Worth More Dead and Other True Cases Page 8

  She was very busy as always, still working two jobs. If Roland didn’t have the children when she worked at PJ’s, Isak Nelson was glad to sit with them. She had moved to within easy walking distance of where he lived. He still admired Cheryl, and he felt sorry for her after Roland left her. He was beginning to see that his hero had feet of clay.

  The Port Orchard Judo Academy folded; Roland no longer had a place to hold classes. Where Roland had always been available to his students before, now they were rarely able to reach him, either by phone or in person. It was as if Roland had closed down one phase of his life and stepped through a door with a whole new cast of characters.

  The weekend of October 15 and 16 was typical for autumn in the Northwest. The sun shone brightly, but the nights were growing chilly. The vine maples were turning bright coral, and the big leaf maples soft yellow. The University of Washington Huskies had a game on Saturday, but Roland Pitre was far more interested in Sunday’s NFL game at the Kingdome in Seattle. The Seahawks were playing the New Orleans Saints. He told everyone he was going to root for his hometown team: the Saints.

  Roland had a visitation with Bébé and André on that weekend. The 10-year-old Bébé got along well with Della’s children. She was too young to really understand that her father and mother had broken up, and Della was nice to her. André was only a year old and wasn’t aware of much of anything.

  Cheryl was relieved to have Roland babysit with their children that weekend. She was scheduled to work on Saturday night until eleven, and then she had to start the Sunday day shift by seven. She wouldn’t have to worry about the kids. If they weren’t with Roland, he would pay Della’s daughter to babysit them. He told her he planned to take Bébé and Amy roller-skating on Saturday afternoon.

  Although it made Cheryl sad to see her husband with another woman, she agreed to have Roland pick up Bébé and André and take them to Della’s house on Friday evening, promising to pick them up after she finished work at PJ’s on Sunday afternoon.

  Cheryl worked until eleven Saturday night. A number of regular customers would remember chatting with her as she rang up their groceries. She sat in her usual spot, on a stool near the door. She had also talked with a young college woman, Nita Soames,* who was temporarily staying in her father’s apartment. The small unit shared space with the market, and its entry door was close to where Cheryl sat. Nita could sit on her couch and chat comfortably with Cheryl. She had come home shortly after ten, and she told Cheryl she was moving into a new apartment but didn’t have much furniture.

  “I have some things you could use,” Cheryl offered. “I’ll bring them to work with me tomorrow morning.” That was like Cheryl; she went out of her way to help people. She liked Nita.

  Nothing untoward happened at PJ’s that evening. As far as anyone could remember, Cheryl was dressed in her usual blue jeans, a blouse or a T-shirt, and she seemed to be in a good mood. She complained a little that she was going to have to “sleep fast” as she’d barely have time to get home, sleep, and come back to the store early the next morning.

  After she totaled the day’s sales, Cheryl put the receipts into the safe and called her boss. Nita locked the door on the east side of the building behind her. Cheryl drove off in her silver Topaz. Sometimes she stopped at the Subway sandwich shop to buy something for a late supper, but later, no one recalled if she had or not. The guy at the counter was new and didn’t know her.

  Nita recalled that Cheryl certainly hadn’t mentioned any plans to meet someone after work. “If she had a date, she would have told me.”

  Because it was late as she headed home and Cheryl’s neighbors were either out or asleep, there were no witnesses who could say if she had actually arrived at her little house safely.

  And Cheryl Pitre would be gone a long time before anyone ever saw her again.

  8

  Roland Pitre had no particular reason to check on his estranged wife. He was living with Della Roslyn. As far as Della remembered, October 15 and 16, 1988, was a normal weekend. She got up at five Saturday morning to study for a test in her nursing course at Olympic Community College. Roland awakened an hour later and left the house. “He wanted to photograph the sunrise,” she recalled.

