05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (48 page)

Colton was again put on trial as Sawyer asked: “What did Laura Hall and Jennifer Cave have in common? Both were drawn to this man. He murdered for no reason. He is the center of his universe and no one else exists.” Colton Pitonyak was a man who primed himself for murder and fantasized about cutting up a human body. “If Laura Hall had been with Colton that night, she might be dead,” Sawyer speculated.

The defense attorney attacked those who said Laura confided in them that she’d helped Colton cut up Jennifer’s body: Nora Sullivan, Henriette Langenbach, Javier Rosales. All lied, he said.

At the end, Sawyer’s voice quieted. Laura Hall became enmeshed in this tragedy out of love. “I’ve never loved anyone that much. I’ve never loved anyone that way,” he said. Then he pleaded with the jurors to stand their ground if they believed the state hadn’t proved their case. “In the end, I’m confident you’ll say not guilty.”

“I don’t envy you your job. It’s hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with a word-master, someone who is going to twist what you see, twist what you read and try to make it seem something that it’s not,” Bishop began.

Sawyer jumped to his feet. “Pardon me, Mr. Bishop,” he called out. Turning to Judge Flowers, he said, “If he’s talking about me, I object. That’s outside the scope of an acceptable final argument.”

Looking amused at the banter between the attorneys, Judge Flowers dismissed Sawyer’s objection, and Bishop forged ahead, detailing what jurors knew to be true, including that Hall gassed up the car and washed it for the flight to Mexico. It didn’t matter that the warrant wasn’t yet signed, the prosecutor maintained. If jurors let Hall off because of that, they were setting a precedent for “an efficient hindering apprehension…if you procrastinate you might be guilty…That’s not the law.”

As to the tampering charge, it wasn’t necessary for them to succeed in hiding the evidence, they simply had to try. “If you intend, then you are guilty…I know that you know that.”

If jurors doubted that Hall tampered with evidence, Bishop suggested they look at two photos in evidence, and he held them up before the jury: Jennifer’s high school graduation picture, and one of the gruesome photos of her dismembered body on the autopsy table. “The manner in which she was found, that’s the offense,” he said.

And then there were the admissions the woman who called herself “the Mouth of the South” had made to so many, including telling Said Aziz, “I have been all up in this shit since like two hours after the shit started.”

“‘All up in this’ does not mean that you don’t know there was a body in the bathtub,” Bishop said. The other witnesses backed up Aziz, and none of them had anything to gain from their testimony. In all their accounts, there were common threads, that Hall loved Colton, that she’d do anything for him.

“That’s how I roll,” she’d said. She was proud of her role in the murder. “She wanted to be a Bonnie to his Clyde, but for that to work he had to be out on the streets to continue the spree.”

The jurors left the courtroom at 2:53 on Thursday, the third day of the trial, and the waiting began. The hours clicked by slowly. Members of the media speculated on what time a verdict would come in, but the guesses of one after another didn’t materialize. Dinner hour passed, and the jurors sent out for a pizza, working on hammering out a verdict.

Shortly after, at 7
P.M.
, the interested parties returned to the courtroom. The jury had a question. It wanted to review testimony: the answers of the expert who placed Laura Hall’s DNA in the bathroom.

When ordered to by the judge, with the jury again in their seats, Rita Grasshoff, the court reporter, read the DNA testimony to the jury directly from the trial transcript. According to the forensic expert, the odds were 1 in 43 Caucasians that it was Laura Hall’s DNA on the blue shop towel. When it came to the flip-flop found next to the bathtub, the odds were higher: 1 in 402 for Caucasians.

The jury left to continue their deliberations, and as soon as they were gone, Laura Hall grinned, made a fist, and said, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

If the jurors were looking at the DNA, did that mean they didn’t believe the witnesses? Laura appeared to believe that it did. Jennifer’s family worried that Hall was right, that jurors might find her either not guilty or guilty of only the lesser charges, both with maximum sentences of one year. Two misdemeanors would allow Hall to become a lawyer, to go on with her life as if she’d played no part in the horror of Jennifer’s murder.

The jury left for their homes that evening at 10:30, and the Cave family, the Hall family, and the crush of media reporting on the case left as well. At nine the next morning, they were back, and the jury again deliberated. As the day wore on, the worrying started. Was the jury hung? Would they reach a decision?

