05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (14 page)

After her junior year at Crosby High School, Carol and Loren moved the family to the even smaller town of Bedias, and enrolled Laura in Allen Academy, a small, conservative, private military school with an enrollment of 350. Like Jennifer when Sharon told her they were moving to Corpus, Laura didn’t take the news happily. “Laura didn’t want to move,” says Jiles. “She was angry at her parents for making her do it.”

The following fall, when Colton Pitonyak graduated with honors and moved to Austin intent on becoming a Wall Street whiz kid, Laura Hall also enrolled at UT, with plans to major in government and dreams of law school, perhaps at Georgetown University in D.C. “I really thought Laura could do it,” says Jiles. “She was smart, had good grades, and Laura was a great debater. She was a natural.”

In Austin, as in Crosby, Laura struck many of those she met as odd or eccentric. She lived in a four-plex on Twenty-sixth Street, in a converted grocery store, filling her tiny apartment with plants and a big fish tank. The car she parked outside was another hand-me-down from her parents, a 1994 green Cadillac Concours.

As a neighbor remembers her, Laura “played the rebellious, isolated chick to a T.” At times, she could be friendly. At other times, she seemed defensive and rude.

By then, Loren and Carol had relocated again, this time to the small Texas Hill Country town of Tarpley, fifty miles northwest of San Antonio, and opened the Caribbean Cowboy RV Resort, a Jimmy Buffet–style trailer community aimed at active seniors. When her parents arrived for visits in an RV, Laura acted embarrassed. Such times, she’d stop the neighbors to explain that her parents owned the RV park, not just lived there.

At other times, Laura Hall walked right past neighbors, including those she’d talked to a day or so earlier, without even saying hello. “She was moody, and people didn’t know how to react to her,” says a neighbor. “We rarely saw anyone but guys who wore long trench coats visiting her. She didn’t seem to have any girlfriends.”

One day a neighbor found Laura’s Crosby school year-books in the apartment garbage. He thought it was odd that she’d brought them to UT and then thrown them away. When he looked inside, he saw the books bore childish notes scribbled on top of or next to photos of teachers and students, everything from “bull dyke” to “shit head,” along with “queer,” “lesbian,” and “slut.” Next to some of the boys’ photos she wrote “fine,” and “cute.”

There was more evidence that their neighbor was odd. At times, Laura suddenly screamed, shrieking so loud she could be heard throughout the apartment building. “We knew she was alone in there. It was like she was venting,” says a neighbor. They smelled pot outside her door, but that wasn’t unusual in Austin, and Laura didn’t look high or drugged.

Off and on, Andrea Jiles and Laura talked, sometimes about one or another of Laura’s love interests. At one point, Laura announced to Jiles that she was dating a woman named Ericka who went to Harvard. After her breakup with Ericka, Laura briefly attended a Mormon church. “She was always trying to shock people, talking about sex and things. We didn’t know if she was kidding or not,” says someone who met her there and formed the opinion that Hall cultivated drama. “She was a really fickle person, and she’d change her mind on a whim, go along with anything. Once she told us how she’d thought she was a lesbian but then changed her mind. Laura craved attention.”

In the fall of 2004, Laura met Colton’s friend Justin. At the time, she was dating a straitlaced UT student, a guy. Before long, Laura started hanging out at Justin’s apartment, much to the dismay of his roommate and friends, who complained that she was always underfoot and depressed. They asked Justin to tell her to leave, but Justin never did. “I’m not much of a pro at telling people no,” he says. “She hated being alone. Laura had to be with someone constantly.”

At Justin’s, Laura sat around and cried, at times screaming that she hated her life, and Justin expended more energy than he wanted trying to cheer her up. Once, after Laura’s ex-boyfriend stopped at the apartment, Laura lay on the grass in the apartment’s common area, sobbing and shrieking. “It appeared that she had serious emotional problems,” says Justin. “She was seriously strange.”

At a party at Justin’s, Laura Hall met Colton Pitonyak. He came in looking every bit the gangster he wanted to be, in a black leather sport coat and jeans, and talked about guns and selling drugs. After Colton left, Laura pressured Justin for his phone number. “I realized bringing those two together was the worst idea in the history of time,” Justin says with a sigh. Hoping to keep them apart, he lied and told Laura that Colton had a girlfriend, but she wasn’t dissuaded.

