05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (25 page)

Once Frierson finished the first videotape, Walker entered the apartment for the first time with Vince Gonzalez. It would be their job to identify and photograph evidence where it lay, before collection began. Gonzalez started by shooting photos of each room, then parts of the rooms, finally zeroing in on particular items. Evidence lay everywhere they looked, all around them. In the living room, Walker pointed out two spent bullet cartridges near the couch. Only in the kitchen did it appear someone had attempted to cover up what had taken place. The floors were clean, the countertops wiped down. Yet, here, too, they found disturbing evidence. When they opened the dishwasher, a machete lay across the bottom rack. Blood and hair still coated its thick blade.

One item Gonzalez decided on his own to photograph, a phone number written on the wall with the name J. Ribbit above it. It was Jennifer’s cell phone number, written under a reference to the sound made by her family nickname, Frog.

What wasn’t going on inside or outside unit 88 that morning was a lot of talking. Often, to keep murder scenes from weighing on them, detectives and officers banter back and forth as they work, a way of lightening the load. This day, the scene fell oddly quiet. “You could tell that everyone was upset,” says one who was there. “No one felt untouched.”

As he scouted the apartment, Walker placed small, hard plastic tents with numbers, the type restaurants sometimes use to mark tables, beside evidence he wanted photographed and collected. He moved a pillow near the bed and saw red stains on the carpet. Blood? He pulled out an evidence marker and placed it beside the bloodstain. That carpet section would be cut out and bagged. Beside the bed, Walker found an ACE hardware bag. With his hands gloved to protect the evidence, he inspected a receipt that lay inside. Looking it over, Walker realized that the day before Jennifer’s body was discovered, Colton Pitonyak purchased items that included a hacksaw, ammonia, carpet cleaner, dust masks, blue shop towels, Febreze fabric freshener, and latex gloves. It didn’t take much imagination to understand what Pitonyak intended to use the items for.

After the evidence was photographed, Victor Ceballos, the third crime scene specialist assigned to the case, entered the apartment, carefully removing the items that were taken into evidence. An avuncular man with a wide smile, Ceballos designated each piece of evidence with his initials, VC, along with the number on the crime scene marker Walker assigned to it. VC–9 became Colton’s folding knife, one the police would later call “the buck knife.” Black-handled, with “Brandt, the most trusted name in farm implements since 1913, a division of Pitonyak Machinery Corporation” stamped on the serrated blade, the knife was a promotional item given away by Eddie Pitonyak’s company. To prevent disturbing blood evidence he could see on it, Ceballos placed the knife inside a protective cardboard sheath and then into a ventilated white glassine bag.

From the living room, the two fired cartridges were collected. To protect markings that could tie them to a weapon, bullet casings were placed in a special box. The machete became VC–12, and the hacksaw found on top of the body, VC–34.

At the Omni, Jim and Sharon tried to sleep. Telling their families that Jennifer was dead would be one of the hardest things they would ever have to do, but they decided to wait until they had an official identification from the police. Trapped somewhere between shock and grief, Sharon had no choice but to think of others. Sharon had to notify her mother, Myrtle; Clayton; and Charlie, and she had to find Lauren. Sharon assumed her youngest daughter was in Norman, where Lauren roomed with Jim’s youngest, Hailey, and they both attended the university. Jennifer and Lauren were so close that Sharon wanted to tell Lauren in person, and Jim agreed. They decided to bring her to Austin, to be with them and drive home to Corpus the following morning. They had more to do. Even in a horrific death, even in murder, there are customs that needed to be adhered to. Sharon and Jim needed to make arrangements for a funeral.

Jim called friends in Corpus, and one offered his private plane to pick Lauren up. For hours, Jim tried to call Lauren, but she didn’t answer her cell phone. When he finally reached her, he told her to go to the Norman airport, to wait for them. Lauren hemmed and hawed, at first claiming she had to work. Jim insisted, and finally the truth came out.

“I’m not in Oklahoma,” she admitted. “Hailey and I are in Laredo.”

They’d gone to South Texas with Hailey’s mother, Jim’s ex-wife, Susie, for a wedding. Lauren had talked about it with Sharon, but Sharon thought she’d convinced Lauren not to go when she’d told her about recent drug violence in the Rio Grande Valley and a spate of killings in Laredo.

“I’ll get right back with you,” Jim said. He called Lauren a little while later, and said, “Okay, I need you to go to the Laredo airport at about five this afternoon. Bring your suitcase. We’re flying in to get you.” When Lauren asked what was wrong, Jim repeated what time to be ready and asked her not to worry, but, of course, she couldn’t stop wondering what had happened that was serious enough for Jim and Sharon to come for her in a private airplane.

