[crowd cheering]
[chanting]
[crowd cheering]
At Silsbee High School, Friday night football was everything,
and it's always the place to be.
It's Friday night lights, the smells, the popcorn,
the atmosphere, the adrenaline, and you're a part of it.
[Bonnie Coon] Tristan was a freshman at Silsbee High School.
She love cheering for Silsbee.
After homecoming I said, "I love you, I'll see you at school tomorrow."
That was the last thing I said to her.
There was blood in her mouth and coming out of her nose.
It just didn't register... Murder.
I knew that it had to be somebody that we knew.
They all come back from the homecoming game
and that brings in so many more suspects.
I was very worried they were targeting young girls.
[knock on door]
[Chief Scott Duncan] It could have been a football player.
It could have been a friend.
Everybody at that point in time is a suspect.
[whistle blowing]
[opening theme music playing]
[siren wailing]
Our 911 center received a very frantic,
very emotional,
very shaky call from a male individual.
His sister was unresponsive, CPR had been started,
and I believe he's made mention
of there being a pool of blood in the area.
When I got to the location,
I made contact with the mother and her brother.
Of course, the family was in shock.
Very emotional, in disbelief.
It was then identified to me
that the victim was a JV cheerleader at the Silsbee School.
One Tristan Dilley.
When I walked into Tristan Dilley's room as we all did,
we were walking into our daughter's room.
'Cause the same things that was in our daughter's room
like the mums and the trophies and the pictures,
all those triggers are in your house.
So, of course, it was hard to block that out.
It hits home whenever you ask me.
This case hit home at every level.
[train horn blowing]
[Carly] Silsbee is a very tight community.
We're only a town of 7,000 people,
so anytime you have business that shouldn't be told,
if you tell one person, everyone's gonna know.
Them and their momma.
But, we're just one tight, big family here.
Football here is big. It brings the whole community together.
If you're not there on a Friday,
then we don't know what you're doing with your life.
[crowd cheering]
In Silsbee, football, it's one of those things where it's expected.
Our motto in Silsbee was always and forever will be "Tiger pride."
It doesn't matter what you're doing,
it doesn't matter where you are,
that sense of pride, it runs through our veins.
We always end every cheer with "Two, three,"
and then you go... "Tigers."
[crowd clapping]
[Carly] And our favorite one was actually a chant,
and it's called "Fire it up."
And so it goes,
"Fire it up." [rhythmic hand claps]
[all chanting] Fire it up and up and up and up and up.
Fire it up!
Fire it up and up and up and up and up.
-[all chanting] Fire it up! -[rhythmic hand claps]
-Fire it up! -[rhythmic hand claps]
[crowd cheering]
[marching band music plays]
Homecoming is the biggest weekend in Silsbee.
[crowd cheering]
[Carly] Thousands of people show up.
Literally the whole town. Everyone's just standing up, screaming.
Tristan was so excited,
but she was also very nervous 'cause there's so many people there.
I was like, "You should be nervous.
They're all gonna stare at you." [laughs]
Being a cheerleader for a homecoming game, you feel like a celebrity.
When Tristan was in her uniform,
it was just wrinkle-free, perfect-looking.
Her bow was just perfect in her hair.
When I saw her that night, it just blew me away.
I mean, I was so proud for my friend.
After the games, it doesn't stop.
You get to get ready for the dance.
[Carly] She was wearing a blue dress that had sparkles on it,
and then she also was wearing some sparkly kind of shoes.
After the dance,
Tristan went over to Keeleigh's house to stay the night.
[Keeleigh] The next day, Tristan got picked up,
and I gave her a hug and I said,
"I love you, I'll see you at school tomorrow,"
and waved to her mom and she got in the car and they left.
That was the last thing I said to her.
On our way home, we were discussing her 15th birthday,
which was in two days.
We were gonna have a mother-daughter date night,
and just talk about anything and everything.
We got home, and I had to go
do five or six little errands that we had to run, left at about three o'clock.
I gave her a hug and told her that we'd be back soon.
We were constantly texting, and I talked to her.
And I was like, "Just something seems off."
She seemed like she was kind of scared or worried,
or, you know, concerned about something.
I couldn't put my finger on it.
We had cut a few of our errands just so we could get home quickly.
