05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (44 page)

When did Sharon miss her dead daughter? “It’s Christmas. It’s Easter. It’s Thanksgiving, which was her favorite because she loved buttermilk pie. It’s hitting a sale at Dillard’s. It’s the little everyday things, like seeing something and thinking Jennifer would love that.”

Roy Minton asked no questions, and as Sharon walked back to her seat, many had tears collecting in their eyes, both on the jury and in the gallery. When she reached him, Jim stood up, wrapped his arms around her, and hugged her. She sat beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. One of the few who had remained unaffected as she talked was Colton Pitonyak. But Sharon thought she did see something, when she looked at him from the witness stand, a look that said the trial didn’t go as he’d planned.

“I think he truly believed he’d be getting in Eddie’s Toyota Sequoia and driving home to Arkansas with his parents,” she says.

The state rested, and the defense put on their witnesses. The first two were Colton’s high school friends: Ben Smith and Louis Petit. They were well-mannered young men, evidence of their strict Catholic schooling. “If you asked anybody, Colton had one of the brightest futures,” Smith said. “He was a good guy.”

Then how could he be in the courtroom today? How could Colton, “a good guy,” be found guilty of such a horrendous crime? “He fell in with the wrong people, and just kind of went out of control,” Smith said. “He was constantly drunk or high, but now, since he’s had a chance to clean up, it’s helped him to get perspective on things. I think he understands how bad everything was.”

From the witness stand, Louis Petit recalled how he first met Colton at Catholic High School. “I was new at the school at the time, and he befriended me. He was my best friend,” he said. “We did everything together…football, worked out, played sports…he was almost genius level, driven, ambitious. He had a brilliant future.”

Like Smith, Petit talked of the change the drugs brought on, and then about the letters he’d received since the arrest. “He’s sober now, clear-minded, able to assess situations better.” Sadly, of course, Colton Pitonyak’s rehabilitation, if he’d had one, had come too late to save Jennifer Cave’s life.

A portly man with large glasses, Johnny Morris, a structural steel salesman and Colton’s middle school football coach, got on the stand. “Colton was a good kid. A shining star. He got along with everybody, and was always willing to help. Good natured,” Morris said. He’d known Bridget and Eddie for thirteen years. “They’re good people.”

Roy Minton asked if Morris ever thought he’d be testifying for Colton in a case like this one. “Never,” Morris said. Like the others who’d come to support the former scholarship student, Morris knew where the blame lay: “…drugs are a problem where society looks the other way. I’ve seen many young men go this route. Drugs get a hold of them. They’re afraid to ask their parents for help. Once it gets you it gets you. Out of control and tragedies like this happen.”

Colton’s math teacher, Tommy Coy, then took the stand. “Colton made the highest grades in all assignments, all tests, he never had anything lower than a 98. Academically, he was always at the top of his class,” he said. “He was always very respectful…Colton was the last young man I would have anticipated something like this happening to.”

As Colton’s father then took the stand, he appeared nervous, his hand shaking slightly with the papers he held. And he looked angry, his dark brows arched. The son of generations of farmers, in his dark suit he appeared as he was in life, a successful business owner.

With Sam Bassett, Eddie put before the jury two photos of Colton, one at age twelve or thirteen, his soft, dark hair long across his forehead, a smile on his face, an appealing adolescent with bright eyes. The second photo showed Eddie, Colton, and his brother, Dustin, on a family fishing trip, the wholesome freshness of the outdoors surrounding them. Then Bassett suggested Eddie read a statement he prepared.

“First I’d like to tell Mrs. Cave that my family and I are very sorry for the loss of your daughter Jennifer,” he read. He paused and looked up at Sharon, then quickly back down at the paper before him. He recounted the two times he’d met Jennifer, including the dinner at Sullivan’s. Eddie read the statement, glancing up, appearing nervous. “Colton was very defensive to Jennifer about us.”

To show the jurors that Colton wasn’t as he’d been portrayed in the courtroom, a would-be gangster, Eddie said his younger son didn’t like to hunt and would rather be home playing his guitar or out with his friends. “He just wasn’t interested in guns and hunting.”

