Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Page 16

  Mullen had questioned Roland about the details of his buying the insurance policies.

  “Okay. Now let’s talk about the times that you bought these policies. When did you buy those $20,000 policies?”

  “I got the first policy during the first or second week I was there in Pennsylvania [when he was picking tiny Bébé up for a visit to Washington in 1980].”

  “Before you thought of killing your daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the second $20,000 policy was purchased after you thought of killing your daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  It is almost impossible to contemplate what reading these transcripts must have been like for a teenager. Now Bébé admitted to the prosecution team that she had always been afraid of her father and that he had continually tried to draw her into whatever his scheme of the moment was, but she had been much too fearful to tell anyone, even her adoptive mother, who was also frightened. With Roland shut away in jail, Bébé made copies of the court transcripts where her own murder was contemplated and gave them to the prosecutors and the investigators.

  They didn’t disagree with her when she told them that she was finally convinced that her father had killed her mother. That was the very worst truth she had to accept. She had loved him so much, but his latest attack had been just another of his sinister schemes, this time to take away the only family she had left. His lies and manipulations were obvious.

  Della Roslyn Pitre talked to the investigators about her fear of Roland Pitre. He had been a very romantic boyfriend, but once they were married he soon became another person. She was shocked by the way he twisted the truth to suit his purposes. Her family had seen through him before she had—as families often do—but she had been bedazzled by him. That caused a rift between Della and her family, although she was working hard to mend it. Della had always enjoyed a good reputation, and she felt that her association with Roland had tainted her image and cost her promotions at work. Worst of all was how he had persuaded her to distrust her son. She regretted the pain that Tim had gone through and vowed to make it up to him if she could.

  Della knew her children were all suffering from post-traumatic stress. To be at home with them during nighttime hours, she resigned from her second-shift job at Tacoma General Hospital. She had been making about $70,000 a year; suddenly, her income had dropped to $24,000.

  Like Bébé, Della came to believe that Roland was behind Cheryl Pitre’s murder, even though she had been his main alibi witness. Five years earlier, he persuaded her that he had come to bed that Saturday night at almost exactly the time Cheryl locked up PJ’s Market and headed for home. She had had no reason to doubt Roland at the time, but now Della wasn’t so sure.

  Everyone in the Pitre house was sleeping, either in bed or in front of the TV set, between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM. Everyone but Roland. Roland told Della that it was 11:30 when he came to bed, but she hadn’t checked. It was an hour later when they made love. When Della awakened at five the next morning, he was there beside her. But had he really been there all night?

  Bébé knew that she hadn’t watched wrestling on television with her father that night because she had gotten so sleepy that she went to bed. But she was only 10 years old at the time, much too young to even understand what an alibi was.

  Now she did.

  20

  Beth Bixler had plenty of time to think about what a fool she had been. She was the one who had taken almost all of the risks. The only thing Roland had done was to finally agree to go into the house with her to grab his stepson. She had borrowed the gun, bought all the items Roland needed, made the phone calls to Tim. And, afterward, when everything had gone wrong, Roland ordered her to get rid of the ski masks, the gloves, and the rifle. He even talked her into going to the police and telling lies meant to remove all suspicion from him.

  Doug Wright asked Beth where she had disposed of the rifle and the other items. She told them, and their hearts sank. Anyone who thinks being a detective is all intrigue and excitement should know they often have to endure repugnant assignments that nobody would ever choose to perform. Beyond working a homicide crime scene with the corpse of the victim still present, searches for physical evidence too often lead them through garbage dumps or rat-infested hiding places under bridges and in sewers. Now the Bremerton and Kitsap County investigators had an even worse job ahead of them.

  It was almost dark on March 24 when Beth Bixler rode with Lewis Olan and Wright to a park near Port Ludlow, pointing out places where she had thrown away the ski masks and the two pairs of gloves worn during the abortive kidnapping.

