Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Read online

  He didn’t sell many used cars so Roland Pitre didn’t last long at Bay Ford. After he left, he found work here and there. He worked for a while stuffing envelopes for the Port Orchard Independent, a biweekly newspaper in Kitsap County. It paid only minimum wage, but it was something. Although he had never shown any interest in a medical career before, Roland looked into nursing courses at the University of Washington and Olympic Community College in Bremerton. He told Cheryl that in two years he could get a degree as a licensed practical nurse, which would open up many job opportunities. He started the interviewing and paperwork process, saying that he hoped eventually to be an RN. He didn’t feel that his criminal conviction was anyone’s business, so he didn’t mention it.

  As always, Roland’s charm with women helped him. Several supervisors reviewed his application and thought he would be ideal in the medical field, so he was not only admitted to the program but given a scholarship.

  Roland made plans to teach judo classes again, an enterprise in which he had always succeeded. In the meantime, Cheryl worked two jobs: days at Bay Ford, and on weekends and some evenings she clerked at PJ’s Market at Woods Road and Mile Hill Drive in Port Orchard. Sometimes when she worked the evening shift, then switched to days on Saturday and Sunday, she closed up PJ’s at eleven and returned to open the store before seven in the morning. She also did the books for her boss. Cheryl had once taught math and was adept at bookkeeping and business matters.

  With her careful budgeting and Roland’s growing clientele of judo students, the Pitres were able to purchase their first home. It was a triple-wide mobile home on Westway in Port Orchard. Although it was about twenty years old, it had been kept up by the previous owners. It had wall-to-wall dark shag carpeting. They furnished their new home with pieces they picked up at yard sales or at bargain prices. Roland saw that the detached garage would make a perfect studio for his self-defense classes. He would have his own dojo.

  “They looked like a normal suburban couple,” Greg Meakin remembers. “My wife and I were very friendly with them, and a lot of the young people who took judo lessons from Roland looked upon their place as a second home.”

  Roland had contacted the local YMCA to arrange for a space where students of the art could meet. Judo was an offshoot of the much more violent jujitsu. Judo was the creation of Jigoro Kano, who visualized the graceful and powerful body movements as a sport, a nonviolent one. Kano, who died in 1938, was the ultimate master of judo, a holder of the highest degree of black belt. Pitre told students that Kano had inspired him and claimed to have attended the Kodokan Institute in Japan, the Yale or Harvard of judo instruction.

  Pitre was very impressive and garnered a lot of attention in Kitsap County. The Port Orchard Independent published a two-page spread on his Port Orchard Judo Academy that featured photographs of Roland, his daughter Bébé, and several of his students.

  Among his students were two brothers who met Roland when he was working as a salesman at Bay Ford. He sold their parents a car and casually mentioned his classes to the boys. The teenagers had had some previous judo instruction and were excited about signing up at the Port Orchard Judo Academy.

  “We took the foot ferry between Bremerton and Port Orchard,” the younger brother, Isak Nelson,* remembers. “He was still teaching out of the Y at that point. Roland and Cheryl became like my family to me, even closer than my family for a while.”

  Isak was sixteen then, and Pitre rapidly became his hero. Looking back with the wisdom of an adult, he recalls things that didn’t quite add up, but he didn’t recognize deception at the time.

  “I remember that Roland asked me to stay after class the first night, or maybe it was the second night I was there. He said that he and Cheryl needed to talk with me. But it was Roland who did the talking. He said, ‘There’s something I want you to know about me. I want to be honest with you.’ ”

  Isak listened intently.

  “I’ve done time,” Pitre told him, “for stealing some money from a convenience store. I just wanted you to know so you can make up your mind about whether you still want to study with me.”

  Cheryl only nodded slightly as her husband explained his past to the teenager. It didn’t seem so bad to Isak, who admits that he himself was something of a heller as a teenager. He had had to perform community service for a scrape he’d gotten into. Roland’s honesty about being in prison only made him seem like a nicer guy to Isak. He didn’t need any time to decide that he would stay with the judo academy.

