05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (16 page)

In early July, Scott took Madyson to Kansas to see family and help put a new roof on his grandmother’s house. At the last minute, Jennifer decided not to go with him. Increasingly unhappy, she was thinking over options. By then a friend of Scott’s, Eli Damian, a short, dark-haired, solidly built construction worker who lived in the same complex, was spending a lot of time at their apartment. Scott assumed Eli was just being a friend, but when Scott returned home, he discovered that Jen had gone to a barbecue with Eli. As Scott replayed his recent arguments with Jennifer, the tension that was building in their relationship, he wondered if Jennifer was using drugs again or if she and Eli had begun an affair. When Jennifer came home, he confronted her, but she denied both of Scott’s charges. Instead, she told him what she’d been telling others for weeks, that she was too young to be a mother. They argued, voices rising, and Scott said there was no other option. If Jennifer had doubts about being Madyson’s mom, she had to move out.

“She said there wasn’t anyone else. Jen and I held each other and cried and promised we’d try to make it work, try to save our relationship,” he says. “We agreed we’d date, and do our best to make a go of it.”

Only days after July 4, Jennifer left Scott’s apartment and settled in the one Denise shared with her boyfriend. Although Scott had been the one to tell Jennifer to leave, he was distraught over the breakup. “I couldn’t understand what had happened. We had plans to move into a house together. I even had a place rented,” he says. “I understood what she was saying, that she needed to be her own person first, but I loved Jennifer.”

The afternoon Scott and Jennifer explained to Madyson that Jennifer was moving out, the little girl sobbed. Scott and Jen tried to ease the blow by talking to her together, promising that Jennifer would see her often. “I love you, Maddy, but I’m just not going to live here with you and your dad,” Jennifer said, and then she added something she and Scott had decided earlier. “Instead of being your mommy, we’ll be more like sisters.”

“My sister?” Madyson said, intrigued with the idea. Somehow that worked for the little girl, who from that point on referred to Jennifer as “Sister.” Madyson, her soft curls bouncing, hugged Scott and Jennifer. All she cared about was that Jennifer would still be in her life.

Jennifer told Sharon that she’d moved out of Scott’s apartment when Sharon and Jim were in Oklahoma moving Hailey and Lauren into a townhouse in Norman, near the University of Oklahoma, where both were registered for fall classes. Hailey, who’d once been close to Jen, had become Lauren’s best friend. Sharon worried about Jennifer, but her middle daughter sounded strong and determined on the telephone. Jennifer said all the right things: She was applying for jobs and she’d picked up a schedule to register at Austin Community College for the fall semester. “This time I mean it,” Jennifer said. “I really am going to finish school.”

“That’s great, Jennifer,” Sharon said. “We love you and we’re proud of you, but you need to follow through, not just talk about it.”

“I know, Mom.”

Sharon was troubled that Jennifer was moving in with Denise, who’d had drug issues of her own. “Jennifer, I don’t know about this idea,” Sharon said.

“Don’t be so hard on people,” Jennifer said. “She’s not on drugs now. You have to give people a chance.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Sharon said. “But be careful.”

On the drive back from Norman to Texas, Sharon and Jim took a route via Austin to see Jennifer. Sharon wanted to put her arms around her daughter, to sit and talk with her about her future. Jennifer had signed up with a temporary agency while she looked for a job, and Sharon was eager to see for herself if Jennifer was truly changing. On the road, Jim and Sharon listened to reports on Sirius radio about eighteen-year-old Natalee Holloway’s recent disappearance in Aruba.

“My God, Jim,” Sharon said. “How would you ever live with something like that? Survive that?”

Jim shook his head. It seemed incomprehensible that a parent could live through such a loss.

When they reached Austin, Sharon called Jennifer to tell her that they’d arrived and they were ready to meet her for lunch.

“I can’t,” Jennifer said. “Madyson’s babysitter didn’t show up. I need to take care of her.”

Disappointed, Sharon and Jim continued on to the Hill Country town of Fredericksburg, to Jim’s family reunion. Yet Sharon wasn’t too worried; Jennifer sounded focused on the future. Sharon hesitated to open herself up to disappointment by believing that her troubled daughter had finally grown up, but she had to. As Jennifer’s mother, Sharon had to believe that Jen would find her way. Only later would Sharon Cave realize that in Austin that afternoon, she’d missed her last opportunity to ever see Jennifer. Never again would she look into her middle daughter’s beautiful blue eyes.