  It was two when they found the women’s outhouses where Beth said she left the gloves and masks. They had come prepared—as much as they could be. “We had salmon-fishing poles with big hooks on them,” Wright recalled. “And we were there all night long, fishing through the sewage.”

  Using high-powered flashlights to see, they dug through the human waste, and the trash, and garbage cans. They found one black racer-type glove with a white stripe on it in the filthy muck of an outhouse. The glove was just as Beth described.

  The next morning, Olan, accompanied by Detectives Andy Oakley and D. Trudeau and Sergeant K. Long, returned to Port Ludlow to continue the search. After a long nauseating exploration in the privy, they found another glove, one of the brown gloves Beth wore when she purchased the bullets, greeting cards, and ski masks.

  Olan went to the rock breakwater that held back the surging waters of Puget Sound. There he gazed down into the water trying to make out what seemed to be a rifle. Luckily the tide was out, and he could see a Winchester-type .44 Magnun rifle. The butt portion was sticking out of about three inches of water.

  Beth Bixler’s house was located in Kitsap County, and Doug Wright and Jim Harris prepared to search it to see if the outrageous plan Beth had outlined to Wright was really true.

  “We went all out on that,” Wright remembers. “If there was evidence of that kidnapping plan in her house, we were going to find it.”

  Armed with a search warrant, the detectives swarmed over both Beth Bixler’s house and Roland Pitre’s green Ford Econoline van with its handicap license plate. They particularly wanted to inspect the basement bathroom to see if there really was a hidden holding room there. There was.

  The thought that a human being was to have been held in the near coffin-sized space was sobering. Had Tim Nash not managed to escape from Roland and Beth, he would have been imprisoned in this impossibly small, airless room, so tiny, it would make anyone claustrophobic. Gagged, Tim’s voice would almost certainly have failed to carry through the walls that Roland had covered with thick insulation. Tied to a chair, his ability to hear shut off by earplugs, probably blindfolded, Tim’s confinement would have been torturous.

  The detectives took dozens of photos that would be exhibits at Pitre’s trial. The pictures showed Beth Bixler’s basement, the holding cell itself, the insulation, earphones, earplugs, a knife and rope, and numerous receipts from Costco, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart for the purchase of tools and the lumber used to build the silent chamber in Beth’s basement.

  The Bremerton detectives found that Roland hadn’t even bothered to remove the leftover pieces of lumber from his van. There they also found the family records that had once been in the stolen safe, in good shape because for years they’d been kept in a plastic bag. The duct tape, cue cards, and ammunition certainly dovetailed with Beth Bixler’s description of the kidnapping she said Roland had planned.

  If there had ever been any romantic connection between Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler—and detectives believed there had—there no longer was one. Now they were both in jail, and Roland evinced shock that Beth had betrayed him. He insisted that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Yes, he had originally deceived her when he told her that they were going to “kidnap” Tim and hold him for ransom. And yes, he had built a holding cell for Tim in the basement of Beth’s house. But that
was all a false plot never meant to come to fruition

  “I never intended to go through with it,” he said. “I just wanted to scare my family. I just wanted to be around to foil the attempt so Della would feel the need to have me move back in the home to protect them.”

  He had wanted Della to understand the sense of loss that he felt when his marriage collapsed and he was banished to live alone.

  When detectives asked him about the theft of the safe, Roland finally admitted that he had taken it from Della’s house. “But I never received or cashed any insurance checks from that,” he claimed once more, not very convincingly.

  Trial dates for Roland Pitre were set and reset at the request of the defense for a delay.

  As he had done after he was arrested for the murder of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer on Whidbey Island thirteen years earlier, Roland Pitre apparently suffered a mental collapse and made a halfhearted suicide attempt in the Kitsap County Jail. Judge Karlynn Haberly asked for a mental evaluation by a psychologist from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. Dr. Gregg Gagliardi was appointed and met with Roland Pitre on April 8, 1993.

