Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Page 14

  Rather than becoming accustomed to unexpected events, it was natural that Bébé was sensitized to danger and particularly fearful. In the month since her father had been out of the house, it had been almost serene, at least compared with what it was like when he lived there.

  Now everyone in his family tried to reassure Tim that he didn’t need to worry anymore. The police knew what had happened, the family was all together now (with the exception of Roland), and the doors were locked. Eventually Tim calmed down and Bébé headed upstairs.

  She was startled to see that there were two carryall bags in Tim’s room. She recognized them. One belonged to her. It was a white canvas bag with “Slumberjack” printed on the side and her name written in pen in small letters. She had kept her old sleeping bag in it, but lately she used it to carry things to school. The other was a blue nylon bag with “Mum’s” embroidered on the side with red thread. It was a laundry bag from a local firm. Both bags had been around for a long time, a familiar sight in the household.

  But Bébé had seen those bags earlier in the day, and they weren’t in her adoptive mother’s home at that time. They had been in Roland’s green van when he picked her up at noon. She was positive of that. Her dad’s van was cluttered with a whole bunch of stuff, and she had moved the bags out of the way to make room for her little brother, André, to sit down.

  Now, here they were back in the house, in Tim’s bedroom. They were full of items, but she didn’t check to see what was inside. When Bébé told Della what she had found, Della called the police and asked that the officers return. “I want to report a suspect, too,” she said.

  She told the police officers that her estranged husband, Roland, was quite capable of either committing or orchestrating a crime like burglarizing his family’s home and threatening her son. She also showed them the two bags, explaining that Bébé had seen those bags in Roland’s van earlier in the day. She believed that he must have brought them back into her house at the time her son was assaulted. He knew the alarm code, she said; she hadn’t bothered to change it. She allowed him to do his laundry in her house, and he still came to visit André. Still, even though she knew Roland to be a liar and a cheat, she hadn’t considered him a real danger to any of them. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  Bogen and Emm took the suspect bags and logged them into evidence.

  Bébé Pitre had a really bad feeling. Her father had acted out of character all day. After he picked her up at noon, he actually asked her how Tim was doing and made a number of positive comments about her stepbrother. He never said anything nice about Tim. She knew that her father and Tim hadn’t gotten along for years, and it was weird that all of a sudden her dad talked about Tim in such a solicitous and complimentary way.

  “How’s Tim doing?” Roland had asked her. “I’d like to spend more time with him, sit down and talk with him and become pals.”

  That caught her off guard. The two had hated each other for as far back as she could remember. Why was her father suddenly doing this about-face?

  Bébé Pitre was 15, a very intelligent 15, and she was no longer the easily manipulated little girl who always did what her father wanted her to do. Questions kept popping up in her mind. She even began to explore her doubts about her mother’s murder. Cheryl Pitre’s death remained a mystery five years after it occurred, and Bébé could no longer deny her sixth sense that her father might have had something to do with it. She didn’t want that to be true. It was hard enough to have her mother gone. She didn’t even want to think that her father had done something as bad as that.

  Secrets she had been forced to keep for a long time bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness, demanding that she tell someone. Part of her still loved her father, but she was afraid of him. After what had happened to Tim, they were all afraid of Roland and what he might do next.

  Bébé made up her mind to tell the police investigators about her doubts.

  17

  On Monday, March 22, 1993, Bremerton detective Lewis Olan was officially assigned to the investigation of the attack or attempted kidnapping or burglary—whatever it was—of Tim Nash and his home. Olan had encountered Roland Pitre, Tim’s stepfather, two years earlier. He was one of the detectives who investigated the theft of the Pitre family safe. That investigation was never successfully concluded, although Roland had recovered some of the jewelry reported to be missing in the murky incident in which he said he was beaten and cut by someone never identified. That had been a strange case. This alleged burglary was even more peculiar.

  Tim Nash appeared to be terribly frightened, but he wasn’t hurt. There was always the possibility that he’d made up the whole thing to get attention. Any experienced detective knows that people give false reports of crimes for all kinds of reasons. With no sign of tool marks or broken windows signaling a forced entry and no one tripping the security system, it was natural to wonder if the kid had done it. Nothing was missing.

  But when Olan talked to both the victim and family members, taping their statements, they told him essentially the same things they told Officers Emm and Bogen the night before. None of them even suggested that Tim Nash might have made it all up. How would he have had access to Roland Pitre’s van and the two bags later found in his bedroom? That didn’t compute at all.

  Tim made a very believable witness. According to all reports, he was a good kid. Olan pursued his investigation on the assumption that someone had indeed lured him away from the house just long enough for the couple in black to sneak in. And he suspected what the Pitre family suspected: that for some reason Pitre himself had crept into his onetime home and threatened his stepson.

  Next, the Bremerton detective searched the two bags that Bébé Pitre had seen in her father’s van at noon on Sunday, then in Tim’s bedroom that night.

