Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (11 page)

“She never got home at all,” Hank Gruber said. “And I don’t think she was conscious on the trip to Seattle where he, or they, left her car.”

A postmortem
examination of Cheryl Pitre’s body was set for 9:30 on Monday morning, October 24. Detectives Wright and Hudson from Kitsap County and Hank Gruber observed as Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Schmunk began.

“Autopsy” means, literally, “to see for one’s self.” Someone had intercepted Cheryl as she headed home ten days earlier, quite probably unaware of danger. The investigators were still unsure of how she had died.

Her jeans, blue T-shirt, and undergarments had been removed from her body, and so had the strapping tape that bound her hands behind her. Gruber noted that it did not resemble the tape he removed from Roland Pitre’s vehicle.

The critical wounds had all been to Cheryl’s head. There were many of them.

“This might have looked like a single, massive wound,” Dr. Schmunk said, “but there were multiple blows.”

There were no stab wounds and no indications that she had been shot. Someone had beaten her to death by striking her skull and face again and again. She might have been choked, too, but her neck area was decomposed so much that they could not be certain. The hyoid bone in the back of her throat was not cracked as it often is in cases of strangulation.

She had probably fought her killer; there were many bruises on her knees and legs. But she had not been raped, nor had she recently had intercourse.

A forensic technician collected a number of hairs from the victim’s hair and ear and pointed out the dirt that clung to her body. It was very fine and appeared to be either beach sand or the soil found on road shoulders.

That wasn’t much of a clue. Fine sand like that could be found in hundreds of locations in Kitsap County.

Harris, Hudson, Wright, and Gruber hoped that there might be something in Cheryl’s car that the killer had left behind. They would see that it was processed with the utmost care so that no minute bit of physical evidence would be lost.

Bill Haglund, the Chief Investigator of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, who had great expertise in forensic odontology, called them to say that six front teeth were missing from the victim’s jaw and asked them to search for them when they processed her car. Shortly after noon, the detectives met at the Seattle Police Processing Room with George Chan from the Western Washington Crime Lab, Don McDowell from the Photo Lab, and Donna West, an ID technician. They discussed the best way to process the Topaz. First they took blood swab samples for testing and cross-matching. Since the interior had many obvious blood smears, they hoped that there might be fingerprint ridges hidden in the swirls. To isolate fingerprints, Chan suggested that they use Super Glue to enhance any ridges but only after the inside of Cheryl’s car was photographed to preserve blood spatter patterns.

If Roland Pitre should emerge as the prime suspect, finding his fingerprints in blood would be tremendously valuable, absolutely irrefutable evidence that he had been present when Cheryl was dying. That would place him at the murder as it happened. Merely finding his fingerprints in Cheryl’s car wouldn’t help much. Intrafamily murders—when a family member kills another—are extremely difficult to prove. Obviously, their blood, sweat, hair, fibers, etc., will be found in their homes and their cars, and there is little a criminalist can do to mark the time this potential evidence was deposited. Historically, the best physical evidence to be found is a clear fingerprint with numerous matching points pressed into the life’s blood of a victim.

A button found in the trunk with Cheryl’s body might have been important, but it turned out to be from her own jacket. The detectives bagged possible evidence from the car. With a vacuum, Gruber carefully recovered hair, dirt, and fibers from the driver’s seat and floor, the passenger seat, the trunk liner, and the bed liner beneath it.

They removed a length of nylon rope, an orange throw rug, and miscellaneous items in a plastic bag near where the victim’s feet had rested: a first aid kit, a window scraper, paper towels.

When they removed the bottom liner of the trunk they found something interesting. The wire that led to the taillights on the driver’s side was completely free of its socket. Disconnected, neither the taillights nor the brake lights would have worked. Somehow, Cheryl Pitre might have either kicked the wire loose or managed to rip it free before her hands were taped behind her, probably in the vain hope that a police officer would pull her car over for a “no taillights” violation.

Sadly, on the Saturday night she disappeared, there hadn’t been a cop around to notice.

George Chan and Don McDowell began assessing the blood spatter patterns on the silver Topaz early the next morning. Chan noted two small indentations on the trunk’s opening frame between the hinges. He remarked that they appeared to have been made by a tire iron but could not say for sure. Mikrosil castings were made of the marks, and paint samples were removed from that area, too.

