05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (41 page)

“It will fire,” said Hueske. The prosecutors’ expert judged the pressure necessary to pull the gun’s trigger as 8.5 to 11.5 pounds. Hueske placed the number lower, between 6.5 and 7 pounds. Then McFarland stood up, and the defense attorney’s gains were tempered.

“[The gun’s trigger pressure is] within normal range?” she asked on cross-exam.

“Yes,” Hueske said.

“Certainly it’s not a hair-trigger?”

“No,” he agreed.

“State your name for the jury,” Minton instructed his fourth witness.

“Colton Aaron Pitonyak,” the defendant said to an overflowing courtroom.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” he said.

On the witness stand, Pitonyak showed no more emotion than he had sitting at the defense table the preceding three days. His voice was hoarse, his face blotched with even more blemishes than at the beginning of the trial, and he reached often for the water glass beside him. Minton would later blame his client’s flat affect and thirst on an antidepressant prescribed by jail doctors. Watching the testimony, the DA’s investigator, Jim Bergman, scoffed. “That kid wasn’t drinking water like that until he got on the witness stand,” he whispered. “Medicine my eye. He’s drinking to give himself time to think before answering. You’ve gotta do that, if you’re going to lie.”

“Is that your momma and daddy?” Minton asked, pointing at the Pitonyaks.

“Yes, sir,” Colton politely answered.

Minton took Pitonyak on a journey that must have been painful for his parents to relive, one that began when he was a straight-A honor student, and ended when he became a drug addict and a dealer. He talked about his drunk-driving charge and his time in jail for possession, the sentence he’d finished serving only six weeks before he shot and killed Jennifer Cave.

“Did you realize you had a drinking problem?” Minton asked.

“Yes, sir,” Pitonyak answered.

Yet when his parents sent him to La Hacienda for an expensive round of rehab, Pitonyak admitted he hadn’t gone there to reap the benefits. “I just told the counselors what they wanted to hear.”

Minton called Pitonyak’s behavior insincere, and his client didn’t disagree with him. “I was ashamed,” he said. “…I didn’t have a desire to quit in the first place.”

Colton Pitonyak recounted how he met Jennifer Cave in early spring 2004. “After a while we got to be really good friends,” he said.

“Did you ever, either one of you, fall in love with the other?” Minton asked.

Despite his protestations on the night in Justin’s apartment, when he’d pleaded with Jennifer to be with him, saying over and over again that he loved her, Colton Pitonyak answered, “No, it wasn’t like that. She was my best friend.”

If he had loved her, and she didn’t return his affection, of course, that could be motive, so Pitonyak had a reason to lie. And the prosecutors still didn’t know what Pitonyak’s true feelings had been for his victim, so they weren’t able to call him on his deceit. Throughout his testimony, Colton repeated each time he was asked, “She was my friend.”

“When did you start sleeping with Laura Hall?” Minton asked.

“I think it was late spring 2005,” he said.

“Did you realize the girl was in love with you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, then admitting that he’d “taken advantage” of the situation to have sex with her at least once a week. He denied owning a gun, saying the .380 was left at his apartment as collateral from someone who owed him money.

“Why did they owe you money?” Minton asked.

“For drugs,” he responded, staring blandly at the audience. He sold drugs, he admitted, but classified it as “a little bit…to pay for my party habits.”

Even on the witness stand, Pitonyak couldn’t help but appear the campus thug, bragging about how he bought drugs for other college students who were “scared of a lot of people” who sold them. Drugs were a lucrative business, he said, yet he didn’t have enough money to get his car back after it had been towed. “I think my mother helped me with that.”

It was Jennifer’s idea to go out that night, he said, but he didn’t remember where they went or what they did after they left Jazz, the Cajun restaurant where Colton couldn’t remember, but assumed he drank a “Bermuda Triangle,” a rum punch concoction so potent the restaurant limited two to a customer. “I know we didn’t eat much,” he said. “I was taking a bunch of pills that day, too…Xanax.”

What he didn’t mention were the methamphetamines Jason Mack said his good friend Colton abused continually in the months leading up to the killing. Of course, his own attorneys had already mentioned before the jury that meth could make users aggressive.

In his folksy, grandfatherly manner, Roy Minton put both hands on his narrow hips. “Tell me this, why when you were drinking perfectly good whisky, do you take Xanax?”

