Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  But Roland Pitre didn’t marry his gorgeous girlfriend Deb, and he wasn’t faithful to her, either. He almost always had several women on the string at once. One of them may have been Cheryl, whom he eventually did marry. “We all traveled to Pennsylvania once,” a buddy recalls. “Pete had a girlfriend there, too, who was a student nurse. I’m not sure what her name was. Her family lived on a farm just outside Union City.”

  They had another pleasant visit in that small town close to Lake Erie. Roland Pitre never seemed to mind that his buddies knew that he cheated on his women. Indeed, he seemed proud of it and counted on them not to say the wrong thing.

  They also knew that Pete lied, but they suspected he did it to be funny, and he didn’t hurt any of them; his fibs and outright lies were often hilarious. Early on, his closest Marine friend had his doubts about Pitre’s truthfulness. They were assigned to the same training schools, beginning with seven months of avionics classes at a base just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Then they were transferred to the Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron 1 (VMCJ-1) for photo reconnaissance and electronic warfare operations at MCAS at Cherry Point, North Carolina. During their four months there, he and Pitre worked on two types of aircraft: the McDonnell Douglas RF-4B Phantom II and the Grumman Intruder. One of the planes was equipped to collect photographic intelligence; the other retrieved electronic intelligence and also jammed and garbled enemy radar. The young Marines worked principally on the jammers. Their training was given only to students with superior IQs and carried with it a lot of responsibility.

  Roland Pitre had keen native intelligence, although he had minimal formal schooling. He also had his rowdy and mischievous side. “Pete told me that he was working as a narc for the military police,” his buddy says. “He would go out and smoke dope with his ‘friends,’ and then he would turn them in. He told me once he borrowed a car from one of his doper buddies and drove it to the MP station, revealing a substantial stash of marijuana. He then told the dopers that the MPs and a drug dog had busted him at the main gate.”

  Pitre never appeared to have any pangs of conscience about narcing on his friends, and he certainly never felt guilty about betraying the women in his life. He was 19 or 20 and romance was a game of conquest to him; he wasn’t looking for any serious relationship.

  When they graduated from ALQ-76, the Cherry Point school, Roland and his closest friends became lance corporals, and they celebrated at a bar in Morehead City. They were next transferred to Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron 14 in El Toro, California.

  Seven of the highly trained Marines from Marine Corps Avionic School (MCAS) were soon notified that they had less than twenty-four hours to pack up and head overseas; they were ordered to travel in civilian clothing and board civilian airlines to Hiroshima, Japan. Once there, they changed into fatigue uniforms and flew in military aircraft to Cubi Point in the Philippines.

  While the Marines were stationed in the Philippines, Pitre—who ignored the venereal disease warnings in the movies they were required to watch—contracted a painful dose of gonorrhea. Because he’d bragged so much about his success with women, his buddies were merciless as they tormented him. “We’d follow him to the latrine when he’d go to relieve himself, and we’d wait outside so we could listen to him whimpering in pain. Naturally, we’d either imitate him or just laugh our butts off.”

  Eventually the penicillin shots he received kicked in, and Pitre recovered. He’d pulled so many practical jokes on the other guys in his unit that nobody really felt sorry for him.

  After that, Pitre slowed down on his dating by the numbers and became semimonogamous when he moved in with a Filipina whose nickname was “Baby.”

  “I particularly remember this,” his buddy says, “because when we finally got back to the States, Pete tried to get off-base housing by telling the Marines that he had gotten married to Baby while we were in the Philippines. When he told me he had gotten married, I wrote to her to find out if that was in fact the case. I remembered her address because I had visited the house on occasion while I was there: 550 Santa Rita. By this time, I knew not to take Pete at his word on anything.”

  Baby wrote back, telling him that she had never married Roland Pitre, had never even considered it. “When I showed her letter to Pete, he was the typical kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Silly grin. No explanation.”

