Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  Roland said he had no idea who might have taken the safe; he had been away from home the night it disappeared. He said he’d taken Bébé and André to Panther Lake at 7:30 and hadn’t returned until the next day. As he thought now about the contents of the safe, he recalled that there had been some of his own jewelry in a jewelry box inside it. He added seven items to the inventory that Della had made of twenty-five pieces of her jewelry. Not counting the sentimental value of family keepsakes, the loss of the contents of the safe—almost all of it Della’s property—was well over $10,000.

  As he often had, Roland Pitre submitted yet another insurance claim, this time for the stolen safe, to the American States Insurance Company. He soon received payment in the amount of only $1,715. The company said that the policy did not cover jewelry. The check didn’t begin to cover the value of Della’s rings and necklaces or the sentimental value of the family mementos she had lost.

  Two months later, on August 23, Roland went to the emergency room at Harrison Hospital to be treated for what he called “slashing cuts” he said he sustained when someone assaulted him. He wasn’t badly hurt. He told Greg Rawlins, a Bremerton policeman, and Gary Crane, a Mason County detective, that he had set up a meeting with “some people” he suspected of stealing his family’s safe by pretending he had drugs to trade for Della’s jewelry. He had packaged up some powdered sugar to make it look like cocaine.

  “I met these four males who were driving a yellow car. They showed me a bag with some of our things in it,” he said. “I grabbed the bag and pulled it inside my van. But then I was either shot or hit with a club or something…”

  Roland said he somehow managed to struggle free and drive himself to Harrison Hospital’s emergency room. He showed the investigators the bag he allegedly wrested from his mysterious attackers. He gave the police the bag of costume jewelry. They noted that it contained only the inexpensive pieces Della listed as missing.

  In February 1992, Roland Pitre allegedly suffered a stroke, although he seemed to have no lingering effects beyond what he termed “seizures.” These often occurred when he was in the Social Security Administration offices, filling out forms to apply for Supplemental Social Security benefits. He claimed to be 100 percent disabled. He was so convincing that he received payments of $600 a month for his disability. Among the perks resulting from his stroke were license plates that allowed him to park in spots reserved for the disabled.

  The once-powerful judo instructor and Marine Corps staff sergeant said he could no longer work as a CNA at the nursing home. Instead, he again enrolled as a full-time student at Olympic College, this time majoring in accounting.

  With his marriage to Della crumbling, Roland turned to religion, or seemed to. He began to attend the Church of Abundant Life, a fundamentalist congregation. He became so devout that he even went to Bible study classes at the home of Duane and Beth Bixler,* a couple he met in church.

  “Everyone in our group felt sorry for him,” Beth Bixler said. “He told us that he had been framed for murder and sent to prison for the death of his wife. And he was very unhappy in his current marriage.”

  Again, Roland Pitre had shaded the truth, combining his earlier crimes and rearranging them to make his story better. He had not been convicted of murdering his wife; Cheryl’s murder case was still open and unsolved. He sensed—correctly—that the facts about the murder of his mistress’s husband wouldn’t garner as much sympathy if he told them that that was why he went to prison. To the naive churchgoers, his troubles seemed overwhelming. The tears is his eyes appeared genuine, the grief of a martyr. The Bible study group soon spent as much time discussing Roland’s misfortunes and trying to help him as they did examining Bible passages. “We were supposed to support and pray for each other,” Beth Bixler explained, “and in that particular environment everyone showed compassion and sympathy.”

  No one in the congregation knew that Roland Pitre’s estranged wife, her children, and his own children lived in fear of what he might do next. He had always been able to morph from a seemingly meek man to a swaggering martial arts expert and then to a charismatic ladies’ man.

  By February 1993, Della Pitre could see clear to the center of who her husband really was. She found herself in the same position that Cheryl was in when Roland cheated with Della. At first, Della believed him when he said her son Tim was the liar and had probably stolen their safe.

