05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (15 page)

Laura Hall and Colton had the same photo linked to their Facebook pages, one of Colton with his bros: Juan Montero, his fists with his middle fingers extended in the universal symbol of contempt, knelt in the center. In the background, in a wise-guy pose, stood Colton, a small V-shaped beard just under his lower lip, wearing his bill cap backward and a derisive smile. In another Facebook photo, Colton, hair disheveled, wore his black leather sport coat and stared into the camera in a drugged daze.

If the profiles were windows into Colton’s and Laura’s souls, they were frightening. At one point Laura Hall noted: “I should really be a more horrific person. It’s in the works.”

That June, Andrea Jiles warned Hall that Colton had turned her into a drug addict. “Colton is cool,” Hall replied. “He’s a rich boy.”

Jiles looked at her friend and hardly recognized her: “He’d changed her so much there were now two different Lauras.”

Despite his relationship with Laura Hall, Colton and Jennifer talked almost daily. Jason Mack had no doubt about Pitonyak’s feelings. “He was in love with Jen,” says Mack. “Laura was the one he called if he had no one else to hang with, but Laura was in love with Colton. Jen? She thought of Colton as a friend.”

Despite no longer needing him for drugs, since she used so little, Jennifer was still drawn to Pitonyak. Scott noticed that whenever Colton called, Jennifer picked up immediately, and then ran out saying Colton had a problem and “needs to talk.” In May, Colton called Scott with a crisis, claiming someone was trying to kill him. Half an hour later, Colton drove up in a cab and ran to their apartment door. Scott let him in and knew right away that Colton was high, as he rattled on about how he’d been out with an escort, and that her pimp was after him. Scott thought it sounded like the plot of a bad movie.

When they were alone, Scott and Jennifer talked about Colton often, including the upcoming hearings over his possession case. One night she told Scott about a party where Colton played Russian roulette with a loaded gun, while a group of his friends watched him pull the trigger. Rumors floated around the Delt house that summer. Someone heard that one of their inactive brothers, Colton Pitonyak, pulled a gun on a frat kid he sold drugs to.

But most of the time, Colton Pitonyak wasn’t part of Jennifer’s and Scott’s lives, which centered on Madyson. They worked their schedules around caring for her, and Jen catered to the little girl with the big smile and the worldly eyes. Jennifer seemed to be thriving on her time with the youngster. She bought Madyson new clothes, including a pink cowboy hat studded with rhinestones. They cuddled and huddled together: the little girl looking for a mother and Jennifer living her dream of having a child.

On nights when he didn’t work at the restaurant, Scott and Jen got together with friends, playing poker or going out to the Canary Roost, a strip-center bar near the apartment. They drank and laughed, Scott sang karaoke, and they danced long into the night.

One night, when the place was packed, Karissa Reine, the bartender, shouted last call, just as Jen walked behind the bar. Reine had noticed Scott with the redhead. When alcohol-fueled tensions rose in the bar, Reine saw Jennifer try to calm the other patrons down. “It struck me that she always seemed to be worried about other people,” says Reine.

Reine soon found out that was why Jennifer walked behind the bar. “What are you doing?” Reine asked. “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

“You’re working too hard,” Jen said. “You need a break. You need to call me and we’ll go out. You need to relax more.”

She slipped Reine her phone number, and Reine did call her. They became friends, and Jennifer convinced Reine to take more time for herself. “She was right,” says Karissa. “I was working too hard, too many hours.”

On May 31, 2005, Jennifer and Scott went to Reine’s apartment, the one she shared with her boyfriend, Bryan Breaux, a musician. They laughed, told stories, and drank wine, until, exhausted, Scott passed out on the couch. Intrigued by Jennifer, Reine took out a camera, a new digital she’d just bought, and followed Jennifer through the apartment, snapping photos, trying to capture the light in Jen’s blue eyes. The photos from that night showed Jennifer fully in the moment, holding a glass of red wine, her cheeks flushed, with a breathless smile on her face. Some were highly sensual, as Jennifer’s long red hair fell over her pale, freckled shoulders, her breasts plumped by a black lace bustier.

