05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (46 page)

The moon shone a tarnished red-gold over Austin just before sunrise on Tuesday, August 28, 2007, Laura Hall’s twenty-fourth birthday and the first morning of testimony in her trial. The color came from a celestial event, a lunar eclipse. The day before, a panel of eighty jurors had filled the courtroom. One quarter had to be disqualified because they’d read press reports and already formed an opinion about Hall’s guilt or innocence. In the end, the jury consisted of six women and six men.

In the courtroom, many of those who’d been at the Pitonyak trial congregated again. Missing were Pitonyak and his parents. Colton, who was already appealing his conviction, would not testify at Hall’s trial. This time Laura’s parents, Loren and Carol Hall, occupied the front bench on the courtroom’s left side, flanked by Laura’s grandmother and her husband, and Carol’s sisters. Directly in front of them, Laura, dressed in a severe black suit, heels, and an ivory blouse, her hair now a walnut brown, sat between her attorneys: Joe James Sawyer, a dapper raconteur, whose expensively cut suit had a white handkerchief precisely folded in the right breast pocket; and Antonio Wehnes, a balding, somewhat portly man, who would ask no questions but monitored testimony.

Something was new about Stephanie McFarland, who sat beside Bill Bishop at the prosecutor’s table. Roundly pregnant with a daughter, she smiled a bit more freely and, with an additional seven months of experience in the courtroom, seemed more at ease. After McFarland read out loud the two felony indictments against Hall—hindering apprehension and tampering with evidence—Bishop rose to begin opening statements.

Sharon and Jim appeared weary, and Hall, poised with her ballpoint pen over a yellow legal pad, sized up Bishop with contempt as he laid out the case, leading jurors through the events that preceded and followed the murder. That was important, he explained, because Jennifer’s murder “leads us to the charges against Laura Hall.” He described again that fateful night, another Tuesday in August, two years earlier, when Jennifer went out to dinner with Colton Pitonyak. She died in the early morning hours, and two days later, Jim Sedwick walked into Pitonyak’s bathroom.

There would be evidence that proved Hall was Pitonyak’s willing partner in the murder’s bloody cover-up and his attempted escape, Bishop said. Then he detailed bits of that evidence, including the border crossing videotape that clearly showed Laura driving the man she loved into Mexico. What would the jury base their decision on? In addition to the physical evidence, Bishop said he would present “statements made by Laura Hall.”

After Bishop’s brief opening, Sawyer stood and looked sternly at the jury. “The devil is in the details,” he said. The evidence would be in the dates and the times, he proposed, alerting the jurors to pay close attention to minor details.

Ironically, he then reconstructed the crime the way prosecutors had to convict Pitonyak, theorizing that Jennifer was killed as she pulled away from Colton, cleaning up her life and ridding herself of him. But Sawyer proposed something else, something new: that Pitonyak killed Jennifer because he coveted the experience of taking a human life. Colton Pitonyak, Sawyer said, fantasized about murder. Bloodthirsty, Pitonyak lusted over not only the killing but desecrating a body. Why did this exclude Sawyer’s client from the dismemberment? Pitonyak was too greedy to share either experience with Hall, the lawyer hissed. “There was a beast inside Colton Pitonyak, and no one had ever seen his face,” he said. “The beast who wanted to see what it was like to kill.”

Charming but diabolical, Pitonyak victimized two women, Sawyer said: one, Jennifer; the other, Laura Hall. Rather than a Ma Barker, the young woman at the defense table was frightened and abused, a girl in love who unquestioningly believed when Pitonyak claimed Jennifer’s death had been an accident. “She was as much a pawn in the hands of Colton Pitonyak as Jennifer Cave,” said Sawyer, his voice rising. Laura Hall’s “not guilty except of loving someone too much, and making stupid, foolish mistakes.”

From that point on, that first day of trial laid out a trail of events. Jennifer Gass, another of the friends, recounted seeing Jennifer and Colton on Sixth Street that night, and Jennifer’s warning to Melissa Kuhl: “Colton is crazy.” Ryan Martindill and Star Salzman told how Hall stayed at their apartment, and Michael Rodriguez recounted his last conversations with Jennifer before her death. At times it was difficult to see Hall as the victim Sawyer described, as when Martindill testified about the night she had “Colton” tattooed on her ankle.