And I texted her at like 5:12,
when we'd stopped at the store right down the road from the house.
Her last text to me was at 4:44 p.m.
and I didn't realize that she hadn't replied to my 5:12 text.
Got home...
[footsteps approaching]
...went upstairs to go check on her, let her know that we were back.
[Bonnie inhales]
I cracked open the door,
I was like, "Tristan, we're home."
The light was off, it was dark in the room, so I closed the door, too,
and was like, "She was up late, let her sleep."
And [voice shaking] went back downstairs.
Mom told me it was time to take a shower and get ready for dinner.
So I go upstairs and I walked into her room.
I went to go turn on the light...
and then stepped in what was thinking was water.
And I looked down and she's laying in her own puddle of blood on the bed.
He yelled, "Mom, Tristan's bleeding!"
And... So I immediately start running up the stairs.
I go into her room, and...
there was a lot of blood.
I screamed at Colby to get out.
I run over there to her and there's blood in her mouth and coming out of her nose.
[sighs] So I scooped her off of the bed and...
laid her onto the floor.
And...
started CPR.
[siren wailing]
[Bonnie] I continued on until the first responders got there.
He just looked up at me and he shook his head.
And... I just kneeled down
and touched my little baby's feet.
And I walked out.
I drove towards where they were at,
and as soon as you turn off,
you could see cop cars and lights.
I ran up there and ran past Bonnie and I tried to go inside.
Three cops stopped me, and I told them that was my daughter,
I'm going inside there.
And they told me, "No, you don't need to see her the way she is."
-[siren wails] -[police radio chatter]
[Duncan] We noticed that there was what appeared to be a bullet hole
in the Sheetrock wall right above Tristan's bed.
The bullet appeared to me to be .22 caliber Magnum shell.
All we knew was there was no weapon located at the scene.
At that point in time we started quickly leaning towards a homicide.
[Bonnie] Just didn't register, you know, murder.
My child, Tristan, seems impossible.
We didn't feel unsafe or anything along those lines
so that was hard to wrap our mind around.
[Duncan] We didn't know what we had going on.
There's just hundreds of scenarios that was playing on our mind.
A lot of people come back from the homecoming game. Hundreds.
Students, football players, teachers, band members.
That's what a homecoming is all about.
And that brings in so many more suspects.
A predator could have been in the stands watching her or tracking her in some way.
Everybody at that point in time is a suspect.
We did have to wonder if there was somebody targeting cheerleaders
or young girls matching Tristan Dilley's description.
[Carly] I met Tristan in 2017 at cheer tryouts.
I was in the locker room and she had walked up to me and she was like,
"Can you help me with this cheer?
Like, I'm nervous, and I'm struggling,
and I don't know if I'll mess it up or whatever."
And I was like, "Yeah, I'll help you."
And then after that, we were glued at the hip.
She had been waiting her whole life to get into cheer.
From the age of two and three,
instead of watching different cartoons,
she would watch literally these cheer competitions, you know, going to state.
[people laughing]
She was little bitty, but she was a firecracker.
-[yelling] Whoa! -[girl laughing]
[Bonnie] So, she was on the top of the pyramid.
And she could do the flips and stuff.
She was very proud. She put on that uniform and she lit up.
[Keeleigh] My parents came in my room at 3:00 in the morning,
and my dad woke me up and he said,
"Tristan was murdered last night."
And I had to rack my brain and try to figure out how many Tristans were in the school.
I mean, like, it can't be my Tristan.
Like, there's no way.
[sniffling] I'm sorry.
Twenty-four hours before, she was on the dance floor having a great time.
She came to my house, we had a sleepover.
I mean, it just had to be the worst imaginable thing.
Tristan had texted me on Snapchat that day,
and she was like, "Hey, can we hang out tonight?"
But I was asleep.
And then I texted back,
but, of course, there was no answer.
And so I'd live with the guilt of wondering like,
"What if I did just go over anyways?" Type thing.
[police radio chatter]
[Bonnie] I remember looking up
at the ceiling fan or anything that could have
hit her in the head in any way, shape, or form.
My mind could not register a gunshot.
Everything just kind of turned into a blur.
The investigators, they were asking a lot of questions,
and they asked me about the night of the murder.
I remember I'd tidied up the house
before I left, and when I got back,
I'd noticed that there's some other things had been cleaned.
