Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  There was one odd note that long night: Roland Pitre, who identified himself as a close family friend, made three visits to the Archer home, each time demanding to see Maria, insisting that she needed his emotional support. But Maria declined to see him until, at last angered by his continual prowlings by the house, she asked to confront him to tell him to go away. The detectives asked her not to do that. In fact, the Island County investigators were beginning to find Pitre’s presence highly suspect.

  His stubborn refusal to leave was so questionable that they arrested him. He was soon charged on suspicion of first-degree murder. Detective Edwards drew up an affidavit and obtained a search warrant for Roland Pitre’s apartment, a residence approximately seven miles from the Archer home. The search warrant also listed Pitre’s van.

  Their sweep of Pitre’s apartment unearthed one bizarre item: a spiky black wig. His van contained a duffel bag stenciled with the name “D. E. Woods.” Inside, they found only jeans and miscellaneous clothing. The duffel bag and its contents proved to have been reported as stolen by a D. E. Woods in a complaint filed three days before Dennis Archer was shot to death.

  Subsequent lab tests found no fiber, dirt, or grass matches between the crime scene itself and Pitre’s home and vehicles.

  For Detective Edwards, the father of small children whose wife was expecting another in November, the months ahead meant hours and hours of overtime, many trips across the country, and the wildest assortment of witnesses’ stories that any investigator had ever uncovered.

  Virtually none of the principals had told the absolute truth going in. It didn’t take Edwards long to find out about the seven-month affair between the widow Archer and Roland Pitre. Maria Archer willingly gave Edwards an hours-long taped interview a few days after the murder, an interview in which she freely admitted that she and Pitre had been emotionally and physically involved from November 1979 until April 1980. She told Edwards of her resolution to rebuild her marriage at that point and of Pitre’s seeming acceptance of her decision.

  More telling, she also admitted to Edwards that she had not in fact been with her friend Lola Sanchez on the Sunday evening her husband was killed. She had been at Roland Pitre’s apartment. “It didn’t have anything to do with anything—where I was—so I didn’t think it mattered.”

  By late June, when he returned from the East Coast with his little girl and his sister, Maria said Roland Pitre had changed dramatically in his attitude toward her. Where he had seemingly released her from all obligations to him, he suddenly began to cling to her like a drowning man. He didn’t seem to be able to handle anything by himself: raising his daughter, helping his sister, planning his life. Maria told Edwards that she was appalled to realize how weak Roland really was.

  He bombarded her with phone calls, begging her to come see him “just one more time…one more time.”

  He had become the very opposite of what attracted her in the first place. Scornful that a man could be so powerless, Maria told Edwards that she nevertheless felt she had to help Pitre with all his problems.

  She said she saw him in her regular judo classes between July 1 and July 13 and then he dropped in at her friend Lola’s one day when she was there. She agreed to have ice cream with Pitre and his sister one evening at his apartment. And she even invited his sister to her home for lunch one day. She wasn’t very surprised when Roland showed up too, and she had no choice but to let him join them. He then wangled an invitation to ride to Seattle with her to pick up costumes for the Spanish pageant on the pretext that his sister wanted to see the sights there. It was on that occasion, Maria believed, that he purchased a black wig, but she didn’t know what it was for.

  “What happened on that Sunday night, the thirteenth?” Edwards asked Maria.

  Maria deeply inhaled her cigarette’s smoke and recalled the last night of her husband’s life. She said Pitre called her that afternoon and pleaded with her to drop over in the evening to discuss his problems. She hadn’t really intended to go. She and Dennis had had a busy day: taking her children and their friends swimming, baking pizza for her family. She asked her son’s friend to spend the night, but his mother called to say that he had a doctor’s appointment early the next morning and that he’d better come home. So Maria had to deliver him there about eight. Then she visited with his mother, talking about the boys’ teacher and their school. Maria said she left and decided to drop in to see Roland, hoping that maybe she could finally get him straightened out so he wouldn’t be so fixated on her.

