05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (47 page)

Sawyer stood behind the defense table, his face flushed, angry. “Ms. Sullivan, you have lied to this jury from the start about your relationship with Colton Pitonyak, [haven’t] you?” Sawyer stormed.

“That’s incorrect,” Sullivan said.

Sawyer argued over and over, suggesting that, like Hall, Sullivan was enamored of Pitonyak. That wasn’t true, Sullivan insisted. Yet she hadn’t called police after his early-morning visit and didn’t come forward even after the crime scene tape went up around Pitonyak’s apartment.

“You said nothing?” he said.

“That’s true,” Sullivan agreed. She also hadn’t told prosecutors about Hall’s statements, not until the week before the trial. Sawyer found that odd. Sullivan’s explanation was a simple one: “No one asked me about Laura Hall before that.”

On the witness stand, Henriette Langenbach looked like the neighborhood grandmother. She told in detail her conversations with her cellmate in the Travis County jail. Laura couldn’t understand “the fuss” being made over the murder. Colton, after all, was brilliant, a scholarship student. He mattered. Jennifer? “She was nothing. She was nobody. Just a fucking waitress ho,” Langenbach quoted Hall as saying.

Hall loved Colton, and her main concern was finding a way to free them both. She was angry with her father, calling him “that fucking bastard,” because he’d called police. Laura wanted him to hire a new attorney, someone “to help her concoct a credible story to get her and Colton out of the mess they were in.”

In the gallery, Loren Hall sat stoic. One could wonder how many times his daughter, his only child, had screamed at him. At the defense table, Laura, too, showed no emotion. In fact, throughout the trial, she remained focused on the testimony and appeared calm, as if someone else, not she, were on trial. “The Ice Princess,” a few members of the media congregating outside in the courthouse hallway dubbed her. Her face unnaturally pale, she appeared bloodless and cold, her eyes vacant.

There was something else the elder woman said Laura told her: “that the six days she spent with Mr. Pitonyak in Mexico were the happiest of her life.” Along with destroying evidence, Hall told Langenbach another reason to mutilate the body: “How many grandmothers can tell their grandchildren that they cut up a human body?”

From under her dark hair parted in the middle and falling over her eyes, Hall glanced up at the jurors, and half of them stared back at her as if she were an alien.

“Everyone in jail knows about jailhouse snitches, don’t they?” Sawyer charged, detailing how information could be traded for favors, including lighter sentences.

“But I didn’t get anything,” Langenbach answered. Yes, she had a criminal record, but her case had already been disposed of when she first spoke to police about Hall. And Langenbach had never asked either the police or prosecutors for any favors in return for her testimony. She wanted nothing. “It was just the right thing to do,” she said.

Langenbach’s offenses involved fraud and deception, Sawyer said, and she’d swindled or deceived.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, sir.”

“You are good at deceiving people?” he accused.

“If you say so,” she answered.

Yet, if Langenbach lied, how did she know so many details? And why was her testimony eerily similar to that of others? After the woman left the stand, Javier Rosales testified, repeating his words from the Pitonyak trial, that Laura Hall said she “masterminded the escape and helped cut up the body.”

“We would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t called my father,” Rosales said Hall had told him. “He turned us in.”

To Langenbach, Hall had said Jennifer was a nobody. Rosales said his coworker told him, “It was a victimless crime.”

In the gallery, Jennifer’s mother and grandmother cried.

Detective David Fugitt appeared nervous as he took the stand as the final witness of the day. He had reason to be. Gilchrest was supposed to be the one on the stand, but his father was in surgery, and that duty had fallen on Fugitt just hours earlier. He knew the case, but Gilchrest was the one who’d prepared for trial.

With Fugitt, McFarland went over the cell phone calls and messages Colton and Laura made the morning of Jennifer’s death. Sawyer used the detective’s testimony to pound home what he characterized as a glaring mistake by police: their failure to obtain records documenting what towers Hall’s cell phone calls bounced off on the day the body was dismembered. Those records could have confirmed where she was during important times.

The problem was that until Pitonyak’s trial, Hall wasn’t a suspect in the dismemberment. Her location on that day didn’t become an issue until she was under investigation for tampering. By that time, more than a year after the murder, Fugitt said the cell phone companies had long since destroyed all the tower records.