Not that I found it odd because it was completely normal of her
to help out around the house.
But I felt something different.
[Duncan] The fact that we saw no forced entry,
that the house was somewhat unusually cleaner,
that led me to believe
that the parents got away for a little while,
so we're gonna invite somebody over.
So, therefore, we narrowed it down
to there's somebody that she knew, that she trusted,
that walked into that house and performed this heinous act.
[both laughing and screaming]
[Colby] I was 13 when everything happened.
I did have investigators come, but my mom shut them off pretty quick
because that's my sister. That was my best friend.
Everywhere she went, I was basically her shadow.
It was just... I don't know.
My mind was so many other places.
[Duncan] The family, you're dealing with emotional people,
you're dealing with distraught individuals
'cause this is their daughter, their family, their loved one.
So we have to move forward cautiously with that.
We don't like that, nobody does,
but it has to be done. It's part of the job.
Word has made its way to the high school by the time I got there.
There was a big group hug
in the middle of the cafeteria.
And every kid in there, knowing Tristan or not, was in tears.
I mean, instantly, I just... I lost it.
And then the cheerleaders
were all brought into the auditorium
and they were talked to about what happened and questioned.
The investigators were asking questions. They were saying,
"Do you have an idea of who would have done this?"
I had zero answers for them, honestly.
I was just like, "Being a cheerleader at Silsbee High School
had a lot of disadvantages 'cause you're popular and the center of attention
for any pep rallies, or games, or anything.
And especially for Tristan."
People were definitely jealous of her, she was beautiful,
she had all these things under her belt.
And being a flyer in the air, I mean, everybody does turn their attention to you.
I knew that it had to be somebody that we knew.
And that was very hard for me and for her other friends.
We needed to figure out who all had interaction with Tristan
between the homecoming dance and Tristan's death.
We had found out that Tristan had an ex-boyfriend named Brian.
Keeleigh did advise us
that the night before the murder at the homecoming dance,
there was a jealousy issue because Tristan was dancing with Brian
and maybe another girl liked that boy.
Bryan would be one of the good-looking football players in Silsbee
that the girls would wanna go for.
And so, I think a lot of the other cheerleaders were jealous and mad
'cause they couldn't have what she had.
And it did cause drama and gossip within the group of the cheerleaders.
[Duncan] We don't tag it as "That's just girl drama."
We gotta follow that lead out to ground
and that just widens the spectrum of where we gotta look.
But we was advised that it was just some looks and maybe some comments.
You know how homecoming dances are,
so that's what we kind of felt that was.
Was nothing out of the ordinary.
I remember, after the dance, when we were waiting on my dad to pick us up,
we were sitting on the curb and she was telling me
how she wished she could have met up with someone.
I think when we got back to the house,
she was on her phone with the guy.
I didn't know who he was.
[Duncan] We needed to speak to the guy she was texting.
So we got permission from her mother to check Tristan's phone.
While we were looking at Tristan's phone,
we noticed there was a text message started at 2:52 p.m.
The number come back to somebody with the name of Adam.
Looking at the text, we could tell that Adam was interested
in coming and getting to the house.
And that Tristan was trying to hide it from her mother.
It raised questions to us.
[Duncan] The communication was more like
"My parents are leaving, you need to hurry."
The investigators asked me about someone named Adam.
I'm like, "I think she does have a friend named Adam."
She said he was 15, 16 years old
and that he went to school with her
and that was pretty much about it.
And I just asked them to ask her dad, Phillip,
because I think Phillip had met him
and might know more information than I would.
And I said, "The only person I knew by the name of Adam
was a tall, lanky guy that she went to school with."
[Duncan] We got a somewhat description
from Tristan's father, Phillip,
so we went to the next step at that point,
trying to identify and locate who this Adam was.
I told the investigators I did not know any Adams in my high school.
I was just so confused.
With Silsbee being as small as it is,
everybody knows everybody.
I just felt helpless, like there wasn't anything I could do
to point them in the right direction.
[Sheriff Mitchell Newman] We made contact with Silsbee School,
and they had no information on a kid around that age named Adam.
[Duncan] Somebody was lying about who Adam was.
Right then, we was all saying, "Where's he at and what part does he have to play in this?"