“Dating would be a loose way of putting it,” Justin would later say about the relationship that developed between Colton and Laura. “Colton didn’t care about Laura except for sex. Laura was crazy about Colton. Obsessed with him.”

“I don’t know if Laura knew what love was, but she liked having sex with Colton,” says Jiles. “And Colton used her, treated her like a muddy little dog.”

At times, Laura talked to Jiles about Jennifer, once claiming Jen stole drugs from Colton and bragging that she, Laura, was going to steal them back. “Laura was fanatical about Colton, talked about him constantly. And she didn’t like any other woman who had a connection to him, especially Jennifer. Laura hated Jennifer. She was jealous,” says Jiles. When it came to Colton’s guy friends, however, Laura couldn’t have been more pleased. “Laura liked that Colton had friends, because she didn’t have many, and she liked being around college guys who wore hundred-dollar jeans. She thought it was exciting that Colton was a drug dealer,” says Jiles, who warned her friend how dangerous drugs and guns could be. Jiles had seen other suburban white kids who acted like gangsters. “It’s a way to be part of the group. It’s a game.”

“It’s cool,” Laura told her. “It’s more like a gangster movie than real gangsters. It’s not real.”

That winter, Laura worked at the Richard Pena law firm in Austin, where they specialized in workers’ comp and personal injury cases. High-profile in Austin, Pena was a past president of the Texas Bar Association and had photos of himself with presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It was a plum job for a would-be law student, and Laura worked hard, doing everything from filing and filling out reports to running errands.

Not long after she met Colton, friends at the firm noticed changes in Laura Hall. She looked rougher, dressed sexier, talked tougher, and before long started showing up for work late. She referred to Colton constantly, calling him her boyfriend, and seeming to be fixated on him. When she dropped in at the duplex of a woman she worked with, Sammi Moore, and her boyfriend, Chris Collins, Laura was strung out. “Once she met Colton, she was messed up all the time, nearly always high,” says Chris. “She was a middle-class white kid and she began jiving like a thug from a South Central L.A. ghetto.”

Not long after Laura hooked up with Colton, Jiles drove into Austin to see her. She was struck by how much Laura had changed. She’d lost weight, her eyes were surrounded by dark circles and sunken; she looked like a different person. “Laura talked about drugs and money constantly. It was a terrible relationship for her. Everything was bad,” says Jiles. “Colton Pitonyak used my friend for sex and turned her into an addict.”

As Colton’s June court date on the possession charge approached, his attorney, Hughes, still hadn’t worked out a plea bargain. With the help of his parents, Colton replaced Hughes with Sam Bassett, an attorney at one of the best-known firms in Austin, Minton, Burton, Foster & Collins.

Founded in 1963, Minton Burton had a client list that included a who’s who of Texas’s financial and social circles. Their offices, in a converted house across the street from the courthouse, led people to call Minton Burton “the red brick firm.” Over the decades, they’d defended their share of drug cases. In fact Roy Minton, the patriarch of the firm, started forty-four years earlier at a time when even the possession of a small amount of pot was a felony. “The thing with criminal law is that you often end up with very young clients,” he says. A grandfatherly man, Minton was slight and frail-looking, with oversize glasses and a genteel manner. Lawyers who came up against him were wary. Minton had the ability to lull prosecutors and opposing attorneys, only to strike at the first opening and leave them wondering what had happened.

A protégé of Minton, Sam Bassett, with a high forehead; thick, reddish-brown hair; and incisive eyes, had joined the firm four years earlier. In addition to practicing civil and criminal law, Bassett taught part-time in the UT law school, where he’d earned his degree. Bassett had interned at Minton Burton during law school, and he’d adopted Minton’s calm demeanor in the courtroom.

For Colton Pitonyak, Bassett negotiated with the prosecutor’s office, urging the assistant DA to reduce the possession charge to a misdemeanor. Colton was a young man with his future on the line. If convicted of a felony, it would be on his record forever. Even if he turned his life around and became a model citizen, the felony would follow him wherever he went. It could keep him from ever being licensed to work on Wall Street, even prevent him from voting.

Perhaps the least concerned was the defendant himself. That spring, Colton made no apparent attempt to change his lifestyle. He arrived at parties bleary-eyed, talked about drugs, guns, and how his attorney was going to get him out of serving time. Laura Hall came with him, hanging on his every word, arguing with anyone who contradicted him.