“You don’t have to drink as much to get messed up as quick,” his client responded.

After the restaurant, Colton Pitonyak insisted the next thing he remembered was waking up the next morning. When did he realize Jennifer was in the bathtub, dead? “I’m not sure. Everything kind of blurred together,” he answered. He believed he saw her when he used the bathroom. He admitted shooting the fatal bullet, saying he must have because no one else was in the apartment that night.

“Did you know this child is dead?” Minton asked, his voice rising like a parent scolding a misbehaving teenager.

“I knew…I got scared and panicked,” he said, when asked why he didn’t call 911.

From that point on, Colton blamed everything that happened on Laura Hall. It was her idea to dismember the body. In fact, she must have done the work, for he certainly couldn’t have. He didn’t have the stomach for it. “I wouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“Why cut up the body?” Minton asked. While his client admitted he’d shot the fatal bullet, the defense attorney was attempting to separate Pitonyak from the horrific aftermath. Colton admitted that he and Hall discussed cutting up Jennifer’s body and that he wanted to “get rid of it,” but again he insisted he wasn’t the one who wielded the machete and hacksaw.

“…I didn’t cut on the body…” He tried to, he said, “…I couldn’t.”

Why had he gone to Breed’s Hardware with the list? “[Laura] said something wasn’t working and that she needed some things,” he said.

“Who killed [Jennifer]?” Minton asked.

“I did,” Pitonyak said, although again he stressed that he didn’t remember anything that happened. Why then did he believe he’d fired the bullet? “Everything points to it.” As to why he would have done such a horrendous thing, he didn’t have an answer, beyond that he wouldn’t and couldn’t have done it on purpose.

The escape to Mexico in the green Cadillac, Pitonyak said, was also Laura Hall’s doing. He thought they were going to Houston, simply to flee the apartment with the body in the bathtub and give himself time to think.

Once again with a grandfatherly scowl, Minton asked, “Did you ever realize the grief you were causing?”

Remarkably, Pitonyak answered, “I know now.”

Apparently, it had taken Pitonyak’s arrest, more than a year in jail, and a trial before he understood the vast harm he’d done.

Minton railed at his client, accusing him of having to have known what Hall wanted the masks, gloves, hacksaw, and ammonia for. Yes, Pitonyak admitted. He knew. “Didn’t your momma and daddy tell you, if you’re ever in trouble, call me first?” Minton asked, as if talking to a child.

“Too many times,” Pitonyak answered. Again and again, the defense attorney and his client talked about the booze and the pills, and Colton insisted he remembered nothing of the horror of either the killing or the mutilation of Jennifer’s body.

“Did you fire the shot into Jennifer’s severed head?”

“No, I did not,” Colton insisted.

“Then who did?” Minton asked.

“I can only assume,” Pitonyak said.

“Who else was around the body?”

Pitonyak looked at the jury. “Laura Hall,” he said.

“Did you knowingly cause the death of Jennifer Cave?” Minton asked.

“No I did not,” Pitonyak answered.

The judge called a morning break, and everyone filed out of the courtroom. Sharon left crying. The last question Minton had asked before he’d passed the witness was who had written “J. Ribbit” with Jennifer’s cell phone number on his wall. Jennifer wrote it, Colton said. “Ribbit, like a frog,” he added.

Frog, of course, was Jennifer’s family nickname. “Colton Pitonyak had even stolen that from me,” Sharon says. “Something that was between us would now be linked to him and to her murder.”

As he left the courtroom to get lunch, Bishop considered the morning’s testimony. He knew Pitonyak’s flat affect probably wasn’t playing well for the jury. They wanted to see the young man show remorse. “That kid didn’t even look flustered,” says Bishop. Yet he worried about the cross-examination. Most murder defendants don’t testify, so it’s unusual for a prosecutor to get to question one on the witness stand. And that Pitonyak said he didn’t remember could be tricky. Says Bishop: “It’s hard to trip someone up if that’s all they’re going to tell you.”

“You testified this morning, basically, that you were a victim of an addiction to drugs and alcohol,” Bishop said to Pitonyak. “Is that fair to say?”

At first, Pitonyak hesitated, appearing to think over his response, “Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t you cultivate a gangster persona?” Bishop asked, his eyes boring into Pitonyak.

“No,” Pitonyak said.

Scoffing, Bishop laid out the Internet evidence, first Colton’s ILoveMoneyAndHos screen name.