The rear bumper and the exterior of the trunk deck had been wiped clean, but a spray with leucomalachite green proved that a thin sheen of blood, invisible to the naked eye, remained, as it later proved to be in many areas inside the car.

The next morning, Hank Gruber assisted ID Technician Donna West in preparing Cheryl’s car for the Super Glue method. First, she dusted the exterior doors and the trunk lid with black fingerprint powder to ensure they wouldn’t accidentally destroy any prints as they moved in and out of the car.

Would they find any unidentified prints, perhaps unknowingly left by a stranger who had killed her? Even if they did, it might be several days before Donna West could have those prints transferred to a card and even longer to have prints of the victim and any suspects for comparison.

The Super Glue fumer was sealed into the Topaz at two
PM
on October 25. The fumes would make fingerprints appear as if they were stenciled on the car’s interior. Hank Gruber returned three hours later to remove it. Next, Donna West would do her part in lifting the prints that had surfaced.

They desperately needed either prints that matched known suspects’ prints or an eyewitness.

Still no one came forward with a story about seeing a woman struggling with someone, not in Kitsap County, not in Seattle. As unlikely as it seemed, whoever abducted Cheryl Pitre had done it without so much as raising any suspicion, silently and swiftly in the dark near midnight.

Chan turned to Hank Gruber to say what he believed had occurred. “I would say that the attack positively took place while the victim was actually inside the trunk,” he said. “Her head must have been above the height of the trunk opening when the blows were struck. She was probably in a semi-seated position with her feet extended to the driver’s side.”

But the driver’s seat had been in a far-forward position when the vehicle was found. Was it possible that Cheryl herself might have been forced to drive her car to the site where it was found, only to be bludgeoned there? The Seattle investigators searched for a female detective who was about the same height as Cheryl. Sara Springer was five feet four and half and about the same weight. She eased into the driver’s seat and said she felt “perfectly comfortable” there.

When a male detective who was five ten and a half tried the seat, he couldn’t fit; his legs were too long.

There were many questions they could not answer definitively. Either Cheryl herself or someone less than five feet five inches tall was the last driver of the Topaz. Or maybe someone had deliberately pushed the seat forward to leave that impression.

After the glue fuming, Donna West lifted twelve cards of prints, but she was not encouraged by the quality of those she isolated from the bloodstained area.

The investigators agreed that Cheryl Pitre had almost certainly been bound—but alive—when she was forced into the trunk of her car. How far she was taken before the trunk lid was opened and her killer had struck her fatally with the tire iron or some other implement would be impossible to establish unless they found witnesses. Maybe she was forced to get into the trunk at the houseboat docks.
Where
she was when she was put into the trunk was unknown. They suspected it might have been close to PJ’s Market. If they could somehow find that location, they might also find the victim’s six missing teeth and the spot where Cheryl’s stocking bottoms were shredded by gravel and rocks.

That was a very big
if.
Searches near PJ’s and around where her car was left yielded none of that information.

Cheryl’s funeral
was held in her church, and many of her friends were in attendance. Isak Nelson and his brother and some of the other regulars at the Port Orchard Judo Academy were there, as were, of course, most of her fellow employees at Bay Ford. So was Roland, who appeared to be stunned with grief.

“The pastor who conducted the service didn’t know Cheryl,” Isak recalled with some bitterness. “It was a horrible eulogy because he said he was just getting to know her. Maybe he was just awkward at choosing his words, but he kept describing Cheryl as a ‘comfortable’ person, comparing her to an ‘old shoe.’ She was easy to be with and she made you feel safe and accepted, but she was only in her thirties. She wasn’t an ‘old shoe’ at all.”

Roland came to the elder Nelsons’ house after the funeral service was over, something he rarely—if ever—had done before.

“He was crying real tears, and he appeared to be grief-stricken,” Isak remembers. “Roland talked at great length to my dad. He had all these theories of what might have happened to Cheryl. He said he’d found books in her house about how someone could change their identity. He said he’d told the police that a young kid had been stalking Cheryl and that the person following her was driving a white convertible.

