05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (39 page)

“It’s fair to say that you observed Jennifer using drugs?” Sam Bassett asked.

“Yes,” Denise said. She’d seen Jennifer smoke pot, and she knew she used meth.

“It wasn’t a secret, was it?” Bassett asked.

“She was honest with me,” Denise said.

The day would dissolve into a parade of witnesses, all setting the stage for the horror that took place in Orange Tree unit 88. Three of those who gathered on Sixth Street that night testified, including Jeffrey Sanderson, who relayed how eager Colton Pitonyak seemed to procure an eight ball of drugs and how he pulled a knife out to cut off a girl’s wristband. Yes, Sanderson admitted, he’d described Colton to police as seeming as if he’d “fried” his brain with drugs.

“That’s a descriptive way of saying his brain wasn’t working right?” Minton prodded. The defense wanted jurors to see Colton as unable to make a rational decision.

“Yes, sir,” Sanderson agreed.

When Melissa Kuhl took the stand, the girl whose birthday was being celebrated on Sixth Street that Tuesday night, she described how Jennifer confided Colton “is crazy,” and then how she watched Jennifer and Colton walk away from the Cheers Shot Bar and turn the corner, disappearing from her sight.

A break was called, and Sharon left the courtroom, followed by Ellen Halbert, the head of the DA’s victims’ assistance office. In the women’s restroom, Sharon washed her hands, when Bridget Pitonyak bustled in.

“Sharon, Sharon, please I want to talk to you,” Colton’s mother pleaded.

To avoid her, Sharon rushed into one of the stalls and closed the door. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to Colton’s mother.

“I’m so sorry…” Bridget began.

Standing between Bridget and the bathroom stall door, Halbert put up her hand. “This is inappropriate,” she said. “It’s not the time or place. Please leave.”

Bridget looked flustered and upset, disappointed. Jennifer’s death must have been weighing heavily on her. Ever since testimony began, she’d stolen quick glances at Sharon, perhaps identifying with the pain Jennifer’s mother endured. Certainly the Pitonyaks were suffering. But then, as Sharon would later say, “their child is still alive. They can still talk to him, still tell him they love him.”

When testimony resumed, the chronicle of Jennifer’s final night continued to play out. Michael Rodriguez recounted how Jennifer complained Pitonyak was acting up, urinating on one car and threatening to break the window of another. Colton’s cell phone was missing, Jennifer had said, and she was helping him find it before she took him home. “I’ll call you when I get to my apartment,” she promised. But Rodriguez fell asleep, and his phone never rang.

“You didn’t sense any fear in her voice?” Bassett asked, making his point that Jennifer had no reason to fear Colton, that they were friends.

“No…if I would have, I would have made plans to meet her somewhere,” Rodriguez replied.

Two hours later, Colton banged on Nora Sullivan’s door. Pitonyak had been drinking, and he babbled about a gunfight with Mexican drug dealers. “Did he seem…highly intoxicated?” Bishop asked Sullivan.

“He was functioning fine, talking fine,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan insisted she didn’t worry about Colton having a gun in her apartment at three in the morning. “Were you ever concerned for your safety?” Bassett asked.

“No, not at all,” she said.

At times, Sharon Cave’s face so reflected her grief that it was painful to watch her on the witness stand. When the questions became too agonizing and her emotions too raw, she paused, grimaced, and took a deep breath. Then, remarkably, she went on.

“Are you close to your children?” Stephanie McFarland asked.

“Yes,” Sharon said. McFarland brought a framed photo to the witness stand, and Sharon identified the fresh-faced high school senior with bright blue eyes as her dead daughter, Jennifer. The prosecutor placed the picture on a ledge in front of the judge, facing the jury. For most of the rest of the trial, when the jurors looked at the judge’s bench, Jennifer looked back at them.

Throughout her testimony, Sharon appeared as vulnerable as an open wound, bleeding sorrow. She recounted her last conversation with her daughter, how happy Jennifer had been that day, her disappearance, and Sharon’s frantic rush with Jim to Austin. What did Colton Pitonyak say to Sharon when she pleaded for information about her daughter?

“Dude, I’m having pizza with my friend,” he told her. “Don’t bother me.”

When Sharon repeated his words, she looked over at the defense table. Colton stared blankly down at his hands, and Sam Bassett seemed to bristle. She looked back at Pitonyak and he looked up, but Sharon saw no emotion in his eyes. They looked dead and cold.

