05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (43 page)

The day of the killing, Pitonyak was “losing it,” McFarland said, his lifestyle evaporating around him, a thug who owed money for drugs. After he killed Jennifer, she was stabbed in the face and the chest, a bullet shot through her severed neck into her brain, her head and hands cut off. “No decent person would do that, so he blamed Laura Hall,” she said. “He is lying, and the DNA evidence proves it.

“You can’t find someone guilty of murder for mutilating a body, but it tells you a lot about their intent toward the person,” she said. To Colton, “Jennifer was just a body, just a piece of meat…He called Jennifer’s mother, while [Jennifer’s] dead body was in his bathtub, and said, ‘Dude, don’t bother me’…He called Jennifer a bitch to Scott Engle.”

Putting the photo from Mexico on the screen, the one of Pitonyak and Hall smiling as if on a holiday, she asked, “Is he panicked, grief-stricken?…He knows he’s guilty of murder. All you have to do is tell him that you’re going to hold him accountable.”

When McFarland reclaimed her seat, Sam Bassett took over the courtroom floor. He paused and looked at the jury, thoughtful, with irritation in his voice. “You ought to be angry with Colton. You ought to be disgusted with some of his behavior after Jennifer died,” he said. “But don’t confuse the way she died with the cause of her death…Is there evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to prove that Colton killed his friend Jennifer Cave on purpose, intentionally and knowingly?” There wasn’t, he insisted.

As the prosecutors knew he would, Bassett then turned his attention to motive. “The state’s not required to prove motive,” he said. “But don’t you know that if they had any instance or evidence of Colton being mean to Jennifer, threatening Jennifer, doing anything bad to Jennifer, you would have heard about it?”

Then Bassett turned to the subject of Laura Hall, insisting she was responsible for the condition of Jennifer’s body and the run to Mexico. “In Laura’s words, ‘I masterminded the escape,’” he said, quoting Javier Rosales. Colton could have tried to blame Laura for the killing, but he didn’t. “Wouldn’t that have been more convincing if he’s a liar?”

Finally, Bassett pleaded, “[Colton’s] telling the truth: ‘I can’t remember. God I wish I could. I’m sorry my friend is dead. There is no way I could have killed her on purpose.’”

Looking weary, Roy Minton stood before the jurors. He walked to the judge’s bench, where he picked up from the ledge the SW .380 gun that was used to kill Jennifer Cave. In his calm, unaffected manner, Minton said, “Let me begin, folks, by talking to you about this gun…”

As he had during testimony, Minton called the gun unsafe, poorly designed, an accident waiting to happen. The buck knife with the Pitonyak Machinery Corporation logo on the handle, Minton called “a cheap little old knife that his father buys by the hundreds. PMC. That’s his daddy.”

Was there, Minton asked, “some speck of motive? Some idea why these two kids were mad at each other? Why he wanted to take this girl’s life?”

“Was [Colton] lying when he tells you he is drinking the way he has?…I am telling you I don’t know what happened. Colton doesn’t know what happened,” he said, his voice rising. “All of this evidence has indicated that Colton didn’t have any feelings for Jennifer. She was his buddy, his pal…the drugs were part of their relationship.”

Why? he asked, over and over, hitting hard on the absence of a motive.

Again Minton took the stance of an old man scolding unruly children. “I don’t mean to criticize the child,” he said, referring to Jennifer. “But what business do either of these kids have going out to Sixth Street when she has to be at work the next morning?”

After listing the drugs and alcohol Pitonyak said he’d ingested that fateful night, Minton returned to the main issue: “Intentionally means that he meant to kill her. Knowingly means that he knows what he’s doing when he picks up the gun and pulls the trigger…There is no way…So we have to decide how likely it is that something came up that he decided to murder Jennifer…I just don’t see it…you are dealing with a drunk, drugged up kid…he hasn’t got a brain, folks.”

When it came to the mutilation of Jennifer’s corpse, the dismemberment, the cuts to her face and chest, the bullet shot up into her skull, the disgrace of it made Minton furious. “Both of them [Colton and Laura] involved up to their eyelashes, and they’re smiling for a picture. I don’t defend that conduct at all,” he said. Yet, he urged the jurors to think of Colton’s actions and his wannabe gangster persona in the context of modern culture. “I hope some of ya’ll have got kids that buy posters and put their names on websites and call themselves Dillinger,” he said. “Oh this has been a heartbreaker, just a heartbreaker…I’m getting too old to try cases where kids get killed,” Minton moaned…“[But] I do not want to see this boy get convicted of something he’s not guilty of.”

