05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (11 page)

That August, as every August for decades before it, freshmen arrived at the university, both apprehensive and excited about their futures. Some pledged at the houses surrounding the Orange Tree, and the sound of young women leading sorority cheers and chants filled the streets, while at the frat houses, young men milled about discussing plans for the fall and what houses they would pledge. Just three years earlier, Colton Pitonyak had been such a bright-eyed student.

That summer, with classes starting at the end of the month, the glassy-eyed, unkempt Colton moved his belongings into Orange Tree unit number 88, a small studio. It should have been his senior year, but he’d earned only enough credits to be a sophomore.

Unit number 88 had little room to spare. Colton tucked a bed into the alcove to the left of the door, between a glass block divider and a hallway that led to the vanity and the bathroom areas. To the right, just inside the red door marked with gold numbers, was a small living room area. Colton positioned his television next to the fireplace and across from a dark cloth couch and a coffee table. Through a doorway to the left of the television was the kitchen, dark wood cabinets lining the walls and the dishwasher visible from the living room. To keep out prying eyes, he hung heavy curtains over the three living room windows, which looked out onto the courtyard.

Outside, the staircase to the apartment above formed a roof over his front door, shading it from the often blistering Texas sun. From the closest stairway, the UT campus was easily visible and, surging above a lush green carpet formed by the leafy crowns of gnarled live oaks, the school’s famous clock tower. When the carillon rang, it echoed through the Orange Tree’s courtyard.

That month, Jim and Sharon drove to Austin to see Jennifer. Sharon was apprehensive about the meeting. She was disappointed in the way Jennifer was living her life and intended to tell her. It was frustrating talking to Jennifer and getting promises that never materialized.

“Well, I didn’t find a job,” Jennifer said, when they sat down at a Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant.

Jim had stopped on the way and picked up a copy of the
Austin American Statesman
and two free newspapers with employment ads. “If you’re not going to go to school, get a good full-time job with benefits, Jennifer,” he said. “Look at all these jobs.”

They went through ones he’d circled, but Jennifer had reasons that none of them would work: They were too far or didn’t interest her. She wanted something with more pay or better benefits.

In the past, Jim had always been the one reassuring Sharon, cautioning her not to get upset; Jennifer was just going through a stage. This time, even he was angry. “You know, Jennifer, this is bullshit,” he said, and he got up and left, going outside to smoke.

“Well, great. He’s mad at me,” Jen said, cocky.

Sharon tried to talk to her, but Jennifer was evasive and revealed little about what was going on in her life. They argued and Jennifer cried, and the emotional distance between them loomed so vast, it saddened Sharon. “Forget school,” she advised. “Get a job until you figure out what you want to do. Don’t even waste any more money registering for classes.”

“Well, I can’t do anything to make you happy, Mother,” Jennifer said.

“Yes you can, but that’s not what’s important here. It’s about you building a good future,” Sharon said, meaning it. “I love you, Jennifer. I just want you to do well in life.”

Angry, Jennifer stormed off, and when she drove from the parking lot, she was still sobbing.

All the way home to Corpus, Jim and Sharon cried. “The drugs were ruining Jennifer’s life,” Sharon says. “We knew it, but we felt helpless. We tried, but she just wasn’t listening.”

From Corpus Christi, Sharon continued to call Jennifer daily. At times, Sharon knew Jennifer was upset with herself, like the day she recounted running into a high school friend who was graduating from college in a year.

“When are you graduating?” the girl asked Jennifer.

“I’m not,” she replied.

“I felt like a dummy,” Jennifer told Sharon.

“Well, Jennifer, you should feel like a dummy,” Sharon said. “You’re screwing this all up. But the good news is that you can turn it around anytime you want.”

Always her daughter’s loyal supporter, Sharon urged Jennifer to make changes. As she’d done so many times before, Jennifer insisted she would but then did nothing. As always, before Sharon hung up, she said, “I love you.”

“Colton got arrested,” Jennifer said on the telephone to Sharon, one day. Then she told her about the possession charge. “His attorney wants him to go into rehab.”

Hughes was trying to negotiate a deal for Pitonyak, the same type of plea bargain that had dropped his DUI down to a misdemeanor. So far, the prosecutor resisted. That fall, Colton talked constantly about his drug case, analyzing his attorney’s strategy and bantering about what Judge Flowers might rule.

