The blue and red lights washed over the neat, beige two-story house at the end of the cul-de-sac, turning the quiet Illinois morning into a crime scene. Yellow tape flickered in the early dawn wind. Neighbors in Columbia, Illinois—a small American town not far from St. Louis—stood on their driveways in pajamas, arms folded against the chill, watching officers move in and out of the Coleman home.
It was May 5, 2009, and by sunrise, word was already spreading: something terrible had happened in the house where the family looked like they belonged in a church brochure.
Three bodies.
A mother.
Two boys.
And the man who was supposed to protect them stood in the driveway, face tight, arms crossed over his workout clothes, telling police that when he left for the gym that morning, everything had been fine.
His name was Christopher L. Coleman.
Before that morning, Chris Coleman’s life read like the kind of American story people in small towns were proud of. He was born in 1977 in Chester, Illinois, a little river town clinging to the banks of the Mississippi. It was the kind of Midwest place where Friday nights centered on high school football, Sundays belonged to church, and everyone knew the names of the families who’d lived there for generations.
Chris grew up in a religious household. Discipline, structure, and obedience to authority weren’t just encouraged—they were expected. Faith and family, he was taught, were the twin pillars of a life worth living. His parents believed in clear lines, strong rules, and the idea that a good reputation was almost as important as a clean soul.
He wasn’t the loud kid. Not the class clown. He was the boy people described as steady, serious, athletic. He grew into his frame early—broad shoulders, solid build, the kind of teenager who looked like he knew his way around a weight room. In high school, he played sports, pushed himself physically, learned to value strength and control. It wasn’t hard to imagine him in uniform, and he didn’t fight that path for long.
After graduation, he joined the United States Marine Corps.
The military sharpened what small-town life had already begun. Rigid schedules. Early mornings. Demanding training. The quiet boy from Chester became the man who walked with straight posture, squared shoulders, jaw set. The one who followed orders, gave orders, and lived in a world where control wasn’t just a personality trait—it was survival.
Yet somewhere in those years, as he traveled and saw more than the river town and church pews of his childhood, Chris began to want something bigger. He’d had a taste of structure and respect. Now he wanted status. A career that would lift him beyond the limits of hard hats and factory shifts. He wanted influence. He wanted to be somebody.
That ambition would eventually place him beside one of the most recognizable evangelical figures in the United States.
But before he stepped into that world of cameras, conferences, and Christian television, he met the woman who would become his wife.
Her name was Sherry Weiss.
If Chris was the quiet weight in a room, Sherry was the light. She had been born the same year he was, 1977, and grew up just across the river in Columbia, Illinois, the very town where her life would one day end. Friends remembered her as the kind of girl who filled a space with color—laughing easily, talking with her hands, making friends in grocery store lines.
She liked art, decorating, music. She had a rebellious streak as a teenager, sure—sneaking out, testing boundaries—as many girls in small American towns do. But under the attitude was a softness that people never forgot. She was kind. She remembered birthdays. She showed up when people needed her.
When Chris and Sherry crossed paths in the mid-1990s, through mutual friends, they were both young, both searching for what came next. To Sherry, Chris in a neat Marine uniform looked like an anchor—steady, solid, dependable. To Chris, Sherry’s warmth smoothed out his rough edges. She made his seriousness seem less heavy, less severe.
Their personalities seemed to balance each other. The disciplined soldier and the free-spirited girl. The structured and the spontaneous. They moved quickly. Dates turned into a relationship, the relationship turned into vows. They were married in 1997.
From the outside, it looked like a match made in church bulletin heaven.
By the early 2000s, Chris had left the military and stepped into a job that felt like a calling—and a promotion. He landed a position with Joyce Meyer Ministries, a massive evangelical organization based in the Midwest. Joyce Meyer, a televangelist whose sermons were broadcast across the United States and around the world, was a powerful figure in American Christian media. She needed someone she could trust to protect her on the road, at conferences, on stage.
Chris Coleman, with his Marine training, upright image, and religious background, looked perfect for the job.
He rose quickly, becoming head of security. He traveled with the ministry team, flew across states and countries, and walked in the shadow of a woman recognized by millions of American viewers. He was no longer just a kid from Chester. He was now part of a high-profile ministry machine, standing at the center of attention while still playing the role of quiet protector.
