Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Page 15

  While Beth listened, both shocked and mesmerized, Roland laid out the specifics of his scenario. First, he and his good friend, Bud Halser, planned to kidnap Tim and hold him for $250,000 ransom. Currently in jail, Bud would have been out in plenty of time to help Roland.

  When Beth opened her mouth to protest, Roland jumped ahead. “We won’t really kidnap him,” he promised her. “I know I can convince Tim to go along with the plan. See, I’m going to pay him $50,000 and buy him a plane ticket to Hawaii.”

  She wondered where the $250,000 was going to come from. Surely Della didn’t have that kind of money. Roland said that was true, but Della’s parents had a large and expensive home. Tim would be instructed to tell his mother that he had been abducted by people to whom he owed money. Then Della would persuade her parents to take out a second mortgage on their house. They were very respectable citizens with good credit, and they loved their grandchildren. Roland was positive they would agree to do that, anything to save Tim from his kidnappers. They would be told to leave the $250,000 somewhere where Roland or Bud could retrieve it without being seen. Subsequently Tim would be released.

  Nobody would be hurt, Roland had promised her. The police would never even know about any of it.

  It was a wild idea, a scheme rife with holes and things that could go wrong. What if Tim wouldn’t go along with it? How long would it take to get a house refinanced? What if his grandparents refused to go into debt for a quarter of a million dollars? What if somebody called the FBI?

  Roland waved away all of Beth Bixler’s questions, telling her that she lacked the “ability to think big.” He assured her that he had never had a plan go wrong, that he always won because he was a detail man with a great talent for predicting what people would do. It was all a matter of pushing the right buttons, and he knew where those buttons were.

  She was entranced with him, passionately in love with him. She had already betrayed her husband for him, shocked her church, and put her family in jeopardy. And she was about to lose her house because she couldn’t pay her bills.

  Beth asked Roland what her part of the project would be.

  “Hardly anything,” he said easily. “All we need is your house, just the basement of your house, actually. We have to have someplace to hide Tim.”

  She wondered about that. If Tim was cooperating and would get a ticket to Hawaii, why would they have to hide him? But Roland said they needed him at first. Tim would have to be available to make phone calls to his mother. If he were in Hawaii, there would be long-distance phone bills that could be traced, and there was also the matter of controlling Tim. Roland wanted to be right there with him to be sure he said the right things at the right time.

  One element of the perfect caper went awry early on. Bud Halser, who was to be Roland’s wing man, was arrested for the umpteenth time and sent back to prison. He was no longer available to help Roland “kidnap” Tim.

  That wasn’t a real problem, Roland told his new girlfriend. She could take Bud’s place. It wouldn’t require any particular strength. All she had to do was follow his instructions.

  First they had to do some construction in the basement of Beth’s house. She became caught up in the plotting, each step tumbling after the other until it seemed to make some crazy kind of sense, and the deeper she was pulled in, the more difficult it was for her to back out. Roland convinced her that they had to build a little room within a room that had to be soundproof so that no one inside or outside the house would know where Tim was staying.

  The bathroom in Beth’s basement was fairly good-sized, and Roland built a tiny room inside. By removing the shelves in a large closet in the bathroom, he constructed a space that was approximately two feet by three and a half feet. He built a false wall that hid the entrance to the room within a room. He added thick layers of insulation to deaden any sounds coming from the cramped chamber. Then he pulled the flowered shower curtain over his handiwork so that no one could detect that this was anything but a basement bathroom.

  Beth went on with her confession. The earplugs in the two bags accidentally left behind after the failed kidnapping had a purpose. Tim Nash was supposed to be tied up and taped to a chair in the hidden room. Then the earplugs would be inserted into his ears so he wouldn’t be able to hear whether anyone was home in the house.

  Essentially, had the kidnapping been a success, Tim would have been held captive and deprived of most of his senses. He would not have been able to move, to see, to hear. If he called out for help, no one would be able to hear him outside the soundproofed walls.

