Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  “I’ve never been to either of those towns.”

  “When was the last time you saw Roland?”

  “I never knew him well, so I was kind of surprised last June when he came by my house with his kids and asked me to go to lunch. I was busy and told him no. And then he called me in July or maybe early August. He said he just wanted to see how I was doing. That was the last time I ever talked to him.”

  Sally Halser seemed truthful and eager to help the detectives, but she really didn’t know much about Roland Pitre or anyone else in Seattle he might know. She wasn’t sure if he had been coming on to her or if he was only genuinely concerned about her. But she had a boyfriend, and he had no reason to worry about her.

  Gruber hooked up with Doug Wright again, and they went to McNeil Island to talk to Bud Halser. Halser realized right away that Hank Gruber was the detective who had talked to his sister. But the Seattle detective made small talk for about seven minutes until he explained that he and Wright were there investigating Cheryl Pitre’s murder.

  Halser stood up so rapidly that he might have been stung by a bee. “I have nothing further to say to you,” he said gruffly. “I want to talk to my attorney.” And he stomped out of the interview room.

  A few minutes later, he came back but only to request the detectives’ business cards to give to his lawyer. Gruber said that they might be back as the investigation was proceeding.

  They had no shortage of suspects. And they still weren’t convinced that Roland Pitre and Bud Halser hadn’t figured out a way to bring someone who was on the outside in mid-October into a common plan.

  As the holidays approached, the Pitre family underwent what might be called a reorganization. Christmas in 1987 had been happy for Cheryl; she and Roland had their new baby and a new house, and the future looked promising. Now Cheryl was dead and their children were almost three thousand miles away.

  But Roland planned to rectify that. He arranged to have Bébé and André return from their maternal aunt’s home in Pennsylvania. They would soon have a stepmother to help care for them: He and Della Roslyn planned to get married on New Year’s Eve of 1988, ten weeks after Cheryl’s murder. It was as if she had been erased from Roland’s life and someone else quickly penciled in.

  Frank Haberlach, the insurance agent who sold the Pitres their individual $125,000 policies, got a call from Roland requesting payment on Cheryl’s death. Haberlach explained that the company would have to follow procedure and that it might have to go to the underwriters since the criminal case was still open.

  King County Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird had been evaluating the efficacy of bringing charges against Roland and calling possible witnesses to appear before an inquiry judge. As with a grand jury, what is said before an inquiry judge is secret. Should Della become the next Mrs. Roland Pitre, she could invoke marital privilege and refuse to answer questions that might serve to incriminate him.

  Baird subpoenaed Della to appear before Judge Charles Johnson on December 29. She was still single on that date. What she said behind closed doors was not revealed.

  On New Year’s Eve, Della and Roland were married. He became stepfather to her children, Amy and Tim, and Della, stepmother to Bébé and André. She loved them and knew they needed a mother badly, and she legally adopted them. Although Bébé, particularly, would never forget her own mother, Della wanted to be as close to a real mother for them as she could. Their lives went well at first, despite the stress of the murder investigation.

  At 14, Tim was at a difficult age to accept another man into the household, and he and Roland soon had problems. He always felt that Roland was putting him down.

  And soon there was no question that his new stepfather detested him.

  13

  1989

  The detectives were a long way from giving up. With the new year, Doug Wright and Jim Harris and Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich continued their search for Cheryl’s killer. It had been a hard-luck case so far. Then, on February 13, 1989, they received information that moved the probe in an entirely different direction.

  Gruber and Sutlovich got a phone call from a man who identified himself as Creg Darby, a reporter for the Bremerton Sun. He said that someone had phoned him, asking for him by name.

  “He told me that he was the person who killed Cheryl Pitre,” Darby reported. “He said he killed her because she told him he was too young for her.”

  Darby said the anonymous caller went into specifics, saying that he first tried to strangle Cheryl but was unsuccessful. Next, he hit her with a pipe, then with a rock. The caller, who did sound like a young male in his late teens or early twenties, said he took Cheryl to Lake Union in Seattle about two on Sunday morning and left her in her car there.

  “She didn’t want me,” he said in what seemed a contrite voice. “I’m too young. I’m sorry.”

  This information galvanized the investigators. Maybe they had been focusing on the wrong suspect. The caller had his facts right about the manner of death, and his time line matched what they knew, too.

  Darby said he had tried his best to get the caller’s name. “He wouldn’t tell me that, but he said he would call back. He wanted my home phone number, but I wouldn’t give him that. He was very suspicious that his call was being recorded, and I had to reassure him about that. Of course, it wasn’t being recorded.”

  But as any good reporter would, Darby took notes during the call, and he readily agreed to give a taped statement to Hank Gruber. He mentioned that the unknown caller had a very soft voice.

  Darby and his editors agreed to have a trap put on his phone in case the man did call back. Rudy Sutlovich arranged with US West’s telephone security department to have a pen register put in place on Creg Darby’s office phone. It would be there for two weeks and would note the date, time, and phone number of the caller.

  Sixteen years later, the phone trap sounds antiquated, but there was no caller ID in 1989, and the pen register was state of the art as it mechanically wrote down phone numbers.