“That was a joke,” Pitonyak said, his voice strained.

In the kitchen, Colton hung one poster: “Make way for the bad guy,” written under Al Pacino as
Scarface
. When Bishop asked Pitonyak to read quotes off his Facebook.com profile from Al Capone and John Gotti, Colton did as instructed, but then, without being asked, read one more, a Warren Buffett quote: “I always knew I was going to be rich…”

“You didn’t just use drugs, you sold them, a lot,” Bishop said.

Pitonyak agreed that was how he’d made money, while Bishop put up on the screen images APD experts had pulled off the young man’s computer, photographs of Xanax and ecstasy tablets, Pitonyak’s drug catalog. His sign-on name on the Web site was C-Money.

“Is it fair to say that’s the image you were trying to portray yourself, as a gangster?” Bishop asked.

“No, I wasn’t,” Pitonyak protested, but when Bishop asked for the names of Colton’s drug contacts, his suppliers, the scene played out like a bad TV cop show. “I don’t have specific names,” Pitonyak said. Under questioning, Pitonyak admitted he carried a gun at times, and when Bishop asked who Pitonyak owed money to, again, the young man’s answers were evasive, saying simply, “Some guys.”

On the witness stand, even the meticulously pressed suit he wore couldn’t camouflage what he’d become; Colton Pitonyak acted like a criminal. Bishop rattled off a summary of Pitonyak’s life at the time of the killing: Colton owed his drug suppliers money, he’d gotten a D in his summer school class, his car had been towed, and he was on the Internet in the middle of the night looking for a silencer and an assault weapon.

When it came to the night of Jennifer’s death, nearly every question Bishop asked was answered by Pitonyak, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t recall.”

Again, Bishop trailed back to Colton’s Facebook profile, first going through the list of gangster rappers Pitonyak idolized, and then reading off the movies he’d listed as his favorites. In
Goodfellas
, “that movie has a pretty graphic scene of a dismemberment of a human body, doesn’t it?” Bishop asked.

“I don’t recall specifically, but…”

“You don’t recall in
Goodfellas
where a combination of a large butcher knife and a machete were used to dismember a body?” Bishop asked, his voice incredulous.

“I don’t recall. It has been a while since I have seen that movie,” Pitonyak said.

There were dismemberments in the other movies as well, including in
Donnie Brasco
, where “they used a hatchet or a machete and a saw,” Bishop said.

“I don’t remember specifically, but, yes,” Pitonyak admitted.

Then Bishop asked about the Netflix folder police found on Pitonyak’s coffee table. The
Sopranos
DVD inside included an episode where a body was taken to a bathtub and the head and hands cut off, eerily similar to the condition of Jennifer’s body. “I don’t recall that specific scene,” Pitonyak said.

“How many times between four-twenty-eight that morning when you were on Sherdog.com and three-eighteen that afternoon when you checked out at Breed’s did you go to the bathroom?” Bishop asked. How could Pitonyak say he didn’t participate in or even know about the dismemberment when he’d spent the day inside the apartment? There was only one bathroom.

“Quite a few times, I assume,” Pitonyak said.

“So it’s not really accurate to say you didn’t know what Laura Hall was doing?”

“No,” Pitonyak admitted. “I knew what was going on.”

“In fact, you were either doing it yourself or assisting her in the process…”

“By letting it go on…but I didn’t assist…”

“You don’t think using the machete on a deceased body is taking part?” Bishop asked.

“I didn’t use the machete,” Pitonyak said.

It was habit, he said, that made him order his value meal at Burger King that afternoon without onions, not evidence that he wasn’t in the drugged fog he’d testified to. When he’d talked to Scott Engle and said, “That bitch is going to get me arrested,” Bishop asked if Pitonyak was talking about his good friend Jennifer Cave, who was in pieces in his bathroom?

“I don’t specifically remember,” Pitonyak said for what seemed like the hundredth time that day.

In the gallery, Sharon, Lauren, Vanessa, and Hailey sobbed. Disgusted by Pitonyak’s performance on the witness stand, Vanessa ran from the courtroom, unable to listen anymore, and a moment later, Lauren, Hailey, and Sharon followed.

On the screen, Bishop projected a photograph of Jennifer’s severed head, the side of her face covered with gaping cuts. “How did that happen?” he asked, furious.