  But the weather hadn’t cooperated, and the bright colors of dawn were obscured by low clouds. A few hours later, Roland called her to say that the battery on his car was dead, but he’d found someone to jump-start it. It was sometime between nine and ten when he arrived back at her house. As he had promised, he then took Amy and Bébé roller-skating for a few hours. They were all home by about four.

  None of them went out that night. Instead, Della, Roland, and their children watched television together until nine. Della was tired and went to bed, leaving Roland to play Monopoly with Bébé and Della’s son Tim.

  At 11:30, just about the time Cheryl Pitre drove away from PJ’s Market, Roland came up to the bedroom he shared with Della. Then he changed his mind and told Della he was going back downstairs to watch wrestling with Bébé and Tim. Della was positive that she saw Roland at 11:30, but he didn’t stay in the bedroom long.

  By the time Roland finally did come to bed, Della had dozed off. But she glanced at the clock as he reached out and turned her toward him. It was half an hour past midnight. They made love, and Della fell asleep again. She didn’t waken until about five. When she did, she saw that he was asleep beside her.

  Sometime during those dark hours, Cheryl had gone missing. No alarm was sounded until the next morning when she didn’t show up for work at PJ’s. Early customers found the doors locked.

  There are several routes between Port Orchard, Bremerton, and Seattle. Most commuters choose between a number of ferries. And it’s relatively easy to drive to Tacoma and around the many waterways that branch off from Puget Sound. Many travelers do drive around, and if it isn’t rush hour and there’s no traffic to fight, it’s a pleasant trip. But the ferry ride is more relaxing and scenic. As the seagull flies—or as the ferryboats cross Puget Sound and Elliott Bay—to downtown Seattle, only about ten miles separate the land masses. Both the ferries and the drive take about an hour.

  As close together as the east and west shores of Puget Sound look on a map, most Olympic Peninsula residents who don’t actually work in Seattle usually spend their lives in Bremerton and Port Orchard. Cheryl Pitre did; her world was the Ford dealer, PJ’s, and her church. It was a rare thing for her to leave.

  But on Sunday it appeared that she had left. She didn’t show up for work or to pick up her children or appear at any of the places she was expected to be. Not on Sunday. Or Monday—or any day after.

  Just as New York City has its Central Park, Seattle has its lakes. Lake Union is one of several lakes located providentially in the middle of the city of Seattle. The “Emerald City” is defined by water. Its vegetation is green and lush, both from the rain that falls in all but the warmest summer season and because it is bound on its eastern borders by Lake Washington and on the west by Elliott Bay. Lake Union begins just north of downtown and extends several miles to the Lake Washington Ship Canal near the University District. Its shore provides space and mooring for restaurants, Coast Guard ships, condominiums, tour boats and, especially, to scores of floating homes.

  The houseboat neighborhoods that became familiar in the movie Sleepless in Seattle line private docks that extend into Lake Union like charms on a necklace. Some are lavish and worth millions; others harken back to the early days when houseboats were mostly little square wood cabins kept afloat by logs.

  For nine months out of the year, flowers and vegetables flourish in containers on the docks and the houseboat porches. Residents in the most desirable end-of-the-dock locations can tie up their boats to their front porches. There is a feeling of security in the houseboat community. Everybody knows everyone else, and a stranger on the dock is carefully scrutinized. Neighbors know who belongs there, and they watch out for one another. It is a small town dropped into the middle of a big city
and a wonderful place to live except, perhaps, when a rare blizzard dumps a heavy snow load onto rooftops and some houseboats begin to sink. Even then, neighbors are there to shovel frantically.

  But this was not Cheryl Pitre’s world. As far as anyone knew, she had never visited anyone along the rows of houseboats on Fairview Avenue East.

  Cheryl’s fellow employees at Bay Ford were worried sick about her, and so were her coworkers at PJ’s Market. They had been worried since Sunday morning. When they called her house from the market, they got only Cheryl’s voice on her answering machine. As the days passed and Cheryl didn’t come to work at Bay Ford, they all had a sense of dread.