  Hank Gruber went to Bremerton and met with Creg Darby and his fellow reporter Gene Yoachum. Darby thought it was strange that the caller had asked for him because it was Yoachum who was tracking Cheryl’s murder investigation. His byline had appeared above the Pitre article. Gruber asked if it might be possible to run another article, one designed to lure the caller out of the shadows. “Maybe it could be something like this,” he suggested. “You could write that you weren’t sure that the call wasn’t a hoax, and you needed something more to prove it was the real guy”

  The reporters were receptive to the idea, but they didn’t want to go so far as entrap the caller.

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Gruber explained. “You would write the truth and say that you had revealed his call to the police. He’d expect you to do that because you’d be obligated to report that kind of information.”

  Their editor agreed that an article would be appropriate as long as it was truthful and not misleading.

  It was decided that Darby would write a short piece about the stranger’s call that would run in the Bremerton Sun on February 16.

  In the meantime, the investigators decided to contact Cheryl’s associates and friends to see if they knew of any teenager or young man in her life who might have been obsessed with her. They didn’t have to do that because the article sparked the memory of one of Cheryl’s bosses at Bay Ford. He said that several of the dealer’s staff had read it and agreed that the younger man might be a former lot boy who had worked for them doing chores, washing cars, bringing cars around for prospective buyers.

  “His name is Alby Brotzweller,*” the caller said.

  The car dealer didn’t have an address for him. Jim Harris ran a background check on Brotzweller and found he was 20 years old, and had no prior record. He had a father, 43, and a brother, 17, in the area. Detective Ed Striedinger of the Seattle Police Department ran “Brotzweller” through records and found a woman named Patsy Brotzweller, 37, who liv
ed in the north end of Seattle and had an old address in Bremerton.

  Hank Gruber and Jim Harris went to Bay Ford to ask Cheryl’s fellow employees about Brotzweller. They learned he was a loner.

  “He wasn’t very good at relating to women,” one salesman said. “The kind of kid you knew wanted to have a girlfriend but just didn’t seem to know how to start anything going with them.”

  Alby had talked about getting a job as a dental technician; he’d done that in the army. Cheryl had told him she would help him compose a short résumé. She had helped him once before when he had car trouble. “He called her for a ride and she picked him up, but she never mentioned anything about his asking her for a date or coming on to her.”

  Cheryl said she would help Alby, but she was firm with him, telling him that she would type his résumés, but only if he put some effort into it, too. He would have to find the names and locations of dentists and address the envelopes. “You have to show some effort,” she chided him. “To prove you really want to get this job.”

  Alby Brotzweller was showing more and more promise as a suspect. But the anonymous caller didn’t bite on the article about his call.

  Records at Bay Ford showed that Alby left work early on Friday, October 14—the day before Cheryl’s murder—and never came back. “He called in on Monday and said he was resigning from his job as a lot boy,” a representative said. “We ran into him later that week, and he had this big bandage on his hand covering a finger and part of his palm. It looked professionally done, like maybe a doctor had put it on.”

  When the detectives asked more about Brotzweller, his bosses said that he had a difficult time accepting criticism. “If he did something wrong or failed to get it done, he’d be really apologetic. He had a problem handling stress, like he wouldn’t know what to say, get very upset, almost to the point of trembling.”

  “Was he ever violent?” Gruber asked.

  “We never saw that, but everything in the article in the paper fit him perfectly.”

  In addition, Brotzweller’s father lived at Long Lake, which was only a short distance from PJ’s Market. Detectives Jim Harris and Hank Gruber drove the route between the father’s house and Cheryl’s home; they clocked it at 3.6 miles, and it took six minutes. They then drove from the Brotzwellers’ to PJ’s and found it was only eight-tenths of a mile, driving time: one minute. Furthermore, the most direct route for Cheryl to have taken from PJ’s Market was past where Alby lived.

  The elder Brotzweller had once been under investigation for a homicide, although charges were never filed.

  The detectives went to his house to talk with him, and he met them in his yard. He was polite but evasive. He told them his son had moved out sometime in October. “I don’t know where he’s at, and I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

  Cal Brotzweller* had no idea who Alby’s friends were or where the investigators might check to find them or him.

  “What about his mother?” Gruber asked. “Could he be with her?”

  Cal spat on the ground. “We don’t have anything to do with her. We both hate his mother. She lives someplace in Seattle, I hear.”

  “Do you know how he hurt his hand?” Jim Harris asked.

  “He cut it fishing.”

  “When was that?”

  “Right about the time he moved out.”

  That was all the information they got from Alby’s father. They left with the impression that Alby was no longer living with his father but were pretty sure that Cal Brotzweller knew exactly where to find him if he wanted to. He had been lying to protect his son even though he believed they were there to see Alby over a DWI (driving while intoxicated) warrant.

  Harris radioed the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office and asked them to do a search on a current DWI involving Alby Brotzweller. That netted a possible current address for him: his grandparents’ home in Bremerton. When they drove there, Gruber and Harris found a very rundown tri-level house. No one answered their knocks, and there was no car on the property, although there were fresh tracks in the mud of the carport. And then, just as they started to drive away, a car pulled in. Three men carrying grocery bags headed for the house.