  This time, there was no “Targan,” the entity that Roland blamed for Archer’s death in 1980. When Gagliardi said that he would like to review reports of Pitre’s earlier breakdowns and his alleged stroke in 1991 and those of his outpatient counselor and the neurologist who verified the stroke’s effects to the Social Security Administration, Roland looked at him and said that he could not sign permission slips because he wasn’t Roland Pitre.

  “I’m Wade Pitre,” he said. “The records say I died when I was two, but I didn’t really die. I was in a coma, and I didn’t come out of it until 1988. You’ll have to ask Roland’s attorney to sign those permission slips for you.”

  Gagliardi stared at the man before him. Was he really looking at a dual personality, or was this a show put on just for him? He attempted to point out inconsistencies in Roland/Wade’s premise. “Wade” denied that he had ever been in the Marine Corps, even after Gagliardi pointed out the large Marine Corps tattoo on his upper left arm.

  He tended to think that Roland Pitre was malingering and that his performance was “exceedingly amateurish” and thoroughly unconvincing. Despite the prisoner’s refusal to let him access his earlier psychiatric records, there was plenty of information on him on file in the corrections system of the State of Washington.

  The psychologist knew the basics of Roland’s family history. There was no evidence of psychiatric disorder in any of his family members. Roland had always tested above average in IQ tests, and he had a stellar service record. He was a model inmate on McNeil Island. He’d done very well in college courses, both in prison and after he was paroled.

  But now Roland Pitre was acting psychotic. He seemed to know he was in Bremerton but thought the county was either “King” or “Kansas City.” He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember even three objects shown to him and couldn’t count backward by seven, yet in other intelligence tests Gagliardi gave him, Pitre scored slightly above average.

  On one test, Pitre scored in the bottom 0.007 percentile of the relevant adult population.

  “If the present mental status examination findings and test results were to be believed,” Dr. Gagliardi wrote, “it would indicate that Mr. Pitre is not only suffering from multiple personality disorder, but also that the alter personality, ‘Wade’ Pitre, is moderately mentally retarded or moderately demented.”

  But Gagliardi didn’t believe him for a minute. He’d talked to Pitre’s family and to Beth Bixler, and he believed the patient was faking. He mixed up his symptoms in ways that warred with what—or who—he was attempting to portray.

  The psychologist even doubted that Pitre had suffered a stroke that allegedly made him 100 percent disabled. There were no indications of it. He felt he was looking at a Class A imposter.

  One of the mental evaluations of Roland Pitre was available to Dr. Gagliardi. He read about the 1980 case and mentioned it in his 1993 report. “While undergoing a forensic mental evaluation pursuant to charges of Second Degree Murder, Mr. Pitre malingered symptoms of psychosis.”

  Dr. Gagliardi made the following DSM-III-R (the “bible” used by psychologists and psychiatrists) diagnoses:

  AXIS 1: 1) Malingering V65.20; 2) Alleged Adul Antisocial Behavior V71.01

  AXIS II Antisocial Personality Disorder, by history

  AXIS III Alleged Stroke resulting in 100% disability, March, 1991 (unconfirmed)

  These terms are meaningful to professionals in mental health. According to this summary, Roland Pitre was much like any number of felons who make headlines.

  Next, Dr. Gagliardi wrote a narrative that would hopefully help the Court decide what Roland Pitre’s sentence should be for the crimes where he had chosen to take the Alford Plea—which stipulated that he denied guilt, but believed he would be found guilty in a trial. Roland had every reason to hope that he would get a short sentence. Hadn’t he, after all, walked out of prison in only six years after his first conviction of murder? Surely, the simple theft of a safe and what he insisted was nothing more than a little scheme gone wrong wouldn’t bring him even that much prison time.

  Dr. Gagliardi was not of the same mind.