From that night on, Jen sometimes visited Reine in the wee hours of the morning, after she closed the bar and returned home from work, while Scott and Madyson slept. At times, Karissa talked to Jennifer about the way she took on the problems of others. Jennifer told her about a friend, a “crazy guy,” and how she sometimes stayed with him. He was smart and, when he wasn’t high, sweet, and Jennifer saw something in him that needed to be protected. “Jennifer, you’re not responsible for everyone else,” Reine advised. “You can’t save everyone.”

Over the months, the two women drank wine and shared stories about their lives and their dreams. One night their conversation turned to premonitions. “We both believed in them,” Reine says.

That night, Jennifer confided that she had the unmistakable feeling that she had to live her life quickly, that she wouldn’t be around to grow old. A fear haunted her, giving her the sense that she needed to enjoy every moment, because, although only twenty-one years old, Jennifer Cave believed her time on earth would be short.

“It feels like something evil is stalking me,” Jennifer said. “I have to be one step ahead; I have to run.”

Twelve

On June 10, 2005, Colton Pitonyak appeared before Judge Wilford Flowers in the 147th District Court, on the seventh floor of the Travis County Criminal Courthouse, an understated, modern structure next to the old courthouse near the corner of Eleventh and Guadalupe. Sam Bassett had negotiated a good deal. Colton had two offers from the prosecutor to consider: the first, Colton could plead guilty to the felony charge and serve no additional jail time; the second, the charge would be plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, attempted possession of a controlled substance, but there was a catch—Colton would be sentenced to sixty days in Travis County’s Del Valle jail. Perhaps on the advice of his attorney and parents, who worried about the effect of a felony on his record, Colton chose the second option: the misdemeanor conviction with accompanying jail sentence.

Sixty days may have seemed formidable, but based on good time laws in place in Texas, if Colton stayed out of trouble in prison, he’d be out in less than a month. That same day, he entered the Travis County jail system for the third time and disappeared inside.

While he was incarcerated, neighbors at the Orange Tree saw Laura Hall at Colton’s apartment almost daily, watching his cable television, preferring it to her current apartment, one she’d moved into on Oltorf Street, south of the city. “Colton’s in jail,” Laura told Andrea Jiles. “He just needs to do his time, and he’ll be out.”

“Well, obviously he’s not that smart to end up in there,” Jiles said.

“Colton’s cool,” Laura said.

“He’s the wrong guy,” Jiles cautioned again. She knew her friend was giving Colton money, funds Laura needed to pay expenses, including rent. At times, Colton gave Laura a little back, but then quickly asked for more, and Laura gave it to him, even money her grandmother gave her as an early graduation gift. “Colton’s using you,” Jiles said. “And remember: A lot of people in my family ended up in prison or dead because of drugs and guns.”

Meanwhile, with Colton confined in jail, Jennifer began to piece her life back together in earnest. “She really did well,” says a friend. “Colton was a distraction she didn’t need but couldn’t seem to get rid of, and having him in jail did that for her.” Jennifer applied for jobs, interviewing for one in an insurance office. She was excited about the opportunity and was disappointed when another applicant was hired. The executive who broke the bad news to Jennifer told her, “You won’t stay here. You’re too bright. I don’t know why you’re not in school.”

In June, Jennifer drove with Madyson to San Marcos, the city where she’d once gone to college, and met Lauren at the vast, 130-store outlet mall, an open-air discount shopping center boasting such upscale shops as Kate Spade and Ferragamo. Despite their differences over the past few years, Lauren and Jennifer enjoyed the day together. Jennifer talked of her plans, getting a job and starting to take classes again. When she later talked to Sharon on the telephone, Jennifer sounded more positive than she had in a long time. Sharon still worried, but she began to hope her middle daughter’s life had finally found its course.

“Mom, since I’m applying for jobs, I need my cell phone back,” Jennifer said during one conversation from Scott’s apartment, “Can I have it?”

“Sure,” Sharon said. She felt as if she walked a thin line, wanting to reward Jennifer for improvement but afraid she’d open the door for more disappointment. Still, the telephone was a little thing. “Is everything okay with Scott?”

Jennifer hesitated, thinking, then admitted: “I’m starting to wonder if I’m ready to be a wife and a mother. I’m so young, and I haven’t really done anything yet.”