  The detectives approached one of the men and asked if Alby Brotzweller was there. At first, he said “No” but then admitted that the young man in the back seat of the car was Alby. Alby agreed to talk with Harris and Gruber and willingly got into their car.

  “We’re here about Cheryl,” Gruber told him. “We’ve been talking to everyone who works at Bay Ford.”

  Alby nodded. “I read the article in the paper about that guy who called.”

  Asked if he would accompany them to the sheriff’s office, the suspect—and he was a suspect—said that would be fine. There Alby was advised of his rights and he gave a detailed statement. He denied having anything to do with Cheryl Pitre’s death and insisted he was not the person who had called the Bremerton Sun. “I’ve never called them for any reason.”

  “You go to Seattle much?” Harris asked.

  “I don’t like it there,” he said. “I only went there one time with my grandparents to visit my mother. She lives in an apartment on someplace called Queen Anne Hill.”

  “Is that near Lake Union?” Gruber asked casually, knowing that the area was a mile or so from the lake.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where that is.”

  He was either stonewalling them or telling the truth or, perhaps, the partial truth. Alby said he’d never called Cheryl when he had car trouble, never asked her for help, didn’t know she worked part time at PJ’s.

  Gruber didn’t change expression, but he wasn’t buying Alby’s story. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Alby even denied knowing where PJ’s was. He certainly wasn’t admitting to having any thoughts about dating Cheryl.

  Alby’s alibis all sounded contrived. He told them that Friday, October 14, had been a bad day for him. He had an accident with his car on his lunch hour and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get that straightened out. He quit his job that day, too.

  “On Saturday?” Harris asked. “What did you do on Saturday?”

  “I was with my friend, Jer, until about ten PM, and then I went home to my dad’s house about 10:30. He was asleep, but my brother was there listening to music.”

  As for Sunday, Alby said he’d gone fishing with Jer about eleven AM. “I cut my hand that night trying to fillet a flounder. I had to go to the hospital to get it stitched up. Jer and his father were there when I cut myself.”

  If that was true—and there were, indeed, witnesses to his injury—that would make Alby Brotzweller look far less guilty. Even so, there was the possibility that he might have deliberately cut himself to hide any injuries he suffered when Cheryl was bludgeoned the night before.

  This was a case where detectives had felt sure they knew who killed Cheryl. That was her husband, Roland Pitre. Yet more and more suspects kept popping up, suspects they would have been glad to find under other circumstances. They were all veteran investigators and knew the dangers of tunnel vision, so they shoved their gut instincts aside and pursued every lead that came in.

  Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich met with Jim Harris and the reporter Creg Darby. They brought along audiotapes of Alby Brotzweller’s and Roland Pitre’s voices for Darby to listen to.

  Darby shook his head when he heard Pitre’s voice. “I’m pretty certain it wasn’t him.”

  He was even more sure that he had never heard Alby’s voice.

  At the time, none of the detectives knew that Pitre was spreading a rumor that some younger man had been stalking Cheryl only days before her death.

  14

  A Port Orchard woman had been wrestling with her conscience for several months. She believed that her ex-boyfriend might be the one who killed Cheryl, but because she herself had been beaten by him so many times she was afraid to report him. In late February 1989, she finally called the police. His name was Jack Short,* and he had a long r
ap sheet filled with charges for assault and rape. He was also an associate of a wealthy man who once had a financial interest in PJ’s Market.

  Short had been imprisoned on McNeil Island, too, and was paroled in December 1987. Once more, Hank Gruber talked to the security staff at McNeil. He learned that though Short and Roland Pitre were never housed in the same unit, they had worked in prison shops that adjoined each other. There was a good possibility that they had known each other in prison.

  But an intensive check of phone records in and out of the block where Jack Short served time failed to bring up any connections. Detectives were able to establish that Jack Short and Martin O’Brian,* a former owner of PJ’s, were well acquainted. The ex-con with a reputation for hurting and sexually attacking women and the wealthy man who tried countless times to set him on the straight path were both familiar faces at PJ’s Market.

  When detectives talked to O’Brian in his opulent and well-kept home, they asked him about both Cheryl Pitre and Jack Short. O’Brian said he’d known Jack since they were kids when they’d been friends, but they’d taken different paths. He said Short had an “explosive personality” and was “scary” when he was drinking. Even so he had tried to help him. “I gave him jobs,” O’Brian said. “I even set up a work-release job for him, but the past few years he’s just been bad news.”

  He said he’d given up on helping Jack Short because he no longer trusted him.

  “Do you know if he knew Cheryl Pitre?” Hudson asked.

  “I don’t know. He might have seen her at the market.”

  O’Brian had nothing but good things to say about Cheryl. He’d always found her to be an excellent employee and said he’d been planning to ask her to do his bookkeeping for him in his various business ventures.

  “When she worked for me,” he continued, “it was standard procedure for her to call me when she was locking up the store. She’d tell me what the day’s receipts were and assure me that she was okay and ready to leave. I may have been the last person to talk to her. She called me at 11:15 that last night. Everything was fine.”