05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (4 page)

The mother and daughter argued yet again, and Jim chastised Sharon, telling her, “She’s not going to listen to you when you’re angry like that.”

Yet by then he had his own concerns. His younger daughter, Hailey, had begun hanging out with Jennifer, going to the same parties. For Hailey, it would turn out to be a brief waylay, a little fun before she charted a straighter course. As Vanessa had before her, Hailey wouldn’t need any help realigning her life.

In Sharon’s darker moments, when she fretted over the turn Jennifer’s life had taken, Vanessa’s and Hailey’s successes reassured her. If they came around, why wouldn’t Jennifer? The party scene would grow old, Sharon told herself. Jennifer would move on. Yet as the months passed, Jen continued to flip-flop between the shy, smart, sweet girl she’d always been and the angry teenager who saw no reason to listen to her mother.

If the alcohol helped, the pot’s fuzziness must have done even more to camouflage Jennifer’s uncertainties. With friends, there were two Jennifers. The first was the one Sharon knew, the kind, intense, smart, and caring girl who’d do whatever she could to help a friend. When Leah Cook broke up with her boyfriend, Jennifer was the friend who drove her to the beach, where they sat and talked, Jennifer comforting Leah and reassuring her that life would go on.

Yet on the Carroll High School campus, Jennifer was known as a “party chick.” After a spate of car accidents, Jennifer’s friends began calling Lauren to pick up her sister at parties. When Lauren arrived, teenagers milled around outside the houses, smoking pot and talking. They were the “chill” crowd, the low-key kids. Inside the house were the partiers, throwing down shots and dancing. Jennifer was always among them, her hands up in the air, losing herself to the heavy beat of the music reverberating through the house.

The new Jennifer made Lauren uneasy, as if she instinctively sensed this change in her sister would not end well. On the nights Jennifer partied with friends, Lauren couldn’t sleep. “I was always paranoid that something would happen to her. I didn’t want to pick her up. I didn’t want to see what she was doing. I didn’t want to know,” Lauren says. “People talk. I dissed her on the way she was living her life, so I knew others would gossip, too.”

When Lauren complained to Jennifer about the company she kept, Jen snapped that it wasn’t her little sister’s business. And when Sharon expressed alarm, Jennifer waved it off, playing on the guilt her mother felt for uprooting her to Corpus. “You moved me here, and this is what the kids are like here,” she’d say.

Throughout that year, Jim and Sharon talked of merging households, moving her possessions into his home, but they held off. Forming a new family was hard enough without an out-of-control teenager to contend with. “Jennifer wouldn’t listen to me. She said she didn’t have to,” Sharon says. “We shouted and screamed at each other, but it didn’t help. As bad as things got, though, we never stopped telling each other ‘I love you.’”

Of them all, Jim was the one who seemed to understand Jen the best. They both smoked, and at family gatherings, they stood outside, enjoying a cigarette and dessert. Jim started calling Jen his “pie-eating buddy,” after they once finished off an entire chocolate pie with their coffee. He talked with Jennifer about the course her life was taking, cajoling her to understand that there was a whole world ahead of her, and that she had everything she needed, including brains and good looks, to do whatever she wanted, but he never felt as if he got through. “Deep down Jennifer didn’t believe she was capable of succeeding,” Jim says. “She always felt like something held her back.”

Despite her disinterest in school, when Jennifer graduated from Carroll High School in May 2002, she was in the top fifteen percent of her class. Jennifer’s graduation came as a relief, and Sharon hoped the worst was over. Lauren wrote in her sister’s yearbook, telling her “how important she was to me, and how much I loved her.”

That summer, Jen worked for Sharon and Jim’s old friend Harold Shockley, the tall, serious-looking banker who’d become such a beloved part of the family that the Cave and Sedwick kids referred to him as Uncle Harold. Jennifer delighted in dressing up every day and going into the office, circulating from department to department, working hard and doing whatever was needed. She always had a warm smile, and when Harold saw her, he didn’t see self-doubt or pain. He thought Jennifer Cave’s future couldn’t look brighter.

There were big plans in the works that fall: college.