Meanwhile, Jennifer continued to be at loose ends. She didn’t have a job and partied so often that Michaela kicked her out, and before long, Amy realized that Jennifer was living in Colton’s apartment. Amy thought that, too, was odd. She couldn’t understand their relationship, except that she sensed Colton wanted more from Jennifer than just friendship.

That fall, Jennifer stayed at Colton’s for little more than a month. Why she left was something she never truly explained, except to say that something had frightened her. One night after she moved out, she was at a friend’s apartment listening to music and talking to Justin Walters. When he asked why she’d left Colton’s, she said only, “I didn’t feel safe there.”

Taking it at face value, Justin assumed Jennifer didn’t like all the students dropping in to buy drugs or the suppliers Colton dealt with, underworld types. “Colton complained that his parents weren’t sending him the money they used to, and he’d started doing bigger deals. He wasn’t nickel-and-diming it anymore. The higher-ups in the drug chain are not nice people,” says Justin. “The higher up, the more unsavory.”

That night when Justin and Jennifer talked, Colton showed up, looking for Jennifer. “I want to talk in private,” Colton said to her. To Justin, Pitonyak looked strung out.

“No, no, no,” Jennifer said, visibly frightened.

“What if Justin is in the room with us?” Colton asked.

Jennifer thought about that for a while, and then agreed.

Later Justin realized the conversation lasted only twenty minutes or so, but it felt like he, Colton, and Jennifer were in the bedroom together for more than an hour. Over and over, Colton told Jennifer, “I love you. We belong together.”

“I don’t feel that way about you, Colton,” she said.

As he watched, Justin sensed that Colton had thought long and hard about what he would say to Jennifer, planning how he would convince her to be with him. Colton looked surprised at first and then angry that his profession of love didn’t propel Jennifer into his arms with a breathless “I love you, too.”

As he continued to plead, Colton grew progressively angrier, his voice louder, his face flushed, and his words more insistent. “I love you,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we be together?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not going to happen. I don’t love you that way. We’re friends and that’s all.”

“I love you, and I want to be with you,” he pleaded. “Please, let’s…”

“You scare me, Colton,” Jennifer said with an air of finality. “I can’t be with you.”

“You’re scared I might have a knife?” he said. With that, Colton pulled out a knife, a black-handled folding knife, the type used in hunting. He popped the blade open and locked it in place.

“Oh, my God,” Jennifer screamed, running into the nearby closet.

Colton rushed toward her, but Justin, taller and heavier, held him back, inserting his bulk between Colton and the open closet. All the while, Justin talked calmly, trying to cool the situation down. Since they’d met, Justin had often been able to placate Colton when their other friends couldn’t, on nights when Colton seemed intent on starting brawls.

“Put the knife away, Colton,” he ordered. “We talked about this before. I don’t want weapons around. It’s dangerous.”

At first Colton pushed harder toward Jennifer, and Justin thought that his friend intended to enter the closet and loom over her, frightening her. Justin never considered that Colton could actually hurt Jennifer. Colton was threatening at times, out of control, but Justin had never seen him hit a woman. Despite Colton’s gangster demeanor, Justin believed that on some level his friend was still the funny, bright college kid. The old Colton just didn’t emerge as often as he used to, now that the drug-dealing Colton was in control.

Finally, Colton put the knife away, and, while Jennifer hid, Justin talked him out the door. Once Colton was gone, Justin consoled a frightened Jennifer. Perhaps, if she’d been thinking clearly, Jennifer would have ended the relationship then, excising Colton Pitonyak from her life. But the tie that bound them was strong.

“Jennifer never stayed mad at anyone,” says Justin. “I don’t think she ever believed in her heart that Colton could hurt her.”

Not long after, Jennifer began telling friends that she and Colton had talked, and that while he wanted more from her, he agreed they would only be friends. Perhaps she truly believed that he was able to turn off his deep feelings for her, bury them and go on.

