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Christopher Coleman was convicted in Monroe County Circuit Court on May 5, 2011, of three counts of first-degree murder in the strangulation deaths of his wife and two sons in Columbia, Illinois, and was sentenced to three concurrent terms of natural life without parole.

Coleman, a former Marine, was director of security for Joyce Meyer Ministries, a Christian ministry headquartered in Missouri. He lived with his wife, Sheri, 31, and their sons, Garett, 11, and Gavin, 9. Beginning in November 2008, he was involved with Tara Lintz, Sheri's high school friend who lived in Florida. The relationship became physical in mid-December 2008. Trial testimony established that Coleman and Lintz discussed marriage, exchanged rings and booked a cruise for June 2009. Coleman told Lintz he was having divorce papers prepared. Friends testified that he believed Sheri was ruining his life but feared a divorce would cost him his ministry job.

Starting November 14, 2008, Coleman reported that his family was receiving threatening emails and letters over his ministry work. Letters arrived January 2, 2009, and April 27, 2009. A neighbor, Columbia police Detective Sergeant Justin Barlow, aimed a surveillance camera at the Coleman mailbox on April 28, 2009, and Coleman knew it was there.

At 6:43 a.m. on May 5, 2009, Coleman called Barlow while driving home from a gym in Missouri and asked police to check his house because Sheri was not answering the phone. Officers entered through an open basement window and found messages spray-painted in red on the walls. Upstairs, they found Sheri, Garett and Gavin dead in their beds, with no sign of forced entry. Autopsies by Dr. Raj Nanduri found ligature furrows and abrasions on all three necks and determined that each died of ligature strangulation. Surveillance video showed Coleman leaving at 5:43 a.m. and returning at 6:56 a.m. Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden testified that all three were dead before Coleman left that morning.

Coleman was taken by ambulance to the police station and interviewed for five hours and 56 minutes by Barlow and Trooper Bivens of the Illinois State Police. He insisted Sheri was alive and lying beside him when he left at about 5:45 a.m., while the detectives told him the physical evidence showed otherwise. Police noted fresh scratches on his arm. Coleman attributed them partly to an injury days earlier and partly to hitting his arm in the ambulance. He initially denied the affair with Lintz, then admitted it while minimizing the relationship after being told investigators were speaking with her. He never asked how his family had been killed. About four hours into the interview, when asked directly whether he knew how they died, he said he did not.

Coleman provided bodily and handwriting samples, his clothes, phone and computer. Cybercrime investigators traced the threatening emails to his laptop and found that "opportunities" was misspelled "oppurtunities" in both the threatening letters and documents on the computer. He was charged by information on May 20, 2009, with three counts of first-degree murder by strangulation.

Judge Milton S. Wharton presided over Coleman's trial. A jury of ten women and two men convicted him on all counts after about 14 hours of deliberation, two years to the day after the killings, and found him eligible for the death penalty. Coleman waived jury sentencing. On May 9, 2011, Wharton imposed three concurrent sentences of natural life without parole, declining to impose death with Illinois abolition taking effect that July. The Illinois Appellate Court, Fifth District, affirmed the convictions on December 31, 2014, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied leave to appeal on May 27, 2015. Judge Stephen P. McGlynn dismissed Coleman's postconviction petition alleging actual innocence, due process violations and ineffective assistance of counsel. The appellate court affirmed that dismissal on August 30, 2023. Coleman remains in prison.

The video is a police interview-room recording that runs about 5 minutes and carries the opening portion of the nearly six-hour interview. It shows the interview itself, without narration or a presenter.