  The two Marines stayed in the same unit, waiting in El Toro for their next assignment. After a few months, they were transferred to Iwakuni, Japan. “We both found places to live off base,” his long-ago friend says, noting that the base housing had two dozen men to a room “unless you were a sergeant. Pete was a regular at my house for parties or just to hang out. I don’t recall any serious scams or activities that Pete was involved in at this time, but he did get involved in the streaking craze. People said he streaked the BX [Base Exchange] as well as an on-base softball game.”

  Pete Pitre may have run naked around the Japanese base to show off; anyone who ever knew him really well commented that he was exceptionally well-endowed.

  The Marines were young men in their prime, all interested in having fun and partying. Although his buddy didn’t trust the man he called Pete to tell him the truth or to be there for anything that counted, he liked him well enough.

  In their off-duty hours, the young Marines threw parties. “We had a lot of parties at my place, so Pete spent a lot of time there, drinking, talking, just passing the time. Somewhere, I still have a tape of a time when Pete and I conspired to get another buddy of ours to sing a particularly risqué song. Of course, he didn’t know he was being recorded!”

  Roland Pitre had always had a short fuse, and he got in a little trouble when he punched a gunnery sergeant, but as always he talked his way out of big trouble. He did his job well in the Marines, and so he remained in the service even after some of his friends opted for civilian life. His best friend in the Corps was back at Cherry Point, awaiting his discharge, when Pitre came to see him.

  “Pete’s story was that he had been ordered back to the States to appear as a witness in a trial against some of his doper buddies. And, of course, he had to make it more interesting by telling me that someone had taken a shot at him—on base!”

  That was not even vaguely believable, but that was Roland Pitre, and all his friends knew it. He was a compulsive liar, but they were on to him. He wasn’t a bad guy; you just couldn’t believe what he said.

  No one who knew him in the seventies expected Pitre to do anything criminal. Years later, when one of the other men they had been with all through the Marine Corps years wrote to Pitre’s best friend to tell him that Pete had some “legal problems,” he didn’t believe it. “I thought he was pulling my leg.”

  The Pete he recalled was in his early twenties, a handsome guy who was a practical joker, at most a small-potatoes con man. Thirty years later, his closest service buddy, who has become a successful businessman, was stunned to learn all that happened to Roland Pitre Jr. after their paths diverged.

  “Pete was bright, well-spoken, and talented. He was fun to be around. He made things happen. He was tough—a brown belt in judo and a black belt in karate—when I knew him. We worked side by side almost every day for nearly two years. He was a good Marine—most of the time—and a good electronics technician. And funny!

  “When I think of what he could have accomplished and the life he could have had with just a little effort on his part, it depresses me.”

  6

  Kept from the outside world in the McNeil Island Penitentiary, Roland Pitre had plenty of time to formulate careful plans for his future. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps, of course, and he had no option of military service. He needed to make contacts that he thought would be helpful to him later.

  His letters from prison to Cheryl and their daughter, Bébé, were masterpieces of persuasion, if not outright brainwashing. He’d assured Cheryl again and again that he wanted only to rescue their marria
ge and help her raise their daughter. They could start a new life together if only he could be free to be with her.

  Cheryl took a huge chance. So they could be close to Roland, she left her family and the security they offered her as she and Bébé moved back to Washington in the mid-eighties. Now Cheryl could visit Roland in the McNeil Island prison. She found a tiny place to live near Bremerton, site of the huge Bremerton Naval Base. She immediately looked for a job and found one with a local car dealer, Bay Ford.

  Cheryl began to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist church and made friends. She was searching for the right church, and she read books and participated in Bible studies. Roland had been raised Catholic, but he hadn’t practiced that religion for a long time.

  One of the books that tremendously impressed Cheryl was a true story called They’re All Dead, Aren’t They? by Joy Swift. Swift wrote of her marriage to a man much older than she was and then becoming the mother of five, including three stepchildren, when she was still in her teens. Her family’s lives were soon marked by terrible violence. Swift and her husband lost his two sons and the two little girls they had together to a teenaged mass murderer. Less than a year later, Joy’s young stepdaughter died of cancer. Swift’s book was a gripping and inspiring story about her struggle to find faith in the wake of incredible personal disasters. After studying the beliefs of many religions, Joy Swift found her answers in the Seventh-Day Adventists’ doctrine.

