05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (6 page)

“Colton was like a brother to a lot of people,” says Tracey. “He always checked in with his parents when he was out late, and if he had too much to drink, he walked home instead of drove.” Sometimes the parties were at the Pitonyaks’ house. On one such night a friend sat talking to Colton, a junior that year. They drank beer and discussed the normal things teenage boys are interested in: girls, school, and sports. “Everyone drank,” remembers one girl. “Even the smart kids.”

Looking back, the teenagers coming of age in Pleasant Valley would see their upbringing as privileged. “There was this thing about the rich kids. We all hung out together, kind of a rich-kids’ cult, a bunch of rich kids who would do anything to cover up their mistakes,” says one of Colton’s friends. “We had lots of money, and we thought we had impunity, we could do whatever we wanted and no one could touch us.”

There was an undercurrent in Little Rock, a need for boys to be tough, to stand by their word, and to grow into men’s men. “There was a lot of testosterone floating around, and on weekends, especially Friday nights after football games, the kids wandered off into the woods. There were lots of places to get lost with friends,” says a friend of Colton’s. “The guys would find reasons to fight. Colton was kind of a wimpy kid in some ways. He got in lots of fights, but he never won. When he was drinking, he had a short temper. And Colton drank a lot.”

Another of Colton’s classmates would later agree: “We didn’t have anything to do but drink, do drugs, have sex, or go to church. Colton wasn’t into hunting and such like most Southern boys, but he did love to drink.”

There was little doubt that Colton Pitonyak had multiple sides: the scholar and gentleman his teachers and Tracey knew, the racist Tim Lim met, and the insolent drunk many saw emerging. By his junior year, boys from Catholic High, not unlike those across the nation, experimented with not only drinking but drugs, mainly pot. Colton was among them. “I saw him smoking pot a lot,” says one friend. “But then, lots of kids did.” With Colton, however, it seemed to have more than the usual effects. Mixed with alcohol, pot made him mean.

One night at a party, high and drunk, Colton screamed without reason at one of the Mount St. Mary girls, calling her a slut and a whore. “My brother and my boyfriend were there,” she remembers. “They beat him up, pretty bad. I never liked talking to Colton after that, and he avoided talking to me, probably afraid of my brother.”

Colton’s fights became a regular occurrence. “If someone called you out to fight and you didn’t, the others ganged up on you and beat your ass,” says a friend of Colton’s. “You had to stand up and defend yourself. We were a bunch of rich kids with too much time on our hands and a fascination with being hard-core tough.”

One day relatives visited the Pitonyaks and noticed a car with a window smashed. Bridget said they thought some of the boys’ friends might be responsible. Whether or not his parents were aware of it, Colton was building a reputation as someone who got into brawls. “Colton wanted to be tough, because that was a way to be popular,” says a friend. “And Colton cared about being popular.”

Louis Petit began at Catholic High in his sophomore year and was seated alphabetically near Colton. They became fast friends, hanging out together, going on summer and spring break trips. Petit, tall and thin, is the son of a family that owns a Little Rock restaurant, and in the summer of 2000, he and Colton worked out together, lifting weights at Powerhouse Gym. Perhaps Colton thought bulking up would help him win a few of those fights in the woods, or perhaps he was just trying to fulfill the expectation that the kids in Arkansas had, that to be a real man he had to be strong.

Colton and Petit spent months learning poses and stances, building muscle. One night at a party at the Pitonyaks’ house, no one could find Colton until a group discovered him in his bedroom, putting on artificial tanner for a bodybuilding competition the next day. Colton and Petit tried out for the Mr. Teen Arkansas title, but didn’t win. “It was really funny,” says a friend of Colton’s. “He worked at the bodybuilding like he did everything else, really focused. Colton never did anything halfway.”

By the fall of 2000, Dustin had graduated from Catholic High and gone off to the University of Arkansas. That year, Colton was a senior at Catholic High, wearing his class ring and the purple, green, and gold school tie. His parents sold the big house on Valley Club Circle and bought a smaller house in the nearby St. Charles subdivision. At the end of a cul-de-sac, with a lot and a price tag one-third smaller than the old house, the new house, at least as neighbors saw it, was an indication that Eddie and Bridget were scaling back, downsizing now that Dustin was gone and Colton was getting ready to leave.

