Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  O’Brian was able to account for his whereabouts that night. Telephone records verified that account.

  The wild card in the deck was still Alby Brotzweller. His reluctance to cooperate with the investigators made him look guilty. Detective Jim Harris set up an appointment for Alby to take a polygraph test, telling him that that was one way to clear himself. He reluctantly agreed; then, on the March day when he was to be transported to Seattle for the lie detector test, he was nowhere to be found. When Harris called the house where he had been staying, someone who said his name was Harry said Brotzweller wasn’t there. Harris called again. The person who answered the phone said “Wrong number” and hung up. It sounded to Harris just like Alby’s voice.

  Irritated, the Kitsap County detectives drove to the address. The residents said he wasn’t there; he had moved again. “He’s back at his dad’s place, and he don’t want to take that lie detector test anymore.”

  Jim Harris spoke with Alby’s friend Jer. To Harris’s surprise, Jer said that Alby had indeed cut his hand on a very sharp fish knife. He himself had taken him to a hospital emergency room to get it sewed up. His mother said she was there when it happened. “He was new to fishing, and that was his first clumsy try at cleaning fish.”

  Her description of the incident was identical in detail to what Alby told the detectives.

  Beginning on March 13, 1989, Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich literally moved to Kitsap County to begin an intensive probe of Cheryl Pitre’s murder. They intended to talk to every suspect and every witness and to join in searches of homes and vehicles, anything that might tip the scales and cause a single suspect to emerge as Cheryl’s killer.

  Detectives Harris and Hudson searched Alby Brotzweller’s car, which had been wrecked on the afternoon of October 14 and stored in an impound lot ever since. The front window was broken out, and there was a lot of interior water damage caused by winter snowstorms. They removed a tire iron and the steering wheel cover and had them tested for signs of blood. There were none.

  Interestingly, they found a professionally typed résumé for Brotzweller in the car. This seemed to war with his statement that he had never gotten a résumé from Cheryl. They checked the tape of his statement, and their memories were correct. They had asked him: “Was Cheryl going to do a work résumé for you?”

  “She was. She was going to help me out with a job or work résumé for the dental field but due to my procrastination, we never got around to completing that or even getting started on it.”

  Yet here was a complete résumé! Had they caught Alby in a lie? They compared the font on the papers in Brotzweller’s car with all the typewriters at Bay Ford. None of them matched.

  Now they checked again with the Source at the dealer who told them that Cheryl had picked the young lot boy up when his car broke down. Rumors were like the childhood game of “telephone.” They changed slightly when each person repeated them. Cheryl had told a friend of a friend about receiving a call at three AM from someone who needed help, but it hadn’t been from Alby Brotzweller at all. Rather, she said it was a friend of Roland’s who called. And Roland’s statement that his car had broken down the day before Cheryl was killed might even mean that he was the one who had attempted to lure her out of her house.

  Jim Harris received an angry phone call from Alby Brotzweller. He was upset because the investigators were still asking questions about him. “I didn’t kill the bitch!” he said vehemently.

  “Then why didn’t you take your polygraph?”

  “It was snowing and I couldn’t make it. I talked to people who told me not to take a lie detector test in a police station. They said the police would just hold me there and pin that murder on me because you don’t know who did it. Those police lie detector guys can make the test come out any way they want them to.”

  Asked about the résumés found in his car at the impound yard, Alby Brotzweller said he’d had that done four or five days after he quit Bay Ford. “They did it for me at the JPTA job training place in Bremerton. Cheryl didn’t have anything to do with those.”

  It was the truth. The youth employment agency put detectives in touch with the typist who prepared the résumés. Alby Brotzweller caused himself a lot of trouble with his attitude, and he could have been cleared of suspicion a lot sooner. The investigators now believed he had nothing to do with Cheryl’s murder.

  Jack Short was the next suspect for the detectives either to close in on or to eliminate. It was quite likely that he had at least seen Cheryl working at PJ’s Market since he had been friends with the store’s owner. Whether he knew her as anyone beyond a clerk no one knew. And there was his record of violence against women to consider. At the investigators’ invitation, he sauntered into the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. He explained to Jim Harris and Hank Gruber that his official address was with his brother, but he was presently staying with a “female friend” in Port Orchard.

  He was a very relaxed interviewee, apparently not in the least upset to be questioned about a brutal murder. Shown photos of both Roland and Cheryl, he said he didn’t know either of them.

  “You never saw her at PJ’s?”

  “Don’t remember her. I go there to charge stuff and cash checks sometimes, but I don’t remember her face at all.”

  “You were housed close to Roland Pitre during the same time period at McNeil Island,” Gruber said.

  “Naw, I was on D Block. Never met the guy. I was in a whole different place. I was a meat cutter there.”

  “You keep in touch with the guys you knew there?”

  “Nope. I don’t have any contact with them. No mail. Nothing. My mom won’t pass on mail or messages from anyone wanting to talk to me if they’re from McNeil. She doesn’t want me seeing that old gang.”

  Gruber and Harris noted that Short talked a lot but didn’t say much that was useful to them. His demeanor was so confident that they felt he had no guilty knowledge of Cheryl Pitre’s death.