The job paid well. Very well.
Chris and Sherry moved into a spacious two-story home in Columbia, Illinois, tucked into a quiet subdivision with cul-de-sacs, trimmed lawns, and kids’ bikes left in front yards. It was the kind of place where neighbors waved from driveways, where people knew who belonged on the street and who didn’t, where the idea of “crime” felt far away—something that happened in big cities on the news, not down the block.
Their family grew. In 1999, Sherry gave birth to their first son, Garrett. In 2002, their second son, Gavin, was born. The boys were loud, energetic, playful—the heart of the house. Sherry poured herself into motherhood. She decorated their rooms carefully, volunteered at school, joined church activities, made the Coleman house feel like a home people wanted to be in.
Photos from those years show a charming, all-American family: Sherry’s smile bright and open, Chris’s arms around his sons, the boys beaming in sports jerseys and holiday sweaters. Vacations with palm trees. Christmas mornings with wrapping paper everywhere. A family that, on paper and in pictures, had it all: faith, a good home, two healthy children, and financial stability from a job with one of the biggest ministries in the country.
But photographs freeze moments, not the tension around them.
Behind the polished exterior, cracks had begun to form.
Sherry confided to friends that life with Chris wasn’t as effortless as it appeared. His job, glamorous to outsiders, meant long hours and frequent travel. While he was on the road protecting a famous preacher, Sherry was at home managing nearly everything alone—bills, homework, school events, scraped knees, scared kids on stormy nights.
The qualities she had once admired in him—discipline, focus, seriousness—began to feel less like strengths and more like distance. Chris was rigid. Controlling. He cared deeply about image, about how things looked from the outside. Sherry wanted more warmth, more affection, more partnership. She wanted the Chris who’d held her hand and made her feel chosen, not the Chris who seemed to treat their life like another assignment to manage.
She didn’t stop loving him. She didn’t leave. She stayed. Because she believed in vows. Because she loved her sons more than she loved her own comfort. Because in a world where family values were preached from pulpits and broadcast across American TV, divorce felt like failure. Especially for the wife of the man who guarded a famous Christian leader.
So Sherry did what many women do—she endured. She stayed for the boys.
She filled the house with color and laughter where she could. She made holidays magical. She painted, decorated, hosted friends. But those same friends noticed the way her voice subtly changed when she talked about Chris. The way she hinted at his temper, his emotional distance, his obsession with the gym, with his phone, with appearances.
Meanwhile, Chris was living in two worlds: the one everyone could see, and the one he kept hidden.
In 2008, the hidden world pulled him further in.
He reconnected with a woman named Tara Lintz, a friend of Sherry’s from earlier years who now lived in Florida. What began as casual conversation—an old friend messaging an old friend—became something more. Texts turned into calls. Calls turned into constant communication. She was fun, adventurous, far from the domestic responsibilities of Illinois. With her, Chris didn’t have to be the stoic husband, the church security guy, the father. He could be someone else.
Phone records would later reveal just how intense their contact became: calls every day, messages at all hours, emails filled with affection and plans. Tara believed they were building a future. Chris told her he would leave Sherry. He imagined a life in Florida, away from the quiet subdivision and the expectations of a faith-based job. A fresh start. Sun, freedom, a new beginning.
There was just one problem, and it was massive.
Chris didn’t work for a bank or a tech company. He worked for Joyce Meyer Ministries—an organization that loudly championed marriage, fidelity, and family unity. Divorce wasn’t just personally messy; it was professionally disastrous. If he left his wife for another woman, he didn’t risk just hurting his family. He risked losing his job, his income, his role, his standing in a world where public image was everything.
He wanted out of his marriage. He wanted Tara. But he also wanted to keep his paycheck, his access, his status.
So he stayed. He told Tara to be patient. He told her he would leave soon, that the timing had to be right. He told her they’d be together openly one day.
He just didn’t tell her the plan he was forming.
Back in Columbia, the strain grew more obvious. Sherry’s friends noticed that she looked tired, stressed, uneasy. She mentioned Chris’s constant phone use, the way he guarded it. She suspected there might be someone else. She felt the chill of something wrong curling into her home.
By early 2009, there was another layer to the tension: threatening emails.