Sounding infuriated at APD, Sawyer charged, “Did you ever so much as just try to get cell phone information on those calls?”

The jury left for the afternoon with the charge that APD hadn’t done its job hanging in the air. The following morning, Lauren, Hailey, and Whitney joined Myrtle, Sharon, and Jim in the gallery. When court reconvened, Sawyer again attacked Fugitt about the lack of tower records. Only this time, the detective came prepared, holding up a textbook from a course he’d taken on cell phone records in which it said companies retained tower activity records for one month.

“Is it still your answer to this jury that cell phone information is only kept for thirty days?” Sawyer stormed.

“Yes,” Fugitt said.

Quickly, Sawyer changed the subject, asking, “How many jailhouse snitches contacted APD on this case?”

“Two I’m aware of,” Fugitt said, but Sawyer attacked again, saying he didn’t want Fugitt’s recollection, but the exact number.

“What about Virginia Hill?” the defense attorney asked.

Looking perplexed, Fugitt said he’d never heard of Hill. “There are only two statements in the case book,” he said, pointing at the two thick loose-leaf binders on the shelf before him, the notebooks where Gilchrest had tracked the investigation and evidence.

Hill was a fellow inmate of Hall’s, and raising her name but not explaining any more left an unanswered question before the jury. If Sawyer hoped to put APD on trial, claiming they’d botched the investigation and unfairly charged his client, Gilchrest’s absence played into his hands. Fugitt, however, refused to cooperate.

Rather than losing his patience, he simply stood his ground. “To the best of my knowledge, there are only two statements,” he said.

With Fugitt, Sawyer constructed a chart, showing the times of phone calls between Jennifer, Colton, and Laura that day before the murder. He implied this would be important later, but didn’t explain how. The defense attorney pulled out Colton Pitonyak’s Facebook profile, asking David Fugitt to read the movies listed as his favorites:
Goodfellas
,
Donnie Brasco
,
Scarface
, and more.

“
Goodfellas
has one of the most graphic dismemberment scenes in the movies, doesn’t it?” he asked Fugitt.

Fugitt said he had heard that but didn’t know, and Sawyer went on, detailing scenes in the other movies and in a
Sopranos
DVD found in a Netflix envelope on Pitonyak’s coffee table, including an episode in which Tony Soprano dismembered a body in a bathtub.

“Did you determine what course Colton Pitonyak took that summer, his last course at the University of Texas?” Sawyer asked.

The course was entitled The Human Body.

“As a detective, do you see a pattern developing that is going to culminate in violence?” Sawyer asked.

Bishop objected.

When she again had the witness, McFarland asked Fugitt to read from Hall’s Facebook page, including her favorite movies, many the same as Pitonyak’s, and her favorite quote from horror writer Peter Straub: “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.”

What was written on Facebook next to Hall’s summer plans on the day Jennifer was murdered? “I should really be a more horrific person. It’s in the works.”

Sawyer went on the defensive. “Laura Hall isn’t guilty of killing anyone, is she? She didn’t kill Jennifer Cave?” Sawyer demanded.

“We don’t believe so. No,” Fugitt said

The questioning of the detective ended, and Bishop stood and said, “The State of Texas rests.”

Joe James Sawyer had presented many issues during his emotional arguing before the jury, among them that Laura Hall was an abused woman manipulated by Colton Pitonyak and that something in the timeline of the telephone calls would prove she couldn’t have participated in butchering Jennifer Cave’s dead body. But when he took over the courtroom, his first two witnesses were recalled state witnesses.

First Sawyer brought back the AT& T employee who testified earlier about Pitonyak’s cell tower activity as he fled Texas. Yes, the manager said, he’d made up the chart prosecutors presented, one showing the locations of the towers. When Sawyer asked when the chart was constructed, the manager said just weeks before the trial.

Did that mean that Fugitt misled the jury, that phone companies stored information indefinitely and that it could be accessed at any time? Sawyer’s line of questioning seemed to suggest that. Still, the information on Colton Pitonyak’s cell phones had been requested even before his arrest, and kept at APD for evidence. What about Hall’s?

“Do you know how long the information is stored as regards to cell towers?” Bishop asked on cross.