  Greg Meakin received a call from Roland Pitre at eleven on Monday morning. He sounded very concerned, “Greg,” he said, “have you seen Cheryl? She didn’t come home last night.”

  Greg hadn’t heard from Cheryl all weekend, and her regular post at the counter of the dealership looked empty without her.

  “I was instantly concerned,” Meakin recalls. “That wasn’t like Cheryl. I hate to say it, but right away several of our employees suspected that Roland had done something to her.”

  Ron Trogdon, a Kitsap County deputy, was dispatched to check Cheryl’s small house. From the exterior he could see no sign of a disturbance. Her car was gone, and the doors were locked.

  When Monday and Tuesday passed with no word from Cheryl, everyone who knew her feared the worst. Their one hope was that neither she nor her car had been located. There was always the possibility that she had finally had enough of Roland’s womanizing. It would be understandable; she had worked tirelessly to get him out of prison and continued to work while he went to nursing school only to have all her dreams explode. No one would have blamed her if she’d just opted out of her life and started driving, putting her disappointment behind her.

  Some of those who knew Cheryl had darker thoughts. She had been through so much disappointment in the year just past. If she had given in to depression, it was possible that she had committed suicide.

  “But that wasn’t Cheryl. We knew she wouldn’t leave her kids,” Greg Meakin said. “Not if she had a choice. That was what scared us the most.”

  Roland insisted that he had no idea where Cheryl might have gone, but he acted as if she wasn’t going to come home. He made arrangements for her family to come to Washington from Pennsylvania and take Bébé and André back home with them. He couldn’t go to college and be responsible for the children, too. Della’s days in nursing school were as full as his were.

  Cheryl had been gone four days by Wednesday, October 19, and no one had seen or heard from her. Then some men walking toward their motorboat moored near the houseboat docks along the 1600 block of Fairview Avenue East were startled to see a woman’s purse, a wallet, and some papers floating in the shallows of Lake Union. After they fished them out of the lake, they looked for a name or some ID.

  They saw that several items bore the name Cheryl Pitre. Her address showed that she lived in Port Orchard. They called the sheriff’s office and learned that Cheryl Pitre’s name was very familiar to Kitsap County sheriff’s detectives. She had been reported as a missing person in their jurisdiction, and this was the first solid information that they had received.

  Detectives Doug Hudson and Jim Harris went to the area where Cheryl’s purse had drifted in the lake. They didn’t really expect to find her there, but it was a place to start. Parking was at a premium along the narrow street; it was jammed with cars belonging to houseboat residents, visitors, and delivery people. The two men moved slowly north from the 1600 block to the 2200 block, looking for Cheryl’s 1984 Mercury Topaz. They doubted that her car would be there. If she had killed herself, it would likely have been by jumping off the University Bridge or the Aurora Bridge, and for that the drift pattern for her purse and wallet was all wrong; those soaring bridges were a long way away. If someone had killed Cheryl and had any cunning at all, he wouldn’t have left her car so close to her identifying belongings.

  As the Kitsap County detectives got closer to Pete’s Market and to a luxury condominium whose units were actually built on piers out over the water, they spotted a silver Topaz parked in a very dimly lighted area. The license plate read WHA-414. The plate frame said Port Orchard on the top and had the Bay Ford logo, too. There was no question that this was Cheryl’s vehicle.

  Hudson and Harris contacted the Seattle Police Department’s Harbor Unit and requested divers. Cheryl had been gone for almost ninety-six hours; they were afraid that her body might be caught up under a houseboat or one of the docks.

  The divers arrived and spent hours searching beneath the surface but found no body. It was possible that someone had encountered Cheryl in Port Orchard as she left PJ’s late Saturday night and had stolen her purse and her car. Alive or dead, she herself could be anywhere between Port Orchard and Lake Union.