  “I am very independent,” she said proudly. “I never knew anyone could be so dependent.”

  When she arrived at Pitre’s apartment, she intended to stay only about twenty minutes. But she found him very anxious, and he said his sister was with friends for the evening. Maria said she meant to leave in plenty of time to get to the store to buy milk and bananas, but ended up talking with Pitre from about nine until eleven. She tried to explain to him that “responsibility is all around us—not just ourselves.”

  Edwards’s mind was calculating the time sequence of the murder with Maria’s story. While she said she was in Pitre’s apartment, talking for two hours, someone stealthily entered her house, locked her children in the basement darkroom, and shot her husband.

  Sergeant Edwards asked Maria the most cogent question: “Do you think Roland Pitre had anything to do with it [Archer’s murder]?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Putting the pieces together, I asked myself, ‘Why did he come back? How could anybody do that?’ ”

  Edwards wasn’t sure what she meant. “Why did who come back?” he asked himself. Did she mean, “Why did Pitre come back from the East Coast? Or why did he come back to her?” But she was talking freely, so he didn’t interrupt her.

  Maria stated vehemently that she wanted only the truth. “I just want one thing. I pray to God. I don’t want to think he had anything to do with it. I’ve studied psychology. I thought he was all right.”

  Maria seemed absolutely baffled that this man who showed such love for her, for her children, for all children, who seemed such a good person, could possibly be responsible for the death of her husband. And yet—and yet, he still loved her so much. She realized that he never really stopped adoring her, never accepted that she had totally gone back to her husband.

  It was clear that she was painting herself as a woman who loved her husband, who had no reason to want him dead, and at the same time describing Roland Pitre as a besotted man who might well have done anything to win her back.

  Ron Edwards interviewed a number of people who verified that Roland Pitre and Maria had been—at least for several months—a flaming duo. Jo and Mick Brock,* who categorized themselves as good friends of Pitre’s and more casual friends of Maria’s, had some electrifying information. Jo Brock said that before Dennis Archer returned from deployment, Maria had discussed her affair with Pitre.

  “She said she loved Roland and she was afraid Dennis would keep her children if she divorced him. I told her to keep her family together and not consider Roland’s feelings.”

  Jo Brock recalled that Roland begged her to call Maria and arrange a meeting between him and his lost love in the Brock home on the first or second of July and that this was after Dennis Archer returned from sea. “I did that, and they talked awhile in the living room and then went upstairs to our bedroom to talk for a couple of hours. When they came down, Maria rushed out and we could tell that Roland had been crying.”

  Jo Brock said her husband had helped Roland move on or about July 1 and that Mick had been terribly upset afterward. “I finally got him to tell me what was wrong. He said Roland told him that he and a friend of his from back home [New Orleans] were going to kill Dennis Archer and make it look like an accident. We went to our chaplain and told him about what Roland had said. That was on July 5. My husband tried to talk Roland out of it. He didn’t know if he’d succeeded or not, but Roland thanked him for his concern.”

  Jo Brock recall
ed that she had seen Roland Pitre three times on Sunday, July 13, the day Dennis was murdered. Roland lived only a half-block from the Brocks. He was “quite hyper” that day. “He came over around three to three-thirty, and he sat in the kitchen juggling brightly colored balls. He had dressed up like a clown the day before and juggled for the kids, and he promised to teach them how and to have a party for them. Then he came back at six to six-thirty and asked if his sister could spend the evening with us—because Maria was coming to see him and he wanted to talk to her alone. We liked his sister, so we said, ‘Sure,’ and she came over that evening about eight and stayed until eleven-thirty.”

  “You said you saw Roland Pitre three times that Sunday?” Edwards prodded.

  “Yes. Roland came over again at twelve-thirty, and he was so hyper that his hair was literally standing on end. He said he thought something had happened at Maria’s because he saw police cars there. He wanted me or Mick to drive over there with him. I was afraid of him. I thought he might hurt me or Mick—or maybe that other person he’d talked about would—but Mick went with him.”