“The thing was that I believed him at the time. I was in shock. You have to remember that I’d had to go to court to testify against these guys I knew who had shot their father not too long before Cheryl was killed. And they practically lived across the street from Cheryl. It was all too much for me to absorb at that age.

“Everything Roland said seemed plausible. He just kept spinning out these possibilities about Cheryl’s murder. He’d never talked that much to my dad before, but he stayed at our house for hours.”

Later, Isak Nelson wondered if Roland had been crying “crocodile tears” or if he were trying to foist suspicion onto someone else. It had never occurred to Isak, as it had to Cheryl’s coworkers at Bay Ford, that Roland could have hurt Cheryl. But then he had never imagined that the couple he admired so much would ever break up and talk about divorce, either.

Despite his mourning, Roland took care of business. As her beneficiary, he filed a claim with the insurance company that had issued Cheryl the $125,000 policy just a few months before, and he applied for Social Security survivors’ benefits for André and Bébé under Cheryl’s account.

The investigators
from Kitsap County and the Seattle Police Department continued to divide up the case. Officially now Cheryl’s murder was a Seattle case, 88-551006, because her body was found there. But they all suspected that her abduction and the initial attack had occurred near Port Orchard. She would have had no reason to drive to Seattle late at night.

Hank Gruber contacted Roland Pitre’s parole officer at the Washington State Department of Corrections. She had no trouble remembering him. Because his wife stood so firmly behind him and because he was a model prisoner, he had been released far sooner than most convicts with that long a sentence. His parole officer verified that he had first been enrolled at the University of Washington and had commuted there by ferry several times a week. The location near the houseboats where Cheryl’s car was parked was a few miles south of the university and only a block off Eastlake Avenue, a popular route for those who preferred to avoid the I-5 freeway. Roland would have been familiar with the area.

As standard procedure, Pitre’s parole officer had talked with a number of people he interacted with as a free man. She was surprised to hear one of the administrators at Olympic Community College rave about Roland. “She went way overboard in describing what a wonderful person he was and spoke of him almost as if he was the greatest student she had ever encountered. She helped him to become student body president and seemed entranced with him. I began to wonder if there was more going on than the usual student-teacher relationship.”

Although parolees are urged—sometimes ordered—not to spend time with other recently released prisoners, Roland Pitre had seen his prison friends and even returned to visit some of those still locked up. The parole officer furnished Gruber with the names and addresses of a half-dozen convicts and parolees Roland had associated with since he walked out of prison in 1986. Since there was still the suspicion that he had not acted alone in the murder of Dennis Archer in 1980, the Seattle detective wondered about his more recent felon friends. All of them had convictions for sexual crimes, some including rape. One man, Olaf Svenson,* had gone to prison for rape and “promoting a suicide.” He was reporting to a parole office in Olympia. The others were scattered from the south end of King County down to Vancouver, Washington.

Detectives located and talked to them about their whereabouts on the night of October 15.

On October 28, six detectives from three jurisdictions attended a summit meeting on Roland Pitre. Doug Wright, Jim Harris, and their Chief of Detectives, Dave Morgan, were there from Port Orchard; Hank Gruber and Joe Sanford represented Seattle; and Ron Edwards, who had investigated the Archer murder in Oak Harbor eight years before, gathered to discuss Pitre. Edwards brought the bulging file he’d put together on his case. He had certainly not expected Pitre to be walking free so soon.

Still frustrated by not knowing where the murder had taken place, all six returned to Lake Union, where they fanned out. It was a bright sunlit day and they covered every inch of the ground where Cheryl’s car ended up. They were looking for Cheryl Pitre’s six missing teeth. They didn’t find them. They got little satisfaction from gathering dirt samples from the lake bank and the parking area to save for possible comparisons down the road.

This killer had been clumsy and sloppy, leaving a welter of blood and dozens of smudged prints, and he should have been easy to track.

But he wasn’t.

