05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (24 page)

The lead homicide detective on that night, Mark Gilchrest, heard about a suspicious death about 11:15, an hour after the 911 call came in. At midnight, Gilchrest arrived on the scene, where he circulated and talked to witnesses. One of the homicide unit’s senior detectives, Gilchrest was a broad-shouldered man with a mustache. At APD, the detective was known to be unemotional and precise, methodical and determined. This night, Gilchrest listened to reports of what waited for them inside Colton Pitonyak’s condo. Without seeing the atrocity for himself, the detective already looked mad as hell.

Backing up Gilchrest were two others from homicide. With three years in the unit, Detective Keith Walker was younger than Gilchrest, with ears that stood out from his long face, and a chin that ended in a dimple. Walker was a new father, who was known to be obsessive about following up leads, and his role in the case would be to run the crime scene, coordinating the forensic team and guiding the search of the apartment.

The third detective, David Fugitt, would take statements from witnesses. Wearing Clark Kent glasses and a dark flat-top, Fugitt had been in homicide for four years, coming from the family violence unit. At the time he’d made the change, APD offered two options: homicide or the cold case unit. Fugitt took homicide because he wanted the experience. Being on 24/7 was one of the downsides of the job. It left little time for a social life.

By then Officer Barbaria had questioned the students in the surrounding apartments about the tenant in unit 88. Colton Pitonyak, it turned out, was well known at the Orange Tree, as he was throughout campus, as a source for drugs. When he reached unit 66, the apartment some of the gawkers pointed to as the home of a girl who knew Pitonyak, Barbaria knocked, and Nora Sullivan opened the door. By then it was the middle of the night, but Sullivan was still wide awake. Barbaria asked questions, but sensed Sullivan wasn’t being forthcoming. Before long, he told her, “I’d like you to go downtown to give us a statement.”

Downstairs on the street, Vanessa and Sharon had been separated again, Sharon taken to sit in a squad car. Despite the information circulating through the clutch of officers and paramedics, Jennifer’s mother and sister still didn’t fully understand what had happened. They hadn’t been told about the condition of Jennifer’s body. Grappling with the horror of losing her daughter, Sharon was already precariously close to giving in to the urge to just let go, to give herself over to the grief. About midnight, she looked up at the Orange Tree through the car window, and thought about her other children. Clayton and Lauren would have to be told. How would she tell them? How could she? And Vanessa? Sharon looked across the street at her oldest crying on the curb and wondered if she would ever recover.

Glancing back and forth from the apartment complex, to the street, to the paramedic assigned to stay with her, Vanessa fought the terror that surrounded her that night. She knew Jennifer was dead. Not only had the firefighter she’d stopped to ask told her, but now she remembered hearing Sharon scream, “He killed her. I knew he killed her.”

All the way to Austin that afternoon, Vanessa had feared that her sister was dead, but knowing was different. She’d accepted the possibility that Jennifer might have died of an overdose. Although that was horrible, murder was so much worse, nearly inconceivable. At times, Vanessa feared she would “lose it.” She hyperventilated, and the paramedics talked to her, calming her down. One brought her a paper bag to breathe into, so she could catch her breath. Finally, a paramedic sat beside her and talked, in a soothing, reassuring voice, about skydiving. When she began to shake, he described how it felt to soar through the air, free, and, for a little while at least, Vanessa held on.

Eighteen

At 1:30
A.M.
, Jim followed in his Suburban, and the police, with Sharon and Vanessa in separate squad cars, led him to APD’s brown brick headquarters building, off I–35, in downtown Austin. Once there, they were escorted upstairs to homicide, where their accounts would be taken. The events of the last two days were now evidence that needed to be documented in the search warrant application for Pitonyak’s apartment. Jim worried about Sharon. She knew Jennifer was dead, but there was much she didn’t yet understand.

At APD headquarters, Jim, Sharon, Vanessa, and Aaron were all ordered not to talk to anyone or one another, and then Jim was taken into one of the interview rooms to give his statement. He recounted everything that had happened the previous two days, from first learning that Jennifer was missing to walking into the bathroom and finding the headless body.

“You know he wasn’t finished, don’t you?” the detective remarked. “Ya’ll interrupted him, so he couldn’t finish.”

Jim hadn’t thought about it, but now that he did, it made sense. “Yeah,” he answered.