  As she lost her trust in Roland, it slowly dawned on Della that her son was the innocent one and that she had made his life worse by doubting him. Although she couldn’t prove it, she suspected that Roland was behind the disappearance of the safe.

  She also speculated that her husband was being unfaithful to her despite his protestations when she questioned him. Finally, Della asked Roland to move out of their home and filed for divorce. This time she meant it, and no amount of sweet talking from him changed her mind. His children remained with her; Della had adopted them, she loved them, and she feared for them if they were alone with Roland. By 1993, Della’s son Tim was 18, Bébé was 15, and André was 5. Although he had not lived with the family for a month, Roland came over often to visit his children, his eyes filling with tears as he tried to tell Della how lonesome he was without her.

  He made a big show of being a concerned father, particularly when Bébé began to date. Her boyfriend, Mike, was just an awkward, “cocky, pretending to be invulnerable” kid, and their dates were innocent. “I was close to Bébé from September 1992 through June 1995,” Mike recalled. “After Roland’s separation from Della, he invited Bébé and me over for dinner. He made a very good manicotti and he entertained us with stories from his Marine Corps drill instructor days as I was considering [enlisting], which I did after graduating. After dinner, Bébé excused herself to go to the bathroom. Roland stepped right up in my face, playing the role of the all-American father, saying, ‘If you ever hurt my daughter, I will kill you, and believe me, I know how.’

  “I just looked him back in the eye and told him I would never hurt her.”

  Mike remembered Roland as a man of contrasts, as one who desperately wanted the affection and loyalty of his family but was also quite willing to hurt them deeply. And, even though he had tried to intimidate Bébé’s young boyfriend, Roland came to his wrestling matches, taught him techniques, and cheered for him.

  In truth, Roland was not heartbroken over the end of his second marriage, and he wasn’t lonely. He had someone to talk to. Beth Bixler, who along with her husband had been among his most sympathetic church friends, was there for him. The two began to meet outside of the Bible study meetings, and Beth didn’t bring her husband along. They consummated their passion on Valentine’s Day 1993. Della Pitre’s suspicions were accurate.

  Not surprisingly, Beth’s marriage soon became shaky. By March 1993, she and Duane separated.

  She later admitted that she had become more and more attracted to Roland Pitre. They began to see each other regularly. Although he later denied they had a sexual relationship, Beth admitted that they did. Beyond her infatuation with him, Beth turned to Roland with her problems. She owned a large house, but as a single woman, her finances became a problem. She’d had no idea how much it cost to maintain a house: mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, general upkeep. Without her estranged husband’s help, Beth soon found herself wallowing in debt.

  She counted on Roland’s considerable wisdom to help her with her financial quandary. He promised her that everything would be all right. She didn’t even consider one of his suggestions, thinking that he could not be serious even though she was aware of at least part of his criminal past. After they discussed her marital problems, he suggested that he could arrange for her estranged husband to be killed.

  “How much insurance does he have?” Roland asked her bluntly.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, hesitantly. “Maybe $100,000 or $150,000.”

  “Well…”

  That conversational thread ended abruptly. Beth would
never dream of having her husband hurt or killed. Besides, she figured Roland hadn’t really meant it. He must have been making a bad joke.

  Sometime later, Roland suggested that she consider renting out part of her house. That would bring in income, and she agreed it was a feasible possibility.

  He told Beth that he knew of “an individual” who was looking for what Roland called “a safe house” for about six weeks.

  “You can make $3,000 in rent in that short a time,” he promised her, and he calmed her fears that having a complete stranger with some kind of secret in her house might be dangerous. “It’s perfectly safe,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t do anything to place you in danger—you know that—and I don’t see that you have any other choice right now.”

  Beth Bixler nodded hesitantly. Everything was happening so fast. It had been such a short time since she was a happily married, churchgoing young wife. Now she was with another man, and neither of them was officially divorced.