Finally, at 4:40 that afternoon, Billy Pannell, the bailiff, escorted the twelve jurors back into the packed courtroom. They’d reached a verdict. As the foreman read the decision, Lauren and Jim sat on either side of Sharon, and they all held hands. Whatever it was, they would have to live with it. To reclaim their lives, they had to move ahead, they had to put Jennifer’s murder and the pain of the past two years behind them.

“On the felony charge of hindering apprehension, we find the defendant not guilty,” the foreman read, and Sharon and Jim both grimaced. Sharon hung her head, and put her arm around Lauren to comfort her. As they had all feared, the jurors had found Laura guilty not on the felony hindering apprehension charge but on the misdemeanor. Sawyer’s argument that Pitonyak’s warrant had not yet been signed at the time Hall spirited him across the border had won.

Behind the defense table, Laura Hall grinned, but it would prove premature.

“On the felony charge of tampering with evidence,” the man continued. “We find the defendant guilty.”

Sharon’s frown turned into a soft smile. Her eyes closed, and she seemed to be praying, thanking God. Jim, wrapped his arm tighter around her, and Lauren looked at her mother, their eyes meeting. Hailey, not understanding what had happened, fumed, believing the jurors had decided against them. Jim would later explain to his younger daughter that Laura Hall would pay for what she had done to Jennifer, for her role in their suffering.

In the end, the jurors decided that while Colton Pitonyak may have led Laura Hall down a path that descended into the depths of hell, she walked with him willingly.

The jury filed out. They’d return the following Tuesday, after the Labor Day weekend, to decide what punishment Hall should receive. Bishop rose and addressed Judge Flowers. “We ask that Ms. Hall be taken into custody,” he said.

“Denied,” Flowers said.

Meanwhile, Laura Hall remained emotionless. If there were any indication that she understood what had just happened, it was only that as she stood for the judge to leave, she appeared just slightly unsteady.

The court adjourned, and a short time later, Jim, Sharon, Laura, Myrtle, Hailey, and Whitney all left the courtroom, believing that justice would be served the following Tuesday.

A short time later, Loren Hall sat alone outside the courthouse on a black wrought-iron bench, his eyes wide and disbelieving. He shuddered slightly, holding back tears. “I don’t disagree with what the jurors said,” he whispered. “I’m only sorry for all Laura’s been through.”

At five minutes to nine the following Tuesday morning, Laura wasn’t in the courtroom. Her parents stood in the hallway waiting for her, and a murmur went through the audience. Could she be on the run, reliving the flight into Mexico with Colton Pitonyak? When she finally arrived, she had her new boyfriend in tow, a young man who resembled Pitonyak, his dark hair buzzed short; he slouched in his seat with a scruffy five o’clock shadow. As she had every day of her trial, Laura looked like the lawyer she now could never be, her hair resolutely anchored into a severe bun with a heavy silver clasp.

The first witness called by the state was Doug Conley, a nattily dressed taxi driver who’d picked up Laura on August 6 of the previous year, to take her from her West Campus apartment to her job at Baby Acapulco. In the cab, Laura mentioned that she was facing a felony, as if to explain why she was working as a waitress. When Conley asked what it was about, Laura said it had something to do with her boyfriend who was facing a murder charge.

“Who did he kill?” Conley asked.

“Some bitch,” Hall snapped. A full year after Jennifer’s death, Laura Hall still had no remorse, no understanding that a young woman had lost her life and that Jennifer’s family had suffered.

When Bishop asked if Conley could pick Hall out in the courtroom, he pointed directly at her.

“Do you have a tape recording of this conversation?” Sawyer asked on cross-exam.

“No,” Conley said. With that, the state rested.

On the witness stand, Loren cried. His daughter, he said, was a gifted athlete and a determined young woman. “Has she ever been convicted of a felony, prior to this?” Sawyer asked.

“No,” Hall answered.

He talked of Laura’s prowess as a swimmer and on the soccer field. She’d played trombone in high school and been on the debate team her freshman year in high school. The year she was the captain of the team, she took them all the way to a national competition. “That’s where she excelled,” Loren said. “She wanted to be a lawyer.”

Like Bridget and Eddie Pitonyak with Colton, the Halls had given Laura advantages. In high school, Laura had gone to a camp at the University of Michigan and spent a month at Dartmouth, honing her debating skills.