On September 19 of that year, the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
ran a list of the 166 seniors in the state who were National Merit Scholar finalists. There were seven at Catholic High, including Colton Aaron Pitonyak.

Tommy Coy, Colton’s math teacher, had continued to be awed by his brilliant young student, not only by Colton’s intellectual capabilities but also by his determination. That year, Colton presented a class project on the stock market. Coy was so impressed that he asked the young man who’d helped him.

“No one,” Colton said, and Coy didn’t doubt it.

“It was mind-boggling how much he knew about the stock market,” says Coy. “Absolutely amazing.”

In Coy’s grade book, Colton scored nothing below a 98 in calculus and ranked among the top five students in the class, this at a school where many were high achievers. Coy never saw a wrinkle in Colton Pitonyak’s demeanor. “I never even saw him get angry,” the teacher says. When Colton asked, Coy happily wrote letters to universities, urging them to accept Colton.

His senior year, Colton had one goal in his sights: the University of Texas in Austin’s blue-chip McCombs Business School. It was difficult to get in, highly competitive, even more so for out-of-state students, but Colton was determined. To Coy and others, Colton talked like a young Donald Trump or Dale Carnegie, a budding tycoon destined to conquer the business world.

Catholic High legend would later have it that when Colton showed up to take the ACT, the American College Testing Program exam that universities use to judge whom they admit, he was hung over from a party the night before. If so, it didn’t hurt him. Colton scored a 32 on the exam, only four points below a perfect score.

At graduation that spring, 2001, Colton was sixth in his class and had a perfect 4.0 grade point. To do that he’d averaged 93 or above in every class he’d taken in his four years at Catholic High. His stellar grades attracted $150,000 in scholarship money. Colton had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, but his parents would later say they were pleased when he chose UT because it was closer to home. Along with the acceptance came a full academic scholarship.

There must have been celebrating in the Pitonyak house the day Colton’s acceptance letter arrived from McCombs. It was yet another honor in Colton’s fast-growing list of accomplishments. His teachers, family, and friends alike had reason to believe there were more conquests ahead for the young man, who in his high school graduation photo looked like a perfect son, snappily dressed in a coat and tie, his dark hair carefully trimmed and combed. Colton’s Catholic High yearbook carried a testament from his family: “Colton, you have made us very proud,” from Eddie, Bridget, and Dustin.

In July, Bridget took her son to UT’s orientation. Once there, she was even more impressed. It turned out that Colton was one of only twelve admitted from out of state to McCombs that fall. At UT, he bought his grandmother a present, a bumper sticker for her car. Beside the “My Grandson Goes to the University of Arkansas” banner for Dustin, she now had one in honor of Colton that read, “My Grandson Goes to the University of Texas.”

In the fall of 2001, Colton Pitonyak had the world spread out before him like a sumptuous buffet. He had the advantages many crave but so few have: a family who loved him, loyal friends who supported him, and the money, credentials, and intellect to aim as high as his imagination could take him. He brought three of his favorite books to Austin with him:
The Three Musketeers
,
Robinson Crusoe
, and
The Power of Positive Thinking
. Tommy Coy expected to one day see his former star pupil make his mark as a sage venture capitalist or Wall Street mogul.

“We all expected truly great things of Colton,” Coy says. “He was that outstanding.”

Just four years later, Colton would be in headlines across the country, his face splashed on national television. But the context would be very different from anything Tommy Coy ever imagined. Instead of making his name as a financial tycoon, Colton Pitonyak would be forever linked to the most gruesome murder in the history of the University of Texas, and family and friends in Arkansas would be left to wonder how it happened, and why.

Five

On April 6, 2001, the spring Colton Pitonyak graduated from Catholic High,
Blow
premiered, a movie starring Johnny Depp as George Jung, who in the seventies partnered with the Medellín drug cartel to powder the noses of Hollywood and then America. In real life, Jung made tens of millions escalating U.S. drug habits, introducing first celebrities and later the general populace to cocaine. In the movie, the young drug king lived the dream, even pairing up with a woman portrayed by the stunning Penelope Cruz. The movie was dark and moody, and in the end Jung lost his money and his freedom.