Finally, Bill Bishop addressed the jury, as in his opening statement, with his hands clasped behind his back. “Mr. Bassett and Mr. Minton want you to ignore the fact that Jennifer Cave was mutilated. Her hands were removed. Her head was removed. Because that is something they can’t explain…” he said. “I think if we apply stories to the evidence we know, I think we can make sense of it.”

The jurors, Bishop said, needed to remember who Colton Pitonyak was in August 2005, when Jennifer died. He was abusing drugs and alcohol, portraying himself in a gangster image. He owed people money, and his good customer, Jennifer Cave, wasn’t buying drugs from him anymore. “The mutilation shows you and the flight shows you that he had a guilty conscience. He knew what he had done, he knew he shouldn’t have done it, and he was going to get out of there,” Bishop said. “They want to blame [Laura Hall] for all that happened, but the evidence doesn’t support that…Look at the DNA.” It was Colton Pitonyak’s DNA all over the bathroom and the tools. “There is a green towel with his blood. There are jeans in the washer with his blood. You don’t get injured; you don’t bleed as the result of [firing] an accidental gunshot…You get injured [and bloody] mutilating a body in a bathtub.”

If Hall, a slightly built woman, had been able to cut up Jennifer’s body without leaving DNA, “she’s an absolute genius.” Colton Pitonyak, Bishop charged, told the jurors what they wanted to hear, just as he admitted he’d done with the drug counselors at La Hacienda. “He wasn’t going to Houston. He took his passport.”

Then Bishop played what he saw as his ace in the hole, the piece of evidence he’d subtly driven home to the jurors: that there was a second bullet casing found in the living room. Why was the second casing important? During his testimony, Colton had testified that he’d never shot the gun before that night. If Colton shot at Jennifer only once, unintentionally, there would have been only one casing. But there were two.

That second cartridge was proof, Bishop said, that Colton lied. Could he have fired twice at Jennifer that night, perhaps missing the first time and firing again? “You don’t fire accidentally twice!” the prosecutor said. “…There is nothing more intentional than pointing a gun and shooting it.”

Bishop suggested the jury consider Colton Pitonyak’s actions. From the moment he showed up at Nora Sullivan’s that morning, Colton worked on setting up an alibi, laying the groundwork to explain away the gunshots. “[Colton had] seen all the movies,
Donnie Brasco
,
Goodfellas
,
Sopranos
,” Bishop said. “[H]e [knew] the next step: get rid of the body.”

“Unfortunately for Mr. Pitonyak, movies are movies, and life is life,” Bishop said. “And [cutting up a body] is a lot harder than he thought.”

Roy Minton had espoused a theory that had Jennifer sitting on the bed when Colton picked up the gun and it accidentally went off. Bill Bishop disagreed. He proposed that Jennifer was in the kitchen, “the one room that’s been cleaned within an inch of its life.”

“You have heard nothing, nothing in this case that leads you to believe anything but that Colton Pitonyak intentionally shot Jennifer Cave.”

The jurors left the courtroom single file to deliberate. The judge retired to his chambers shortly after noon. By nature, Stephanie McFarland could be fiery, but Bill Bishop had surprised many in the courtroom. In his closing, his voice had taken on an emotional edge they hadn’t heard before. This case had touched him.

Three friends had come to support the Pitonyaks, and they walked from the courtroom with Bridget and Eddie. From the Cave side came Sharon, Jim, Vanessa, Lauren, Hailey, and the rest of their family, including for this final day, Clayton; Whitney, who took time off from medical school to come; and her husband, Shawn. Jennifer’s grandmother, Myrtle, was there, along with Jim and Sharon’s good friend Harold Shockley, and many of Jennifer’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. While they waited, they filed downstairs to a lounge in the victims’ assistance office, anxious and apprehensive.

On the way to his office, just across the street from the courthouse, Roy Minton stewed, wondering if the jury “fully understood and appreciated that the shooting could have been an accident.” Downstairs in his office, Bill Bishop worried that he’d left something out, some crucial piece of evidence that it was now too late to present. He looked at the brief outline he’d pulled together, one that read: “Memory does not equal intent”; “Mutilation and flight not as they told you because of DNA”; and more. Everything had been covered, but he still felt restless.

