Read 05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 Online
Authors: Kathryn Casey
“Why did he say that? What did you say to him?” Langenbach asked.
“I want a lawyer to help me and Colton concoct a story, so that we can get Colton off on a lesser charge and me on a misdemeanor,” Hall said. She talked about O. J. Simpson, whom she said was obviously guilty but had walked with the aid of a high-priced and high-profile band of attorneys.
“Lawyers don’t do that, Laura,” Langenbach said. “They’re not even supposed to put you on the stand if they know you’re lying.”
Laura’s attorney, Tom Weber, would later say that he did tell Hall she was the oddest client he’d ever had. Although she’d never even been arrested before, Hall reveled in her role in the sensational murder case and its accompanying publicity. When he looked in her eyes, he saw no feeling. Laura Hall cared for no one but herself and Colton, whom she talked about constantly, professing her love. When Jennifer Cave’s name came up, Laura fumed about the dead girl, expressing no sympathy for either Jennifer or her family.
Early on, Weber talked to Hall about working a deal with the prosecutors by agreeing to testify against Colton, but she refused. “That’s my homeboy,” she said. “I love him, and I stand by him.”
Weber, chief prosecutor in Judge Flowers’s court until 1996, warned Hall not to talk with anyone about the case, especially in jail, but she didn’t listen.
“That fucking bastard,” Hall said, and Langenbach knew her cellmate meant her father, Loren. “He wants me to talk to the police, tell them what they want to know, but what the fucking bastard doesn’t get is that I’m federally fucked if I do.”
Although Langenbach spoke six languages and had lived all over the world, throughout their weeks bunking together, Hall treated the older woman as if she were an inferior human being, someone with limited intellect who couldn’t understand those with superior intelligence. “I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about Jennifer Cave. She wasn’t anything,” Hall said more than once. “Colton’s brilliant. He had a full scholarship at UT, in the business school. Jennifer Cave was a fucking waitress ho.”
At times, Hall talked about the night Jennifer died. As she portrayed it, Colton and Jennifer argued, Hall said, over money Jennifer owed Colton for drugs. “The next thing he knew, she was dead. He shot her.”
Colton was in a frenzy when Hall arrived at his apartment that morning, crying, screaming, irrational, drunk, and high on drugs. At first, Pitonyak didn’t tell Hall whom he’d shot, but instead took her to the bathroom to show her the body. “I didn’t realize who it was until he lifted up her head and I recognized her,” Hall said.
“We have to get rid of the body,” Hall said she told Colton. From that point on, Langenbach had the impression Hall was in charge, making the decisions. When she used the toilet, Colton pulled the green vinyl shower curtain to hide the body.
“How could you use that bathroom with a body in there like that?” Langenbach asked.
“When you’re very intelligent, you’re able to compartmentalize things,” Hall bragged.
The gun was in the living room, on the cocktail table, and Colton sat on the couch playing with his machete and the buck knife with the folding blade that locked into place. Hall claimed Colton put the machete to her throat, laughing.
“Stop fucking around,” she told him. “We need to concentrate on getting rid of the evidence.”
“Weren’t you afraid of him?” Langenbach asked.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I love him, and he knows it.”
Langenbach had the impression that Hall wrote the shopping list Colton took to Breed’s that afternoon. She was furious that he’d gone to the small neighborhood store, instead of a large hardware store where he might have gone unnoticed. “Had I taken control of everything, that would not have happened,” she said. “Getting caught on camera buying the stuff.”
While she was running her own errands, filling the Cadillac with gas and getting it washed, Hall said she stopped for a hamburger. Then she met Colton at a Mr. Gatti’s pizza restaurant. Hall recounted being furious that the waitress tried to charge her when she wasn’t eating. While they were there, Sharon Cave called, saying she’d called the police, and Colton again “freaked out.”
Back at the apartment, they grabbed Colton’s things, and then ran to Mexico.
“Why would you cut up a human body?” Langenbach asked.
“Think of it,” Hall said dreamily. “How many grandmothers can tell their grandchildren that they cut up a body?”
“But how could you eat knowing that you had a dead body, cutting it up?” Langenbach asked.
Again Hall talked about compartmentalizing. “Dead body in one compartment; my hunger in another, and so forth.”