That August, Jennifer left for San Marcos, Texas, a small city on a river, halfway between Austin and San Antonio, to become one of Southwest Texas State University’s more than twenty-seven thousand students. The school dated back to 1899, and changed names nearly as often as freshmen change majors, including the year after Jennifer arrived, when it became Texas State University. In its picturesque setting of green, rolling, tree-covered hills, the university’s symbol was Old Main, a red-roofed, castlelike Victorian structure that housed the school of communication. The university’s most prominent grad was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who attended when it was still a small teachers’ college.

On her application, Jennifer designated her major as finance, and Jim and Sharon urged her to pledge a sorority, to ensure she ran with a good group of friends. Sharon brought Jennifer along with an overflowing car full of her belongings to school that fall and moved her in, spending the night in nearby San Antonio. “We had a great time,” Sharon says. “I just felt so good about it, so positive for Jennifer’s future.”

Although excited, Jennifer had mixed feelings. She had no real goals. Unlike Lauren, who’d known since childhood that she wanted to be a television news reporter, Jennifer wasn’t sure where her future lay. She seemed to be floundering, wondering where she wanted life to take her. “She didn’t want to go to college, because she didn’t know what it would do to help her,” says Lauren. “She just didn’t have a goal.”

Sharon tried to reassure Jennifer, to tell her that as a freshman she didn’t need set plans. In fact, Jen had at least two years before declaring a firm major. But Jennifer’s uncertainty was, as it had been throughout her young life, tempered with a pervasive self-doubt. She wanted to please her mother, her father, and Jim, but lurking behind her confident exterior and her wide smile was that nagging lack of self-confidence. Hailey, Jim’s youngest daughter, saw it. “I think Jen was excited to get out of Corpus,” she says. “But she was petrified out of her mind about college. She’d tell me, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t make it work.’”

Jennifer Cave’s stint at Southwest would be short. She dropped out of sorority rush after just a few days, telling Hailey, “It’s just not my thing.” Before long, Jen skipped classes, and her grades suffered. When Sharon asked why, her middle daughter always had an answer. “Your expectations are too high for me,” Jennifer said. “I’m not smart enough. I’m trying but I don’t get it.”

Sharon felt her exasperation building. Jennifer was the brightest of her four children; how could she not realize that?

When things went wrong, Jennifer called Lauren, who acted as intermediary in the building war between Jennifer and their increasingly frustrated mother. It became Lauren’s job to tell Sharon when Jennifer overdrew her bank account. “I told Mom and she started yelling at me,” Lauren says. “I really started to resent Jennifer for putting me in the middle.”

Then there was the day in late October when Lauren’s cell phone rang and one of Jennifer’s friends whispered more bad news: Jennifer was in jail. Again Lauren reluctantly delivered the message. Furious, Sharon called the jail, and one of the officers explained that Jennifer had been found in her dorm room with a boy who was smoking pot. The woman advised her to hurry and bail Jennifer out.

“She’s just losing it in here,” the officer said.

Worried and angry, Sharon put Jennifer’s bond on her credit card, and she was released. The matter ended as Jennifer’s high school escapade had when the boy said the pot was his, and the charges against Jennifer were dropped. When the mother and daughter finally talked, it didn’t go well. Sharon was livid and told Jennifer as much. “Why do you keep picking up these strays?” she asked. “Why do you hang out with people who aren’t good for you?”

Jennifer didn’t have an answer.

Despite the boy’s confession, the damage for Jennifer had been done. Her counselor informed her that she’d be allowed to finish the semester at Southwest, but having the pot in her room had broken a campus rule, and she wouldn’t be allowed to return for the spring semester.

Sharon was upset, yet Jennifer didn’t appear to be. “She never really wanted to be there in the first place,” says Lauren. “She never felt like she fit in.”

That December 2002, Jennifer packed her belongings for yet another move. She had a boyfriend, Mark, tall and blond, a good kid from a nice family, one Sharon thought well of. He was leaving Southwest and moving to Austin to continue his education at the University of Texas. Jennifer wanted to move to Austin to be near him, to get her own apartment, find a job, and attend Austin Community College.

Jim and Sharon were both in favor of the move, hopeful that Jennifer just needed time to maneuver through her problems and consider her future.