On Halloween, Hank Gruber pored over Sea-King (Seattle police and King County sheriff) files looking for any entries for Roland and Cheryl Pitre and Roland’s new girlfriend, Della Roslyn. He hoped that he might find some link to the houseboat area. Seattle police records noted both complainants and suspects. He found absolutely nothing on any of the three, either in the city or in King County. Next, he ran the names of the parolees that Pitre’s parole officer provided. There was nothing to link any of them to the vital neighborhood. He checked their license numbers. No contact with the King County sheriff or the Seattle police. He couldn’t even find a parking ticket for any of them.

Gruber placed a phone call the next day to Roland Pitre. Della answered. She sounded suspicious and a little hostile at first. Reluctantly, she called Roland to the phone. Gruber asked him if they could arrange to get a full set of fingerprints from him. He agreed but said he would have to go through his attorney. His children were returning from the East Coast in a few days, he said, and he wanted to get into Cheryl’s house to remove some of her possessions he expected that they—and he—might need.

“I’m not the one who decides that,” Gruber said easily. “Over here, we’d seal that house up, but you’ll have to ask the detectives at Kitsap County.”

Sensing that Pitre was going to stall, Gruber called Ron Edwards in Island County and asked if they could send down a copy of Pitre’s prints.

What should have been easy continued to get more difficult. Detective Myrle Carner of the Seattle Police Crime Stopper program agreed to prepare a television announcement asking for help from the public. Someone had to have seen Cheryl or her car between Kitsap County and Lake Union. All it would take would be one sighting.

An ignition key was made for Cheryl’s car. The engine turned over immediately, and the fuel gauge showed that the gas tank was between one-half and two-thirds full.

There were no prints on the gas cap, none on the ignition. The Mikrosil tool marks test from the trunk were insufficient to identify exactly what had been used in the bludgeoning or its manufacturer. None of the forensic science evidence of the kind that was often truly helpful was panning out. Both the detectives and the criminalists came to the conclusion that the murderer knew that he or she had to be wary of leaving fingerprints; the prints that had been lifted showed patterns that were consistent with someone who wore rubber gloves. Anyone who wore rubber gloves to carry out an abduction and a murder had to have carefully planned it all out.

In the end, despite the dozens and dozens of items of possible physical evidence the detectives had gathered, they had to admit that they were out of luck. Hairs, fibers, blood, buttons, smeared prints, keys, papers, books, tool marks, rope, strapping tape, and more: all of it useless as far as bringing them any closer to the person who had so callously bludgeoned Cheryl Pitre.

The circumstantial evidence didn’t make them any more optimistic. If Della Roslyn was telling the truth, Roland Pitre could not have been the person Cheryl encountered as she left PJ’s on the last night of her life. Della and her teenage children and his 10-year-old daughter had apparently seen him all that Saturday evening and at the very time Cheryl was believed to have encountered her killer.

Doug Wright and Jim Harris had searched her home thoroughly. They found absolutely no indication that Cheryl had ever come home that night. Although none of her friends who had seen her while she worked at PJ’s remembered exactly what she was wearing that night, they agreed that it was jeans and a blouse or T-shirt of some sort. And that was what she was wearing when she was found: jeans and an aqua T-shirt.

Hank Gruber and his partner, Rudy Sutlovich, took another ferry ride to Port Orchard to confer with Harris and Wright, and they picked up evidence the Kitsap County detectives had preserved: Cheryl’s purse and its contents, dried out now; a knapsack that held papers and records connected to her job at Bay Ford; and the answering machine they took from her home. They rewound the machine and listened as it played all the messages left after Cheryl had reset it before leaving for work on Saturday, October 15. There were calls on Sunday morning from PJ’s, the manager and another clerk wondering why she hadn’t come to work. There was a call from Roland at about 6:30 that evening. Just as he told detectives, he phoned to ask Cheryl if she was going to pick up Bébé and André or if he should bring them home.

“If you’re not already on your way over,” his voice said, “give me a call.” He sounded calm; there was no hint of concern in his voice. Either he had no reason to be worried about Cheryl on Sunday evening or he wanted to leave that impression with anyone who might listen to his message after she disappeared

It was hard to tell.

Kitsap detective Doug Wright asked the local phone company for records of toll calls made from the phones belonging to Roland Pitre, Della Roslyn, and Cheryl Pitre.