When Martindill said Hall appeared traumatized by Colton’s arrest, Sawyer had him repeat that on cross-examination. Laura Hall was a woman suffering, the defense attorney wanted the jurors to understand.

Sadly, Jim and Sharon took the stand and detailed for one last time to a jury the events of the terrible day they’d found Jennifer’s violated corpse. Sawyer asked them no questions, but he had one for Scott Engle. “Did Jennifer relate to you that [Colton] once threatened her with a knife?” he asked.

“Yes,” Scott said. “She did.”

It was the first glimmer in the courtroom at either trial of Pitonyak’s true character, and that he hadn’t snapped that night but had a history of violence. Sawyer wanted that episode before the jurors because it fit the picture he’d paint of Pitonyak, a threatening man who abused women.

Still, it was Nora Sullivan’s time on the stand that proved the focal point of the day. After she testified to her early morning visit from Pitonyak, in which he tried to cover for the noise of the gunshot by making up a gunfight with drug dealers, McFarland asked Sullivan to recount a conversation she’d had with Laura Hall, one in which Hall described her role in the aftermath of the killing.

Blustering, Sawyer rose to his feet, objecting, and the jury was removed from the room. The prosecutors weren’t playing fair, he maintained. Under the judge’s orders, they were required to inform him of incriminating statements made by his client.

Bishop protested. The judge’s order included only statements to law enforcement personnel, he said. The argument built, both men standing before the judge, insisting the law was on their side.

What admission elicited such fervor?

Sawyer read out loud from McFarland’s notes: Hall told Sullivan that on the Wednesday following the killing, Hall lost patience with Pitonyak. Instead of using the hacksaw to dismember Jennifer’s body, he sat in the living room drinking beer and watching television. Sullivan had the impression that Hall took over and finished the job.

Judge Flowers looked at both attorneys, appearing uncertain, and then put off his decision until later. He wanted time to consider his ruling. Hall’s words to Sullivan were incriminating, and the stakes were high.

The afternoon filled with police officers and crime scene specialists, all testifying as they had at Pitonyak’s trial about their roles on the crime scene and in the investigation. Sharon and Vanessa left the courtroom before the twelve jurors looked up at the screen on the courtroom wall at photos of Jennifer’s desecrated body in Pitonyak’s bathtub, and the horror was again driven home. Then jurors heard that Laura Hall was a probable contributor to DNA found on a blue shop towel purchased at the hardware store, the gun and its six-bullet magazine, and flip-flops found in the bathroom.

With the DNA expert on the stand, Sawyer asked for more time to review his notes, and the trial ended for the day. As she left the courthouse, Sharon fumed over an encounter with the woman on trial. Leah Smith, one of the counselors in the DA’s victims’ assistance office, blocked the door to keep others out briefly that morning while Sharon and Vanessa used the woman’s restroom, a common practice to protect victims and their families in high-profile cases. Carol Hall walked up to the restroom door with Laura, and Smith asked them to wait. Her mother agreed, but Laura stormed past Smith into the restroom. Vanessa stood guard outside the door to the stall her mother used, as Hall chided: “There’s no law that says we can’t use a public bathroom.”

At that moment, Laura Hall looked far from Sawyer’s depiction of a young woman easily controlled or victimized.

More DNA testimony began day two of the trial. On cross-exam, Sawyer went through the long list of items processed by the lab, pointing out that most tested positive not for Laura Hall’s DNA, but rather for Jennifer’s and Colton’s. Had investigators checked Jennifer’s nail clippings for blood? he asked. No, the DNA expert admitted. They didn’t. Sawyer looked mystified.

Compared with Minton and Bassett, Sawyer was a different breed of lawyer, more the showman, and more openly aggressive. When the bullet found inside Jennifer’s head was put before the jurors by Dr. Peacock, Sawyer tried to defuse the damaging information by demonstrating in a nonchalant manner for jurors how the gun was shot into the severed neck. Still, one of the women turned away while Peacock held up the X-ray of Jennifer’s skull with the bullet inside. The X-ray showed the head unattached to the body, seeming to float in space, a disturbing image. On another X-ray, one of Jennifer’s severed hands looked like a glove without an arm, except for the ghostly white outline of bones.

At Colton Pitonyak’s trial, autopsy photos were displayed on the courtroom screen. This time, Dr. Peacock held them up to show jurors as she talked of the knife wounds across Jennifer’s face, throat, and chest. “The flesh appears waxy,” she said, pointing at the deep cuts. That there was no hemorrhage, no blood, meant, Peacock explained, that they were postmortem, after death, most likely between four and twenty-four hours after the killing.

