05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (13 page)

That spring, Lauren wrote Jennifer a letter, telling her that she wanted a relationship with her, that she missed having her in her life. “I just want you to be honest with me. I want you to call me if you have a problem,” she wrote. “I just want you to be my sister again.”

“I was done with criticizing Jennifer,” Lauren says. “It came between us.”

Off and on, Jen began calling her younger sister to share the good things that were unfolding and the joy of raising little Madyson. To Lauren and to her friends, Jennifer recounted stories about her day-to-day life, telling them about the funny things Madyson said. Jennifer giggled explaining how, on a picnic at a lake, a minnow swam up the little one’s swimsuit, sending her into a screaming, arm-flailing run from the water. There were stories about her attempts at disciplining the little girl. “What do you do when a little girl says ‘butt’?” she asked one day.

“I don’t know,” a friend answered. “What did you do?”

“I wasn’t sure. We do time-outs, but this time I put a drop of hot sauce on her tongue,” Jen said, laughing. “But Madyson liked it.”

On Sundays, Scott, Jennifer, and Madyson went to church together, sometimes with Katrina and Laura Ingles, a friend of Scott’s majoring in music at a nearby college. During the week, Ingles, pretty with dark brown hair and eyes that matched, hung out with Jen and Madyson. Laura didn’t do drugs, and was solidly against them, but she sympathized when Jen talked about how they’d taken over her life and how glad she was that she’d put them behind her. Jennifer confided that more than anything, she thought she’d like to be a good mother for Madyson, and Laura, who loved the little girl, believed Jennifer would be.

In March, Jennifer met Denise Winterbottom around the pool. Denise, tall with long, light brown hair, was a decade older and had a bachelor’s in psychology from a Maryland college. She lived with her boyfriend, Scott Wilson, the apartment complex’s manager and handyman, a building away, in an apartment that came with Scott’s job. Denise, who suffered from CRPS, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a rare, painful disorder, babysat for a four-year-old named Gracie for another single dad in the complex.

It was at the pool one day that Jennifer approached Denise and introduced herself and Madyson. “I thought maybe we could hang out and let the girls play,” Jennifer said.

Denise and Jennifer, it would turn out, had a lot in common. Like Jennifer, Denise started using drugs in high school, “to be rebellious.” She’d tried heroin at seventeen, but got hooked on Xanax and pot, and finally ended up at Narcotics Anonymous. Denise had been in recovery for eleven years when she and Jennifer met, but did have occasional setbacks. “Nothing serious,” she says. “I never got heavy into it again.”

It didn’t take long before Denise and Jennifer spent nearly every day together with Gracie and Madyson. They took the girls on outings, including to McDonald’s for lunch and the park and playground. Once the weather warmed up, they spent mornings at the pool, Jennifer teaching Madyson to swim. Madyson was fairylike, tiny, smart, and wiser than her years, while Gracie was a sturdily built tomboy. The girls loved playing together, “And I was enthralled to have an adult to talk to,” says Denise, in her throaty, raspy, cigarette voice.

At times, Jennifer talked to Denise about moving back to Corpus Christi, but said she couldn’t. “All my friends are in Austin, and I have Scott and Madyson,” she said. “I have a life here, now.”

In the evenings, Jennifer and Denise walked her dog, Speedy, a Lab-chow mix, while they smoked. Before long, Jennifer left the cigarettes home and pulled out a joint, and their evening walks became a quiet, laid-back time when they smoked pot and talked. “I knew I shouldn’t. Neither one of us really should have,” says Denise. “But it wasn’t much. Just one joint, and we shared it. It took the edge off.”

Soon, in the afternoons while the girls napped, they began sharing a second joint.

Early on, Jennifer told Scott about Colton. In fact, he’d been something of a presence in their relationship. Before Jen weaned off the heavier drugs, they’d stopped at his apartment one night so she could get cocaine. Then, as they grew closer, she confided in him, telling Scott about the incident with the knife. “Jennifer didn’t seem frightened. It wasn’t like she thought he’d really hurt her,” he says.

Another night, Jen took Scott to a party, and Colton was there. At first, it bothered Scott just looking at Colton, remembering what Jennifer had said about him. But as Scott watched, Jen and Colton acted like old friends, telling stories and laughing at inside jokes. “Colton was talking one hundred miles per hour about nothing,” says Scott. “And he was wrapped up in himself. He didn’t have a clue of what life was like without drugs.”