  Perhaps the most peculiar suspects yet in this totally frustrating investigation were the men who had found Cheryl’s purse floating in Lake Union way back in October near where her body lay hidden in the trunk of her own car. They were Native Americans who actually lived in Suquamish, which is in Kitsap County north of Bremerton, not that far from where Cheryl lived and worked. That they should be the ones who spotted her belongings so far from where they—and she—lived could serve to implicate them in the crime. Initially, detectives didn’t know that the men who called to report the purse were not Seattle residents.

  But then this case was becoming infamous for the number of slam-dunk “has to be a connection” suspects, none of whom had panned out.

  And this one didn’t either. Hank Gruber talked to Sant D’Eagle,* who owned a funky and popular antique store in Suquamish. D’Eagle said that he and a male friend had indeed found the things that belonged to Cheryl Pitre drifting near the houseboats as they walked along Fairview Avenue East.

  “What were you doing way over there?” Gruber asked.

  “We went over to see a game on TV. See, we scout out different places around Puget Sound, checking to see which taverns have the biggest TV sets. And Bogie’s has the biggest screen—ten feet diagonally—and the best food. We’ve got a boat with a canopy, and we just take an excursion…”

  “You cross the sound in a small boat to get to a tavern?” Gruber asked incredulously.

  “Sure do. It only takes us about half an hour to get to Seattle and then some more time to get through the locks in Ballard.”

  Apparently D’Eagle and his pals considered taking such an unorthodox shortcut to Seattle, even in bad weather or rough seas, an adventure.

  “We’re going to Camano Island next weekend,” he added.

  It seemed like a long way around to watch a televised game in a tavern, but Gruber had been a detective for years and he’d seen stranger things. He went to the address D’Eagle had given him for another of the Native Americans who made it a point to f
ind the best taverns on Puget Sound via the sea route. Asked if they really did travel that far in a small craft, the man gave the same details D’Eagle had. They didn’t see any need to take the ferries. Cost too much and took too long.

  Neither man had the slightest connection to Roland or Cheryl Pitre (beyond finding her sodden purse near where her body was left) or to Alby Brotzweller, Jack Short, or Bud Halser.

  Although leads continued to trickle in through the spring of 1989, their possible worth in identifying Cheryl Pitre’s murderer diminished steadily.

  One man, a truck driver, said he stopped at PJ’s every morning to buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a pack of cigarettes and sometimes talked to Cheryl there when she worked a rare morning shift. He said he also knew Roland. Like so many others, he had met Roland in prison.

  “Last time I talked to Cheryl was about three weeks before she got killed,” he said. “At the time, there was some guy and a bunch of kids in the parking lot, and I asked her what that was all about. She said she thought the guy was selling drugs.”

  “Can you describe him?” Sergeant Joe Sanford asked.

  The witness shrugged his shoulders. “All I remember is he was older than the kids.”

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  He offered his opinion. “You know, toward the end, Cheryl was having mood swings,” he said. “She was going over the deep end. She was dating some guy from Seattle.”

  “That’s from your own knowledge or did Roland tell you that?” Sanford asked.

  The man mumbled something that was hard to understand. The investigators knew that Roland Pitre had a number of observations about Cheryl that he was quite willing to share. Most of them were different scenarios about who might have killed her: stalkers, men she might have dated. But Cheryl hadn’t really had time to date. When she wasn’t working, she was looking after André and Bébé or in church. Her foray into the Parents Without Partners coffee group was the most adventure-some thing she’d done since Roland left her.

  The Kitsap County and Seattle detectives still had the same problem: they had not come up with enough physical or circumstantial evidence to arrest Roland Pitre for her murder.

  Nevertheless Roland was getting impatient. It was May, seven months after Cheryl’s death, and the Lutheran Brotherhood Insurance Company had not yet paid off on the policy he purchased on her life. When the company called Joe Sanford to ask if the police investigation was over, Sanford told them that the active investigation was still alive. “Roland Pitre has not been eliminated.”

  Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich had to end their full-court press on the other side of the sound from Seattle and move back home. With Jim Harris, Doug Wright, and Doug Hudson, they had given the Pitre murder investigation everything they had for several weeks, talked to dozens of people, followed innumerable leads—no matter how far-fetched—and were left with unanswerable questions.

  Cheryl’s murder looked as though it might be headed for the cold-case files. It galled them, but there it was. If anything new turned up, they would of course check it out. But there were other homicides to work in Seattle and in Port Orchard. Nobody forgot Cheryl Pitre, the young mother who had fought so hard to have a happy family only to be savagely beaten to death.

  Sadly, no one knew how long it would be before Cheryl would have some kind of justice.

  15

  1990–1993

  Roland Pitre moved swiftly on to his next marriage. He and Della Pitre graduated from Olympic College and applied for their registered nurse licenses. Della became an RN, but Roland ran into trouble. When the Washington State Nursing Board checked his background and found that he had been convicted of murder and a number of lesser crimes and that he “was a prime suspect in his ex-wife’s murder,” they denied him a nursing license. Della became the main financial support of the family, often working double shifts at Harrison Hospital in Bremerton and Tacoma General Hospital while Roland stayed home to take care of the children.