Throughout the grisly testimony, Laura Hall sat nearly motionless, her face without emotion, as if it meant little or nothing to her. She adopted a lawyerly pose, writing in her yellow legal pad, as jurors stared at her with questioning eyes. When Dr. Peacock talked of the difficulty of decapitating a corpse, one male juror looked at Laura Hall and gulped.

During cross-examination, Sawyer took up the wound to Jennifer’s hand, the only cut on the corpse that showed signs of hemorrhage, albeit slight. That wound, Dr. Peacock said, was different from the others. It took place before all blood pressure was lost, making it peri-mortem, either just before or after death. Sawyer described it as a defensive wound, one that could have happened when Jennifer grabbed Pitonyak’s knife. Dr. Peacock agreed that was possible, but she failed to give the defense attorney what he wanted. Sawyer floated a theory that the wound to the hand meant all the wounds covering Jennifer’s face, throat, and chest happened soon after her death, before Laura arrived on the scene.

“I can’t say that,” Dr. Peacock said.

Yet it would be the afternoon witnesses that would deal the worst blows to the defense. One after another they took the stand and talked of Hall’s love of Colton or what she’d told them about her own actions in the Orange Tree bathroom.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Joseph Smith recounted how an agitated Hall paced the border crossing office waiting for her father in the early-morning hours following Colton’s arrest. She talked without being asked questions, sometimes as if to herself. Smith said she ranted about her love of Pitonyak and quoted Hall as warning at one point that she’d “kill anybody who hurt Colton.”

What Smith insisted he didn’t see were any injuries on Hall, any signs that Colton Pitonyak abused her. The only injury Hall complained of that morning was that Mexican police had been rough with her during the arrest. She said they’d “tried to give her a compound fracture of her right arm.” But when Smith inspected Hall’s arm, he saw nothing.

During cross-exam, Sawyer asked Smith to look at two dates: the first on the entrance of the green Cadillac into Mexico and the second the date on the warrant for Pitonyak’s arrest. “There is no question that at the time the car crossed into Mexico, there was no signed warrant for Colton Pitonyak’s arrest?” Sawyer asked.

“No question,” Smith agreed.

On the stand, Said Aziz looked guarded. He clearly didn’t want to be there, as he read from his statement to police the many things Hall told him on the day after Colton’s arrest, including the first phone call when she said, “I have been all up in this shit since like two hours after the shit started.”

When he asked her why she’d protect someone who’d murdered a girl much like herself, Laura professed her love for Pitonyak and said, “That’s just how I roll.”

When he asked how they’d gotten to Mexico, Hall said, “We just hauled in my Caddy.” As they’d talked, Said grew angry. He liked Jennifer, but Hall voiced no concern that her boyfriend had just killed a girl. Instead, Hall bragged that she’d do anything to protect Pitonyak. In front of the jury, Aziz put Laura Hall’s plan: that she’d stay out of trouble by telling police she thought they were on a vacation.

Aziz said he warned her several times to cooperate with the police but had the impression Hall wasn’t listening. Only after he pointed out that he thought she was crazy for helping Pitonyak and that “everyone else would be talking to police,” did Hall change her attitude. After detectives Gilchrest and Fugitt were at her parents’ RV park questioning her, Hall told Aziz a completely different story: that she didn’t know about Jennifer’s killing when she and Colton left for Mexico.

“Were you lying before or now?” Aziz asked.

“Before,” Hall answered.

When he took over, Sawyer tried to defuse the damaging testimony. During cross-exam, Aziz agreed with Sawyer that Laura was a “pretty nice girl,” yet his agreement sounded halfhearted. And Laura’s old friend said something else: Hall never appeared afraid of Pitonyak, and she had a long history of telling lies. “I don’t know that I ever knew her to be very truthful,” Aziz said.

That was only the beginning of a bad afternoon for the defense.

Soon, Nora Sullivan got back on the stand. Backed with a favorable ruling on the admissibility of her testimony, she recounted a conversation with Hall about the afternoon following Jennifer’s killing. Pitonyak watched TV, drinking, and Hall was miffed at him for not carrying through with the dismemberment. Sullivan had the impression that a frustrated Hall did the work herself.