Colton was in the top ten in scholarships when he graduated from Catholic High. He’d had so many opportunities, but he’d chosen UT, and the Pitonyaks were glad. “Colton was honored to be accepted into the program,” Eddie said. He talked about Texas, over and over, in positive terms, how good UT’s reputation was, how happy he and Bridget were that Colton chose the McCombs Business School. Perhaps Eddie Pitonyak felt out of place coming from Arkansas. Perhaps he thought praising the university would please the jury.

Then Colton’s father again addressed Sharon. “As previously mentioned to Mrs. Cave, we’re all truly sorry for
the accident
[emphasis added] with Jennifer’s death,” Pitonyak said. Perhaps he didn’t realize that the jury had discarded the accident theory, labeling the killing murder, or perhaps he meant to reintroduce it, to assert it once again. Even after the verdict, Eddie Pitonyak insisted his son wasn’t guilty.

“There’s nothing any of us can do to bring [Jennifer] back,” he said, dismissing any notion that coming down hard on Colton could alleviate her family’s pain.

For the jury, Eddie described seeing Colton for the first time at the jail, separated by a glass wall, Colton so encumbered by chains he couldn’t “even scratch his nose.” Colton had already spent seventeen months in jail, his father pointed out, a hardship for their entire family. Bridget longed to put her arms around her son, and had asked her husband what police would do if she ran up to him in the courtroom and hugged him. Eddie said, “I told her they would take their billy clubs out and beat her silly or worse. Bridget said, ‘It might be worth it.’”

“We’re not a rich family,” Eddie said, maintaining they couldn’t put up the million-dollar bond to get Colton out of jail. “[T]his was a terrible experience for both families. There were TV crews parked outside our house and everyone in the world had heard about this…Colton and his family will suffer from this tragedy for years to come…it affects both families…Colton will have to deal with this for the rest of his life.”

Once the defense attorneys passed the witness, Bill Bishop asked about Eddie Pitonyak’s conversation with Sharon the day she’d come to Austin looking for Jennifer. “Do you remember telling her that you were upset that she’d contacted your sister[-in-law] in Arkansas?” Bishop asked.

“If I’d known what was going on at the time, I would have handled it differently,” Eddie conceded.

“Do you remember telling Mr. Sedwick that you and your wife thought it was all Jennifer’s fault, that she was part of the problem?” Bishop prodded.

A blank look on his face, Pitonyak shook his head, hesitated just a moment, and then said, “No.”

Eddie didn’t pat his wife on the shoulder or make any physical move toward her when they passed as she walked to the witness stand. Roy Minton introduced Bridget again to the jury, and then asked her to read the letter she’d prepared, saying everyone would understand if she became overcome with emotion and needed to stop.

From the start, Bridget’s eyes filled with tears, and pain twisted her voice. “First, Sharon, I’m so sorry for all your family is going through,” Bridget said. She said she’d met Jennifer only once, but she was lovely. And “she’s the only girl Colton ever, ever mentioned when he was down here. He always talked about Jennifer being his friend, something they’d done together or laughed about. I never heard any other girl’s name. He was very fond of her.

“For the past seventeen months, I’ve listened as my son has been portrayed as a monster,” she said. “Nothing could be further from the truth…because of his problems with alcohol and drugs, I wouldn’t have been surprised about a call about his death, and had on some level prepared myself for it. But I never imagined this could happen. It’s not in his character to hurt anybody…especially a friend. Especially someone he loved deeply.”

On the stand, Bridget was likable, warm, smiling at the jury, as she talked. The mother talked of her pride in the old Colton, the bright, precocious child, and behind the defense table, for the first time in the entire trial, Colton Pitonyak cried. His face flushed, and he sobbed as his mother talked about his good qualities, how he’d helped others, and poured himself into everything he did, from swimming competitions to studies. He’d always had a lot of female friends.

“He was always very protective of his female friends. He called home a few years ago, extremely upset that a friend had been raped,” she read. “Colton couldn’t understand how someone could hurt a woman like that. He was sad and angry.”

Colton had sat stone-faced through Sharon Cave’s emotional testimony, but having his mother on the stand had finally gotten through to him, perhaps driving home for the first time that it had all truly happened. He was no longer playing the tough guy, the wannabe gangster. The jury had named him a murderer.