Sharon had been worried for months about little Madyson and what would happen if Jennifer and Scott didn’t make their relationship work. Now Jennifer, for the first time, expressed doubts, and Sharon immediately worried about the little four-year-old. “Be careful with Madyson, Jennifer,” she advised. “You’ve always wanted to be a mother, and that little girl needs a mother. Be careful how you handle her.”

“I know,” Jennifer agreed. “But I do want to be someone first before I’m a wife and a mother. I love Scott and Madyson, but I just don’t know that I’m ready.”

In hindsight, it wasn’t just the confines of caring for a child that weighed on Jennifer. By then, she and Scott were arguing about money. When she moved in, Scott assumed Jennifer would work and help pay expenses, but in the six months they’d been together, she stayed home to care for Madyson and the apartment. Once he found her a job as a hostess at a small microbrewery, but Jennifer didn’t like it and worked only a few nights before quitting.

To friends, Jennifer said she found the crush of caring for a house and child and a job overwhelming. Not realizing she was having doubts about their little family, Scott was happy when Jennifer said she wanted a real job, like the one she’d had at the bank in Corpus, where she went to an office every day.

That June, Scott and Jennifer looked at rental houses in Austin’s north suburbs, not far from their apartment. Madyson was growing up, and he wanted to put down roots. Jennifer, meanwhile, felt increasingly at odds with the life she’d built for herself, the instant family she became a part of when she and Scott got together. “I love Scott,” she told Laura Ingles. “I really do love him and Madyson. But I want a job, and I want to finish college.”

In her Day-Timer, Jennifer recorded job interviews, at banks and small companies, charting her course through June. Madyson must have seen Jennifer writing in the black vinyl notebook, for one day she took a black crayon and wrote her numbers on one page. It would later seem strange that the little girl used that black crayon on another page to draw a box and color it black, a box shaped eerily similar to a casket.

On June 30, 2005, twenty days after he entered, Colton left jail, his sentence completed. Someone who saw him noticed something odd. Rather than hiding his time behind bars, Colton showcased it, in the form of a jailhouse tattoo penned by a poor speller, for what he’d crudely etched on Colton’s back instead of “felon” was “fell on.”

Although not convicted of a felony, Colton appeared intent on achieving what, in his mind, apparently held a certain status. That duality in his personality was still front and center when, in the mold of the proper and well-mannered Catholic schoolboy he’d once been, Colton wrote his attorney a thank-you letter. “It was unusual,” Bassett says. “It’s not very often that a client takes the time.”

Living back in his apartment at the Orange Tree, Colton registered for a second-semester summer class at UT, a biology course, The Human Body, then spent two weeks before it started drunk and high on meth, making up for the forced abstinence during his incarceration. “Colton’s out,” Laura told Jiles on the telephone, and in Houston, Hall’s high school friend shook her head, thinking,
This is bad.

“My friend Colton is out of jail,” Jennifer told Denise at the pool, in early July.

“That’s not a good thing, Jen,” Denise said. Jennifer had described Colton as a mean drunk and told her about the night at Justin’s when he’d come at her with a knife. “Stay away from him.”

Scott’s friend Laura Ingles gave Jennifer the same advice when Jen asked if Laura wanted to meet Colton. “You need to stay away from him,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“Oh, no, I’ll be fine,” Jennifer insisted. “He’s really a sweet guy. When he’s not drunk or high, he’s great.”

“He just got out of jail for drugs, Jennifer,” Laura said. “Let’s get real about this guy.”

Like so many others, Laura wondered why Jennifer kept Colton Pitonyak in her life. Jen seemed so spunky, so strong in ways. “Colton was Jennifer’s weak spot,” says Laura. “She didn’t seem to be able to get rid of him, even though she knew he was dangerous.”

Perhaps the attraction wasn’t just Colton. In July, after his release, Denise noticed that Jennifer acted differently, more keyed up, and she lost weight. “Jennifer looked jazzed,” Denise says. “Something had changed.”

What started as occasional questioning built into determination to step back and take a look at her situation, to reevaluate and decide if she’d chosen the right path. When Jennifer talked to Denise about her concerns at the pool one afternoon, Denise assumed Jennifer just needed a break from Scott and the responsibilities of motherhood. “You can stay with us,” Denise offered. “We have a spare bedroom.”

“I’ll think about it,” Jennifer said.