At one point, Colton leaned over and said to Scott, “If you ever need anyone taken care of, I’ve done that before.”

Scott didn’t believe him, but he wondered why Colton thought that sounded cool. To Scott, Colton seemed out of touch with reality.

As the night went on, the two young men talked, and Colton mentioned that he wanted to get off the drugs, to stop dealing and regain his life. Scott wondered if he could help him, even if they could be friends. Jennifer cared about Colton. Scott understood that.

At the apartment, the phone rang at odd hours, especially at night, and Jennifer rushed out, saying Colton needed her help. At times, she stayed out all night, but Scott didn’t worry. “I knew it wasn’t like that with them. It wasn’t sexual,” he says. “I could tell that Jennifer thought of him as a friend, and that she worried about him.”

That February, Colton’s parents came to Austin for a farm equipment trade show, and Colton invited Jennifer and Scott to go out to dinner with them and with Said Aziz, a friend of Jennifer’s and Colton’s who was set to graduate in a year from UT; and Colton’s longtime pal Juan Montero. Aziz had spent the summer working in Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide, and Scott thought when they all gathered that night at Sullivan’s, the steakhouse where Jennifer had once worked, that Colton was showing off for his parents, inviting his more presentable friends.

It would turn out to be a pleasant dinner. Eddie mainly talked to Colton, Said, Juan, and Scott, while Bridget and Jennifer conversed. Throughout the evening, Colton’s parents appeared anxious about their son, peppering the conversation with questions about his activities. Smiling and acting nonchalant, Colton claimed his classes were going well, and that he’d been putting in a lot of time studying. But when Scott looked at Colton, he could tell Colton was “all coked up.”

Later, Eddie would say that when he and Bridget later asked about Jennifer, “Colton became very defensive.”

That month, Colton stopped at Justin’s apartment and handed him a box. “Will you keep this for me?” he asked. Reluctantly, Justin agreed, afraid to ask what was inside. At times, he wondered about Colton and what he was becoming. At that point, Colton spent much of the time shooting morphine, using cocaine, popping pills, and drinking; partying on Sixth Street; and hanging out with drug dealers. “There must have been times when he sobered up enough to take a good long look at himself and felt stone-cold disgusted,” says Justin.

Once when Justin met Colton for lunch, he insisted he was going to turn his life around. “Yeah, I’m going to get back in the gym and become a trainer, then get back to school and pull it together,” Colton said.

“Colton had plans. He wanted to stop selling the drugs,” says Justin, who’d gotten himself clean about eight months earlier. “Colton didn’t like the way his life was going. But day turned to evening, and evening turned to night, and people called wanting drugs, and it was impossible for Colton, the entrepreneur, to resist meeting that demand.”

That March 12, 2005, was Jennifer’s twenty-first birthday. Sharon and Jim had given the other girls trips for their big birthday, but, with Jennifer’s progress still so uncertain, Sharon drove to Austin and took her out instead. Sharon booked a room at a La Quinta hotel, and they went to Sullivan’s for dinner, and then to a cozy wine bar. Afterward, they lounged together on the hotel bed watching a movie and talking. The following weekend, Vanessa, too, drove in to celebrate. The sisters spent a night on Sixth Street, partying and dancing. Two beautiful women, they garnered a lot of attention.

For their celebration, Scott brought home “magic” mushrooms from a friend, mild hallucinogens. After cooking dinner, when Madyson was asleep, they ate the mushrooms, and Scott gave Jennifer a massage. Soon, he visualized black clouds rising up around her, and he started pulling at them, tearing them out. As he worked on her shoulders and her back, untangling the stress points of her muscles, he continued to see dark clouds materialize and then evaporate in his grasp. Before long, Jennifer sobbed. Crying hysterically, she lay on the bed for more than an hour, while Scott kneaded her back.

Afterward, Jennifer lay in Scott’s arms. They talked, and Jennifer confided that before that evening she’d felt something dark and frightening hanging over her. At least temporarily, it was gone. “You saved my life,” she said, and, for the first time, Jennifer told Scott, “I love you.”

“From that point on, we were even closer,” Scott says. “It was like we were at a deeper level of intimacy.”

One of the things Jennifer called out that night while Scott kneaded her back and visualized the black clouds gathering around them was a name, “Colton.”