[thunder rolling]
[thunder cracking]
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey was a nightmare for Silsbee.
It destroyed multiple houses, multiple businesses.
You'd have thought the world was ending
'cause of how much thunder there was.
[thunder rumbling]
Silsbee High School football was actually delayed for weeks because of Harvey.
Our community could not handle a delay.
They were like, "We still need a dawn."
Prior to school starting, we starting helping out everyone in the community.
Tristan had actually got together three bags of clothes
and then a full bag-and-a-half of shoes to donate.
She was always wanting to help somebody out in any way that she could.
She just had a very, very good heart.
Tristan was very trusting and she was very sweet.
I think that she would have never guessed what would happen
because she tried to help.
[Duncan] Things were starting to gain momentum at this point,
but we only had the name of Adam and we had a number.
She had made several text messages with this Adam guy.
So we went on Facebook and searched Adam with that number
and found an individual by the name of Paul Adams.
And we saw that this Paul Adams was in fact friends with Tristan.
So that posed the question, why is he just Adam on Tristan's phone?
An officer comes up to me, showed me the pictures and asked me,
"Was this the gentleman that she was talking to?"
And I told him I didn't recognize him.
[Duncan] We started tracking Paul Adams down
because even though he's not a suspect,
they can be a witness. They can be a lead.
But as we dug deeper,
we found out that Paul Adams is actually a 19-year-old young man
at a nursing school,
not a 16-year-old student that went to Silsbee School.
We didn't know if this Paul Adams was lying to her
or both of them was to maybe conceal Paul from the parents
'cause he was a little bit older.
[Bonnie] After Hurricane Harvey,
I know that Tristan and Paul Adams became friends on Facebook.
Paul Adams' house flooded and needed assistance,
and Tristan contacted other friends that were out helping people
with boats and everything else like that
and then sent help to rescue him and his family.
That was the end of August and they communicated through the month of September.
Tristan's mom, Bonnie, advised us that they was just acquaintances,
passerbys during a traumatic time in a storm
and she didn't really think there was anything more than that.
[Bonnie] We did have one conversation.
She said something along the lines
about a 19-year-old boy being interested in her,
but she wasn't specific about it being Paul Adams,
and I told her that her being 14 and him being 19,
I didn't think that was appropriate.
So, I think she kept that a secret.
And she just put him as Adam versus Paul Adams in her phone.
As a teenager, you try to cover your tracks as well as you can.
I mean, when a freshman talks to a senior, it's kind of frowned upon,
but there's nothing anybody can do about it.
But he wasn't a senior, he was older
and she didn't want to be the talk of the town in a bad light.
Their age difference, it's not something normal.
[Duncan] Based upon the text messages,
it was our opinion that Paul Adams being a 19-year-old,
more experienced in life, was possibly grooming Tristan and getting into her life,
real emotional with her, gaining her trust.
And when we checked his Facebook,
most of the girls, all matched the description of Tristan.
That in itself is an indicator that he had a certain type of girl,
certain body shape, certain hair color,
certain eye color that he liked.
And that's what made us even more concerned with this individual.
We found out that he lived in Vidor
within ten minutes of where Tristan lived.
At this point, we knew that we had enough information
that we needed to find him and question him.
-[siren wailing] -[police radio chatter]
So, we arrived at this location,
we noticed a camper trailer and a house frame to the side of the camper.
[Newman] It was after the storm,
and the house they normally lived in was being repaired.
It was a mess.
[Duncan] So at approximately midnight, we knocked on the camper door
and we were met by a female that was named Patricia Adams.
She stated that her son, Paul Adams,
was staying in the house in the back bedroom.
We went to the back bedroom... Paul Adams was not there.
At that point, Ms. Adams advised us
that her son had left to go meet another girl.
We needed to find him quick.
[Duncan] Because Paul Adams is with another female,
we no longer can be covert, if you will.
So we advised the mother, Ms. Patricia Adams, why we're looking for him,
what he might be involved in,
to which time Ms. Patricia Adams states, "I'll help you find him."
She tried to contact Paul to no avail.
He didn't answer his phone.
So at that point, we didn't have an exact location.
But during this whole time, we had been pinging Paul's phone.
And the only reliable information we had
that it was 3.69 miles of a tire in Orange County.
It didn't tell us if it was north, south, east, west.