  The book helped Cheryl believe that she, too, could turn the tragedies in her own life into triumphs.

  Cheryl had long since forgiven Roland for his affair with Maria. That was in the past. She also convinced herself that Roland would never have wanted to kill Maria’s husband. She felt that if he had anything to do with Dennis Archer’s death, it could only have been because he was hounded and manipulated into a situation that raged out of control. Cheryl blamed Maria. Now she was willing to wipe the slate clean and to look at her marriage as if it was just beginning. Somehow she would find a way to show the parole board in Washington that Roland wasn’t dangerous and that he deserved to be free.

  Cheryl Pitre was organized and precise, and she was a whiz at math. She rapidly became a very valuable employee in the office at Bay Ford. In a few weeks, she knew everything there was to know about car contracts, title searches, simple and compound interest. It wasn’t long before she was running the office and training new salesmen. Her bosses at Bay Ford were grateful to have her.

  Greg Meakin, who later worked at the car dealer for over a year, recalls that Cheryl taught him “about paperwork and financing. She helped everyone. Cheryl was like—well, sort of like your favorite teacher in grade school. She was nice to everyone.”

  And she was. It didn’t matter if it was the lot boy who washed the cars or one of the owners of Bay Ford, Cheryl went out of her way to help people.

  Meakin remembers that it was obvious Cheryl didn’t spend money on clothes or makeup for herself. She wore stretch pants and bargain knit tops. The dealership was very much laid-back and casual, and nobody cared that she didn’t dress like a career woman.

  “She was poor as a church mouse, and she lived in this tiny little house down in Port Orchard,” Greg Meakin says. “She was pretty plain with long dark hair that had kind of a reddish tone to it,” Meakin says. “She was only about five feet three, and she was a little chubby. But she had a completely angelic demeanor and beautiful light-blue eyes. Everybody at Bay liked her.”

  Between her job and her church, Cheryl Pitre had any number of friends. Some of them worried about her devotion to her convict husband, although she was careful to avoid telling anyone but Greg exactly why Roland was in prison. She wanted him to have a true fresh start when he was paroled.

  Always seeing that Bébé had what she needed, Cheryl deprived herself of everything beyond necessities so that she could send Roland money for the prison canteen and put savings away for when he got out.

  The dealer where Cheryl worked looked like a business frozen in time since the fifties or sixties. Bay Ford was owned by longtime Bremerton residents who knew almost everyone in Kitsap County. The office and the smaller cubicle rooms where car deals were made was a gathering place for a lot of Bremerton businessmen, who stopped by for a cup of coffee or a cigarette break or just to talk. Cheryl sat behind a counter in the large open space at the top of the stairs. Her desk was close to that of Bonnie Arter and that of the automobile title clerk.

  Cheryl seemed always to be smiling, and customers and salesman alike enjoyed visiting with her. “She had a tremendous confidence in her own abilities,” Greg Meakin recalls. “She was completely trustworthy. She was fun-loving, and she had a great dry sense of humor, but there was a romantic in her, too.”

  Because she took the time to listen, people shared their troubles and secrets with Cheryl. She wasn’t a gossip and never betrayed their confidences. Meakin, who avoided talking about his personal life on the job, did talk to Cheryl. He had just proposed to his girlfriend—who lived on the other side of Puget Sound in the Federal Way area—and he was very happy that she had accepted, but he didn’t want to talk about it with all the Bay Ford staff. Greg told only Cheryl, knowing that she would never tell anyone else.

  And Cheryl talked to him about Roland. She was hoping to get him a job at Bay when he got out. Like her other friends, Meakin was worried that she might be in for a disappointment. Roland’s track record for honesty and fidelity didn’t sound promising. But Cheryl’s optimism was pervasive. She was able to get a number of references from her church friends and prominent businessmen verifying that she had the reSources to help her husband adjust to the world outside prison.