  By this time, Beth said, she was terrified by Roland. She felt she had to continue with the plot. “I was afraid of not doing it, and I just didn’t say no.”

  He instructed her to get a gun. She borrowed one from a coworker, telling him that she was afraid to be alone and needed a gun for protection. Roland told her to buy a box of bullets and some greeting cards. They were to be used as letters that Tim would periodically send to various relatives. Beth said she wore brown gloves whenever she purchased the things on Roland’s list at Kmart so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints behind.

  Roland prepared the script that Tim was to follow and printed the words carefully on the five-by-eight-inch lined cards she bought. When Tim called his mother, he would be forced to stick to the words written on the cue cards. Roland’s scenario called for Tim to tell his mother that he hated her and that she was responsible for making his life miserable and for his disappearance. Further, the script called for Tim to say that Roland was not to be blamed for leaving, that instead Della should notify Roland that Tim desperately needed his help.

  This woman, who never expected to see the inside of a jail, said she was completely trapped at this point and could find no way out of her lover’s scheme. Beth said Roland’s scenario moved along with a life of its own. Whether the detectives were buying her whole story was questionable, although it was apparent that she didn’t have a strong personality: they could see how someone like Pitre could have dominated her.

  Doug Wright asked her what she and Roland had worn when they went to his former home to confront Tim Nash.

  “Roland was wearing black pants and either a black turtleneck or sweatshirt; I can’t remember which right now. He had a black leather fanny pack and a black pair of shoes.”

  On his instruction, Beth said, she also wore black clothing, and they both wore dark ski masks.

  Actually, they had been geared up to kidnap Tim a week earlier than when they carried it out. Roland said they should do it on a Sunday night since he could be sure that Tim would be alone. They’d gotten dressed in black on March 14, but for some reason Roland had a bad feeling and put it off for a week.

  Roland had it worked out to the tiniest detail. He had Bud Halser’s girlfriend, Bobbi,* babysitting for André at his apartment. Bobbi would also serve as an alibi for Roland, swearing that he had been home all evening.

  Bébé would be sitting for Beth’s children so her father could be sure she wasn’t in the house with Tim.

  Beth told Doug Wright that she was the female who called Tim. “On the way to the house, we stopped at the R and H Market on Kitsap Way. I disguised my voice and called Tim and coaxed him to come to the Pancake House.”

  After Roland and Beth were sure Tim had left his home, they went to Della Pitre’s house, parked in the back, and entered the house through the garage. “Roland still had a key to the door. He turned off the alarm system and then unscrewed the lightbulbs over the stairs and in Tim’s room.”

  Beth said that when Tim returned, the alarm had temporarily activated, which spooked her, but Tim quickly turned it off.

  “I was in a state of shock at this point,” she said. “When the light didn’t go on over the stairs, he walked up anyway. When he reached the landing, Roland pointed the gun at him and said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ ”

  Everything had started to collapse. She said Tim began to scream wildly, and someone in the apartment yelled
and asked what was the matter. Beth said she and Roland ran to the bottom of the stairs and then ran from the house. “Roland was driving like a maniac when we left, and he was telling me I had to get rid of our masks and the gun, just dump them somewhere.

  “We didn’t notice that we’d left those bags behind until we were driving away in the car. Roland asked me where they were, and I told him they were still in the house, and he said, ‘We’re fucked!’ ”

  It certainly seemed that they were. After they managed to lure Tim away from the house and were able to enter without a problem, nothing went as Roland planned. They weren’t even able to accomplish the kidnapping, much less go forward with his foolproof plan to keep Tim tied up in Beth’s basement until his grandparents came up with the $250,000 ransom.