With Sharon, McFarland took the jury to the Orange Tree and condo 88. Sharon recounted knocking on the door, calling out the name of the daughter everyone in the courtroom knew was already dead and mutilated, Jim entering the apartment, the horrible smell of decomposing flesh, and the frantic call to 911.

“I knew it was Jennifer when Jim came out and said he saw her feet,” Sharon said, sobbing. “Jennifer had freckles on her feet. I knew then.” In the gallery, Jim and Vanessa helplessly watched. Sharon’s face was a mask of utter misery.

“I feel sorry for both of us,” Minton said, when he stood up to begin cross-examination. “I hate like the devil to ask you questions.”

Despite any reluctance, Minton had a job to do, and he started his inquiry where it would tell the most about what had transpired in Jennifer’s life, the path she took from high school to college to Austin. School, work, drugs, and partying, Jennifer’s life seemed in chaos at times.

“Jennifer was having a hard time finding herself,” Sharon admitted. Minton handled her questioning gently, calmly, and before long she’d returned to the gallery, where Jim slipped his arm over her shoulder and she cried.

On the stand, Scott Engle talked about the “connection” he and Jennifer felt the first time they met and how the relationship ended. He left a voice mail on Colton’s telephone the day Jennifer disappeared. When Colton called him back, Scott mentioned that Sharon had called the police.

“What did he say?” Bishop asked.

“[Colton said,] ‘That bitch is going to get me arrested,’” Scott repeated.

In the jury box, one of the men turned and looked at Colton, his eyes boring into him.

“You knew she was using methamphetamines,” Minton said to Scott. “People on that can get aggressive.”

“I never saw that,” Scott said. “I’ve never seen a problem with her thoughts…her way of doing things…she took great care of my daughter.”

What about Colton? Minton wanted to know. In his statement to police, Scott had written, “Colton is crazy.”

“Was that the drugs or was he psychotic?” Minton asked.

“I could never balance the two,” Scott responded.

When the prosecutor questioned him, Jim kept his eyes on Bishop. Articulate and calm, Jim described the terror of walking into Pitonyak’s dark apartment and the horror of finding Jennifer’s decapitated body.

“There’s a body,” he repeated, looking weary. He’d told this painful story too many times, relived the nightmare too often. “Sharon asked, ‘Is it Jennifer?’”

On cross-examination, Sam Bassett asked questions. No, Jim wasn’t concerned about Jennifer’s use of drugs the night that she disappeared. He’d talked with her, and she was excited about her new job. As he answered, Jim glanced at Colton seated beside his attorney. Like Sharon, he searched the younger man’s face. Like Sharon, Jim saw no emotion and nothing to indicate remorse.

After Jim left the witness stand, a parade of investigators testified, from Richard Barbaria, the first APD officer to enter the apartment, through the forensic investigators who photographed and collected the evidence. “Were you made aware that there was a decapitated body in the apartment?” McFarland asked crime scene specialist Victor Ceballos.

“Yes, ma’am,” he responded.

“Let’s take them one at a time,” Judge Flowers ordered with Vince Gonzalez, the crime scene specialist who’d taken the photographs. Bishop had labeled each photo he planned to bring into evidence, organizing them to take the jurors through the apartment, just as Gonzalez had experienced the scene, through Colton Pitonyak’s front door, the debrisstrewn efficiency with an ACE hardware bag near the bed and fired shell casings on the cocktail table, into the kitchen where the bloody machete waited in the dishwasher, toward the bathroom, where the full horror awaited them.

Sharon and Vanessa left before the photographs of Jennifer’s mutilated body were displayed on a screen behind the witness, for the entire courtroom to see. They’d decided Jim was right, that there were images they were better off not seeing. Jim and his cousin Bissett stayed. “I thought I’d seen it all before, and I could stay for this as well,” says Jim. At times, he didn’t want to look, but nothing the prosecutors displayed on the screen rivaled the horror of being in the apartment that day, seeing Jennifer’s poor, mutilated body.

The last thing the jurors witnessed as the first day of testimony came to an end was a photo of Jennifer’s dismembered body: her hands and head in trash bags and her violated body in Colton Pitonyak’s bathtub.