  The blue nylon bag, now marked Number One, held a hundred-foot reel of white nylon rope, an open roll of duct tape, two rolls of duct tape still sealed in a package, several large plastic bags, a diver’s knife in a black rubber sheath, foam earplugs, a plastic sack from a Kmart store with a box half full of .44 Magnum bullets, and a receipt dated March 10, 1993.

  Curious, Olan opened another, smaller, Kmart bag. It held a full box of earplugs and more than a dozen greeting cards. There were five more cards in another sack, a package of utility knife blades, and a white handkerchief.

  So far, with the possible exception of the .44 rounds, there wasn’t anything really ominous about the contents of the blue bag. There could be dozens of legitimate reasons for having rope, duct tape, and greeting cards. Even the earplugs and the diver’s knife weren’t suspicious; there were hundreds of people in the Puget Sound area who dove beneath its surface for sport.

  Olan turned next to the Slumberjack bag. Inside he found a bag from a PayLess store. It held three packages of five-by-eight-inch cards. One was open, and several of the cards had printing on them, done with a black felt-tip pen.

  They seemed to be cue cards, meant for someone to read or perhaps to memorize or simply say aloud. It was apparent that Tim was the one who was supposed to read them.

  Basically, the message was the same. Tim’s voice—probably in a phone call—would say he was in some kind of trouble and that the only one who could help him was Roland Pitre.

  One read, “Hi, Mom, this is Tim. I moved out of the house.” Another said, “I’m in trouble this time. I need Roland’s help. I don’t know if he’ll help me because I switched his medication and then I put, I think, arsenic in his chewing…” (Olan couldn’t tell whether the blurred next word was “gum” or “tobacco.”) The writing ended abruptly.

  Why would Tim need cue cards? Why couldn’t he just call up his mother and talk to her?

  Detective Olan asked Bébé Pitre to look at the cards to see if she could identify the writing on them. She could. It was her father’s. For some reason, Roland Pitre had written a script for Tim to read.

  There were more papers in the white canvas bag. Della Roslyn reco
gnized them, even though she hadn’t seen them for almost two years. They were the documents that had been in her stolen safe. Stuffed in a paper bag were marriage and birth certificates, passports, insurance policies, and legal documents. Roland’s marriage certificate with Cheryl was there, as were birth certificates for some members of Della’s and Roland’s combined family. There were the adoption papers from when she had adopted Bébé and André. And there was a handful of newspaper clippings about Cheryl Pitre’s homicide in Kitsap County and even newspaper accounts of the trial after the murder of Dennis Archer on Whidbey Island and Roland’s conviction on conspiracy to commit that murder.

  Lewis Olan had never believed that Roland wasn’t involved in the theft of the safe back in 1991, but he hadn’t been able to prove his complicity. Now in this bag was proof that he had undoubtedly kept the fruits of that theft while collecting insurance for the loss. The only documents that ever surfaced were papers that Roland needed. All of Della’s, Bébé’s, André’s, Tim’s, and Amy’s important papers were gone, but Roland managed to keep his birth certificate and that of his dead brother, Wade Pitre.

  Olan tended to believe Della Pitre when she said that Roland Pitre was connected to the incident with his stepson, Tim.

  But why? Surely he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to terrorize a kid he didn’t like. Motive is a vital part in an investigation, and so far it was as obscure as a gray ship cruising on Puget Sound in a pea-soup fog.

  One older mystery was solved, however: Bébé Pitre had identified her father’s handwriting on the cue cards and also said that the handkerchief in the Slumberjack bag belonged to Roland; now she was finally ready to reveal a secret he had made her keep since she was 13. She cleared up the question of who had stolen the safe from her house in 1991.

  Bébé admitted that she had watched her father and Bud Halser carry the safe out. She explained, to her stepmother’s shock, that at her father’s insistence she accompanied them as they drove to an isolated spot near Panther Lake, Washington.

  She told Lewis Olan and Della Roslyn that she saw the two men remove the contents of the safe before they attempted to bury it near an old outhouse. As they began to dig, they disturbed a nest of angry hornets. They abandoned that plan and drove instead to Renton, Washington, where she thought they left the safe with some relative of “Uncle Bud’s.”

  Roland had warned Bébé that she must never tell that she saw him and Uncle Bud take the safe and bury it. His warning had been very effective; she was so frightened that she hadn’t told the story until now.

  But Roland apparently hadn’t been able to restrain himself from bragging to his daughter about how clever he was. Bébé also told Olan that she knew her father used another name to get his certified nursing assistant’s license from the State of Louisiana. He used Wade Pitre’s name and Social Security number, and he finagled a way to use the Louisiana CNA credits to gain employment in Washington State. Wade had been dead for almost half a century, and apparently no one checked on the authenticity of Roland’s stolen identity.

  Bébé’s admissions were a huge relief to her and proved that Roland Pitre was a liar and a thief, though that wasn’t a surprise to the investigating detective or Roland’s latest estranged wife. But the question of motive—if he was involved in the attack on Tim Nash—remained.

  When Olan looked into the murders of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, he learned that Roland Pitre had had an alibi in each case. He was far more likely to be a conspirator in a crime than the one who actually committed it. Maybe “Uncle Bud” was the man in black in the mask?