Not long after, a friend of Scott’s painted a portrait of Jennifer, strong lines in grays and blues. The painting was of Jen’s nude torso, and it would later seem eerily prophetic.

Eleven

While Jennifer was busy setting up housekeeping with Scott and Madyson in early 2005, Colton continued to redefine his image, leaving ever further behind the former altar boy and scholarship student and cultivating the gangster persona he’d worked on since arriving at UT nearly four years earlier. If Scott was Jennifer’s “kindred spirit,” as she’d told friends, Colton had found his own counterpart, of sorts, in an aggressive young woman named Laura Ashley Hall.

Hall spent her first years in Madisonville, Texas, but grew up in Crosby, twenty-five miles northeast of Houston, in a metropolitan area of around twenty-three thousand. An agricultural setting, Crosby wasn’t particularly affluent, but it had a certain charm. Many of the residents were blue-collar, middle-class folks who worked hard, paid their bills, and raised their families.

Laura’s mother, Carol, was a lissome woman, with short, reddish-blond hair, a fair but freckled complexion, and calm manner, who worked for a plastic surgeon. Laura’s father, Loren, had a thinly trimmed beard and a dark mustache, and reddish-brown hair combed back. With a penchant for jeans, Western shirts, and loud sport coats, he made his living as a yacht broker but fancied himself a writer. He’d produced a five-book series of children’s books and one work on “poetic philosophy,” but none was published.

“He adored Laura,” says Andrea Jiles, Laura’s best friend for many years. “Her dad had her on a pedestal.”

Casual, fun-loving people, Carol and Loren weren’t called Mom and Dad by their only child, but by their first names. The family lived in one of the nicer houses in town, in a good area, and Laura had the run of the second floor. As Jiles remembers it, Laura usually got whatever she wanted from her parents. When she was sixteen, for instance, Laura drove a hand-me-down Cadillac sedan. Loren and Carol Hall “acted more like friends than parents,” says Jiles, a tall, slender, African-American woman with a long face and rich, dark complexion.

Always, Laura seemed in a world of her own, and she had a sense of herself that Jiles found bigger than life. As a teenager, Laura carried her small rat terrier, Sweetie, in her purse, taking him everywhere, a decade before Paris Hilton made it fashionable. Her hair dyed dark, her complexion pale, and with a long, straight nose, Hall resembled the actress Gina Gershon. She dressed vaguely Goth, in black with black makeup, but was athletic, swam, and played soccer, and beginning in her freshman year, competed on the school debate team, often placing well at competitions. The year Laura was the captain, the team competed before the American Legion and the local VFW chapter, and she took them to nationals. To the dismay of her opponents, Laura read and formed arguments quickly, taking a strong stance on whatever issue was assigned.

At times, Hall became so passionate about ideas, she acted on them, as when during one debate meeting a team member threw out a comment derogatory of the United States. The students agreed the country was “screwed up,” and one said things were so bad they should refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. At the next school function, Hall did just that.

As far as Jiles knew, Laura Hall didn’t use drugs in high school. The dangers of illegal drugs and guns were topics Jiles understood firsthand. For much of her life, she’d grown up in Houston’s rough fifth and third wards, where gun violence was commonplace. Her biological father had been killed by drug dealers, and her mother and stepfather were both murdered. With all her parents deceased, Jiles lived with her grandfather.

In Crosby, Hall and Jiles hung out with the “smart” kids, although, in school, Laura was far from popular. She hid her athletic body under sweatshirts, and walked through the halls reading vampire novels. While Laura let her guard down around Jiles, she put on a tough front with her other schoolmates, often glaring at them with cold, blank eyes, and many questioned why Jiles befriended Hall. “Laura’s not a people person,” says Jiles. “She was rude without realizing it. Not many people liked her.”

At the same time, Laura loved to talk. In fact, Jiles believed her friend habitually said whatever occurred to her, without self-censorship. “Laura never had a thought she didn’t share,” says Jiles. “If she wasn’t with someone, she was talking to someone on the telephone.”

When it came to boys, Laura fell head over heels, never holding back, suffering when the liaisons ended. “Laura put everything into a boyfriend. Blew them out of proportion. When they split, she was devastated,” says Jiles. “It doesn’t really matter how smart someone is. Relationships are a different thing.”