  Of course, something had happened at the Archer home.

  Roland Pitre seemed to have had a motive for murder as old as the history of man: jealousy. Despite his later insistence that he and Maria had become only platonic friends, he had told others that he planned to kill Dennis Archer.

  Edwards discovered that a .357 Magnum gun belonging to a friend of Pitre’s had turned up missing after he’d had a visit from the judo expert. Pitre borrowed a truck from another serviceman on the day of the murder, a truck that turned up—inexplicably—at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) the morning after the murder. The parking ticket for that vehicle, from the machine at the airport gate, read “12:16 AM, July 14.” That was just after midnight on Monday morning.

  There were so many parts to this puzzle, and they were such extraneous fragments that they could not be forced to mesh into a working mold. Dennis Archer had been gunned down on July 13 between nine and eleven PM. During that exact time period, Maria Archer swore she was with Roland Pitre and that neither of them had left his apartment.

  If the two lovers had arranged Dennis’s murder and were telling the truth about being together, there had to be a third individual who had done the shooting. Was it the “friend from home” that Pitre told the Brocks about? Jo Brock had seen a dark-haired, mustached man wearing a blue plaid shirt walk away from a truck near Pitre’s apartment on Sunday afternoon. Even though he was a stranger, she felt she could identify him if she ever saw him again.

  Edwards looked for this mysterious man as the case became curiouser and curiouser. Roland Pitre’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly in jail. He mumbled about a killer named Targan who was responsible for Archer’s death, he constantly carried around a blanket that he said was his small daughter, and he urinated on himself. He appeared to be in a catatonic state. He was either crazy or was doing a very good job of pretending to be. When he grew even more disoriented, he was taken first to a local hospital, then transferred to the Western Washington State Hospital for observation.

  While Pitre babbled incoherently and pretended not to understand what psychiatrists were saying to him, the Island County sheriff’s investigators learned that a close friend had indeed visited him in Oak Harbor on the weekend of July 12 and 13. This was Steven Guidry, 26, another man of Cajun descent, who normally lived in Hanrahan, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Airline records confirmed that Roland Pitre had prepaid a round-trip plane ticket through a travel agency for one “Billy Evans” to travel coach from New Orleans to Seattle. Edwards found that this ticket was canceled and that Pitre wired money to Steven Guidry instead.

  A “Billy Evans” had been on a flight that arrived at Sea-Tac airport around noon on July 12 (Saturday) and had departed Sea-Tac for New Orleans on a seven AM flight on Monday, July 14.

  Having been declared sane at the Western Washington State Hospital, Pitre was returned to the Island County Jail. On July 21, he visited in jail with relatives, and then asked to speak to Captain Sharp. His statements at that time gave the Island County Prosecutor’s Office probable cause to arrest Steven Guidry on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of Dennis Archer. Sergeant Edwards flew to New Orleans and assisted in the arrest, bringing an apparently bewildered Guidry to jail on Whidbey Island.

  The second arrest hit the community by surprise. Then the thirty-four-page statement that Roland Pitre gave to Edwards on September 2 led to yet a third arrest, one that sent shock waves through the tight community. Maria Elena Archer was booked into jail on September 6 on murder charges.

  The sheriff’s office tried to maintain a tight lid on information about the murder, but rumors spread furiously. Still, the curious would have to wait for the trial before any of the actual statements made by witnesses and the principals were revealed. A change of venue from Island County to King County was granted and the Seattle courtroom was jam-packed as the trial for Maria Archer and Steven Guidry began in early December. Many of the “Islanders” had taken the ferry from Whidbey Island to the mainland to listen to testimony.

  It seemed ironic that Roland Pitre was not on trial. With his statements about the guilt of Maria, his lost love, and Steven Guidry, he had cleverly manipulated his plea bargain. He had been allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder in exchange for his testimony.