  “It was so rare for me to meet an adult that I could really talk to, who really seemed to understand me.”

  Isak and some of his other students helped Roland move mats into the garage. The dojo was a great place to hang out, to practice, to visit. “Classes were sporadic,” Isak says. “Sometimes, Cheryl and Bébé practiced when I was there, and sometimes Roland taught regular classes.”

  For Isak, Cheryl and Roland were the perfect substitute parents. He was always welcome. He thought of Bébé as a little sister, and often babysat for her.

  As for Cheryl, Isak recalls a wonderful woman. “She was just the nicest person you’d ever want to meet. She was so kind and giving. She taught me how to cook. When I had my first girlfriend, I brought her over for Cheryl’s approval.”

  Isak believed as the Meakins did. “From the outside, they looked very happy,” Greg said. “More so when Cheryl found out she was pregnant.”

  Cheryl didn’t appear to mind the rough pace of her life, even with a new baby on the way, two jobs, and the responsibility of putting her husband through college. Roland had finished his prenursing classes at the University of Washington, where he’d had to commute by ferry between Bremerton and the docks in downtown Seattle, an hour’s ride. It was easier to attend nursing classes at Olympic Community College in Bremerton. Cheryl was proud of him.

  Perhaps she was unaware that he had become quite friendly with a number of female nursing students. Women still liked Roland, and he played on that. He had been unfaithful with Maria, but that was in the past. If Roland talked about other women, Cheryl resisted suspicion; if they were going to make it, she had to trust him.

  Cheryl was delighted to be pregnant; she thought it would make her marriage more solid, and Roland seemed as happy as she was. He wanted a son. And she gave him one. In 1987, Cheryl gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named after his father. Just as he had nicknamed his daughter Bébé, a popular Cajun name, Roland gave his son a Cajun nickname. Everyone called him André.

  The Meakins’ older son, Tanner, took judo lessons from Roland, and he and Bébé were in the same class, wearing the traditional white pajama outfit and barefoot. They were working toward their yellow belts, the first level of achievement. They were too young to even have crushes on each other, but they were great pals. Bébé was a pretty little girl with straight blondish hair who could not pronounce her r’s.

  Although Bébé and her mother had of necessity formed a very strong bond in the years they were alone, the little girl seemed happy to have her dad back in the family, and she was thrilled to have a baby brother. Whenever they could find the time, Bébé and Cheryl watched NFL football games, an interest they had shared since Bébé was little more than a baby.

  Despite the odds against them and their chaotic history together, it looked as if Cheryl and Roland Pitre were going to make it after all. Many people who knew them were not aware of exactly what Roland had been to prison for. Seeing the clean-cut, athletic man who was so nice to his students, they couldn’t imagine that it had been anything very serious.

  Occasionally, though, even Isak had fleeting doubts about what Roland had confided to him. “One time we were practicing iaido; that’s the quick draw of removing the sword. I said something to Bébé about it, and she said, ‘Daddy’s not allowed to have swords anymore.’ I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded funny. Why wouldn’t he be allowed to have a sword? Just because he’d stolen a couple of things from a 7-Eleven?”

  But the teenager soon forgot his doubts.

  Isak remembers now that Cheryl was “subservient” to her husband. It was always Roland who made the decisions, but she didn’t seem to mind that. She was a plain woman who moved in the shadow of her far more dynamic husband. This Roland was almost the exact opposite of the failed used-car salesman. He was in his element, in charge of his life and the center of admiring attention.

  Roland drove to judo tournaments around the Northwest with his students. Isak recalls going to Spokane, a drive of more than three hundred miles from Port Orchard, and another time to Scio, Oregon. Greg Meakin’s son Tanner often went on the trips.

  “It was kind of funny, really, at one hotel we stayed at,” Isak says. “One weekend in Oregon, the hotel where we stayed had two groups on their reader board: the judo tournament and a transvestite drag queen convention. Roland and Dave, another guy from the dojo, went to the bar to have a drink, and Dave came back to me and said he needed help getting a drunk and combative Roland out of the bar. I was too young to even go in the bar, but somehow we got him out of there and onto the elevator.”