  What would he have done with Tim at that point if Roland’s scenario had worked? The answer was obvious: Roland could never have let Tim go free. Tim surely would have figured out who was holding him captive, even if the amateurish soundproof prison actually blocked out all sound and Roland and Beth managed to change their voices enough to fool him when they checked on him. Tim would have become a major threat. Any reasonable person would deduce that Tim Nash—alive—could and probably would report Roland Pitre to the police.

  Tim Nash, like others less lucky, would have been worth more dead to Roland Pitre.

  19

  At 4:10PM on March 24, Superior Court Judge Karen B. Conoley issued an arrest warrant for Pitre, not for kidnapping or conspiracy—which were still under intense investigation—but for burglary stemming from the theft on July 13, 1991, of the family safe, which was still missing. That would be enough to take him off the street and give his family a measure of relief that he would not be sneaking back into their house. Just to be sure, Della Roslyn obtained a restraining order that barred Roland from any contact whatsoever with his terrified family.

  Tim had believed his stepfather had wanted to kill him for a long time, and the rest of the Pitre family, including his daughter and estranged wife, were deathly afraid of Roland. The charges were soon amended to include the attempted kidnapping and burglary. Christian Casad, Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for Kitsap County, and Deputy Prosecutor Brian Moran were assigned to handle the State’s case. Steve Sherman was appointed to represent Roland Pitre.

  Held on $500,000 bail, Roland said he was shocked that anyone could possibly deduce that he would hurt his family. He said that he suffered from such terrible feelings of loneliness and loss after Della asked him to move out and told him she was going ahead with a divorce that he had come up with all the reasons he could to go back to what had been his home. Why would Della have allowed him to keep his key to the garage if she didn’t still need him? He said he tried to find small repairs to make and took his laundry there, making any excuse he could to stay close to her and his children.

  As far as his having a sexual relationship with Beth Bixler, he laughed that off. He told detectives that he never considered sleeping with Beth and had no romantic feelings toward her. It was she, he insisted, who was the aggressor. She regularly came to his house, complaining about how miserable she was in her marriage, and they had commiserated with each other.

  Roland said he was taken aback when Beth approached him and asked him to kill her husband, promising him a share of his $200,000 insurance policy.

  “I told her immediately that I did not kill people,” he protested, seeming to be appalled at the very thought of it.

  But Beth had persisted in her demands that either Roland or someone he could hire would murder her husband. It was at that point, Roland said, that he realized that Beth might be just the kind of person who could help him create a false danger for his family. He thought he might be able to use her to work out a scenario that wouldn’t truly be a menace to Della and the kids but one in which he could appear to be their savior.

  Yes, he had told Beth Bixler a tall story of how Tim would be kidnapped and held for ransom. But her own “greed” took over, he recalled, and she came up with ideas on how they could accomplish the kidnapping.

  “The holding room, the cards, and most of the other ideas were all hers,” Roland said quietly. “I just went along with several of her suggestions so she wouldn’t guess my true intentions of pretending to rescue my family until the last minute.”

  Roland Pitre swore he never meant for the plan to go beyond frightening Tim. He assured the investigators that all he planned was for someone to get into the house, frighten Tim into believing he was about to be abducted, and then leave. At that point, Roland would come back home, and his family would realize they needed him to take care of them. His marriage would resume, and they would all live happily ever after.

  But he knew that he couldn’t do it himself. If he went into the house, Tim would recognize him. Beth was afraid to go in alone, so she found some young guy Roland did not know to pretend to be a kidnapper. It was she, he insisted, who said they needed a gun. “I asked her to please just get a BB or a pellet gun,” he sighed. “Without my knowledge, she borrowed a .44 caliber gun from some coworker.”

  He added that Beth was having a sexual relationship with that man.

  On March 21, Roland said, he and Beth picked up a young man at the Handy Mart on Marine Drive. Then she called Tim and flirted with him, luring him to the Pancake House. When they saw Tim riding by on his scooter, Roland drove to Della’s house.