Over the weeks they shared the cell, Hall explained that their plan had been to cut off Jennifer’s head, hands, and feet, the parts of her that were most easily identified, and then throw them in a lake. The rest of her corpse, they planned to dump in Mexico.
When it came to her six days with Colton in Mexico, Hall described the time as “the happiest of my life.”
Sickened by what she heard, Langenbach used her “rack-up” or quiet time to make notes on Laura’s statements. She wrote them into letters she sent to her attorney, asking him to keep them for her. At times, she stayed up after Hall went to sleep, writing.
In addition to emphasizing that Langenbach was her intellectual inferior, Hall crowed that she was smarter than Travis County prosecutors and APD. She laughed about the offer she’d made to APD to take a lie detector test, and boasted that she knew how to lie and pass it. She had ice water running through her veins, she bragged, and had no trouble masquerading her emotions. Still, she looked for other ways to ensure that she passed the test. She talked about taking a jail meditation class to learn how to rein in her emotions even further, and one day returned from the jail infirmary drugged up on what she told Langenbach were antipsychotics. The medicines, which she claimed she lied to get, would mask her reactions and help her sail through the lie detector.
For hours on end, Laura droned on about getting two tattoos, one with her and Colton’s initials entwined, and the other the letter “F” for felon. Perhaps she was emulating Pitonyak with his “fell on” tattoo from his drug-charge jail stay. As Langenbach watched, Hall spent hours scribbling on sheets of paper, trying to design just the right tattoos.
At times, Hall frightened Langenbach. The girl seemed out of touch with reality, devoid of any normal human emotion. Then, the night before Hall’s first court appearance, something even more bizarre happened.
In her upper bunk, Hall slept, doped up on the antipsychotic medicines. Sometime after eleven, she thrashed about, appearing to be in the throes of a nightmare, crying out, “Get away bitch. You’re dead. You’re dead.”
Langenbach got out of her bunk and sat in a chair opposite the bunk beds watching Hall scream at no one. The younger woman writhed in the bed, shouting and cursing, then, suddenly, Hall dove off the top bunk, smashing her head against the edge of the wall and the floor.
The next day, Hall had two black eyes and a lump on her forehead. Laughing it off, Hall told Langenbach that she planned to sue the jail, claiming they had unsafe beds, hoping to make enough money to “pay for a good attorney.”
The day after Hall’s nightmare, she was transferred to a unit with an open lower bunk, near the guard’s station, where she could be monitored. From that point on, Langenbach says, her former cellmate fared poorly in jail, refusing to do her work, such as helping to clean her unit, offering other inmates candy and chips to pay them for doing her wash, and then refusing to give them what she’d promised. More often than not, Langenbach heard Hall was in solitary.
Despite having her out of her cell and her life, Langenbach thought often of Hall, her ice-cold emotions, her unfeeling references to Jennifer as no more important than garbage to be disposed of. And Langenbach would always remember the night Hall plummeted out of the top bunk as the night Jennifer Cave’s spirit haunted Laura Hall’s dreams.
West Campus was still percolating with the aftermath of the killing. News reports offered tips on how women could stay safe, including advice from a private investigator on how to do background checks on potential dates. Meanwhile, Gilchrest and Walker searched Pitonyak’s apartment one last time before releasing it to his parents and the landlord. In particular, they hoped to find the missing bullet. While three casings had been found, they’d discovered only two bullets: both removed from Jennifer’s body. Where was the missing bullet?
Gilchrest paid particular attention to the torn-up couch, where a bullet could wedge inside cushions and be hard to find, but never discovered what they’d come looking for. Instead, the detectives recovered an orange, barrel-shaped purse from under the bed, one with Jennifer’s cell phone and wallet inside.
One other thing they logged into evidence that day, found near the coffee table, was a Burger King bag with a receipt attached, for a $6.16 meal purchased the day Jennifer disappeared. Just after Colton Pitonyak left Breed & Co. Hardware, he bought a value meal with a medium Coke and fries, requesting no onions.
When Bishop saw it, he shook his head. Minutes earlier, Pitonyak was shopping for tools to cut up Jennifer Cave’s body, which lay decomposing in his bathtub, but he obviously hadn’t let it spoil his appetite.
