05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (28 page)

Laura Hall, here in the courtroom, dyed her hair red, something those who knew Jennifer found unsettling.
Photo Kathryn Casey

Scott’s shrine in his bedroom, including the prophetic painting of Jennifer’s torso, praying hands, and a small plaque that reads: “Heaven.”
Photo Kathryn Casey

Two hours later, Lauren waited at the Laredo airport, worried, frustrated, and annoyed. She wondered if her father had suffered another stroke, if he had died. She kept urging herself to calm down. Jim’s ex-wife, Susie, and Hailey stayed with her, trying to help but not knowing what to say. When the small plane landed and the stairway came down, Sharon, doubled over, could barely walk, and Jim looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. Lauren noticed she and Sharon had worn the same outfits, and she made a joke of it. “We’re twins,” she said.

Sharon didn’t even smile.

“There’s been an accident,” Jim finally told them as they all grouped together in a small room in the airport offices. “Jennifer’s been killed.”

“How?” Lauren asked.

“Somebody killed her,” he answered.

Nausea welled up inside her, and Lauren hurried to the wastebasket and started retching, her whole body shaking. She screamed and cried, but it would last only minutes. From that moment forward, Lauren wouldn’t cry for her almost twin for more than a year.

Along with a search warrant for the apartment and cars, Gilchrest had a signed warrant for Colton Pitonyak’s cell phone records. Once they came in, showing what towers the telephone was bouncing off on the night of August 17, a pattern was easily apparent. Shortly after Sharon hung up the telephone with Pitonyak, warning him that she’d called police, he was on the run. His cell phone showed that someone had used it while cutting a southbound path through Texas, leading to the Mexican border. Calls went out to the FBI and the U.S. Marshals office, asking for their help in finding Pitonyak, but there were problems. First, Pitonyak’s cell phone calls had been recorded nearly two days earlier, giving the fugitive a formidable head start. Second, no one knew what type of car he would be in. His Toyota, after all, was locked up in APD’s forensic processing center.

That afternoon, nearly three days after Jennifer’s disappearance, the U.S. Marshals office, a division of the federal Department of Justice, issued a wanted poster for Colton Aaron Pitonyak, distributing it to the agents working throughout Texas, especially those on the border with Mexico. Pitonyak had blue eyes and brown hair, at five-eleven weighed 170 pounds, and he was to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. The bulletin warned, “Approach with caution.”

Four years earlier, Colton had lived the cloistered life of a Catholic schoolboy. Now, at just twenty-two, he was a wanted criminal living a fantasy that matched
Scarface
or any of his favorite gangster movies. Colton Pitonyak had transcended a level most criminals never reach: He was being searched for by the FBI, the U.S. Marshals office, and Austin PD for what many were already calling the most brutal murder in the history of the University of Texas.

That evening, Jim, Sharon, and Lauren flew back into Austin. The next day, Jim and Sharon had the appointment with Gilchrest, and then they’d all drive home to Corpus. Jennifer’s autopsy was scheduled for the morning, and then her body would follow. Sharon had already decided where her daughter’s gravesite should be, beside her grandfather. “I had this crazy feeling that if I did that, my dad would protect Jennifer,” Sharon says. “I wanted her to be safe.”

Late that evening, many of Jennifer’s friends congregated at Eli’s, to band together to comfort one another. Many were crying, including Eli, who didn’t appear to be able to stop. He lit a candle, one scented with apple spice, Jennifer’s favorite. Friends noticed that he talked about her in the present tense, as if he hadn’t yet absorbed that she’d died.

Meanwhile, at eleven that evening, in Piedras Negras, Mexico, a city just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, Laura Hall walked into the Casablanca Inn, and Pedro Fernandez, a heavyset man with glasses, looked up. He was the manager of the establishment, which had the look of a converted Holiday Inn. The place was busy that evening, and Fernandez had stayed late to help the desk clerk. When he saw Laura and the young, dark-haired man next to her, Fernandez assumed they were college students on a holiday.

“Do you have a room?” Hall asked.

“We’re pretty full,” Fernandez said. “I have to check.”

Ten minutes later, Fernandez gave the couple the good news. He had a vacancy. Hall handed Fernandez a credit card and two University of Texas IDs. One was in Hall’s name, the other was in the name of her traveling companion: Colton Aaron Pitonyak.

Nineteen

The first article on the case appeared in the
Austin American Statesman
the following morning, Saturday, August 20, 2005. In the metro section, it was small and said simply that Jennifer Cave, age twenty-one, had been found dead with obvious trauma Thursday night and that police were seeking Colton Pitonyak, twenty-two, on a first-degree murder charge.

At nine, Travis County deputy medical examiner Dr. Elizabeth Peacock again stood over Jennifer’s remains in the morgue, along with two crime scene specialists: Ceballos, there to bag evidence, and James Bixler, assigned to take autopsy photographs. Detective Gilchrest, the lead detective on the case, stood by as well.

The day before, the head, hands, and body were all wrapped in sterile sheets, a final attempt to collect any trace evidence. Dr. Peacock conducted a vaginal examination and took swabs, to look for evidence of rape. No semen would be found, and there was no evidence of sexual assault. When she cut away Jennifer’s halter top, Dr. Peacock, along with an assistant, rolled the body over to unhook Jennifer’s bra. For the first time, Peacock saw a bullet hole, a gunshot wound in Jennifer’s upper right arm, eight and a half inches below her shoulder. When she moved the arm, Peacock discovered that the bullet had exited without hitting the bone and gone directly into Jennifer’s chest from the right side.