  Olan located the man Bébé called Uncle only to find that Bud Halser had the best alibi of all. He was once again behind prison bars, and there was no way he could have been free to commit any kind of crime on the night of March 21.

  It wasn’t Halser, and the woman’s identity was even more difficult to puzzle out. All Tim could describe about her was that she had a good figure and that her voice sounded young.

  That woman soon returned to Tim’s life.

  18

  On March 24, three days after the home invasion, the Bremerton Police Department had an unexpected visitor. A nervous woman appeared, saying that she wanted to confess to a robbery.

  Her name was Beth Bixler. She had red hair and pale skin dusted with freckles. She was undoubtedly paler than usual now but was pretty in a quiet way. She looked like the sort of young woman who should be teaching Sunday school rather than turning herself in as a felon.

  She was quickly escorted to an interview room, where Lewis Olan and Detective Doug Wright listened with fascination to her story. They heard yet another woman go to bat for Roland Pitre.

  Beth Bixler told them that she had conspired with Tim Nash to work out a plan to fake his own kidnapping.

  Beth recalled that she had met Roland, Tim’s stepfather, at her church three years before and had participated in many church activities with him. She admitted that she recently found herself in love with him. Her husband accused her of having an affair with Roland, and her marriage completely collapsed. But her love for Roland Pitre was so compelling that she had accepted that she was headed for divorce.

  According to Beth, Tim called her and told her that Roland was trying to get back with his mother, Della. Tim didn’t want that to happen; he hated Roland and wanted him to stay away forever. Beth said she didn’t want the Pitres to reconcile, either. She loved Roland and wanted to be with him. So, she said, Tim had come up with a plan that would make Roland look really bad to Della so that she would lose all respect for him and refuse to take him back.

  The detectives stared at the woman who was confessing to what she called a complicated plot. They had seen Tim in the aftermath of the attack on him, and he certainly had not impressed them as the kind of mastermind who would suggest that Roland be framed to appear to be a monster. But that’s what Beth Bixler was telling them. At this point her version of the crime began to falter. She said Tim told her that if the two of them planted items that had obviously been in Roland’s custody—specifically, the two bags—in Della’s house, Della would be furious. That didn’t seem to be a particularly terrible thing for Roland to do: the investigators knew that Della allowed him to do his laundry there. She hinted that it was Tim’s idea to make up a story about the couple in black who threatened him, knowing that Della would immediately suspect Roland.

  When Wright and Olan questioned Beth Bixler about the details of the plot, her answers became increasingly vague. But she continued to insist that Roland had done nothing wrong; that he wasn’t even in Della’s house on Sunday night and had no knowledge of the plan she and Tim had formulated. She told them that it had basically been Tim’s plot to get rid of a stepfather he hated. He was so persuasive that she went along with it in the hope that Della would be angry and reject Roland and then she would have him to herself.

  Beth said she filled the two carryall bags that were supposed to be given to Tim to put in his bedroom and that a “female and a male were there,” but her description of the evidence didn’t match what the detectives knew. She inadvertently put herself into the crime, slipping up and admitting that she was the female involved.

  “The police were not supposed to be involved,” she stammered. “Somehow, everything got messed up.”

  It didn’t take much adept questioning by the detectives to shred Beth Bixler’s story. Doug Wright told her frankly that the statement they had just taped was obviously false.

  “After a brief discussion that we did not believe her story,” Lewis Olan told a Superior Court judge, “at which time she was given the choice to tell the truth—and decided not to—she was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary, conspiracy, attempted kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit murder.”

  “When was she arrested?” the judge asked.

  “She was arrested yesterday: March 24, 1993.”

  Beth Bixler was stunned when Doug Wright placed her under
arrest. She had probably been duped, just as Roland Pitre had duped so many other people, many of them women who—at least initially—were in love with him. At this point, her feelings were ambivalent. She still felt a very strong attraction to him, but she said that she had also come to be afraid of him. He had told her that he believed in revenge and that he knew people who owed him favors.

  Shaken, Beth was booked into jail.

  It took only a few hours for Beth Bixler to send word to Wright through the jail staff that she wanted to talk to him. It was ten minutes after ten that Wednesday night when Wright called Olan and then walked over to the jail. At Wright’s request, the jail staff advised Beth Bixler of her rights under Miranda and asked her if she wanted to have an attorney present.

  She shook her head. “I want to talk to the detectives,” she said. “I want to tell them the truth and confess.”

  Even though the two detectives hadn’t believed her original recitation of events, the real story was nevertheless a surprise.

  The winsome, churchgoing mother said that she was desperate for money, and the $3,000 in rent money that Roland promised her never materialized, even though she kept asking him where the renter who needed a safe house was. She was ready to listen to any solution he could offer her.

  Finally Roland told her that he had developed another plan, one that would bring them a lot more money. He explained to her how much he disliked his stepson, Tim. “He was responsible for the failure of my marriage to Della,” Pitre said. “And now, he’s going to be involved in my new plan.”