The man frowned. He wasn’t sure.

“It isn’t kept forever?” Bishop asked.

“No,” he said.

In his second appearance as a witness at Hall’s trial, Keith Walker, who’d recently earned his sergeant’s stripes, was asked by Sawyer about a subpoena that had been referred to during Fugitt’s testimony, a subpoena issued within a week of Jennifer’s killing for Laura Hall’s phone records. In the document, Gilchrest requested not only her call records but accompanying tower activity. When the information from the cell phone company arrived, however, the tower information wasn’t included.

“Isn’t this an enforceable subpoena?” Sawyer asked. “Why didn’t you follow through?”

Walker said he didn’t know, but added that many of the companies are uncooperative.

With Walker, Sawyer again emphasized that the warrant for Pitonyak’s arrest hadn’t been signed yet when Hall drove him out of the United States and into Mexico.

Then, to the surprise of many in the courtroom, after Walker’s testimony, Sawyer rested. Other than the two recalled prosecution witnesses, the defense attorney presented no one to bolster his client’s case. Laura Hall did not take the stand in her own defense.

Still, as the attorneys and the judge prepared for closing arguments, Sawyer would prove victorious in an important way; he successfully argued to include lesser, misdemeanor offenses as options for the jury on each of the two charges against Hall. Bill Bishop appeared disappointed. For Sharon, it was a grave setback. “I want a felony on her record, so she can never be a lawyer,” Sharon said. “I want what she did to follow her for the rest of her life.”

After a short break, closing statements began, with McFarland taking the lead.

Laura Hall loved Colton Pitonyak, she said. But hers was a dangerous love. “This dark obsession led Laura Hall to a place none of us can imagine. Colton Pitonyak led Laura Hall down the road to hell, but he went down it with her and exposed both their inner beasts.”

“What did Laura Hall tell Deputy U.S. Marshal Smith?” McFarland asked. “That she loved Colton Pitonyak so much she would kill for him.”

Hall’s love for Pitonyak was tattooed onto her body, and she defended him whenever she could. At the same time, “she refused to acknowledge the humanity of Jennifer Cave,” calling her names and labeling her murder a “victimless crime.”

How did jurors know what she’d done, that Hall understood Pitonyak had committed a murder and helped him anyway as he first tried to destroy evidence, and then spiriting him off to Mexico? Hall’s DNA was in the bathroom. She had to have been in the condo after Pitonyak returned from the hardware store, McFarland pointed out, because Laura’s DNA was also on a blue shop towel Colton purchased that day. Sawyer’s suggestion that his client wasn’t at the Orange Tree while Pitonyak cut up the body didn’t hold up in the face of the evidence.

When it came to Hall’s motive, McFarland pegged it as her love for Pitonyak. “She wanted to solidify that relationship,” the prosecutor said. “She wanted him indebted to her…this obsession quenched her beast.”

“I’m going to talk to you first about the law,” Sawyer said. “You are a jury, not vigilantes, and you have to follow the law as best you can.”

Their decisions were to be logical, not based on passion or emotion, he said. Then he asked them to keep in mind when they considered the hindering charge that the warrant had not yet been issued for Pitonyak’s arrest when Laura drove him into Mexico. While the dismemberment was horrific, Sawyer suggested it didn’t constitute tampering with evidence. Why? “Dr. Peacock didn’t tell you that she wasn’t able to do a complete autopsy on the body because of the dismemberment,” he said. “The evidence was still there…Dr. Peacock could still examine it. It was used as evidence.”

“Laura Hall has no burden at all. She is cloaked in innocence,” he said, reminding them that defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

Arguing again that Hall wasn’t involved in the dismemberment, he insisted that if she had been, she would have made Pitonyak dispose of the bags holding the head and hands. “[Pitonyak] couldn’t let Laura know that he’d dismembered the body. He ran out of time,” Sawyer said. “He knew damn well that if he asked her for help to dispose of the body, she would have refused…the state is wrong!

“…If my daughter had made these choices, I’d be down on my knees just like her dad,” the attorney said, gesturing to Loren, who began sobbing, loudly enough so the courtroom could hear him. While her father cried, Laura didn’t blink, instead staring blankly at her attorney, as if involved in some macabre show of emotional fortitude.