  A cursory look into the car revealed nothing to indicate violence. The transmission was still in drive, which suggested that whoever had left the vehicle was in a hurry. There were no car keys.

  Sergeant Joe Sanford and Detective Hank Gruber from the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit responded to the Lake Union site and agreed to have Cheryl Pitre’s car taken to the Seattle department’s property room garage. It was too dark where the car had been abandoned to search for clues and, without the keys, difficult to check the trunk without damaging the vehicle. The lighting in the property/evidence area was far superior, and they would be less likely to miss something of evidentiary value.

  It was a matter of which department had jurisdiction. There was no body. If there had been a crime, it almost certainly had occurred on the other side of Puget Sound and would be a Kitsap County case. Cheryl’s vanishing was still officially a missing persons case, Kitsap County–Number 88-14014. Sergeant Sanford assured the detectives working it that the Seattle Homicide Unit would assist them in any way they could.

  At eleven PM the truck driver who had towed in Cheryl’s car called the Seattle detectives to let them know he had just impounded another vehicle a few parking spaces away from the silver Topaz.

  “It’s an old Ford van,” the driver said to Hank Gruber. “It’s got a Kitsap County Fire Department sticker on its windshield, and I know you’ve been looking for a woman missing from over there.”

  Shortly before midnight, Sanford and Gruber went to look at the van in the tow yard. They saw that it was dirty and full of litter: beer cans and garbage. It appeared that someone had been sleeping, possibly even living, in it. Beyond the fire department sticker, there were no other signs that it had any connection to Kitsap County. They ran the license number and the VIN (vehicle identification number) through computers, but there were no hits for the battered van. It wasn’t stolen or even listed as being registered.

  The silver Topaz remained in the property room until the Kitsap County sheriff’s detectives in Port Orchard decided to have it towed aboard a ferry and returned to the area where Cheryl Pitre had vanished. Sergeant Sanford and Detective Gruber conferred with Doug Hudson and Jim Harris, and the quartet decided the car should be checked out more thoroughly before it left the Seattle Police property room.

  Gruber, Doug Wright (another Kitsap County detective), and Jim Harris walked carefully around the car. It appeared to be well cared for, and they didn’t see any dents that might indicate it had been in an accident or forced off the road. Three of the tires were in good shape, but the right front tire was nearly bald.

  The car was unlocked, and Gruber opened it carefully and examined the interior. In the bright light, he could now see what looked like blood smears, long dried. There were dark brownish-red smears in and around the ignition slot, and on the inside of the driver’s door on the armrest, the door itself, and the latch. His trained eyes saw small spots of blood on the back of the driver’s seat and on the gearshift box between the front seats and tiny globules spattered in many locations on the driver’s side. Even the passenger seat’s seat bel
t retractor was bloody.

  The smears on the steering wheel might still hold fingerprints—that would be the best evidence possible—but Gruber doubted that clear ridges had survived.

  Other than the blood that appeared now in the glow of bright lights, the interior looked like the vehicle of any housewife. An infant’s car seat was attached as recommended to the rear seat, and there was a jumble of papers in the car. Between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, they found a single key on an orange fob. It was marked “Do Not Duplicate.” (Doug Wright and Jim Harris later established that this was a key to PJ’s Market.)

  The detectives said little as they moved around the Topaz, but they were all thinking the same thing. Something terrible must have happened to the missing 33-year-old woman, and it had probably begun as she sat behind the steering wheel.

  “We decided to pop the trunk forcibly,” Gruber remembers, “to see what else might have been left in the car.”

  Using a screwdriver and a hammer, Hank Gruber eased open the locked trunk lid. As it lifted, the four investigators were shocked. None of them had detected the odor of a decomposing body, so they weren’t prepared for the sight before them. A woman lay there, wedged in. They couldn’t see her face because it was covered by a paper bag and magazines and books—as if whoever had put her there didn’t want her dead eyes to look at him.