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KATHRYN CASEY
A DESCENT
INTO HELL
THE TRUE STORY OF AN
ALTAR BOY,
A CHEERLEADER,
AND A
TWISTED
TEXAS MURDER
In memory of Jennifer Cave,
the girl who dreamed of Oz.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The inscription over the gate to hell,

DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Divine Comedy
 Contents

Epigraph iii

Preface x

One
The clock tower had placidly watched over
Austin from 230… 1

Two
Bishop, Texas, lies thirty minutes by car
south of Corpus… 4

Three
Parenthood is a dance of sorts. Mothers and
fathers carry… 13

Four
Despite her hopes, Sharon moved Jennifer to
Austin with some… 28

Five
On April 6, 2001, the spring Colton Pitonyak
graduated from… 42

Six
Jennifer had been in Austin for nearly a
year in… 53
Seven
In Little Rock, the Pitonyaks moved that spring.
They sold… 58

Eight
“Tell me about your friend, Colton,” Sharon
asked Jennifer one… 65

Nine
Weeks after his arrest, Colton moved into a
rented second-floor… 77

Ten
Their paths had crossed the previous November
at a party. 90

Eleven
While Jennifer was busy setting up housekeeping
with Scott and… 99

Twelve
On June 10, 2005, Colton Pitonyak appeared
before Judge Wilford… 112

Thirteen
“I didn’t know at first that Jennifer was back on… 119

Fourteen
After he’d blown his biology exam on Saturday,
Colton Pitonyak… 129
Fifteen
Less than an hour after Michael Rodriguez hung
up the… 142

Sixteen
At seven the next morning, August 18, a
Thursday, Vanessa’s… 157

Seventeen
“Is it Jennifer?” Sharon demanded again, when
he walked outside. 174

Eighteen
At 1:30 A.M., Jim followed in his Suburban,
and the… 182

Photographic Insert

Nineteen
The first article on the case appeared in the
Austin… 196

Twenty
An article on the West Campus killing in
the Austin… 208

Twenty-One
“They got him. They got him,” Scott heard
Vanessa screaming… 220
Twenty-Two
Within days of the first Statesman articles on
the case… 231

Twenty-Three
At first, Henriette Langenbach didn’t understand
why the other inmates… 239

Twenty-Four
West Campus was still percolating with the
aftermath of the… 245

Twenty-Five
In October, two months after Jennifer’s death,
Sharon saw Colton… 248

Twenty-Six
On Friday, June 9, 2006, Austin temperatures
crept up, flirting… 256

Twenty-Seven
A year after Jennifer Cave’s death, at the
start of… 264

Twenty-Eight
As she got ready to leave for Austin for the… 273

Twenty-Nine
Throughout the week, the UT dorm rooms,
classrooms, and Internet… 293
Thirty
At 9:50 that Monday morning, court reconvened.
The two alternate… 311

Thirty-One
That spring, following Colton Pitonyak’s
conviction, Sharon Cave tried to… 331

Thirty-Two
The moon shone a tarnished red-gold over
Austin just before… 336

Author’s Footnote
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Kathryn Casey
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface

Some names and identifying features have been changed

throughout this book. They include: Justin Walters, Eva
Taylor, Brent, Frank, Tracey Ryan, Jared Smyth, Amy Pack,
Michaela Sloan, Sammi Moore, Chris Collins, Louisa,
Larry, and Nicole Ford.
One