  Roland was very confrontational with three of the transvestites who were dressed in their full regalia with wigs and makeup. In the elevator, he turned around and tried to stare them down. Towering over him in their four-inch heels, they asked him what his problem was.

  “I have no problem,” he said. “You do.”

  “We got him off the elevator,” Isak recalls. “Without a fight.”

  Even though he was sometimes moody or surly, it didn’t really matter how Roland Pitre acted; his teenage students saw him as almost perfect. His skill and grace were unmatched by anyone they had ever seen. His marriage was happy and serene, and they loved to hang out in the Pitres’ mobile home. It wasn’t that their parents weren’t good to them; it was that Roland treated them like they were adults. He valued their opinions, and they were happy to help him with any chores he requested. They cleaned the dojo, folded the mats, carried groceries, and babysat for André.

  It was in the late spring and early summer of 1988 when the first narrow fissures snaked through the perfect marriage. The solid foundation of the Pitres’ home crumbled as Roland’s students watched, disbelieving.

  Just as observers had become absolutely convinced that Cheryl and Roland and their children were blessed, a faint shadow hovered over their happiness. Apparently the picture of health, Roland told Cheryl about some subtle symptoms that worried him. He said he’d been having strange rashes, slight episodes of fever, and growing fatigue.

  He had always been so strong, and he still looked healthy, but he told Cheryl he was afraid. After she questioned him closely, he finally admitted to her that he feared his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam might have predisposed him to cancer. He’d heard from other guys in his old unit who had it.

  It was only a week or two later when Roland sadly told Cheryl that he had been to a doctor. His fears were confirmed; at the age of 37, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As Cheryl started to cry, he vowed to fight it with everything he had. Still, he was very concerned about what Cheryl and their two children would do if he lost the fight. How could they survive if he died? Or—not nearly as likely—what would he do to care for Bébé and André if she should die? They were being shown how unpredictable life could be. He stressed that they had responsibilities, especially to their children.

  His arguments made sense to Cheryl, and she agreed that they should each take out an insurance policy for $125,000, naming the other as beneficiary. She suggested that he contact Frank Haberlach, a popular fixture in the Bremerton insurance business. Haberlach was a regular at the coffee hour in Cheryl’s office at Bay Ford.

  Cheryl wasn’t sure that Roland could even get insurance in his condition. He said at his age, no physical examination was required. He told her that their policies with the Lutheran Brotherhood Company in Minneapolis would go into effect in June 1988. Whether Roland ever got a policy on himself is unclear.

  When one looks at the insurance transactions Roland arranged, there is a jarring note. Was he really dying? If he ever actually served in Vietnam, it isn’t documented. No one who knew him in the Marines can validate it. According to his Marine friends, he was deployed to the Philippines and Japan, never to Vietnam. But then he was assigned to secret spy missions, so it was possible.

  Despite his supposed terminal illness, Roland kept going to nursing school and continued to teach his judo classes. He didn’t look or act sick. Cheryl watched him anxiously, waiting for the more serious symptoms that surely must come.

  But they never did, and she was grateful that her prayers had been answered. Their marriage, however, was ailing. Although it had only been two years since she helped him get out of prison, and he had his own dojo, his college studies, a baby son, and a wife who worked constantly to help support him, Roland was restless. He had always planned to live better than they were living. The mobile home wasn’t his idea of luxury, and Cheryl had put on some weight after her pregnancy with André. She no longer satisfied him.

  He wanted to be rich, he wanted excitement, and he wanted, as always, more sexual adventures than he could find in a monogamous marriage.

  Cheryl could no longer deny that Roland was cheating on her. He had far too many women in his life for a faithful married man. At first she had tried to believe that he was making friends with women because he was one of the few males in the nursing classes he attended. But she knew in her heart that he hadn’t really changed at all. When she questioned him, he made excuses. Then by full summer he didn’t even bother to explain why he came home late or why he was at local restaurants with women.