They found two of particular interest: collect calls to Roland on October 15 at 10:23
PM
(fifteen minutes) and on October 18 at 7:52
PM
(seven minutes). They came from the prison on McNeil Island. The McNeil authorities were able to identify the numbers as having come from pay phones in the Olympic Hall cell area; which prisoner had made a particular call would be more difficult to determine. Records were kept, but it might take a long time to cross-reference the calls.

The next place to go for Doug Wright, Jim Harris, Hank Gruber, and Rudy Sutlovich—who had joined the investigation—was an intense scrutiny of the list of Roland Pitre’s associates inside and outside prison. They soon found that he was popular in both circles. If Roland hadn’t left his mistress’s bed on Saturday night, perhaps it was because he had already arranged for someone else to kill Cheryl. It was an awful thought, but with his history, it was possible.

Few of the people who knew Roland Pitre well in the late eighties found it strange that Roland could have been with Cheryl at the beginning of the summer and then moved in with Della without missing a step, acclimating smoothly to a different woman and different children. For most of his life, he lived parallel lives in the same time frame. He was a chameleon: the powerful and commanding judo instructor, the contrite prisoner who only wanted his wife back, the timid and ineffective used-car salesman, the charismatic nursing student, the good father who took the children in his life skating and played board games with them, the unfaithful husband, the sexual and sensitive lover, the schemer, and the charmer.

His friends and associates came from all walks of life, from the professional people who were benevolent to their fellow man to the lowest conniving and violent psychopath.

The latter seemed like the most fertile field for investigators to turn over. Roland Pitre’s friend and fellow convict, Bud Halser,* had been out of prison only briefly: from May 1986, when he was sent to a work-release program, to December 1987, when he was returned to prison. Halser and Pitre were housed in the Olympic Hall cell area for six months just before Roland won his parole. They had evidently been in touch for some time inside and outside of prison. In fact, Roland asked to visit Halser on September 22, a little more than three weeks before Cheryl was killed. That visit was denied by the prison.

Bud Halser could not have killed Cheryl; he was locked up tight on McNeil Island. But he might have served as an intermediary to connect Pitre to someone who was on the outside.

Although Halser had been in prison during the vital time period, Hank Gruber thought there still might be some connection to him. He learned that Halser’s sister, Sally, had occasionally visited Roland in prison. She lived in West Seattle. When he knocked at her door, she answered carrying a newborn baby boy. She would have been eight and a half months pregnant when Cheryl was killed, hardly in any condition to participate in either an abduction or a murder.

“I knew Cheryl and Roland,” she said. “But only because I went to McNeil to visit my brother, Bud.”

“You didn’t visit them in Port Orchard or Bremerton?” Gruber asked.

“I’ve never been to either of those towns.”

“When was the last time you saw Roland?”

“I never knew him well, so I was kind of surprised last June when he came by my house with his kids and asked me to go to lunch. I was busy and told him no. And then he called me in July or maybe early August. He said he just wanted to see how I was doing. That was the last time I ever talked to him.”

Sally Halser seemed truthful and eager to help the detectives, but she really didn’t know much about Roland Pitre or anyone else in Seattle he might know. She wasn’t sure if he had been coming on to her or if he was only genuinely concerned about her. But she had a boyfriend, and he had no reason to worry about her.

Gruber hooked up with Doug Wright again, and they went to McNeil Island to talk to Bud Halser. Halser realized right away that Hank Gruber was the detective who had talked to his sister. But the Seattle detective made small talk for about seven minutes until he explained that he and Wright were there investigating Cheryl Pitre’s murder.

Halser stood up so rapidly that he might have been stung by a bee. “I have nothing further to say to you,” he said gruffly. “I want to talk to my attorney.” And he stomped out of the interview room.

A few minutes later, he came back but only to request the detectives’ business cards to give to his lawyer. Gruber said that they might be back as the investigation was proceeding.

They had no shortage of suspects. And they still weren’t convinced that Roland Pitre and Bud Halser hadn’t figured out a way to bring someone who was on the outside in mid-October into a common plan.

As the holidays approached, the Pitre family underwent what might be called a reorganization. Christmas in 1987 had been happy for Cheryl; she and Roland had their new baby and a new house, and the future looked promising. Now Cheryl was dead and their children were almost three thousand miles away.