It could have been anywhere.
We asked Ms. Patricia Adams at that point
what kind of vehicle did Paul Adams drive,
and she advised us it was a 1995 white Toyota Camry.
So with that vehicle description, we put a BOLO out on this
for every law enforcement agency, every police officer,
every patrol to be trying to be attempting to locate this vehicle.
And we could start checking residences, checking gas stations,
checking hotels to see if we can locate that car.
The investigators, they were just keeping me informed of what's happening,
what the next step is,
as I went on to plan her funeral instead of her birthday.
I'd never planned a funeral before.
How do you plan one for your baby? So...
Given how much she loved cheering,
I felt it best that she be buried in her uniform.
They had a football game, and before they went to that,
they loaded the school buses
and came to where
her funeral was at.
Then after the funeral,
the cheerleaders didn't even wanna go do the football game
because Tristan was their fly-up girl cheerleader,
and they didn't know what to do.
[crowd cheering]
[Bonnie] A friend had brought me the game ball
straight from off the field to present to me at home, and it was really sweet.
After the game, we all, the family got together
and showed up at Silsbee High School
and we had a little candle-light vigil.
They brought us
into like a little gazebo area in the middle of the school
and we all brought a bunch of purple balloons.
Purple was Tristan's favorite color.
[all] Five, six, seven, eight.
[Carly] We yelled "Five, six, seven, eight," when we released 'em.
It was like a sea of purple balloons.
There was a lot of crying.
The community basically held each other together after.
[Duncan] At that point, we went back to Paul Adams' residence
so we could get a better search.
We went to the back bedroom. We observed there to be a lump in this mattress on the floor.
We pulled the covers back
and we located a .22 caliber Magnum spent casing,
which we believed to be the caliber that caused Tristan's death.
So now Paul Adams is a prime suspect.
[Newman] While we were searching his room,
we called the Texas Rangers to come to Paul's residence and talk to his mother.
We was hoping that he had made contact
and she would know his whereabouts.
While the ranger was talking to Paul's mother...
-[cell phone ringing] -...the phone rang.
And it was Paul.
And she let the ranger speak to Paul on the phone.
The ranger told him that he needed to come in and needed to talk to him,
he needed to visit with him about what was going on.
Paul Adams was very emotional, was crying.
He said he had past history with Tristan.
And they was just texting each other,
then he asked, "While you're parents are gone, let me come over there."
He stated that he was in the house at the time that she was murdered,
but he did not kill her.
But then what he told us almost gave a horror-story kind of feel to it.
Paul Adams stated that he heard someone coming in,
he thought it might be the mom.
And then he hid in the shower.
And he comes out, it wasn't the mom,
he described a male subject wearing a Boston Red Sox cap with a beard.
It was this white bearded male,
got on top of Tristan, he could hear Tristan screaming.
The reason why he didn't come out of the shower?
Because he was threatening her with a gun, he was gonna kill her.
And that's why he didn't help her.
[gunshots]
And Tristan's bedroom, where her body was, on the bed,
and the way the stuff was situated in her room, everything was in its place.
That does not go along with somebody coming to that room,
getting on top of her, struggling with her.
Even after this happened and the male left, he still didn't call 911.
That's one thing he didn't do that doesn't put merit to his story.
During that phone conversation,
the ranger stated that for a few seconds there was silence.
Then the ranger heard what appeared to be a gunshot.
[gunshot over phone]
We didn't have any idea what might have happened at that moment.
All we knew was Paul Adams was with another female.
So this kind of throws us into a whole 'nother gear.
Then we start thinking, "Okay, now we're looking for a body."
Now we're looking for another victim.
Or we don't know what we got.
[gunshot over phone]
[Duncan] Based upon the evidence,
Paul Adams' story of what happened to Tristan is not adding up.
And you think how our mind's working.
At this point,
there could have very well been a second victim.
Paul was still our prime suspect. We needed to find him.
But we knew that he had a gun
'cause we found the casings in the room,
so we figured that he was armed
and we didn't know what Paul would do next.
[police siren wailing]
So we split up and we went to drive in that 3.5-mile circle
'cause we knew his phone was somewhere within that.
[police radio chatter]
[Duncan] The phone was not moving,
so quite possibly, we are looking for an injured or a body.
Everybody's running every different directions.