According to Chris, messages had begun arriving that targeted him because of his work with Joyce Meyer. They were hostile, ominous, filled with talk of revenge. Not just against him—against his family. He brought the emails to his superiors at the ministry and to the local police department in Columbia, Illinois.
On paper, it looked like this: a high-profile ministry figure’s security chief receiving threats, possibly from someone angry at the ministry, maybe from a stalker or an extremist. The threats mentioned Chris’s family as leverage. The narrative was scary, believable. Enough to make police open a file. Enough to make Sherry nervous.
Chris said he was worried. He said his work had made him a target. He said his wife and children might be in danger because of him.
For the ministry, for law enforcement, it was a concerning possibility.
For Chris, in hindsight, it was much more—a foundation.
Because those emails, it would later be revealed, did not come from a faceless enemy. They came from a keyboard connected to the Coleman home.
As spring 2009 approached, the two paths of Chris Coleman’s life—his affair with Tara and his role as Sherry’s husband—collided with increasing speed. Tara, living in Florida, wanted clarity. When would he leave? When would they be together? She told friends she believed he was finally serious, that he had promised he’d be free by May.
A deadline.
A line on the calendar.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, Sherry confided something chilling to a friend. She said that if anything ever happened to her, Chris would be responsible. It sounded like the kind of thing a hurt wife might say in anger, in despair. But later, that sentence would hang over the entire case like a warning nobody knew to heed in time.
On the evening of May 4, 2009, the Coleman family moved through what looked, from the outside, like an ordinary night in small-town America.
Sherry got the boys ready for bed in their Columbia home. Garrett, eleven, and Gavin, nine, brushed their teeth, joked, argued about little things. They were kids, and kids rarely sense the storms adults bring into their lives. Sherry tucked them in, kissed them goodnight, pulled their blankets up. She moved through the house, tidying, texting, perhaps thinking about tomorrow’s tasks—school, meals, errands.
In the bedroom she shared with Chris, her side of the bed was still a place of hope, even if it was fraying. She had not left. She had stayed. She was still believing, maybe, that things could change.
According to Chris, the morning of May 5th started like many others.
He said he woke early, around 5:30 a.m., to go to the gym—a routine part of his life. Neighbors later confirmed they saw him driving away alone in his SUV in the predawn light. The house behind him was dark and still. The street was quiet. It was the kind of unremarkable suburban moment people forget the second it passes.
At the gym, Chris claimed he worked out, maintaining the body he’d honed since his Marine days. He said he tried calling Sherry when he was there, didn’t get an answer, tried again, no response. Enough, he would tell police later, to make him uneasy.
Sometime around 6:45 a.m., he drove back to the house on Robert Drive in Columbia.
What he said he found inside, he described as a nightmare.
Police arrived at the Coleman residence after a 911 call from Chris reporting something horribly wrong in his home. Officers entered and quickly realized this was not a burglary. It was not a random break-in. It was something far worse.
In the bedrooms where Sherry and the boys should have been getting ready for another school and work day, they were found lifeless.
No signs of a violent struggle throughout the house. No forced entry. No signs of a stranger rampaging through a Midwest home in the early morning hours. Just a quiet, horrifying stillness.
On the walls, there was writing—angry, crude messages that seemed to align with the narrative of threats Chris had reported. It looked, at first glance, like the work of someone with a grudge, someone who wanted to connect the crime to the earlier emails and make it clear: this was about revenge.
To some, the scenario fit. Chris had been receiving threats tied to his high-visibility job for a US megaministry. Now his wife and children were dead. The simplest story was that the threats had escalated to action.
Chris told the police that his role with Joyce Meyer Ministries had put a target on his back, and his family had paid the price.
He wept in front of cameras later. He bowed his head during prayers. On the surface, he played the part of a shattered husband and father—a man whose life had been blown apart by forces beyond his control.
But the detectives on scene weren’t just listening to his words. They were watching him. How he stood. How he spoke. How he reacted—or didn’t. Experienced investigators are trained to sense when grief doesn’t quite match the gravity of the moment.
Something about him felt tightly managed. Controlled. Performed.
They cataloged it all.
The Columbia Police Department, aided by Illinois state investigators and federal resources, began to dig. They pulled computer records, phone logs, emails. They retraced Chris’s steps. They examined the crime scene again and again, looking for inconsistencies.