Thirteen

“I didn’t know at first that Jennifer was back on the meth,” says Denise, who’d noticed that her new houseguest rarely slept, yet seemed to have boundless energy. “Then one night, I stopped in her room, and she was inhaling fumes from something she was melting in this glass tube. I asked what it was and she said, ‘Ice.’ Jennifer wasn’t using a lot, and she never looked strung out, but it was like everything started up once Colton was out of jail.”

Confirming Denise’s suspicions, Jennifer mentioned that she’d been out with Colton. “He got drunk and started a fight again,” Jennifer said. “Colton’s out of control.”

That July 2005, Colton Pitonyak wasn’t the only Catholic High grad out of control. On July 2, Marty Heidgen, who graduated with Dustin Pitonyak, was drunk and driving the wrong way down a Long Island, New York, expressway, when he slammed a wedding limousine head-on. The limo driver and a seven-year-old flower girl, Kate Flynn, died. “No one in Little Rock even talked about it,” says a young man who graduated with Heidgen. “It was like it hadn’t happened, just another rich kid having fun and getting in trouble.”

Meanwhile, Scott wrestled with the breakup. Losing Jennifer had hurt Scott, and he was on the rebound. He met a thirty-four-year-old real estate agent, a pretty blond, and ended up in bed with her. “But it didn’t help,” he says. “I loved Jennifer.”

Jennifer, too, was in a quandary. She told Vanessa she loved Scott, but worried about being a wife and mom. Yet she said being away from Madyson was the most difficult part of the breakup. “She adored Scott, but she needed space and her independence back,” says Vanessa. “Jennifer was just twenty-one, and I understood that.”

Jennifer settled into Denise’s. She cleaned out the spare bedroom, sorted through the boxes stored there, and took the clothes inside, at Denise’s direction, to Goodwill or a resale shop. Jennifer hung curtains and cleaned. She found a painting at the apartment Dumpster, one with airy pink flowers, and hung it on the wall. Within a week, the room looked feminine and pretty, bright and cheerful, with everything in place.

The two women got along well. “It was like having a true girlfriend,” says Denise. “We’d play around with hair and makeup and clothes.” At times, she ferried Jennifer and her friends down to Sixth Street for a night out. Since Denise didn’t drink, she was the designated driver.

As she seemed to do wherever she went, Jennifer organized Denise’s apartment, cleaning closets and sprucing the place up, something Denise, who was constantly battling fatigue and pain from her disease, didn’t have the energy for. At night, Jennifer often went out with Eli. As Scott suspected, they’d begun dating. One weekend, Jennifer and Eli camped on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Draped over an inner tube they brought to float down the river, she looked full of life in her swimsuit and a big floppy hat. Later Eli would remember how she’d smiled that day, content and happy. Jen had loved the outdoors since her childhood tomboy days, and fresh air and trees still invigorated her.

Back at Denise’s, Jennifer worked on her résumé on the computer and posted it on Monster.com, then tracked down an old roommate who held some of Jen’s things as collateral against money Jen owed her. She and Eli rushed over to the girl’s apartment, and she returned to Jen the things she still had, including baby pictures, a collection of miniature frog figurines, and a star Jim’s older daughter, Whitney, had made for Jennifer. The bright, cheerful wall hanging had blurbs cut from magazines pasted on it, fun and inspirational phrases: “You have to go through a little embarrassment to get what you want”; “Miracles”; “Going fast is alive”; “Flirt”; “No barriers”; and “The agony of growing up.”

“The agony of growing up” certainly seemed to summarize much of what Jennifer had gone through, especially in her relationship with Colton. At times, Jennifer mentioned “my friend Colton” to Eli.

“Who is this guy?” he asked one day at Lake Travis when they’d taken his English bulldog, Stash, for a swim.

“Oh, Colton’s a friend. He’s depressed a lot,” Jennifer said. “He wants me to go over to his place.”

“Why’s he depressed?”

Jennifer shrugged. “Colton hates the world.”

As the days passed, neither Jen nor Eli told Scott they were dating. They weren’t sure yet where it would lead, and both cared about Scott and hesitated to hurt him. Yet, somehow, Scott sensed it. Suspicious, he e-mailed Jennifer, demanding to know what had changed between them, why they rarely saw each other, but she gave no real answers. “I was hurt and angry,” Scott says. “All kinds of emotions converging at once.”