“In Arkansas, Those Who Knew Suspect Are Baffled by Arrest” read the
Statesman
headline on August 28. Neighbors and friends of the Pitonyaks talked to the reporter about the Colton Pitonyak they knew, the brilliant student and seemingly happy young man. “We’ve known that child forever,” said one woman. “It could be any one of our kids. That’s what’s most frightening.”
For their part, Bridget and Eddie Pitonyak weren’t talking. As soon as the publicity hit, they’d built a wall of sorts, keeping to themselves. “We’d see them and it was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room,” says one of Bridget’s friends. “No one mentioned Colton sitting in a jail in Austin or what he was accused of doing to that poor girl.”
In South Texas, Jennifer’s family tried to come to terms with her death. Clayton, at times, wondered if it were all a bad dream. He sometimes woke up mornings and, for a little while, forgot. Then it came flooding back. Jennifer was dead.
Hailey felt guilty, wondering if she might have been able to protect Jennifer, if she’d stayed closer to her. And Lauren scanned the Internet, looking at the articles on nights when Hailey was out of their apartment, when she was alone and could absorb it on her own terms. Afterward, she felt sick and awkward, as if everyone watched her. At times, Vanessa thought of something funny and wanted to tell Jennifer, only to remember she couldn’t.
Sleep was difficult for Sharon, and when she did, there were the nightmares. In them, she saw Jim’s frightened face as he emerged from the apartment. And she dreamed of Jennifer, how angry she must be that she was robbed of the opportunity to prove herself. More than anything, Sharon longed to touch her daughter’s long red hair and whisper good-bye.
In early September, after the chaos had started to settle, Jim drank coffee on the patio, covered with potted plants from Jennifer’s funeral. Since they’d moved into the house, he and Sharon had been attempting to lure hummingbirds to the yard, planting flowers to attract them and hanging a hummingbird feeder. All without luck.
On this morning, however, Jim looked up and saw one of the tiny, vibrating birds hovering next to the feeder. Fascinated, he watched, and the bird left the feeder and flew directly over to five brightly painted angel figurines he’d picked up a year earlier on a trip to Colorado. The angels were supposed to ward off evil spirits, and he and Sharon had hung them across the back of the house, at the time dedicating one to each of their girls. To Jim’s surprise, the hummingbird went from angel to angel, as if kissing them.
This is crazy
, Jim thought.
The next morning, however, it happened again. And then, in the afternoon, the hummingbird was back. This time Sharon was outside with Jim, and it appeared the bird was talking to each of the angels, facing them and flitting from one to the other.
“She’s right here,” Jim said.
“What’re you talking about?” Sharon asked.
“That little bird is Jennifer,” Jim said. “She’s come to check on us.”
Her heart breaking, aching for any connection to Jennifer, Sharon didn’t believe the bird was her daughter, but she did want Jim to find what peace he could. He’d been so brave, so wonderful, and they had both been through so much.
For nearly a month, the hummingbird visited daily, watching Jim drink his coffee. Then it left and never returned.
In October, two months after Jennifer’s death, Sharon saw Colton Pitonyak for the first time, in a courtroom at a motion hearing. She would later remember staring at the man accused of murdering her daughter. One question nagged her: Why? She left feeling physically ill and couldn’t eat for days.
Andrea Jiles visited Laura Hall in jail that fall. Her friend had bruises around her eyes and a lump on her forehead.
“What happened?” Jiles asked.
“I fell out of bed,” Laura replied, without elaborating.
The two friends talked, and Laura told Jiles that it had been her idea to flee to Mexico, and she was still standing by Colton.
“How can you do that? He killed a girl,” Jiles said. “That girl is dead.”
“Well, this is all bullshit,” Laura said. She’d already told Jiles the plan she and Colton had agreed on before his arrest: that they’d blame each other for the killing, and the jurors, unable to discount reasonable doubt, would have no choice other than to let them both go. “I have to do everything I can to help Colton,” she said.
“My friend was no longer my friend,” says Jiles. “I didn’t go to the jail to talk to her again.”
That November, Sharon and Jim flew to Norman to attend a football game with Lauren and Hailey, and Sharon noticed a young cheerleader on the field, a pretty girl with long red hair and freckles. Sharon wanted to talk to the girl, to touch her, and Jim had to explain to her that she couldn’t, that she’d scare the girl.