  Yes, he parked in the back and provided them with a key and the alarm system code, but he only waited in the car. Beth got out of his van, carrying the two bags of items she thought she needed, and the stranger carried the rifle case.

  Roland said he took the young man aside to be sure he understood that no one was to be hurt. All he was supposed to do was frighten Tim, then leave. “No harm was to come to him; I told him that.”

  Beth and the other man came running out of the house a short time later, and Roland drove off with them. He left the stranger at the Handy Mart, and then Beth took over the driving and dropped Roland at his house.

  As far as the theft of the safe holding Della’s possessions, jewelry, and the family’s documents, Roland admitted to that. But that had happened two years ago. He and Bud Halser had taken the safe to retaliate against Della for trying to divorce him a year before, sneakily filing papers when he was far away visiting in Louisiana. Insurance? Of course not, he said. He never even thought of insurance on the safe.

  Roland maintained that Della was the one who filed the insurance claims and that the money received from the company was deposited in her personal bank account. After he managed to recover the jewelry, he said, he attempted to report that to the insurance company, but they weren’t interested. “They told me the matter was closed and wasn’t worth pursuing.”

  Roland’s great and good friend, Bud Halser, presently in prison, was not charged in Tim’s kidnapping attempt, but he was charged in the theft of the safe in 1991. As tight as the two men had been for years, Halser’s lawyer nevertheless set out immediately with motions to sever his case from Pitre’s. Evidence showed that Halser’s girlfriend was involved in the kidnapping plot, too. She placed several phone calls to Bébé, who was babysitting for Beth Bixler, in an effort to give Roland a backup alibi.

  It was a matter of whom to believe, Beth Bixler or Roland Pitre. Their stories were diametrically opposed, each version rendering the other as entirely false. But if Beth Bixler was the brains behind the plot to kidnap Tim Nash, why had she come to the police in an attempt to take all the blame away from Roland? On the other hand, he had thrown her to the wolves quite easily. And Roland Pitre was the one who had a long rap sheet and a reputation for being a convincing liar. It wasn’t that the investigators believed her just because she was a woman; they had seen a number of female felons. But Beth Bixler had no criminal past, and Roland had been tied to two homicides.

  Roland lied as easily as he breathed. And he had a history of filing claims with insurance companies. He was a shoplifter
and a faithless lover. Was he only a con man and a grifter, or was he far more dangerous than that? It certainly seemed so when one considered the escalation of his alleged crimes over the past twenty years. He had been close to the violent deaths of both Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, although his actual whereabouts at the moment of their murders was still murky.

  Even though she had come to fear him, Bébé Pitre clung to the hope that deep in his heart her father loved her and the family. That all crumbled when she and her boyfriend Mike were cleaning out Roland’s rental house after his arrest for attempted kidnapping. As they made piles of things to keep and things to give to the Goodwill, they found the transcripts from the 1980 trial in which Roland testified against his mistress and his best friend. Reading them, Bébé suddenly came across the questions about Pitre’s onetime plan to kill her for insurance money. To her shock and sadness, she finally comprehended just how little she meant to her father.

  She was only 15 years old when she realized the danger she had been in at the tender age of 20 months. On page 102 of the transcript, she read that her father admitted to buying an insurance policy on her life. A page later, he spoke of thinking about ways to kill her.

  “How did you plan on killing your daughter?” the defense attorney, Gil Mullen, asked him.

  “I thought about making it look like she accidentally got into some drugs. I thought about making it look like she was kidnapped. I hadn’t really come down to a final…the plan was that I was more leaning towards was her getting into the medicine cabinet. She was at the…she was always crawling around getting into things.”

  “Did you call anybody [Seattle’s Poison Control Center] in reference to a drug overdose or anything in Seattle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Uh, I didn’t know how much it would take. I called to see about how much it would take, how many. I couldn’t get any prescription drugs. I was thinking about sleeping pills. I wanted to know how much it would take to kill somebody.”