Detective Arthur Fortune walked into Breed & Co. ACE hardware store that afternoon with a copy of the receipt found in the bag at the foot of Colton Pitonyak’s bed. Hours earlier, Detective Gilchrest had stopped in and asked if Breed’s had a video surveillance system. They did, one that surveyed the main checkout area.

As Fortune requested, Jeff Breed played the video from mid-afternoon, Wednesday, August 17. At one point, Fortune asked Breed to pause it. On the screen was a young man who looked like Pitonyak. When Breed saw him, he remembered the young, dark-haired man with the goatee. As Fortune took notes, Breed recounted how Pitonyak had appeared lost in the store, looking at a list. The young man smelled of alcohol but didn’t seem drunk, and he’d said he needed the hacksaw to cut up a frozen turkey.

When Fortune talked to the checkout clerk who’d been on that day, Rene Carden, she also remembered the young man, adding that she, too, smelled alcohol on his breath.

Detective Fortune left Breed’s that afternoon without the video, however. Neither he nor Breed knew how to download off the digital equipment the store had just installed. Later that day, Detective Fugitt, homicide’s resident tech geek, circled over to Breed’s and hooked up a Sony Video Walkman to the surveillance camera, recording the segment with Pitonyak on a videocassette. The video Fugitt made clearly showed Pitonyak pushing a cart up to the checkout, waiting in line, checking out, and then leaving the store. In addition to the hacksaw, dust masks, ammonia, Febreze, and latex gloves, Colton purchased fifty-five-gallon drum liners, blue shop towels, bathroom tissue, and Spot Shot carpet cleaner.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, after he’d spent more than fifteen hours on the crime scene processing evidence, Detective Keith Walker was relieved by another detective. Walker, however, wasn’t going home. Instead, he’d accompany the victim’s corpse to the morgue. It was time to remove the corpse from the bathtub.

The sight was so horrific it was difficult to look at the grotesque scene as simply evidence to be collected, but that was precisely what Walker and the forensic team had to do. Walker’s first order of business after videotaping and photographing the body was to have tape lifts used, strips of clear plastic tape used to pick up and preserve loose evidence, such as hair and fibers. The brown patterned rug still lay over the corpse, and everything in the bathtub had to be transported together, to disturb as little as possible.

Along with the rug, the black trash bag on the bathroom floor would accompany the body. No one had looked, but all believed Jennifer’s head would be found inside. When Jennifer’s arms became visible, they had their first clue that the bag might contain more. Jennifer’s head wasn’t the only thing missing. Both her hands were gone, severed at the wrists.

Something else became visible when they moved the body from the bathtub, a third bullet casing, found in the bathtub near the drain. Ceballos marked an evidence box and slipped it inside, one more item to be processed in the lab.

At 3:20 that afternoon, the body and the accompanying bag arrived at the morgue and was rolled on a gurney into an autopsy suite, where it was laid on trace evidence sheets, sterile sheets used to collect any remaining fibers or hairs. As Detective Walker and Ceballos stood nearby, deputy medical examiner Dr. Elizabeth Peacock opened the large, black trash bag. Inside were two black bags. When she took them out, she found a smaller white trash bag with a red pull cord inside each. Dr. Peacock, a woman with a long neck, glasses, cropped dark blond hair, and a competent manner, opened the first white bag, and found Jennifer’s severed hands.

It must have been an unsettling sight as Dr. Peacock held and fingerprinted the small, delicate severed hands. The hands were photographed, and then the second bag was opened. If Detective Walker had any doubts about the victim’s identity, looking inside the second white bag silenced all arguments. Jennifer’s head was removed and set on the autopsy table beside her body. She still wore her earrings and her makeup, and, except for stab wounds across the side of her face, she looked remarkably like her Texas driver’s license photo. Yet that wasn’t sufficient.

When he left the morgue, Walker went to APD and compared the fingerprints from the corpse with those filed with Texas Department of Public Safety’s drivers’ license records. When they matched, the victim had an official name: Jennifer Cave.

After she heard the news that they now had a positive identification, Sharon called Clayton and Charlie, to tell them that Jennifer was dead. They cried, and when she hung up, Sharon worried, both about her son and that her ex-husband could have another stroke. She called friends and asked them to go to Charlie’s house to be with them. Meanwhile, in Sinton, as soon as his mother hung up the telephone, Clayton dialed Jennifer’s cell phone: “Hello, this is Jennifer. I’m not here now, but please leave a message.” He called over and over again that evening, just to hear his dead sister’s voice.

Photographic Insert

The old farmhouse on the edge of a small South Texas town where Jennifer Cave grew up.
Photo Kathryn Casey

Sharon had four children: Vanessa (rear), Jennifer (left front), Clayton (center), and Lauren (right front). For photographs, Jennifer took off her glasses.
Courtesy of the Cave family

As a little girl, Jennifer hated her freckles. Sharon told her they made her special, that they were the places angels kissed her, before God sent her down from heaven.
Courtesy of the Cave family