On July 11, Jennifer went to a career fair in Austin. That evening, she had dinner with Scott and Madyson, then the youngster stayed overnight with Jennifer, sleeping beside her in her room at Denise’s. They played and told stories. Scott was still pushing Jennifer, wanting to know what had driven them apart, and Jennifer still wasn’t opening up to him. “It got all weird,” Scott says.

On the fifteenth, Jennifer took Madyson to see
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
with Johnny Depp, on its opening day in theaters. Afterward they went to the complex swimming pool and then had dinner with Scott. That night, too, Madyson stayed overnight with Jennifer. Despite everything going on in her life, Jen had made a commitment to Madyson, and she was working hard to keep it.

At Denise’s apartment one evening in mid July, Jennifer returned from Colton’s apartment angry. She’d already told Denise that she wasn’t seeing Colton unless other people were around, that she was afraid to be alone with him. He hadn’t hit her, she said, but he’d pushed her. “Why do you go there?” Denise asked.

“Because he’s my friend,” Jennifer replied. She hesitated and then added, “Because he’s not always that way.”

Another night the phone rang at Karissa Reine’s house. She hadn’t heard from Jennifer in a month, but when Karissa picked up, her friend sounded frightened. Someone talked in the background and Jennifer said, “I’ve gotta go.” The phone clicked off.

Minutes later, Jennifer called back, whispering again, saying she was hiding in a closet. “Whatever’s going on, get out of there,” Karissa told her. “Now!”

“I can’t leave. I don’t have my car,” Jennifer said.

“Start walking, and I’ll pick you up,” Karissa said, as the telephone went dead for a second time. All that night Karissa worried about Jennifer, but the next day came and went and she didn’t hear any bad news, so she assumed all was well. Later Karissa would wonder who Jennifer was with that night, and if it could have been Colton Pitonyak.

“I have to stop going to Colton’s,” Jennifer told Denise one afternoon in late July. And then she added flatly, “If I don’t, he’s going to end up killing me.”

Denise must have looked shocked, because Jennifer said it again: “I swear, one day Colton’s just going to kill me.”

The meth and Colton were connected in Jennifer’s life, and she seemed powerless or unwilling to completely rid herself of either. One night when she didn’t return to Denise’s, she partied with her friend Nicole Ford, at an apartment where people inhaled meth fumes out of a shared beaker. Jennifer and Nicole looked around, much as they had a year earlier, and both were frightened by what they saw, hollow human beings ruled by a craving for a powerful drug, many who looked decades older than their years. That night, Jennifer grabbed her friend’s hand.

“We have to change our lives,” Jennifer pleaded. “Promise me we’ll quit, and if one of us can’t make it, the other one will go on without her.”

Nicole hesitated. She knew Jennifer had been trying to rid herself of the drug. Feeling powerless to quit, Nicole feared her friend would succeed and leave her behind. The two women held each other and cried, as Nicole reluctantly agreed, “I promise.”

At 12:17
A.M.
on July 26, six days after the last time Madyson slept overnight with Jennifer, Colton Pitonyak logged onto his computer and went to Yahoo.com. Once the screen loaded, he conducted a search, looking for a silencer for a SW .380 semiautomatic pistol. Half an hour later, he was at his computer again, this time looking for a fully automatic Tech–9 assault gun, like the one used by the killers in the horrific Columbine school shooting.

Four days later, Jennifer was at a Wells Fargo Bank in Austin applying for a job. She didn’t get it, but she wasn’t dissuaded. On August 5, she was at a Compass Bank for a second interview. She kept track of each interview, every appointment in her black Day-Timer. “I really hope I get this one,” she told Denise. “I really do.”

Later Colton would say that he saw little of Jennifer as August began. “She was trying to straighten out her life,” he says. “She was going to stop doing drugs.”

Laura Hall, however, had been sucked whole into Colton’s netherworld, enthusiastically, it would seem. “My boyfriend is the most powerful drug dealer…” she bragged.

“You’re dating Al Capone?” one friend jabbed. “How’s that working out for you?”

July 31, a week before Jennifer heard Compass Bank had hired someone else for the open slot, Laura Hall called her friend Sammi Moore, the woman she’d worked with at the law firm, to tell her that Colton needed money. Hall offered to sell Sammi cocaine. Sammi turned Laura down.