  If Pitre ever had been crazy, he had quickly recovered his wits and made sure he would do himself the most good. During the trial, Guidry was still in jail, but after spending several weeks in custody Maria was released on bail. She was free to come and go from the courtroom, to have lunch in downtown restaurants, and to mingle with trial observers in the marble hallways of the King County Courthouse.

  The twelve jurors and two alternates in Judge H. Joseph Coleman’s courtroom did not have an easy task before them. They would hear the three different and completely contradictory statements regarding the murder of Dennis Archer. Just about the only thing that the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, and the defendants agreed on was that Dennis Archer was dead, that he had been sent to his grave by three bullets in his chest.

  It was strange to see the two defendants in the courtroom. They were both small people who looked as if homicide would be completely alien to them. Steven Guidry sat at the far end of the L-shaped cluster formed by the two defense tables, next to his lawyer, Richard Hansen. Maria Archer sat three chairs away, beside her lawyer, Gil Mullen, a former Seattle police officer. During the three-week trial, Maria and Guidry never even glanced at each other.

  It was quite possible that they didn’t know each other, although the State contended they almost certainly knew about each other because of the plotting between Maria and Roland.

  David Thiele, the Island County prosecutor, presented the State’s case, and Sergeant Ron Edwards of the sheriff’s office assisted the prosecution, sitting close by Thiele to help with information on the details of his investigation.

  The first row of the gallery was reserved for the media. We were packed so tightly that we could barely scribble on our yellow legal pads. The second row was made up principally of friends and family of the victim and of Maria Archer. The rest of the long oak benches were up for grabs by a long line of spectators.

  The Archer-Guidry trial in 1980 was one of the very first in Washington where both television and still cameras were allowed into the courtroom, and cameramen from all major stations and newspapers in Washington took turns filming the proceedings. Maria, completely beautiful from any angle, was their chief subject. Sometimes it appeared that she was unaware of the cameras focused on her. Sometimes she seemed to pose for them.

  Roland Pitre, the former Marine Corps staff sergeant, the judo instructor, the admitted ex-lover of the female defendant, transfixed the crowd and had the jury’s full attention for four days as he laid out a story of passion and conspiracy to commit murder.

  Pitre maintained that
he had been totally in love with Maria and that it was she—not he—who had convinced him that the only way they could ever hope to marry was to have her husband killed.

  He testified that Maria was terrified that she would lose custody of her children if Dennis divorced her and that she couldn’t bear that. According to him, she begged and nagged him to help her until he finally agreed. “I was doing something that I didn’t want to do. I knew it was wrong,” Pitre earnestly told the jury.

  He described how the pressure from Maria to kill her husband built during the last days before Archer’s murder. “I felt I was losing my grip on things.” Pitre said he thought about seeing a psychiatrist and that he spent some time reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (a book then popular about a young woman institutionalized for schizophrenia). Try as he might, he testified, he was unable to stop the inexorable progress toward murder. He sighed as he said that he himself could not bear the thought of murder, but then he couldn’t stand to lose Maria, either.

  Pitre recalled that Maria had first brought up the matter of killing her husband a few weeks before the murder. They were making love on the floor of his apartment when she initially broached the idea after he asked her, “How can I really make you mine?” He told the jurors that she had answered quickly: “The only way I can really belong to you is if you kill Dennis.”

  He was shocked, he said sadly, to hear her say that.

  The witness said he tried at first to suggest the demise of Dennis Archer in a nonviolent way. Pitre admitted that he purchased three bottles of Sominex—an over-the-counter sleep aid—and gave them to Maria, hoping that she would believe they might poison her husband and therefore trust that he, Pitre, was sincere in helping her. That didn’t work. She told him he’d better find a more effective way to kill Dennis.

  Killing Dennis had to be a sure thing, not just something that would give him a stomachache or put him to sleep for a day. It needed to be death by gunshot or knifing or bludgeoning.