That Saturday morning, during the autopsy, Dr. Peacock cut into the body to trace the path of the bullet. She found that the incision made by the bullet entered between the fourth and fifth ribs and then sliced into the lower lobe of the right lung before cutting directly into the aorta, the body’s largest artery. It was a devastating wound; Peacock knew such catastrophic injury to the aorta would kill within seconds.

Following the wound path, from right to left, front to back, and slightly downward, Peacock discovered a pool of coagulated blood inside the chest cavity and, twelve and a half inches below the left shoulder, a medium caliber, fully jacketed, minimally deformed bullet.

On the right side of Jennifer’s face and upper neck, Peacock documented stab wounds, eighteen of them. She noted the pale, waxy appearance of the skin around the incisions and saw “no vital reaction” at the site of the wounds; in other words, no bleeding. That the wounds hadn’t hemorrhaged led Peacock to classify them as postmortem, or after death. Other similar wounds were found on Jennifer’s right forearm, her upper arm, her left thigh, and ten more to her chest and lower neck, all, too, postmortem. Most of the wounds were smooth and straight, some intersecting to form Vs.

Someone had cut repeatedly into Jennifer’s body after death, for no apparent reason.

One knife wound on the palm of Jennifer’s left hand, however, was different. There Dr. Peacock saw a slight pink that suggested it occurred peri-mortem, close to the time of death, while Jennifer still retained some blood pressure.

The biggest surprise of the day began when Peacock X-rayed Jennifer’s severed head. On the X-ray, she saw what appeared to be a bullet inside the skull and behind the left temple. What the physician couldn’t find was an entry wound. Only when Dr. Peacock inspected the cut surface of the severed head did she discern the truth: After the bullet to Jennifer’s aorta killed her, someone cut off her head. Then a gun was fired upward, into her head through the severed neck.

Along with the dozens of cuts to the body, it now appeared even more certain that someone had defiled Jennifer’s dead body for no reason other than amusement.

As is always done, tissue samples were taken to send for analysis, to check for substances, including toxins, drugs, and alcohol, and then, the autopsy completed, Jennifer’s body was zippered into a bag to be transported to Corpus Christi for burial.

Under the heading
Conclusion
on her report, Peacock wrote: “Based on the anatomic findings at autopsy and investigation available to me at this time, it is my conclusion that Jennifer Cave, a 21-year-old white female, died as a result of a gunshot wound which penetrated the lung and aorta. There were extensive peri-and post-mortem sharp force injuries.”

Just before ten that same morning, Jim, Sharon, and Lauren drove to APD headquarters to meet with Gilchrest. At this point, the detective had been assigned to the case for thirty-five hours. In any murder investigation, the first forty-eight hours are the most important. If a suspect isn’t identified and apprehended within two days, statistics showed that the percentage of closed cases drop rapidly with each subsequent day. The first thing Sharon thought when she saw the bulky detective was that Gilchrest appeared to be in a slow burn. “I wouldn’t want that look directed at me,” she says.

During this first meeting, Gilchrest explained that the autopsy was completed and that the cause of death was a gunshot wound. The detective didn’t go into any detail about the many wounds found on the body or its condition, but he reaffirmed what Jim and Sharon had been told the previous afternoon, that fingerprints conclusively identified it as Jennifer.

Angry about what she’d just learned in a text message from a friend, Lauren then claimed the detective’s attention. “There’s this Web site,” she told Gilchrest. “It’s called Facebook.com, and a lot of the college kids are on it. I’m on it, and most of my friends are. My friend says Colton Pitonyak is on it.”

In truth, Lauren simply wanted Colton off the Web site. Facebook was something she enjoyed, and she didn’t want the person targeted as the likeliest suspect in her sister’s killing on the same Web site she logged onto. Lauren wanted Gilchrest to make Facebook take Colton Pitonyak off. But Sharon would later remember how interested Gilchrest appeared in Lauren’s information for another reason: Facebook had the potential to yield evidence.

After leaving Gilchrest, they drove to Denise Winterbottom’s apartment, to collect a few of Jennifer’s things. When Denise opened the door, Sharon walked in crying and nearly collapsed. Jim and Lauren brought her to the couch, and Denise ran for a wet towel to put on Sharon’s forehead.

“Thank you for being Jennifer’s friend,” Sharon said. “Thank you for taking her in.”

Once she felt up to it, Sharon and the others went to Jennifer’s room. It looked like Jennifer, neat and orderly, with her clothes organized and hung in the closet and family pictures around her. Sharon sat on the bed, feeling, for the first time since her daughter’s disappearance, that Jennifer was near.

Crying, Jennifer’s family collected a few of her favorite things, including Jennifer’s jewelry box, an afghan, and a picture of Lauren and Jennifer together, the two of them in their cheerleading uniforms. Sharon gathered Jennifer’s craft box, one filled with beads and paints. Inside were
Scooby Doo
gift bags for party favors Jennifer bought for Madyson’s upcoming birthday party, acrylic paints, and two unopened packs of college-ruled notebook paper. In the past two years, Jennifer had lived a nomadic life, accumulating little. For her twenty-one years of life, she’d left little behind but photographs and memories.

The trip to Corpus Christi that afternoon felt every bit as long as the journey they’d taken two days earlier to Austin. Jim led the way in his Suburban, and Vanessa followed later in her car, driven by a friend who’d flown in from Dallas. As soon as they arrived at the house, Sharon went directly to her bedroom and her bed. Jim called their family doctor and the pastor of their church, All Saints Episcopal’s Father David Stringer, a kind man with graying temples and the beginning of laugh lines around his eyes. The physician gave Sharon tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and when she awoke, she saw Father David at her side, praying.