  Forensic Psychological Opinions:

  As the foregoing evaluation shows, Mr. Pitre is not suffering from a major mental disease or defect. Consequently, by statutory definition, he is competent to stand trial. Moreover, the available information suggests that at the time of the alleged burglary and the attempted kidnapping, Mr. Pitre was not suffering from symptoms of a mental disease or defect. The factual basis for my opinion is not only a clinical assessment of Mr. Pitre, but also the statements of witnesses (particularly Mrs. Beth Bixler) who knew the defendant well over a period of the alleged offenses. Since Mr. Pitre is not suffering from a major mental disease or defect, he would not qualify for an insanity defense.

  By state law, I am obliged to render an opinion regarding the defendant’s future dangerousness. If the information presented in the voluminous police discovery materials is, in fact, true, there can be little doubt that Mr. Pitre represents a particularly high risk of engaging in future felonious acts, jeopardizing public safety and security. If it is ultimately shown that Mr. Pitre did kill his first wife Cheryl, this, taken together with his past conviction for second-degree murder and the present allegations would indicate that Mr. Pitre is not only at high risk for engaging in future felonious offenses but also at high risk for engaging in future homicide. In view of the past allegations that the defendant is capable of engaging in extremely risky, self-injurious behavior as a means for achieving his personal goals, there is some risk that he could constitute a risk for harming himself in the Kitsap County Jail….

  Dr. Gagliardi was not sure that Roland would be a danger to himself, but he had certainly demonstrated he was a likely candidate to be a danger to others. He saw no reason to spend more time with Roland Pitre; it would only be a waste of the taxpayers’ money because Roland was playing games. He wasn’t cooperating, and he continued to pretend he was the resurrected Wade Pitre, not Roland Pitre at all.

  The long summer of 1993 crawled by, and detectives from several jurisdictions continued to add evidence to the case against Roland Pitre. He had tested mostly below normal with Dr. Gagliardi and well above normal in his scholastic venues and in prison. But despite all his planning and preparation to carry out crimes, he had always had a certain “klutziness” about him. Maybe he underestimated those who tracked him; maybe he was only careless.

  He assumed that his telephone conversations with a number of people involved in what was to have been a smooth caper to kidnap Tim Nash would be private. He had a private phone line, but he never learned how investigators could put traps on phones, obtain phone company records, or trace calls made from inside jails and prisons. As it happened, neither Pitre nor the police expected that someone unconnected to his ambitious sche
me might listen in on his calls.

  A man named Wally Ersker* lived next door to the house Roland had moved to after Della kicked him out. Four years earlier, Ersker had purchased a set of Realistic brand walkie-talkies to use when he was hiking or camping with friends. They were fairly powerful—49.83 megahertz—and Ersker discovered that he could easily pick up phone conversations in the house next door to his. Technically, it was illegal to monitor someone else’s phone conversation, and some might well characterize Ersker as a busybody. Nevertheless, the conversations that came over his walkie-talkies were hard to ignore.

  They were electrifying enough that Ersker felt he should report them to someone, especially after Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler were arrested. He called Detective Andy Oakley and repeated what he had heard back in February and March.

  Ersker said he hadn’t recognized the voices he had heard at one AM on March 10, 1993. His ears perked up when he heard a discussion about leaving a van in a shopping mall parking lot with the keys in it in the hope that it would be stolen. In subsequent calls, he heard a man talking with a woman. They were discussing insurance fraud and car theft, getting a key to a side door somewhere, and obtaining a gun.

  By this time, Ersker thought he knew the man’s voice. It was that of his new neighbor, Roland Pitre. Pitre kept talking about someone named Tim, who was “screwing him over.”

  Apparently, this Tim would be sending postcards from his travels for a couple of weeks. The female voice reminded Pitre that they would have to take the tape off Tim’s eyes so he could sign the cards.

  “We’ll have to disguise our voices around him,” Pitre warned her.

  The planning went on. Ersker wasn’t sure what they meant to do, but it sounded pretty suspicious. The voice he was sure was Pitre’s said that Tim would be sleeping upstairs. He said that he knew the code to the alarm system, and he and the woman talked a little about deactivating the system.