https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2007-09-07/534898/In the end, there were few answers.
It's been two years since 21-year-old Jennifer Cave was brutally murdered and dismembered inside the West Campus apartment of her friend Colton Pitonyak. In January, Pitonyak was convicted of intentional murder and sentenced to 55 years in prison; last week, Pitonyak's companion, Laura Hall, was convicted of hindering Pitonyak's apprehension and of tampering with evidence – the latter charge a result of the mutilation of Cave's body. On Tuesday, the same jury sentenced Hall to five years in prison and a year in jail, with the sentences to run concurrently.
The list of confirmed facts is brief. On Aug. 16, 2005, Cave was excited about her new job at an Austin law firm, and that night, she went with Pitonyak to Sixth Street to celebrate. The next afternoon, Jennifer's mother, Sharon Cave, got a phone call in Corpus Christi from Jennifer's new employer, who told her Jennifer had never arrived at work that morning. Sharon made a series of calls, including one to Pitonyak, who lied to her that he last saw Jennifer around midnight. The next day, Aug. 18, Sharon and her fiancé, Jim Sedwick, drove to Austin, hoping to find Jennifer. They twice visited Pitonyak's apartment on Rio Grande Street but got no response – Pitonyak and Hall had fled the previous day.
On the second visit, Sharon Cave slipped a window lock, and Sedwick climbed inside. He found Jennifer in the bathtub. She had been shot dead and then stabbed numerous times; her hands and head had been severed and wrapped in a garbage bag left beside the tub. Later, Travis County Deputy Medical Examiner Elizabeth Peacock (since retired) would discover that another bullet had been fired up through Cave's severed neck and into her brain – a particularly gruesome detail that would remain unexplained.
Pitonyak had fled with Hall to Mexico, where the couple spent five days before they were picked up by U.S. marshals and returned to Austin.
Jennifer Cave
https://www.austinchronicle.com/new...seeks-new-trial-in-jennifer-cave-murder-case/The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled that Colton Pitonyak, serving a 55-year sentence for the gruesome 2005 murder of his friend Jennifer Cave, is not entitled to a new trial based on a claim that prosecutors withheld evidence suggesting that an accomplice, Laura Hall, was actually responsible for the crime. But Pitonyak's lawyers say they've now secured additional evidence that Hall confessed that it was she who murdered Cave.
The three-judge panel ruled that Hall's admission of guilt to a jail counselor was not illegally withheld from Pitonyak's defense, because the duty of prosecutors to disclose to a defendant all exculpatory, impeaching, or mitigating evidence – collectively known as "Brady material" – does not extend to a counselor, who is not responsible for investigating or prosecuting the case against Hall.
Pitonyak attorneys say they will appeal, to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary, because the Fifth Circuit panel's ruling creates an impermissible loophole to the state's ongoing obligation under Brady. But they also say they've secured additional evidence, in the form of a sworn statement from a former friend of Pitonyak and Hall, Jason Mack, who this summer wrote an affidavit saying Hall told him she was at Pitonyak's apartment the night Cave was murdered, and that she was the one who actually fired the fatal shot. "Laura ... stated that if that bitch would have just shut her mouth I never would have had to kill her," Mack wrote.