  She was heartsick as she wondered if she had only been expedient for him, only a vehicle to facilitate his way out of prison. Still, whatever doubts she had, she kept them to herself, hoping he would come back to her. But even Isak, who had come to idolize Roland, had begun to notice an undercurrent that made him uneasy. “Something seemed awkward, wrong somehow. But I was too young to figure it out.”

  Isak noticed that Roland and Cheryl were having fights. “They were verbal—not physical—and they were very mild, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no! Like Mom and Dad are having a fight again.’ ”

  Their arguments became more frequent, and it wasn’t nearly as much fun at their house.

  7

  1988

  Despite all she had done to stand beside Roland to give him a second chance, Cheryl realized that her marriage was the same sham it had always been, a facade that he no longer needed. He had at least one girlfriend he met in nursing school. Cheryl confronted him, and they fought about it openly. Their relationship was stormy. Increasingly, Cheryl caught Roland in lies. He had been so wonderful to her when he wrote from prison, and she had believed everything he told her. She had even been convinced that Roland was the innocent person in the Archer murder, set up as a patsy by Maria to serve time for something he had not done.

  Now she wondered about almost everything he said. Was it true or was it a lie? She learned that he didn’t have terminal cancer; he didn’t have cancer at all and never had. She was glad that he wasn’t dying because a big part of her still loved him, but she had to wonder why he hadn’t told her the truth. Maybe it was the insurance policies. He hadn’t needed to do that; she would have agreed to buy insurance.

  In midsummer 1988, Roland left Cheryl and moved in with his new mistress. There wasn’t even an interim period. His judo students helped him move his belongings to his new address.

  “I was still pretty naive,” Isak remembers. “When we carried stuff into her house for him, Roland introduced his girlfriend as ‘just a friend.’ It was like he was renting a room there, and we bought it. It didn’t really occur to us that he could leave Cheryl and move in with another woman.”

  She was a fairly attractive woman with blond hair and a good figure. Her name was Della Roslyn,* and she was 39, five years older than Cheryl. Just as Cheryl suspected, Roland had met Della when they were fellow students in the nursing program at Olympic Community College. Della had two children from a former marriage, a daughter, Amy Nash,* 17, and a son, Tim Nash,* 14. Della wasn’t prettier than Cheryl, but she seemed to contribute something to Roland’s life that his wife could not.

  It’s quite possible that Della was simply different, more of a challenge for a man who grew bored easily.

  Cheryl gave up their mobile home; there was no way she could keep up the payments without help from Roland. With Bébé and André, she moved into a small rambler house that was close to PJ’s. The street where they moved had been the scene of a violent crime only a year or so before; almost directly across from Cheryl’s rental, a teenager had shot and killed his father in an ambush, then set off to shoot his mother, too. Fortunately, he was captured before he could kill his mother.

  Cheryl wasn’t nervous, but she adopted a German shepherd and kept it in the yard, just in case there were prowlers. She had learned to live alone while Roland was in prison.

  Her marriage seemed to be over, but there was no true resolution of their relationship. Roland couldn’t quite make up his mind. He didn’t push for a divorce. He lived with Della, but he still saw Cheryl occasionally. They spent a weekend together in July on Vancover Island in Victoria, B.C., traveling in Cheryl’s 1984 Mercury Topaz. They went to the Washington State fair in Puyallup together in September. Roland often took Bébé and André on weekends. He wasn’t living with Cheryl, but he was good to their children, and he called her sporadically and talked about getting together, essentially being just kind enough to Cheryl to keep a little flicker of hope alive.

  But she knew that he wasn’t coming back to her, and she tried to embark on a social life of her own. At a friend’s suggestion, she joined Parents Without Partners. On Thursday, October 13, 1988, Cheryl attended a small group meeting in a home in Port Orchard. It took courage for her to do that. She had no sponsor or friend to go with her. There were six women and three men at the PWP meeting, and they spent the evening drinking coffee and eating the desserts some of the women brought. As far as anyone can recall, Cheryl didn’t make dates with any of the men who attended.