  Her sincerity also came through to the Washington State Board of Prison Terms and Parole. She had established a good home and a solid place in the community and her church. She kept her small house spotless, and her credit record was excellent. And she had managed to arrange for a job for Roland at a branch of Bay Ford. He would start as a used-car salesman.

  Cheryl blossomed with happiness when she learned Roland was coming home at last. She started wearing makeup, and she splurged on a haircut and styling at a beauty parlor. Her fellow employees at Bay Ford noticed when she wore a new sapphire blue dress to an office party. She had bought it especially for Roland. She was determined to be so attractive to him that he would never stray again.

  On June 20, 1986, Cheryl waited for Roland when he walked through the gates of the McNeil Island prison. It was almost the first day of summer, and the sea air felt wonderful as they took the little ferry back to the mainland.

  Their little girl, Bébé, was 8 then, and she was thrilled to have her father back in her life.

  Roland Pitre was quietly paroled to his faithful wife after serving only six years of his thirty-five-year sentence. If there was any mention of his early release in the newspapers, it was only a short item in the back pages. Island County, where he was convicted of murder, was quite a distance away from Kitsap County, where he would be living. He settled into the Bremerton–Port Orchard area quickly. He went to work at the Subaru division of Bay Ford; Greg Meakin was his manager on the night shift.

  To his surprise, Meakin found Roland less than the dynamic, handsome man Cheryl had described to him. “The first time I saw Roland was when he came to me with a car deal he was trying to make. He looked like a fish out of water. I remember he was wearing a 1960s-style plaid sport jacket and a really wide tie. His hair was very short—sandy-colored—and he wore really thick glasses.”

  Meakin was struck by Pitre’s meek demeanor; he was nothing like the “killer convict” Greg had been worried about. “He spoke in a very soft voice, and he sure didn’t look like the judo expert I’d heard about. But it was easy to see the ‘sweet side’ of him that Cheryl had told me about.”

  Cheryl seemed very happy to have Roland back in her life, and they were having a great time. She had always been a practical joker, a trait that balanced her angelic side. With Roland to assist
in her elaborate plots, they often caught Cheryl’s fellow employees off guard.

  “She got me a couple of times,” Meakin remembers. “I was brand-new the first time. In walks Cheryl with this ‘cop.’ It was Ed MacNamara, who was a civil deputy for Kitsap County. He told me he had a search warrant for my office for ‘contraband from the other side of the water.’ I was floored and shocked. Ed started searching my desk and all around my office. Then he pulls out a little bag of what looked like cocaine! I have never used drugs, and I didn’t know how it got there.”

  While Meakin sputtered that he had never seen it before, he saw a big grin spread over Cheryl’s face.

  “April Fool!” she shouted, even though April was long past.

  Roland helped Cheryl with her most intricate gag. A customer who was gay appeared to be very attracted to Greg Meakin, who was now the finance manager for Bay Ford, and the other salesmen loved to tease him about it. Philip* always asked for Greg when he came in to look at cars, and he called often to ask Greg questions. Finally, he signed a contract for a new car, and Greg figured he’d seen the last of him.

  Apparently he hadn’t.

  “As the manager who closed the sales, I was the last one to talk to Philip,” Greg says, “I knew Philip had a boyfriend named Ronnie,* who was very jealous. And all of a sudden, I started getting these phone calls from Ronnie, and he wasn’t happy.”

  Meakin didn’t notice that Cheryl was peeking around his office door and listening to his end of the phone calls. “So finally this Ronnie calls me, and he’s mad. He said, ‘I hear you were with Philip, and I don’t like that. You’d better stay away from him—or you’ll be sorry.”

  Ronnie was a big guy, and this sounded like a serious threat. Then Meakin looked up to see Cheryl giggling. She laughed as she admitted that it wasn’t Philip’s lover on the phone at all, it was Roland pretending to be Ronnie. Meakin’s face was red as everyone in the office started to laugh, and then he laughed, too. None of Cheryl’s practical jokes were mean, but she and Roland made quite a pair with their ability to catch someone off guard.