“She was crazy,” says one of the partygoers. “She worshipped Pitonyak.”

The drug business was lucrative that year. Pitonyak and a few of his friends had expanded until they were selling or trading up to four thousand ecstasy pills a week, reserving another one thousand for their own needs. They were flush with cash and throwing the best parties on West Campus. “We ate ecstasy, popped it like candy,” says Pitonyak’s good friend Jason Mack, who hung in Colton’s inner circle. “Everyone showed up at the parties. It was wild.”

That spring, however, something changed. The ecstasy and coke weren’t enough for Pitonyak anymore, even when he mixed them with booze. They just didn’t deliver enough of a thrill. At first Colton tried heroin, but he didn’t like the way it made him feel. Instead, he became enamored with meth. Before long, he was smoking it off and on throughout the day, staying up for days on end, until his body gave out and he crashed. When he woke up, he helped himself to more. “With guys, meth gets the testosterone flowing,” says Mack. “They get amped. They’re on edge. Eventually they become sleep deprived and paranoid. It can drive you insane. There was no doubt that the meth changed Colton. Once he started on the meth, he was never the same.”

Pitonyak traded the ecstasy pills he got from his Asian connection to a dealer who sold meth he procured from a group he described as part of the “Mexican Mafia.” But since Pitonyak was using more than selling, money wasn’t coming in as easily as it had in the past. As summer arrived, Pitonyak consumed up to $300 a day in meth. “Colton got spun,” says Mack. “He was over-amped on the speed. He was so drugged up on the meth, he didn’t know if it was up or down, night or day.”

For more than a year, Colton had dropped in unannounced on Louisa, a UT student who lived in an apartment building where Colton had friends. Louisa liked Colton, thought he was funny, with a quick sense of humor. She knew he was high much of the time, but she never cared. That changed in 2005. By that spring, Colton’s very presence telegraphed danger.

One morning, just after 3
A.M.
, he knocked on Louisa’s door. He had his arm slung over a woman who worked as a topless dancer in an Austin bar, and they were both drunk and high. Colton pushed his way into Louisa’s apartment without being invited and then didn’t take the hint when she suggested they leave. From the moment he entered, Colton watched the door, as if he thought they were being followed. After that, Louisa stopped opening her door for Colton.

“I was worried about Colton, but I was scared of him,” she says. “He’d completely changed, and I felt so sad for him.”

That spring 2005, college students across America flocked to sign up on Facebook.com, an online social network started by a Harvard student. A MySpace.com-type Web site with a private club approach, on Facebook profiles were only visible to those with college or university e-mail addresses, and then only to individuals registered within the same institution. An online database where students displayed photos and profiles, on Facebook students detailed their likes and dislikes, and then posted messages on each others’ walls or message boards.

Colton signed up on Facebook on May 1 of that year, describing himself as a management and French major in the UT group. Although he’d entered the university in the fall of 2001, he estimated, perhaps optimistically since he rarely attended classes, that he’d graduate in 2010. On the left-hand top of his page, he posted a smiling photo with good friends Juan Montero and Roel Escobar. Colton claimed as his screen name ILoveMoneyAndHos.

On Facebook, Colton Pitonyak defined the person he’d become with echoes of his past. He listed his interests as drinking, women, and making money, saying he was self-employed, a reference to his thriving drug business. His favorite music: rappers Paul Wall, Slim Thug, Chamillionaire, and Triple Six. And his favorite movies:
Boondock Saints
,
Menace II Society
,
City of God
,
Reservoir Dogs
,
Goodfellas
,
Casino
, and
Donnie Brasco.
In the section reserved for words of wisdom, the would-be tycoon-turned-drug-dealer quoted Warren Buffet and J. P. Morgan, alongside his gangster idols, including the infamous John Gotti. Perhaps the most telling quotes were two Colton credited to Al Capone: “I am like any other man. All I do is supply a demand,” and “You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.”

Like Colton, Laura Hall built a Facebook profile that spring. A government major, she planned to graduate from UT that coming December. In her photo, she posed playfully in a furry coat and a short skirt with boots. She credited her favorite quote to horror author Peter Straub, from his book
Shadowland
: “You’re part music and part blood, part thinker and part killer. And if you can find all of that within you and control it, then you deserve to be set apart.”