At about that same time, across Austin, Denise slept when someone pounded on her door. She stared out the peephole at two police officers. “Are you Denise Winterbottom?” they asked, when she opened the door.

“Yes.”

“Do you know a Jennifer Cave?”

“She lives here,” Denise said. “She’s a friend.”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” the officer said. “Jennifer’s dead and you need to come with us.”

Shaking, Denise went into her bedroom and pulled on clothes for the drive downtown. When they walked her past the door that said homicide, Denise understood what had happened. Two plainclothes officers escorted her to an isolated cubicle. One of the officers began describing the crime scene, and Denise felt ill. Barely able to believe what she was hearing, Denise had the feeling that they were gauging her reaction.

“I don’t understand why she went out,” Denise told them. “She told me she was going to bed.”

They asked questions about Jennifer, what she was like, where she hung out. When they asked about the drugs, Denise acknowledged that Jennifer had a history of drug use. When they brought up Colton, Denise said, “I don’t like him, but I barely met him,” she says. “But Jennifer told me, she said, ‘Colton will kill me someday.’”

When they’d finished, the detectives walked her out, and Denise looked over and saw Vanessa crying.

Sharon saw Denise, but just nodded at her. They weren’t supposed to talk, and it all felt awkward, strained. By then, Jim was finished, and the homicide department was buzzing with activity, all aimed at getting the search warrant typed up and ready to be signed.

At one point, Sharon noticed Nora Sullivan. She didn’t know who she was, and later she’d feel foolish recalling how she’d worried about the young girl with the long blond hair who sat eating out of an Outback Steakhouse carryout bag, looking upset. “There’s been an accident, and I’m at the police station,” Nora told someone on her cell phone. Sharon kept wondering where Nora’s parents were, why someone wasn’t coming to help her.

Later that morning, Nora was brought into an interview room, where Detective David Fugitt waited to interview her. She still didn’t know what had happened to Jennifer, and thought that perhaps there’d been some kind of an accident at Colton’s, or that he was in more drug trouble. If Fugitt asked about the last time Sullivan saw Colton, she later wouldn’t remember. She left without telling the detective about Pitonyak’s 3
A.M.
visit to her apartment, never really considering that it might be important.

In the waiting area, weighed down by her grief, Vanessa lay with her head on Aaron’s lap, when a detective came about four that morning to collect Sharon and bring her to an interview room. Her mother wasn’t gone long when Vanessa heard Sharon scream, “This can’t be happening. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.”

Vanessa’s entire body ached. She’d never felt so alone.

When the interviews were finally done, Sharon and Jim were taken downstairs to the lab, to be fingerprinted. Once the APD forensic team had their search warrant and could start processing the crime scene, their prints would be needed to match with those on the crime scene, to determine what they’d touched. In the lab, the girl assigned to collect the evidence walked in and said, “Hi, I’m Jennifer.”

Sharon began sobbing violently, and Jim held her, then tried to reassure the startled lab tech. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not about you.”

Approximately seven hours after Jim discovered the body, they were leaving homicide, when Detective Gilchrest pulled Jim to the side. The detective asked if they would remain in Austin for at least one more day, to meet with him again on Saturday. Jim agreed, and then Gilchrest asked one more thing: “I don’t want you to tell anyone about what you saw in that apartment, not even Sharon,” he said. “Until we arrest this guy, we don’t want that out there.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “You’ve got it.”

As they walked through the APD parking lot to his Suburban, Jim, Sharon, and Vanessa saw two tired, tattered-looking men walking toward them, and Jim realized they were undercover officers.

“We’re sorry about what happened,” one said to them.

“You’ve been out working?” Jim asked.

“Yeah,” one said. “We were looking for Colton Pitonyak down on Sixth Street. No sign of him.”

In the Suburban on their way back to the Omni, no one talked. “There was nothing to say. Jennifer was dead,” says Vanessa. In the hotel room, Jim and Sharon lay down on the bed, and Vanessa nestled in beside her mother. They held each other and tried to sleep.

After calling Eli the night before, Scott waited up until after midnight, hoping Sharon would call. When she didn’t, he sat on the edge of his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to visualize Jennifer. All he could see were dark clouds. In bed, he tossed, unable to sleep, feeling sweaty and anxious. At 5:30 that morning, he thought he was dreaming that someone was pounding on his apartment door. He suddenly woke up and realized it wasn’t a dream. He looked out the peephole and saw two police officers.