  But she did depend on Roland Pitre. She totally believed in him, unknowingly stepping into the next vacancy in a long line of women who had felt the same way only to regret it mightily later.

  Roland had a plan for Beth Bixler.

  16

  March 1993

  Tim Nash drew his first easy breath in a long time when he realized that his mother was serious this time when she kicked Roland out and filed for divorce. Even though his stepfather still came by the house to visit with André and Bébé, Tim could make himself scarce and avoid him. To have his mother believe in him again meant a lot to Tim, and he began to regain a lot of his self-respect.

  The next step up a ladder of disturbing events in the Pitre family took place at a time when crime is usually at an ebb. It was a rainy Sunday evening, March 21, 1993—the first day of spring—when a Bremerton Police radio operator received a call from a man who sounded hysterical. It took a while for the dispatcher to understand his words. He was able to make out the address and understood that there was a burglary or robbery going on there, but not much else. The call for help came in shortly before 8:30.

  Officer Steve Emm was dispatched to the residence. There he found a young male who was still unable to control his emotions. In fact, he looked scared to death. Patiently, Emm got the complainant to calm down to a point where he could get information from him.

  He said his name was Tim Nash and that he lived there with his mother and a younger stepbrother and stepsister. His older sister had moved out, and so had his stepfather.

  Tim had a bizarre story to tell. He was all alone in the house when he received a phone call about half an hour earlier from a woman who called him by name. From background noises, it seemed to him that the call was coming from a phone booth. The woman sounded young and incredibly sexy. He thought it might have been some girl he knew at high school making a prank phone call.

  “She asked me if I knew who she was, and I said no, but she seemed to know who I was,” Tim told Emm. “She was kind of flirting with me and teasing me and making me guess her name. She finally said if I really wanted to find out about her I should come up to the Pancake House and meet her. So I said I would.”

  Tim said that the restaurant wasn’t far away. Tantalized, he hopped on his motor scooter and rode to the Pancake House. He checked out the restaurant for familiar faces, expecting to spot some girl he knew. There weren’t many people in the place at the time, and he didn’t recognize anyone there. Nobody waved at him or signaled to him in any way.

  Next, Tim checked out the parking lot for a vehicle he might recognize. But none of the cars parked there looked familiar. He waited for a while at the edge of the lot, thinking the woman must have called him from a phone booth located someplace else. He watched the area for five minutes or so, but no car pulled in.

  Tim told the investigators that he figured he had fallen for some dumb practical joke, so he left and went back home.

  He was sure he had armed their alarm system before he left and locked the front door. That was the rule in his family. Upon his return, he used his key to get back in and immediately disarmed the system.

  What happened next is the stuff of most people’s nightmares. As he would explain first to Officers Emm and Bogen, who had pulled up just behind the first squad car, and the next day to Detective Lewis Olan, Tim said he’d had the eerie sense that he was not alone in the house. It was quiet enough, but he still felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure why.

  Suddenly he heard a sound that seemed to be coming from his upstairs bedroom and recognized it as the slight rustling of venetian blinds. It was as if something or someone had just brushed against them. Of course, it could have been the wind.

  His mother was working, as she always did on Sunday nights, and his stepsister and stepbrother, Bébé and André, were supposed to be having a visitation weekend with their father. There shouldn’t have been anyone else in the house.

  Tim recalled that he tried to turn on the light on the staircase that led up to the bedroom landing, but it was burned out. He walked slowly up the stairs. When he got to the top, he pulled aside a curtain that covered his bedroom doorway and at the same time reached in to click on the light in his room.

  That light didn’t go on, either. He went in anyway, wondering a little at the coincidence of two bulbs burning out at the same time.

  “As I walked in,” he said, “a guy wearing a ski mask stepped out and stuck a rifle up against my throat.”

