The Security Chief

Chris Coleman, a former Marine, was head of security for the televangelist Joyce Meyer, and he lived with his wife Sheri and their sons, Garett and Gavin, in Columbia, Illinois. From late 2008 he was secretly seeing Tara Lintz, a woman in Florida, and the two talked about marriage. Meyer’s ministry fired staff for adultery, so the affair put his job at risk. Around the same time, threatening emails and letters aimed at the family began to arrive.

Early on May 5, 2009, Coleman phoned a neighbor who was a police officer, saying Sheri was not answering the phone and asking him to check the house while he drove back from the gym. Officers found Sheri, Garett and Gavin strangled in their beds, with threats spray-painted on the walls. Investigators saw that the graffiti echoed the wording of the earlier threats, and forensic examiners tied the threatening emails to Coleman’s own laptop.

A jury convicted Coleman of all three murders on May 5, 2011, two years to the day after the killings. On May 9 he received three consecutive life sentences without parole. An appeals court upheld the verdict in December 2014, and a judge rejected his post-conviction petition in 2020.