“Do you know a Jennifer Cave…a Colton Pitonyak?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like you to come downtown with us.”

After Jennifer moved out, a friend of Scott’s, Maci, had moved in to help with Madyson. Scott stuck his head into Madyson’s room, and quietly woke Maci, asking if she could watch the little girl. When Maci agreed, Scott went to his room to dress. Just then the telephone rang.

“Jennifer’s dead,” Denise said, when Maci picked up.

Maci ran to tell Scott. “Jennifer’s dead?” Scott repeated to the police.

“Yes,” one of them said. “We’re sorry.”

As Denise had earlier, Scott walked past the homicide sign and realized that Jennifer’s death wasn’t an accident. It was then that the horror of what had happened came into sharp focus. In the interview room, the first thing the detectives asked was where Scott had been the night Jennifer disappeared. “At home, in my apartment. Madyson, my daughter, and her babysitter, Maci, were there,” he said.

The police talked, asked questions, but Scott barely listened. “All I could think of was that the girl I loved was dead,” he says.

With a series of photos on the table, the detectives asked Scott to pick out the man he knew as Colton. It wasn’t hard. There was the disheveled drug dealer he’d met, the thug Colton Pitonyak had become, in his mug shot, his dirty black hair wild and a goatee circling his mouth.

When Maci called Laura Ingles at eight that morning to tell her Jennifer had died, Laura screamed so loud that her neighbors from surrounding apartments rushed to check on her. She drove to the police station, offering to tell them whatever she knew. All the while, she kept thinking of that last phone conversation, the night Jennifer disappeared. “I couldn’t remember if before I hung up I’d told Jennifer that I loved her,” says Ingles. “I just couldn’t remember.”

“Did she suffer?” Laura kept asking the detectives.

“We can’t tell you anything,” one said.

The story of an unidentified woman’s body found in a central Austin apartment broke at 8:45 that morning. “There were signs of obvious trauma,” the television reporter said. “And it’s being investigated as a murder, the fifteenth in Austin this year.”

A short time later, Scott finished giving his statement, and the detectives said he could leave. He’d been thinking about the message he’d left for Eli. Jennifer’s murder wasn’t Eli’s fault, Scott knew. He didn’t want to hurt his friend. So he called Eli’s phone number and left a second message: “Eli, I’m sorry for what I said. It’s not your fault Jennifer’s dead.” After he hung up, Scott didn’t know where to go, but he knew he had to find Vanessa and Sharon. He called and found out they were at the Omni.

“Come here,” Sharon said.

Scott didn’t have his car with him, so he ran to the hotel. It was a mile or so, and when he arrived he was hot and sweaty. Vanessa opened the door and wrapped her arms around him, and they both wept. When Laura Ingles arrived an hour or so later, Vanessa hugged her tight and sobbed, “He killed my little sister.”

On the edge of the bed, Scott sat shaking and crying so hard he couldn’t talk.

Detective Gilchrest arrived at the Orange Tree condominiums at ten that morning with the signed search warrant, and the team of APD personnel who’d been there much of the night into the morning finally began processing the evidence in Pitonyak’s apartment.

Along with patrolmen who maintained the perimeter, three crime scene officers were on the scene, eager to get busy. To prevent disturbing evidence, the body would be left in place, in the bathtub with the brown rug over it, until the forensic team finished processing the scene. There was no need to hurry. The paramedic in charge had called in the information to nearby Breckenridge Hospital at 10:30 the night before, where a physician pronounced the Jane Doe dead. Despite Jim’s assumptions, the police weren’t yet ready to officially identify the deceased.

Everyone on the scene knew what to expect. They’d all been briefed on what waited for them in the bathroom.

Detective Walker, who’d coordinate the processing of evidence, was still on the scene, and he gave crime scene supervisor Kimberly Frierson permission to enter Orange Tree unit 88. As the first order of business, Frierson videotaped the entire scene, documenting where everything was before work began. While Frierson videotaped, Walker accompanied officers downstairs to the parking garage to inspect Colton Pitonyak’s car. Along with the apartment, Gilchrest had written the warrant to include Pitonyak’s white Toyota and Jennifer’s black Saturn. Walker issued orders for both cars to be towed to 906 McFall, the APD forensic workshop, for processing.