Bridget, however, like Eddie, disagreed. “It is beyond my comprehension,” she said, “that Colton would ever intentionally harm someone, especially a woman.”

In his letters home, Colton, she said, was always trying to comfort them. “When Eddie and I spoke with him last Thursday night by phone, his concern was for our state of mind, not his,” Bridget said, as her barely controlled demeanor broke and she began sobbing, her face a bookend of grief to the way Sharon had appeared on the witness stand when talking about Jennifer.

“I believe with everything…” Bridget began, but she was overcome with emotion, stopping and covering her mouth with her hand. “I believe with everything I am that Colton could not and would not harm his best friend Jennifer. He’s not a cold-hearted murderer. He’s not.”

Colton, she said, had suffered. The last year and a half, he’d been in “anguish and pain for the loss of his friend. Undoubtedly he’ll spend the rest of his life with this pain.

“We love him so much and he’s such a good man,” Bridget said. Looking at her son in the courtroom, her eyes welling with tears, she said, “I love you, Colton.”

After Bridget finished, the defense rested, and Bishop asked to call a rebuttal witness. There was a matter in Eddie’s testimony he wanted to contradict. Jim, already sworn earlier in the trial, took the stand, and Bishop asked about the telephone conversation with Eddie. “On the phone, I said, ‘We’re just looking for Jennifer. We need some help,’” Jim recounted. “‘If you can help, because your son was the last person she was seen with.’ And Eddie said, ‘I don’t have any idea where they are. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And as a matter of fact, my wife tells me that when she met Jennifer down there, that she thinks Jennifer is really the whole problem on this deal.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”

Between the testimonies of Colton’s parents, Eddie calling the killing an accident and Bridget saying she couldn’t believe their son killed Jennifer on purpose, Jim’s words only drove home that the Pitonyaks, despite all they’d been through with Colton, still had no idea what the drugs had done to him. They didn’t understand the man he’d become or what the new Colton, fueled by meth, was capable of.

Of the four attorneys, perhaps Roy Minton was the only one not worried about his final argument before the jury that would decide Pitonyak’s destiny. Minton didn’t believe what he had to say at the very end would change minds. “The overwhelming amount of decision making is done by jurors a little at a time throughout the trial,” he said. “Those jurors had been making up their minds from voir dire on.”

Sam Bassett, meanwhile, hoped jurors would show “a little compassion.”

As she had during the guilt and innocence phase, McFarland was the first to address the jurors. She explained the law, that the jurors could assess a punishment anywhere from probation to life in prison. She told them that she expected life. “What we have here is the most heinous of murders,” McFarland said. Colton’s parents had asked for leniency, but were they entitled to consideration? “Jennifer is not only dead, but what they did to her…that is the most cruel thing I can think of. The defendant didn’t show any leniency to Jennifer, and the state asks you not to show any leniency toward him.”

“I think you have the hardest job,” Minton said to the jurors. “Particularly when you are dealing with young people.”

Colton, he said, was not a hardened criminal with a long rap sheet. Instead, he was a “youngster who’d led an incredibly great life,” the defense attorney said. Before the drugs, Colton had discipline, charm, thoughtfulness, and until he got to UT, he had never been in trouble. In fact, Colton Pitonyak had lived an admirable life, one that should have led to a stellar future.

Again, Minton talked about Colton as if he were still a young boy. The defendant was the age of Minton’s grandchildren. “You never quit worrying about them…It’s a constant pain,” the elder defense attorney confided, his voice low. “Put yourself in the place of Eddie and Bridget, with a youngster who had done so well. He came down here to this school and went to hell in a hand basket.”

Society’s biggest problem was drugs, Minton said, and it was “devastating our young people.” Minton shook his head, and sighed. “How the drugs seem to get a hold of a youngster. That is inconceivable…Compare the conduct of the Colton who came to Austin in 2001, with the world ahead of him.”

Turning to the jurors, he advised them to watch their children carefully. If their grades drop, “jerk them out like a rocket shot,” he advised, and then send them for counseling and treatment. “I wish that I could have told Eddie that. I wish I could have told Bridget that.” But then, Minton said, he, too, had made mistakes as a parent. “And who in the world would know better than I?”