And I remembered seeing a set of tracks
that went off in the grass down the drainage ditch.
The grass was laid down in a perfect set of tire tracks.
[police radio chatter]
So we're on this road going down approximately about a half mile.
We see a light-colored tent set up with a bunch of stuff around it,
and a vehicle parked between us and the tent.
I realize that the vehicle in question
matched that description of the 1995 white Toyota,
which was Paul Adams' vehicle.
I saw movement, appeared to be somebody sitting down
at the rear bumper of the vehicle on the ground, leaning up to the vehicle.
So we go from looking to we found him.
[police radio chatter]
We then get our weapons ready. We don't know what's fixing to happen.
I can see a white male.
And then raised his right arm,
and I said, "Hey, I got movement, I think he's got a gun."
[gunshot]
I see a red splatter come out the side of his head,
and he falls to the left side of the ground.
At that point, we speed up, we're going up there,
I observe Paul Adams roll over on his side, look up and that was it.
Paul Adams ceased all movement.
I don't think he was really ever with another girl.
He was hiding out there, at the stink ditch, the whole time.
We also recovered what appeared to be
index cards of a apparent suicide note
along the lines of
"It wasn't me. I didn't do it.
Everybody's gonna think I'm a coward 'cause I didn't help Tristan
and I'm sorry and I'm this and nobody's gonna believe me."
[Newman] The ballistics found that that was the same gun
that killed Paul killed Tristan.
There is no doubt in my mind that he took the life of Tristan.
I was torn with different emotions.
A part of me was like so grateful
that this part, this section was over,
you know, and I wouldn't have to suffer through a trial
and everything that comes from him being arrested.
But then another part of me was devastated because
there were so many things that I didn't have the answers to.
Things that I would never know that happened in that house when nobody was there.
Maybe it wasn't meant for me to know those things, you know,
have those answers.
-[siren wailing] -[police radio chatter]
[Duncan] Once we started processing that scene,
that's when it became even more apparent what was gonna happen.
He has four burlap sacks, he had a brand-new 30-pound dumbbell.
A brand-new 40-pound dumbbell.
There was also several hand restraints present too, in the car.
And we found receipts in the vehicle
where all the stuff was bought.
He had a tent set up right in front of the car.
Based upon the evidence that we discovered, possibly, to dismantle bodies.
All that led me to believe that he was gonna get Tristan to that location
and then do her harm there and then discard her body in that stink ditch,
but something messed that plan up.
I went back to the last text we got from Bonnie to Tristan
was we're on our way home.
I really think that that text made him panic
and it had to be done at the house.
The thought of Paul Adams killing Tristan, that still haunts me.
I think Tristan herself was gonna possibly be the first of many.
So, we was fixing to have,
in my opinion, a serial killer.
[knock on door]
[Bonnie] It was just such a short amount of time
for it to turn into what turned into.
I believe the reason she let him come over
is because he told her he just wanted to talk,
and there was some manipulating that went on there
and she saw it as he was hurting, or he was sad,
or he was upset and trying to make him feel better.
She was probably just gonna let him come over,
talk to him, and then probably never speak to him again.
She was doing what she thought was the best option.
I think that she would have never guessed what that would lead to.
So after Tristan's passing, every game after that,
we always honored her with her favorite chant to always start the game off.
[chanting] Up and up and up and up.
Fire it up. [rhythmic hand claps]
And I have one solid memory of we were doing a jump line and we put the microphone,
the memorial microphone at the end of it.
Graduation was very hard for me.
We knew that Tristan should have been there.
I wasn't keeping track and they said her name, and I was just stunned.
And she was just so kind, so good.
And...
She is so greatly loved and missed by everyone
that ever had the honor and privilege of meeting her.
With her being gone, we do a lot more things as a family
just because we don't know when we're gonna go.
So we try to enjoy every moment while we have together.
[Duncan] In times like this, when these devastations happen,
our communities always comeback together, support one another,
and heal, and become stronger.
The way to go back to normalcy is just go back
to Friday night ball games and cheerleaders.
And if I got anything to say to her friends,
just honor Tristan by living for her.
He was intensely competetive.
We'd never seen anything like that in Canton.
School is on lockdown.
This is not a drill.
If you start messing with someone's children
you're gonna have a problem.
♪