The emails that had warned of danger were traced more thoroughly. What had looked like threatening messages from an external enemy began to point to a far more unsettling source: the Coleman household.
Forensic analysis traced the origin of the emails back to an IP address used in Chris’s own home, from a computer he used. The menacing messages that had distressed the ministry and set a narrative of danger in place weren’t sent from some obscure location in another state. They came from the same digital fingerprint as Chris’s everyday life.
The narrative began to slide.
The “outsider threat” started to look like an insider’s script.
Then came the phone records.
Investigators examined Chris’s call history and text logs. There she was again and again: Tara. Her number appeared hundreds of times in the weeks before the murders. Thousands of texts. Long calls. Messages at odd hours. Communications that didn’t look like casual friendship but like an all-consuming romantic obsession.
The timeline was damning.
Chris had told Tara he would leave Sherry. He had implied that by May, he’d be free to be with her. He had continued to live in the same house with his family, presenting a picture of normalcy to neighbors and to the ministry, while making plans and promises to another woman in another state.
Divorce could have ended his marriage. It could have spared his wife and children. But in his world, divorce meant public shame, likely job loss, a fall from favor in a community that valued appearances almost as much as it valued scripture.
In the ugly math that detectives suspected he had done, killing them offered what divorce could not: a way to be free of his family without being the man who walked away from them.
Investigators confronted him with the digital trail: the email IP addresses, the phone records, the timeline.
His explanations were thin. He couldn’t adequately explain why the threatening emails came from his own network. He couldn’t justify the frequency and intensity of contact with Tara, or the timing of his promises to her. His insistence that he was an innocent man caught in someone else’s attack began to sound less like truth and more like a story he’d told himself so often he wanted to believe it.
Meanwhile, Sherry’s friends stepped forward to share what she had said before she died. They told officers about her unease, her suspicions of infidelity, her fear. Most chilling of all, they repeated her words: if anything happened to her, Chris would be responsible.
The portrait of the Coleman marriage that emerged in the investigation looked nothing like the smiling family photos people had seen. It looked like a woman living with rising dread and a man slowly deciding that his image and desires mattered more than the lives of the people sleeping under his roof.
Even at the funeral, when the community of Columbia gathered to mourn Sherry, Garrett, and Gavin, some people noticed something off about Chris. He seemed focused on logistics, details, movements, rather than overwhelmed by loss like a father who had just buried his entire family. Grief comes in many forms—but the version investigators saw only heightened their suspicions.
In time, the unraveling was complete.
The affair.
The emails.
The financial and reputational stakes of divorce.
The promises made to Tara.
The staged “threats.”
The morning “gym trip” and the convenient discovery of the bodies.
The narrative of a faithful husband targeted because of his ministry work collapsed, replaced by something far darker: a man who created a phantom enemy to hide his own intentions.
When Chris Coleman was finally arrested and charged with the murders of his wife Sherry and their sons Garrett and Gavin, the shock that rolled through Columbia, Illinois, was sharp and deep. This hadn’t been the act of a stranger, not a prowler, not a stalker in the night.
It was betrayal from inside the house.
The very man tasked with protecting a famous preacher’s life had, according to prosecutors, taken the lives he was supposed to cherish most.
The case quickly became one of the most closely watched murder trials in Illinois. The combination of elements—small-town American suburb, connection to a major US ministry, a seemingly perfect Christian family destroyed—made it irresistible to true crime shows, newspapers, and national television.
In the courthouse in Waterloo, Illinois, where the trial would eventually unfold, Sherry’s family showed up day after day. Her parents sat together, hands wrapped around tissues, their grief etched into the lines of their faces. They were there not just for justice, but to bear witness. To make sure the world knew their daughter and grandsons were not just case files.
Pre-trial hearings were filled with battles over evidence. The defense wanted the threatening emails excluded. They argued that they were too prejudicial, that they would unfairly bias the jury. The prosecution countered that the emails were the key to understanding the entire case—that they were not just background, but the mechanism of Chris’s plan.
The judge ruled that the emails and the digital forensics were essential. They would stay.
When the trial finally began in April 2011, nearly two years after those sirens sliced open the quiet morning in Columbia, the courtroom was packed—journalists, spectators, people from the community who had once waved at the Coleman family on walks now sitting on wooden benches to see how the story would end.
