always came back clean. But this is where the case certainly began to heat up. Because around this time, Sherry began to air her concerns to her friends and her family. She mentioned that Chris's demeanor had changed a lot around the same time that the email came in. She told her friends that Chris had been acting secretive, uninterested and all around just strange. She suspected that he might have been having an affair, but she didn't have any evidence or clues to prove this. But it seems that her concerns reached a peak sometime around March of 2009 when she mentioned to one of her friends that if anything were to ever happen to her, she knew Chris would be responsible. I wish we knew specifically what caused her to say this, but unfortunately those details were never released to the public if Sherry ever shared them at all. In late April of 2009, Chris reached out to the police once again to report that a new letter had been left for his family. I'm not sure if this message was also delivered by email or if it was dropped off at the house personally, but according to case files that have been shared by the police, this letter doesn't have the typical header that an email does, which leads me to believe it may have been personally delivered to the family, but we don't know for sure and nothing ever came up on CCTV. The letter followed the same grammatical themes as the last letter, being somewhat difficult to understand at times. Once again, I've cleaned up the wording a bit, which leads the message to read as follows. I'm giving you the last warning. You've not listened to me and you've not changed your ways. I've warned you to stop traveling and stop with the fake religious lifestyle of stealing other people's money. You think you're so special to do what you do, protecting Joyce or thinking you're protecting Joyce. She's not worth your time. Stop today or else. I know your schedule. You can't hide from me. I'm always watching. This is my last warning. Your worst nightmare is about to happen. On the morning of May 5th, 2009, Chris Coleman left his home to go to the gym in St. Louis to work out. He called Sherry's cell phone up. She didn't answer, so he left her a message. He texted her again while he was at the gym and tried to call her once again when he was on his way home, but she didn't answer. Since he wouldn't be home for quite a while, Chris called the Columbia Police Department and asked if they would head to the family's home and check on them. Detective Barlow arrived at the home first, but he waited for an additional officer to show up before looking around the home. Once that second officer had arrived, they approached the house, but it doesn't appear that anyone answered the door when they knocked. They decided to walk around the home to see if they noticed anything unusual to indicate any sort of crime had taken place. And that's when they noticed one of the basement windows was a jar. Now feeling that something sinister had taken place, the investigators crawled through the basement window and entered the family's home. As they walked through the house, it was clear that an uninvited guest had been there just hours prior. They spray-painted all over the walls and relayed chilling threats against the family. In red letters all throughout the home were the messages, I'm always watching, you have paid, and another red punished. Police continued to search the home for additional clues or evidence, and that's when they discovered the true crime scene. Sherry, Garrett, and Gavin were all found in their beds with ligature marks on their necks. All of them had been murdered. As police were still searching the house, Chris pulled up into the driveway of the property. Before he could enter the front door of the home, the officers rushed downstairs to stop Chris and inform him that the worst had happened. His family had been murdered while he was away. Chris was taken down to the Columbia police headquarters so that he could speak with additional detectives and provide them with any evidence as well as his alibi. Naturally, Chris's side of the story was that nothing unusual had taken place, aside from the strange letters that had been popping up from time to time. According to Chris, he left the home during what was a typical morning routine and returned home to a grisly crime scene that had thankfully been intercepted by police. But as Chris shared his side of the story, the investigation had already been underway and officers who were working the murder investigation had begun to develop a scary theory about what had happened here. Digital evidence had been pulled from Sherry's phone as well as Chris's personal laptop. According to the evidence that they found, police had reason to believe that the couple's marriage had been on the rocks for a very long time. They suspected the same thing as Sherry had a few months ago. There was reason to believe that Chris had been having an affair. But they were able to take things one step further, learning that Chris had been hanging out with a woman named Tara Lintz. As detectives interrogated Chris, they learned that Tara was Sherry's friend who lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, the opposite side of the country. Chris told authorities that he knew Lintz personally and considered her a friend, but nothing more. At the same time, officers in Florida were questioning Lintz about the nature of her relationship with Chris Coleman. Police soon began to paint a picture of a man who'd been engaging in an affair with his wife's best friend. And on that note, if you're still watching this far into the video, comment the phrase scumbag, Chris, and let me know that you're still here. The two had met up in Arizona and Hawaii while Chris was traveling for work and exchanged numerous texts, photos, and videos that were extremely explicit. Detectives had begun to work with the major case squad and began piecing together a case against Chris. Computer and data specialists inspected his laptop with handwriting analysts looking at the threatening emails, notes, and the spray-painted messages from the walls of the home. Forensic examiners also poured over police paperwork and the autopsy reports on the victims to better piece together this puzzle. Evidence was also recovered from a stretch of Interstate 255 that authorities had searched near the Jefferson Barracks Bridge, the same route that Coleman typically took going to and from the gym multiple times a week. However, cell phone tracking records would later show that Chris took an unusually longer route home on the morning of May 5th, the date that the crime scene was uncovered, leaving police more than enough time to discover the crime scene and make the natural assumption that Chris had been away when the murders had taken place. The head of the major case squad, Major Jeff Connor, spoke out in the days following the murder and said that he believed he knew who had killed the Coleman family. After a conference call with a well-known pathologist named Dr. Michael Baden, police realized that the timeline of the murders simply didn't add up, with the crime scene suggesting that the murders had taken place while Chris was still inside the family's home. It took the police just about two weeks to piece together this rather simple crime puzzle. Chris was arrested on May 19th, 2009, on three counts of first degree murder. Police said that all of the evidence pointed toward Chris being the killer, and they were able to conclusively say that the spray painting on the walls had been put there by Chris. There were several delays in the case that ended up pushing the trial all the way to April of 2011, taking police to Waterloo, Illinois. Thankfully, the court proceedings were fairly short with the verdict being turned in by the jury on May 5th of 2011. The jury returned a guilty verdict for all charges. Multiple appeals were made by Chris and his defense team, but all of them were denied. In the end, the case ended almost as simply as it had begun. An unfaithful man decided that he found a better life in the arms of someone else and was willing to do anything in his power to turn his life around, even if that meant claiming the lives of his wife, his 11-year-old son, and his nine-year-old son. With that, we've reached the end of today's story. Don't forget, if you wanna see more true crime stories, be sure to hit the like button and subscribe. If you'd like to help out with the operating costs of the channel, you can also hit the blue join button below this video, but that's entirely optional. With that said, my name is Ty Nottz, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.