That October, Eddie Pitonyak was in Austin, and Colton introduced him to Jennifer. Later Bridget would say that she and Eddie heard Jennifer’s name often from Colton that year. In fact, she was the only girl he’d mentioned to them since moving to Austin. Eddie gave Colton his credit card that night to take Jennifer out for dinner. By then, Eddie and Bridget knew about Colton’s arrest and the charges pending against him. They must have felt much like Sharon Cave: that they had little control over their son and feared where his life was taking him. How they must have agonized over what was happening to him. Colton had been a star, a son to be proud of, but now they faced a battle to simply keep him out of prison.

On his attorney’s advice, that November, Colton committed himself to La Hacienda, a posh drug and alcohol treatment center in Hunt, Texas, not far from Austin in the bucolic landscape of rolling and jagged hills called the Texas Hill Country. The thirty-two-acre campus on the Guadalupe River had walking paths and a waterfall. The facility offered a full medical and counseling staff for individual and group therapy, and prayer and meditation sessions in an open-air, A-frame chapel on the river, called Serenity Hill.

The Pitonyaks undoubtedly hoped the facility and its well-trained staff would repair the damage the drugs and alcohol had done to their son. Certainly, La Hacienda had everything Colton needed if he were so inclined. Later Colton would say, however, that his stay there was a performance, put on for the benefit of Judge Flowers and the prosecutor, to convince them to lower the charges; Colton Pitonyak had no desire to change.

With his superior intellect, Colton had no problem saying what he needed to in order to successfully complete the rehab program. Once released and back in Austin, Colton drank and used drugs with all the determination he had before the weeks of therapy. La Hacienda hadn’t even slowed him down. “His schedule and his consumption would have exhausted most mortal beings,” says a friend.

Meanwhile, Jennifer was still floating around, staying with one friend, then another. Just before the holidays, she met Katrina deVilleneuve, a pretty, compact young woman, with smoky dark eyes and a strong, supple body, who worked as a dancer at an Austin topless bar. A few years older than Jennifer, Katrina came from a tumultuous childhood. Her mother died young of cirrhosis of the liver, after years of alcohol and drug abuse. Her only brother died in a car accident when Katrina was sixteen, and her father of a brain aneurysm when she was twenty-one.

A friend brought Jennifer to a party at Katrina’s house, and introduced the two women. When Katrina learned Jen had nowhere to stay, Katrina invited her to move into her two-bedroom duplex, a cluttered, funky place with a pink living room and electric-blue bedroom. Katrina had a spare bedroom, and Jennifer quickly agreed.

The duplex was filled with the trappings of Katrina’s trade, filmy lingerie and stiletto heels, wigs, and makeup. She’d started dancing two years earlier, when a friend told her she could make $100 a night. She didn’t believe her, but tried and it was true. Early on, her father objected and she quit, but he died not long after, and she went back to the clubs. She’d worked at most of the topless venues in Austin: Joy, Sugars, and Maximus. The money wasn’t the only attraction, although it was more than Katrina could make anywhere else. “I like the attention,” she says. “I like being told I’m pretty. I get to dress up and flirt. It’s like you’re getting dressed up to go out, but you get paid for it.”

When she met Jen, Katrina danced five nights a week at Ecstasy, a club off Springdale, and was considering massage school, although she hadn’t yet applied. “I’m not going to do this forever,” she said. “I’m not going to be a forty-year-old dancer.”

While Katrina went to work, Jennifer watched television, listened to music, and cleaned the duplex, organizing Katrina’s closet, as she’d done for Sharon the year before, putting Katrina’s costumes in order and boxing up and color-coding her shoes. In the wee hours of the morning, Katrina made her way home. At times, they stayed up and talked, took ecstasy or smoked pot. Jennifer told her about Charlie and his drinking. “I wish you could have had my dad,” Katrina told her. She adored her father and kept a framed photo of him on top of the television. “He was a great guy.”

At times, Jennifer cried. There was something wrong, an emptiness that Katrina believed Jennifer couldn’t find a way to fill. Jennifer talked of disappointing her family, and Katrina held her to comfort her. “I think she was trying to pull it together,” says Katrina. “She talked so much about wanting to make her family proud.”

Off and on, Jennifer circulated over to Colton’s. She told Katrina about the night with the knife, and Katrina warned Jennifer never to see him again. “Colton’s okay if he’s not high,” Jen said. “I just make sure I’m not alone with him.”