The clock tower had placidly watched over Austin from 230
feet above since 1937. It was so loved that the sight of its
vertical column soaring into a cloudless blue sky swelled
alumni with pride. Few disputed that the imposing tower
with its four twelve-foot faces rimmed in gold leaf was the
symbol of the University of Texas, or that UT was the uni-
versity Lone Star parents pushed their children to attend, the
institution that inspired high schoolers to crash for exams
and hoard birthday money in a college fund. For UT and
its tower were much more than a university and a building;
they were symbols of hope and the promise of a dream.
Yet the clock tower had another history as well, a much
darker one.
On August 1, 1966, a twenty-five-year-old architecture
student and ex-marine, Charles Joseph Whitman, climbed
the UT clock tower stairs lugging a cache of weapons. The
nightmare lasted eighty minutes. Before a police bullet found
its mark and ended the carnage, Whitman murdered sixteen,
including his wife and mother, and wounded thirty-one.
Fast-forward thirty-nine years to August 18, 2005. On
this day, yet another shocking tragedy unfolded in the clock
tower’s shadow.
On the university’s West Campus, a well-heeled neigh-
borhood of sororities, frat houses, and expensive student
housing, at 2529 Rio Grande, stood the Orange Tree, a
block-long, three-story condominium project, one of the
most prestigious on the campus. On the second floor, a
locked red door with the number 88 marked the condo
2 Kathryn Casey
leased by Colton Pitonyak. A National Merit Scholar finalist
who’d had the advantages of a prosperous upbringing, Pi-
tonyak was a former Catholic school kid, an altar boy who
spoke French and played the guitar and piano. When he left
Little Rock, Arkansas, four years earlier with a full aca-
demic scholarship to study finance at UT’s esteemed Mc-
Combs Business School, many believed he would one day
make his name as a Wall Street whiz kid.
This night would prove them wrong. Instead, Colton Pi-
tonyak’s legacy would be markedly more sinister. But then,
no one could have predicted the horror that waited behind
the door marked 88.
The heat that August was nearly unbearable, well into
the nineties. Summer in Austin could be blisteringly hot.
Yet a breeze ruffled the trees, and no one in the small group
gathered outside Colton Pitonyak’s apartment noticed the
sweltering weather.
They’d been there for hours: Sharon Cave; her tall,
sandy-haired accountant boyfriend, Jim Sedwick; and
Cave’s oldest daughter, Vanessa.
A petite woman with thick, dark blond hair, Cave stared
at the locked red door to unit 88. Her second child, twenty-
one-year-old Jennifer, was missing. No one had seen her in
nearly forty-eight hours, not since she had left a bar with Pi-
tonyak. When Sharon called his cell phone from her Corpus
Christi home, a surly Pitonyak refused to answer questions.
“Dude, I’m having pizza with my friend,” he replied.
“Don’t bother me.”
Worried, Cave and Sedwick rushed to Austin. Twenty-
five-year-old Vanessa came, too, driving in from Dallas.
They were all determined to find Jennifer, and their only
clue was Pitonyak. But they’d pounded over and over again
on his door, and no one answered. The afternoon wore on.
Sunset passed, leaving the sky cloaked in darkness, as lights
illuminated the somber tower. At the apartment marked 88,
Sharon, Jim, and Vanessa stood vigil, for what they weren’t
sure. All Sharon knew for certain was that she had to get
 A Descent Into Hell 3
into Pitonyak’s apartment. The answer to Jennifer’s disap-
pearance waited inside.
Like her mother, Vanessa, willowy with long, dark blond
hair, understood things she couldn’t explain. Sharon and all
three of her daughters were like that, so connected it was
a nearly psychic bond, an uncut spiritual umbilical cord
that bound them together. Deep within them, Vanessa and
Sharon unconsciously understood the importance of this
day. Something grave had taken place, and they sensed the
breaking of the tie that anchored them to Jennifer, the slip-
ping away of her presence in their lives.
At 10 p.m. the University of Texas clock tower’s carillon
rang, marking the hour, and for Sharon, Jim, and Vanessa,
time stood still. When it started again, Jim Sedwick crawled
through a window into Colton Pitonyak’s apartment, and
their lives changed, forever.
Two

Bishop, Texas, lies thirty minutes by car south of Corpus

Christi and inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s a world
away from the hubbub of the city. Surrounded by fields of
sorghum and cotton, the town grain elevator weighs the
bounty from the fields, determining the financial health of
the townsfolk. With a population that hovers just over three
thousand, it’s typical small-town America: a Dairy Queen
and a truck stop, schools and churches that form the core of
the community. The land is flat, the sky is big, and the hori-
zon a full 360 degrees. Relentlessly straight roads appear to
drop off the edge of the earth, and the local chemical plant
is a city of pipe, its smokestacks burning off residue in a
bright, hot, golden flame.
Jennifer Cave grew up in a quaint farmhouse, just outside
town, on land that shares a fence line with the legendary
King Ranch. Her parents, Charlie and Sharon, bought the
place and its five accompanying acres in 1983, a year after
they married. At the time, Charlie intended to fix it up, but,
as is the way with old houses, it seemed there was always
something left perpetually undone.
It was the second marriage for Sharon, a fun-loving
woman with a broad, high-wattage smile. She’d grown up
on a farm in nearby Alice, Texas, an oil town whose for-
tunes fluctuated with the price of a barrel of crude. During a
teenage rebellious streak, she ran away at eighteen and mar-
ried, giving birth to her oldest, Vanessa, in 1979. By then
that marriage was troubled. They divorced, and then she met
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