By then, Sharon had moved in with Jim and blended households, so they donated their excess furniture to Jen. Charlie loaded it into a trailer and hooked it up to his welding truck, then drove to San Marcos in January 2003. They packed Jennifer’s few college possessions, mainly clothing, and with Jennifer in the lead in her rundown car, they caravanned on I–35 to Austin.

“Jennifer, slow down,” Charlie said on his cell phone that day, as Jennifer wove in and out of traffic. The welding truck and trailer couldn’t change lanes as easily as her little Dodge Intrepid. “You’ll lose me, and I’ll get lost.”

“Just follow me,” Jennifer said, with a laugh. “I’ll get you there.”

Despite all Jennifer put the family through, Charlie couldn’t help but be proud. Sure, Jennifer had her ups and downs, but his little Fuffa had grown into a beautiful woman. On the outside, she looked confident and excited about her future, even if inside a shy little girl from Bishop worried about being alone in a bustling metropolitan area with a population of more than a million. The same girl who’d once resisted moving from Bishop to Corpus Christi now looked like she was ready to take on the world.

“It was just impossible not to love her,” Charlie says. “Jennifer had a smile that could melt a heart.”

After Charlie left, Sharon arrived to help Jennifer decorate her small apartment off Riverside Drive. It was just around the corner from Austin Community College, where Jen enrolled in classes for the spring semester. Jennifer was approaching nineteen years old and brimming with excitement. For the first time in her life, perhaps, she was in love. Mark, the young man she’d followed from San Marcos, lived nearby, and he’d already brought Jennifer home to meet his mother, who found her to be “a really lovely young girl.”

As Sharon drove out of Austin a couple of days later, the Texas state capitol’s graceful dome and the austere UT clock tower stood out in the postcard-blue sky from the city’s forest of hotels and office buildings. Thick-leaved live oaks bordered downtown sidewalks in front of office buildings and old storefronts, some dating back more than a century. Any misgivings Sharon had as she settled Jennifer into her new home weren’t enough to give her pause. “I thought Jennifer would find herself in Austin,” Sharon says. “I hoped it was a good place for her. I wanted so much to see her grow into the woman I knew she had the potential to become.”

There was, of course, much that Sharon couldn’t yet know. She didn’t understand the powerful lure of Austin’s wild side, its vibrant nightlife with its deeply entrenched drug scene, and she hadn’t yet heard the name of the young man who would fall in love with Jennifer and ensnare her in his dangerous, delusional world: Colton Pitonyak.

Four

Despite her hopes, Sharon moved Jennifer to Austin with some trepidation. She knew her middle daughter had dabbled in drugs, that Jen drank and had a history of befriending the wrong people. Yet she trusted in the other Jennifer, the happy, charming young woman with the wide smile and the big heart. Perhaps Sharon had no choice. Jennifer was legally an adult and claiming her independence. All Sharon could do was trust that the girl who tried so hard to please, to make everyone around her happy, would learn to trust in herself and find her way.

Eddie and Bridget Pitonyak, on the other hand, probably had no such qualms about how their younger son would tackle college and, following that, life. From his earliest days, Colton Pitonyak was an exceptional student, remarkably intelligent and focused on the future, bright-eyed and ready, the kind of young man any mother would want for a son, the type of young man any mother would want a daughter to date. But there were two sides to Colton Pitonyak. Perhaps his parents didn’t know the other Colton, the one with the quick temper and the thirst that couldn’t be quenched.

The Pitonyaks came from rural beginnings. Bridget, a slight woman with chin-length blond hair and an effervescent personality, grew up with the last name of Waddell in the small farming town of Carlisle, Arkansas. In her 1978 senior photo from Carlisle High School, she looked like the good girl next door, wearing a modest sweater, her long, silky brown hair held back in a barrette.

Four years older than Bridget, Eddie was a bit of a fireplug, dark-haired, not tall in stature but well-built, with a determined, bulldog face. He’d been raised on the rich, fertile soil of a rice and soybean farm situated east of Little Rock between Hazen and Stuttgart. Like his father and grandfather before him, Eddie farmed in the early years of his marriage. But when the farming market took a downturn in 1984, he moved on. Those were hard years for America’s farmers, and Eddie and Bridget had two young sons to build a future for. Their older son, Dustin, was then three, and Colton Aaron Pitonyak, just two, had been born on September 5, 1982.