Austin was in a drought, and few complained when rain soaked the streets and impeded rush hour traffic the following morning. Outside, I–35 was clogged with a river of cars, while inside the courtroom, more of the investigators took the stand, including Detective Keith Walker. He’d accompanied the body to the morgue, where Dr. Peacock fingerprinted Jennifer’s severed hands.

When Maurice Padilla, the DNA specialist, took the stand, he testified that Colton’s DNA was all over the bathroom and the tools used to dismember Jennifer’s body. But then he testified to the test results that worried Bishop and McFarland: Laura Hall’s DNA on the gun and on the outside of the magazine that held the bullets. It wasn’t surprising, Bassett pointed out, that Colton’s DNA was on the gun. It was his gun, and he’d handled it often. But why was Hall’s on the gun? “Mixtures [of DNA] don’t indicate how much someone has handled an item?” Bassett asked.

“Correct,” said Padilla.

Bassett put a photograph of the black-handled knife on the screen, the one prosecutors labeled “the buck knife.” On the serrated blade was the logo for Eddie Pitonyak’s farm equipment company, and in the gallery, Sharon’s throat tightened. It was a promotional knife, and she recognized the model as one she sold through her business to clients who used them for advertising.

Then Bassett turned his attention to the DNA evidence, not what was before the jury but what was missing. APD hadn’t swabbed the handles of the hacksaw or the buck knife for DNA. How else could they know who was holding them? “Was any portion of the handle [of the hacksaw] before or after the fingerprinting swabbed?” Bassett asked.

“Not by me,” Padilla answered.

On the witness stand, Jeff Breed testified that Pitonyak had a list of cleaning supplies when he entered the hardware store the afternoon after the killing. When Breed asked him what kind of saw he needed, the disheveled young man asked for something cheap to “cut up a turkey.”

“Did he act intoxicated?”

“No,” Breed answered. “I smelled alcohol, but he didn’t act intoxicated.”

Jurors and the crowd of spectators watched as on the screen the hardware store surveillance tape played, showing Pitonyak pushing a shopping cart up to the checkout to pay for supplies he planned to use to clean up evidence and dismember Jennifer’s dead body.

Before the medical examiner took the witness stand, Jim brought Sharon to a small room outside the courtroom. There was something he hadn’t told her, something about the autopsy. “I need to tell you something that’s about to come out. They found a bullet,” he said, not wanting to go on but needing to. “Someone shot into Jennifer’s head through her neck, after they cut her head off.”

“What?” Sharon sobbed, and Jim held her. “How many things did they have to do to my child’s body? Why did they have to keep hurting her? She wasn’t doing anything but lying there dead.”

It seemed the horror of Jennifer’s death had no end.

When Dr. Peacock took the stand, she and McFarland went over the main findings, concentrating first on the gunshot wound that killed Jennifer. As Peacock demonstrated the path of the lethal bullet through Jennifer’s body, Colton Pitonyak looked away. Then she talked about the cuts to Jennifer’s face and chest and the bullet lodged in her skull. All were postmortem, after death, and those listening knew what they meant. Pitonyak, Hall, or both, most likely high on drugs, had not only dismembered but played with the corpse, toying with it, slicing into Jennifer’s cold flesh and shooting into her skull. In the gallery, Sharon Cave seethed, believing that perhaps she understood why they’d done it. Colton and Hall were angry with Jennifer, furious that her body lay there taunting them.

“It was pure evil,” says Sharon.

Again, Sharon and Vanessa left the room, this time while McFarland used Dr. Peacock on the stand to introduce the autopsy photos. Jim had intended to stay, as he had while the crime scene photos were up, seated next to his cousin Dr. Bissett for support. “I figured that being a doctor, Jack could take the photos,” said Jim. “It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t be able to.”

But when McFarland put up a photo of the pieces of Jennifer’s body lined up on a cold, steel autopsy table, Jim’s stomach lurched. “I’m out of here,” he stood up and whispered to Bissett. “I can’t do this.”

Jim wasn’t the only one that photo affected. The autopsy table photo hit the jurors hard. One, a thirtysomething woman in a matronly quilted vest, covered her mouth with her hand, while an older woman turned away. A third woman started to cry, while some of the men stared at the photo and others looked at Colton Pitonyak in disbelief.

As the second day of testimony ended, Bishop set the stage for Pitonyak and Hall’s flight from Austin. A cellular telephone expert explained how on the evening after the killing, the path of Pitonyak’s cell phone cut across Texas into Mexico.