  In a sense he contributed to the family income: Cheryl’s children, Bébé and André, received Social Security payments from their dead mother’s account. These payments went to their father, of course.

  Later, Roland tried again to get a nursing license. With some sleight of hand, he apparently became a certified nursing assistant (CNA). He had learned not to use his own name, however. He used the identity and the Social Security number of his long-dead brother, Wade, who was only two when he died.

  Roland’s marriage to Della was troubled from the beginning. Try as she might, Della couldn’t make Roland accept her son, Tim, or Tim accept Roland. They were always wrangling about something. Initially, she believed her new husband when he told her that Tim was sneaky, told lies, and stole things. She began to look at her son with suspicion.

  Tim later recalled his mother’s marriage to Roland and their family life as “an absolute living hell.” His mother was always at work, and he felt that Roland was constantly criticizing him and making him look bad. In Roland’s eyes, nothing Tim did was right. André was only 3 and he could barely remember his mother, but Bébé, at 12, mourned for her mother and wanted to believe in her father. When he was nice, he was really fun to be around. But Bébé was also afraid of him; his temperament was volatile and she never knew how he was going to act. Sometimes he slapped her for no reason at all. Della was good to her, but Della wasn’t her real mother.

  Della and Roland had frequent arguments, and they separated in October 1990. They hadn’t been married even a year. They got back together after several months, but there was no feeling of permanency in their family.

  Roland eventually got a job as a CNA at a nursing home in Poulsbo, although Della still made about double the salary he did.

  Frank Haberlach, the insurance agent who had sold Roland the policies back in 1988, stopped in at Bay Ford and spoke to Greg Meakin.

  “He looked glum,” Meakin recalled. “He had this check from the insurance policy. He said, ‘It just kills me to give this to Pitre.’ He said it was one time he wasn’t happy to present a payoff…”

  As it turned out, except for about ten thousand dollars—which he spent right away—the money didn’t go to Roland Pitre; it was put in a trust by the Court for Bébé and André to have when they were old enough to go to college. Cheryl had apparently realized that her husband wasn’t trustworthy with money and had taken steps to protect her children. André wasn’t old enough to know anything about trust funds. As Bébé grew older, her father told her repeatedly that the money wasn’t hers—it was his—and that she would have to sign it over to him as soon as she got it.

  Roland played with Bébé’s mind a lot. He had always manipulated people around him; he was skilled at making them believe what he wanted them to believe. It didn’t matter to him whether they were strangers, friends, or members of his family. A little girl was an easy target.

  Bébé was confused about the sequence of events on the night that her mother died. She and André were living with her mother, but her father had visitation rights every other week. “One week, he came to pick me up,” Bébé said, “and after that night, I never saw her again.”

  Bébé recalled going skating on that Saturday afternoon, but the evening was hazy. She had been very tired and couldn’t remember staying up late to watch wrestling on TV with her father and Tim. That would have been around midnight or one. She was pretty sure that she watched only a few minutes of TV before she went to bed and was therefore sound asleep at that time, but her father had told her she should tell the police that she was watching TV with him all that time. And she had done what he told her to do.

  But Bébé was a very bright girl. She had a vague feeling that it was her father who killed her mother or at least that he had had something to do with it.

  While Roland’s judo students and her mother’s church friends believed that her parents had had a perfect marriage, she had seen the dark side. One ni
ght after André was born, she had wakened to the sound of her mother’s screams. She had tiptoed out of bed and seen her father holding her mother’s arms “real tight, and squeezing and shaking her.”

  The next morning, her mother had big purplish bruises on her upper arms.

  Bébé Pitre was about 13 when she met Bud Halser. He became a fixture around their house after he was released from prison. He and Roland were really good friends. She was told to call him Uncle Bud, although she didn’t think he was her real uncle. Bébé had long since learned to tiptoe around her father because she knew what he was capable of. She was afraid of him and knew that money meant everything to him.

  On the night of July 14, 1991, while Della Roslyn was at the hospital working a night shift, Bébé was the only one at home when her father and Bud Halser drove up in Bud’s van. She watched as they removed a safe from a closet and carried it to the van. Tim came home unexpectedly, and Bud hid in the back of his van with the safe until Tim left.

  Afraid of her father, Bébé never told anyone what she saw. All Della knew was that the safe had been stolen sometime between 6:30 PM, when she left for work, and 7:40 the next morning, when she got home. Officer Moon of the Bremerton Police Department took the burglary report and noted that Della said their house had a security alarm that should have been activated that night. Moon was unable to find any sign of forced entry, and the Pitres’ next-door neighbors had neither seen nor heard anything unusual during the night.

  Although the safe itself was arguably Roland’s possession, it was filled with sentimental items belonging to Della Roslyn Pitre: two dozen pieces of her jewelry and important documents. She was distraught when she realized that they were gone. She told Moon that she suspected her husband because they were once again on the brink of divorce.