“Even after [her arrest], she went back and got her UT degree,” Hall said, crying.

Seated at the defense table, a glassy-eyed Laura dabbed away faint tears, her first in front of the jury.

Loren listed the law firms Laura had worked for. What he failed to mention was that at all but the first she’d been hired under the name Ashley. When the firms discovered she was Laura Hall, she was fired.

To demonstrate his daughter’s fortitude, Loren Hall recounted how she struggled with math. To graduate from UT, she needed to pass a math class. Her final semester, she had a 24 average until she hired a tutor. Working hard, Laura brought her average up to 84 and graduated.

“That’s determination,” he said. “We were really proud of her.”

Colton changed Laura, her father said. After meeting Pitonyak, Laura talked of women in derogatory terms, calling them bitches, strippers, and the like.

“Has she talked that way ever since?” Sawyer asked.

“It’s taken a while,” Loren said. “…But she’s trying to build herself back up.”

Laura was on medication, her father said, although he didn’t say what kind or for what reason. “Give her a chance,” he pleaded. “She’s on her way to recovery. I’m asking for probation. I know she’ll prove herself worthy.”

In the gallery, Sharon Cave seethed, wanting to get on the witness stand to beg jurors to come down hard on Laura. Sharon wanted to tell jurors how her life and the lives of everyone who loved Jennifer had been torn apart by both the murder and the atrocity of what Colton and Laura had done to Jennifer’s lifeless body. Their actions had cheated them of even being able to see Jennifer, of one last opportunity to say good-bye. Laura Hall didn’t kill Jennifer Cave, but she’d dealt everyone who’d loved her a devastating blow.

Sharon, however, wouldn’t get that opportunity. Not long before, in Judge Flowers’s court, a drug case against the girlfriend of a convicted murderer was reversed because the murder victim’s family gave emotional testimony during sentencing. The appeals court ruled that since the girl wasn’t charged with the murder, the testimony of the victim’s family was improper. “We didn’t ever want to have to retry Laura Hall,” Bishop said. “We didn’t want to take any chances.”

After Laura’s father, Sawyer called a surprise witness, Colton’s good friend Jason Mack, wearing baggy jeans and T-shirt, his arms covered by tattoos. He explained how he’d stayed with Colton in the months before Jennifer’s murder. The Colton he described on the stand was edgy from drugs and itching to kill. High, Pitonyak hadn’t slept in days when he killed Jennifer. His Xanax prescription had run out, and he was wired, even the smallest things annoying him. The week before, Mack said he was at Colton’s when Hall came over. In a foul mood, Colton kicked her out. Laura sat outside in the courtyard, crying, as Colton pulled the gun out of a drawer. “She’s driving me fucking crazy. I ought to just kill the bitch,” he said, referring to Laura.

Mack talked Pitonyak into putting the gun away, and then he took Laura to a friend’s house, where he cautioned her to stay away from Colton Pitonyak. “He’s too fucked up. It’s too dangerous.”

Left unsaid was what everyone in the courtroom knew: Laura Hall hadn’t stayed away. She idolized Colton, and no one could have convinced her to leave him. Instead, when he needed a ride to pick up his car, he knew Laura would take him, and she did.

Stephanie McFarland began closing in the punishment phase by explaining the law to the jurors, their options on both charges from probation to prison time, one year for the misdemeanor and up to ten years for the felony conviction in tampering with evidence.

“You are the representatives of the community, and the state wants you to send a message,” she said, asking for the maximum penalty.

“If a life can be salvaged, isn’t that better than not?” Sawyer countered. “The idea of redemption is central to many of us. Forgiveness is a concept that for many of us is a core value.”

Bill Bishop wrapped up the arguments, speaking for Sharon, who hadn’t been allowed to speak for herself: “Jennifer Cave can never graduate from UT. She’ll never work at a law firm,” Bishop said. Laura Hall “caused her mother to have to endure a funeral with a closed casket…I never thought anything could be worse than burying a child, but it is worse to bury a child and have to have a closed casket.”

Again, the jurors filed from Judge Flowers’s courtroom, and the waiting began. Six hours later word spread and the courtroom filled. Laura Hall stood between her attorneys as Judge Flowers read the jury’s decision: one year on the misdemeanor hindering charge and five years on the felony tampering with evidence conviction.