“I always worry,” he says. “Always.”

In his office, Jim Bergman considered the word “motive.” It was fine to say jurors didn’t need to have a reason for murder, that the prosecutors didn’t need to prove Pitonyak had one, but he understood all too well that jurors are only human. In their hearts, he feared, they’d want an answer to the question, “Why?”

Less than an hour after deliberations began, at 1:10, word swept through the crowd congregated in the hallway: The jury had reached a verdict. Soon the families, attorneys, reporters, and observers again packed the courtroom so tight there was hardly room for a breath, when Colton Pitonyak was escorted back in by an armed deputy. The judge entered and ordered everyone in the courtroom to maintain calm when the verdict was read. “You cannot show any emotion,” he warned. Then the jury filed in.

As he waited to hear his fate, Colton looked placid, even disinterested. The bailiff brought the verdict to Judge Flowers, who read it and handed it back to be given to the jury foreman. The man rose and read: “On the charge of murder…we find Colton Pitonyak guilty.”

Showing little emotion, Colton glanced at his parents, and Bridget rested her head on her husband’s shoulder, as they both quietly wept.

Not having heard the judge’s order, Scott Engle walked in just as the verdict was read, and shouted, “Yes,” throwing his arms up in the air, upon hearing the word “guilty.” The judge pounded his gavel and ordered quiet, then asked that the jury be taken to their room. They were excused until two o’clock, when the punishment phase of the trial would begin.

Once the jury cleared the courtroom, a wave of voices filled the air, crying and cheering. Sharon threw her arms around Lauren, Vanessa, Hailey, and Clayton, as they all sobbed. Two sets of families sat across a courtroom from each other crying, the Pitonyaks out of grief to losing their son to prison, Jennifer’s family out of relief that the man who murdered her would be punished.

Sentencing was, as Sam Bassett put it, “the ball game.” The two defense attorneys had been arguing for lesser charges and a lighter sentence since the trial began. Judge Flowers vetoed the lesser charges. Now, the only hope the defense had was to persuade the jury to come in with a lighter sentence. The options were vast, from probation to life in prison. “If we got Colton twenty to thirty years, he should be cheering,” says Bassett.

While Minton would argue for a light sentence, Bishop would press the jurors for the maximum, life. Who would Bishop put on the witness stand to convince the jury they needed to come down hard on Pitonyak? At first, the prosecutor had considered putting the officers who arrested Colton on the drug charge in 2004 on the stand. They’d seen him at his worst and would be able to explain to the jury who Pitonyak was at the time of the murder. Instead, as court reconvened, Bishop asked Sharon to get ready. She would be the prosecutor’s one and only witness. Sharon alone would shoulder the responsibility of sharing the grief caused by Jennifer’s death, the suffering Colton Pitonyak caused when he raised his gun and fired.

“Jennifer was a middle child,” Sharon said, looking at the jurors, her eyes dark and sunken, and her manner quiet. When Stephanie McFarland asked her to tell of the toll on first herself and then the family, Sharon said: “I go to the doctor now. I’ve never gone to the doctor before. I’m on antidepressants now. Sleep is hard to come by…It hurts every single day.”

Sharon worried about Vanessa, who was with them the day they found Jennifer’s body, and Lauren, who suffered stomach problems since the killing. Clayton was close to his lost sister and missed her deeply. Hailey no longer felt safe in crowds, and Whitney hated sitting in a bathroom. “Jim takes a licking and keeps on kicking,” she said, wiping away tears and smiling at him in the gallery. “He’s our Bondo, and he holds us all together. He loves us even when we’re not very lovable.”

In the jury box, two of the women jurors dabbed at their eyes. The murder had torn all their lives apart, Sharon said. It had affected them all. And none of them would ever be the same person again. Jennifer, Sharon said, was the family mediator, the one all the others counted on to run interference. “Jennifer, bless her heart, she was a big old sounding board.”

For the past year, Sharon said, she’d gone to a counselor. But it was their pastor, Father David, who “taught me how to live again.” She’d been so nervous about the trial, but her pastor’s words spurred her on. “He said, ‘This is it, kiddo. This is the last thing you can do for Jennifer. The last gift you can give her.’”

Sharon held a tissue to her eyes and sobbed, then shuddered, as if to shake off the grief. Whitney had married the June before, and Sharon said, “It’s hard to have what’s supposed to be such a happy event and have it tinged with so much sadness. So much loss.”