The prosecution did not waste time.
They laid out a portrait of Chris Coleman as a man living a double life. In one life, he was the disciplined head of security for a famous Christian figure, part of a high-profile US ministry, respected by many. In the other, he was a husband who wanted out of his marriage, a man in love with another woman, unwilling to pay the price of honesty.
They showed the jury photos of Sherry and the boys. Smiling, laughing, standing in front of Christmas trees, blowing out birthday candles. It wasn’t a tactic to guilt the jury—it was a reminder that these weren’t abstract victims. They were real, with faces, with dreams, with people who loved them.
Experts explained how the threatening emails were traced right back to Chris’s computer, using his internet connection. There was no mysterious hacker, no unknown enemy. The specter he’d warned people about—this shadowy figure angry at Joyce Meyer Ministries—simply didn’t exist.
Communication records told their own devastating story. In the weeks leading up to the murders, Chris’s contact with Tara spiked. Calls. Texts. Messages where he promised freedom, a new life, “by May.” Messages where he spoke as if the end of his marriage was inevitable and imminent.
Sherry’s friends took the stand and repeated what she had told them in the weeks before she died. Her worries. Her suspicion that he was cheating. Her sadness. And that one statement, the one that snapped through the courtroom like an electric wire: if something happened to her, Chris would be responsible.
The defense clung to the idea of reasonable doubt. No one had seen Chris with his hands on his wife or sons. There were no eyewitnesses in the house. They suggested there could be other explanations, other possibilities. They leaned into the gaps, hoping they would be enough to unravel the prosecution’s case.
But the gaps were filled with evidence. The jury didn’t just hear that Chris had lied. They saw the lies confronted by data, by timestamps, by digital trails that didn’t bend for anyone.
When the jury retired to deliberate, the courtroom settled into a heavy stillness. Sherry’s parents, already forced to live through the worst thing that can happen to a family, waited again—for hours—to hear how the state of Illinois would answer their loss.
When the jury returned, it didn’t take long to see the result written on their faces.
Chris Coleman was found guilty on three counts of first-degree murder: for Sherry, for Garrett, for Gavin.
The emotion in the courtroom broke open. Sherry’s family cried openly. Some bowed their heads, thanking God for justice they had doubted they would ever see. Some just stared at Chris, the man who had once promised to cherish their daughter and who now sat, expression flattened, as his fate was sealed.
At sentencing, the prosecution pushed for the harshest punishment available: life in prison without the possibility of parole. They argued that a man who could take the lives of his wife and young sons in such a calculated, cold manner should never again walk free.
The judge agreed.
Chris Coleman was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
In that moment, the man who had once walked hotel halls with a famous televangelist, who had flown across the United States as a guardian of someone else’s safety, became something else entirely: inmate.
For Columbia, Illinois, the story didn’t end with the verdict. The Coleman house on the cul-de-sac became a symbol—of betrayal, of broken image, of the hidden dangers that sometimes live behind the neatest front doors. People drove past it and felt the weight of what had happened there. The lawn grew wild for a while. Eventually, life moved on. But the memory remained, lodged in the town’s quiet like a thorn.
For Joyce Meyer Ministries, the case was a blow to the spotless narrative they preferred. Their trusted security chief—disciplined, polite, efficient—had been living a secret life that erupted in violence. They publicly condemned his actions, made clear they knew nothing of his plan. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone: the man trusted to guard a public figure had destroyed the people who needed him most in private.
For Sherry’s family, justice didn’t erase the empty chairs at holidays, the bedrooms that would never hold laughter again, the birthdays that would go uncelebrated. But it did something small and necessary: it acknowledged, out loud and on the record, that what had been done to them was unforgivable—and that the man responsible would never have the chance to hurt anyone else.
Inside prison walls, far from the quiet streets of Columbia and the lights of American television ministries, Chris Coleman lives out his days with the consequences of the choices he made—a life sentence for a few years of lies.
Sherry, Garrett, and Gavin exist now in photographs and memories. In the voices of relatives who still tell stories about them at kitchen tables. In the true crime documentaries and articles that revisit their case not because of the gruesomeness of the crime, but because of what it reveals: that sometimes the most dangerous person in a house isn’t the one breaking in from the outside.
It’s the one holding the keys.