In August when classes commenced at the University of Texas in Austin, more than fifty-two thousand students flooded the local shops and bookstores, where everything possible was covered in UT burnt orange displaying the university’s longhorn logo. But alongside the UT notebooks, T-shirts, sweatpants, and key rings were
Blow
posters sold to decorate apartments and dorm rooms. If
Blow
didn’t suit, the bookstores stocked posters from HBO’s
The Sopranos
and gangster and drug movies, including
Goodfellas
,
The Godfather
, and the brutal
Scarface
.

The stores stocked the posters for a simple reason: They sold.

“
Scarface
was our generation’s movie,” says one of Colton’s friends, with a shrug. “We listened to gangster rap and saw the rappers’ mansions on MTV. They showed off their home theaters with their DVD collections.
Scarface
was always there. It’s all about the image. You may be a white suburban kid, but you’ve gotta be tough.”

In Austin, the University of Texas comprises a city within the city, covering 350 acres with 156 buildings, organized into eighteen separate colleges. At Jester Hall, UT’s largest dorm, so enormous that its thirty-three hundred residents have their own zip code, kids from small towns and big cities unpacked their computers and their clothes, perused their class schedules to buy their books, and a healthy percentage of the young men hung a gangster poster on the wall. For most of them, it would be a brief fascination, an imaginary armor perhaps to toughen them up for their first experience away from home. The first time out from under parental supervision, freshmen spread their metaphoric wings, setting their own limits, and many paid as much attention to fitting in as to classes and grades. Once settled and accepted, most moved on, abandoning the need or the desire for a tough-guy image: But not all.

While the masses moved into dorm rooms, Colton Pitonyak took the path of the privileged. He pledged a fraternity and moved into the Delta Tau Delta house, at Twenty-eighth and San Jacinto, on the north side of campus, a rambling stone building with the fraternity’s symbol proudly displayed. Windows overlooked the street, and inside leather couches and an Oriental rug formed a sitting area under soaring ceilings, while the walls were lined with photo montages of members dating back to when the chapter, Gamma Iota, began in 1904. Residents’ rooms fanned out from the lobby, past the cafeteria. Late-model sedans, SUVs, and pickup trucks filled the parking lot, and the basketball courts off to the side had a homemade wooden bar for parties.

On campus, jeans and UT shirts were ubiquitous attire, proper for nearly any and all occasions. Colton arrived on the campus looking much as he had in Little Rock, wearing polo shirts, jeans, shorts, and tennis shoes. As the son of well-to-do-parents, much of what he owned was marked with the Polo logo, the designer Ralph Lauren’s pony-riding polo player. Yet one frat brother remembered Colton’s expensive shirts, jeans, and shorts all seemed oversize, and that he wore his baseball cap backward, which seemed odd for a prep school grad.

At the University of Texas, the Greek scene, a.k.a. fraternity and sorority life, was flourishing, one of the most active in the nation. The Delts were known as an old-line, big-name fraternity, with a comfortable house, overseen by the stereotypical frat mom, a rather crusty, fiftyish woman who looked out for her boys. “The fraternities talk about raising money for charity, but it’s all about the parties, and the Delts had amazing parties,” says a student. Because the Delt house is on the North Campus, not the West Campus where most of the frats and sororities have impressive houses, it tends to “fly under the radar,” another says. “They seem to be able to get away with more.” One of UT’s most famous Delts was the hard-partying actor Matthew McConaughey.

Some UT students would look at frats as a good place to network, while one Delt would later look back and say it felt more like “paying for friends.” Within the fraternity, Colton quickly stood out as someone who was “different,” says a frat brother. At the parties, Colton flirted with the young sorority women. He could be charming and fun, at times the life of the party, and they seemed drawn to him, and he to them.

One evening, a frat member named Frank talked to two young women he found rather pedestrian conversationalists and decided to exercise the tactic known as “the classic hand-off,” calling over an underclassman, introducing the girls, and then excusing himself and walking away. The pledge he called over was Colton, but before Frank could extricate himself, Colton made an excuse and left. Frank was dumbfounded, thinking this was a pledge who didn’t understand the customary order of frat life. But then something else happened.