  He froze, panicked, his heart beating loudly in his ears. Tim remembered that he looked into the dimness of his bedroom, lit only by a street light outside, and saw a second figure who also wore a mask. It was a woman. He couldn’t see her face, but she had full breasts that were obvious under her tight black pullover.

  She mumbled something, and he instantly recognized her voice. It was the same woman who had called him and persuaded him to come to the Pancake House to meet her.

  Although Tim didn’t know what was happening or who these wraithlike figures were, he believed he was in terrible danger and that the gun at his neck might go off at any moment. A scream burst from his throat. “Help! Help!” he called out frantically. “I’m being robbed.”

  He had no reason to think that, but why else would anyone be hiding in his room? It was just the first thing that came to his mind. The Roslyn family owned a small apartment that was connected to their house at the first-floor level. He hoped desperately that the couple who lived there were home and would hear him. His house had a large window at the bottom of the stairs that offered a view right into one of the apartment’s windows. If he could manage to get downstairs and their drapes weren’t drawn, they would be able to see him.

  No one responded at first to his screaming. And then one of the tenants shouted something. At least they were home and aware that he was in trouble. His knees buckled under him and he went limp, still calling out for help.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the man in black growled.

  “Shut up,” the woman hissed. “Just shut up.”

  It was her all right. Tim couldn’t mistake that voice, but he had no idea who she was. The man ran down the stairs, but Tim, still lying on the floor, blocked the woman, so she nudged him aside and followed.

  Unable to stand up because he was so frightened, the teenager prayed that they were leaving, but he expected them to come back upstairs and kill him.

  He waited, the sound of his hoarse breathing seeming to fill the room. Then he realized that the house was silent. The two masked strangers appeared to be gone. Trembling, he made his way to a phone and called the Bremerton police emergency number. Next, he called his mother. She said she would come right home.

  Then Tim grabbed a kitchen knife and put it his pocket. He locked all the doors and wedged a chair under the front doorknob. Although he doubted it would do any good, he reactivated the alarm system. It was odd. He had armed it when he left to meet the mysterious woman, but somehow she and the man had gotten in anywa
y without setting it off.

  When Officer Emm arrived, he saw several faces peering out the window at him, trying to see who was knocking on the door. The neighbors had joined Tim. They were all frightened, but Tim was the most afraid since he was the only person who had actually encountered the strangers in black.

  None of them knew who might have been in their house or why. They were not wealthy. They didn’t own anything worth a home-invasion burglary.

  Emm and Bogen searched the house and checked the exterior doors. They found no sign of forced entry. Indeed, they couldn’t even be sure what the point of entry into the house was. They did discover why the lights on the stairs and in Tim’s room hadn’t responded when he hit the switch: someone had carefully unscrewed the bulbs.

  They also found an empty gun case in Tim’s bedroom.

  Della arrived home shortly after the police left. She was instantly suspicious. She had her own idea of who had attacked Tim. That was strengthened by Bébé’s call to Della from Beth Bixler’s house, where she was babysitting. The teenager was nervous because she kept getting phone calls. The caller hung up as soon as she answered. And she told Della that Roland phoned her late in the evening to tell her that he’d suffered a blackout and couldn’t remember what he had done for several hours. He had had blackouts and “spells” before, which he attributed to his stroke; nevertheless, Della found this sudden loss of memory a little too convenient.

  Roland had been late picking Bébé up earlier in the day, arriving at noon rather than at 10:30 as he’d promised. They hadn’t spent very much time together. He told her then that he promised she would babysit for Beth Bixler’s children.

  When Bébé got home late Sunday night, she found the house in an uproar. Of course, it wasn’t the first time she experienced some kind of emergency in her family. Over the years she had known any number of traumatic times: she witnessed her parents’ violent fights, her mother’s fear, her parents’ divorce, and her mother’s disappearance, which proved to be her kidnapping and murder. There was the theft of the family safe, the time her father said he’d been beaten so badly he had to go to the hospital, his fights with Tim, and all the times Della and Roland broke up.