Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (14 page)

Cheryl’s murder looked as though it might be headed for the cold-case files. It galled them, but there it was. If anything new turned up, they would of course check it out. But there were other homicides to work in Seattle and in Port Orchard. Nobody forgot Cheryl Pitre, the young mother who had fought so hard to have a happy family only to be savagely beaten to death.

Sadly, no one knew how long it would be before Cheryl would have some kind of justice.

1990–1993

Roland Pitre
moved swiftly on to his next marriage. He and Della Pitre graduated from Olympic College and applied for their registered nurse licenses. Della became an RN, but Roland ran into trouble. When the Washington State Nursing Board checked his background and found that he had been convicted of murder and a number of lesser crimes and that he “was a prime suspect in his ex-wife’s murder,” they denied him a nursing license. Della became the main financial support of the family, often working double shifts at Harrison Hospital in Bremerton and Tacoma General Hospital while Roland stayed home to take care of the children.

In a sense he contributed to the family income: Cheryl’s children, Bébé and André, received Social Security payments from their dead mother’s account. These payments went to their father, of course.

Later, Roland tried again to get a nursing license. With some sleight of hand, he apparently became a certified nursing assistant (CNA). He had learned not to use his own name, however. He used the identity and the Social Security number of his long-dead brother, Wade, who was only two when he died.

Roland’s marriage to Della was troubled from the beginning. Try as she might, Della couldn’t make Roland accept her son, Tim, or Tim accept Roland. They were always wrangling about something. Initially, she believed her new husband when he told her that Tim was sneaky, told lies, and stole things. She began to look at her son with suspicion.

Tim later recalled his mother’s marriage to Roland and their family life as “an absolute living hell.” His mother was always at work, and he felt that Roland was constantly criticizing him and making him look bad. In Roland’s eyes, nothing Tim did was right. André was only 3 and he could barely remember his mother, but Bébé, at 12, mourned for her mother and wanted to believe in her father. When he was nice, he was really fun to be around. But Bébé was also afraid of him; his temperament was volatile and she never knew how he was going to act. Sometimes he slapped her for no reason at all. Della was good to her, but Della wasn’t her real mother.

Della and Roland had frequent arguments, and they separated in October 1990. They hadn’t been married even a year. They got back together after several months, but there was no feeling of permanency in their family.

Roland eventually got a job as a CNA at a nursing home in Poulsbo, although Della still made about double the salary he did.

Frank Haberlach, the insurance agent who had sold Roland the policies back in 1988, stopped in at Bay Ford and spoke to Greg Meakin.

“He looked glum,” Meakin recalled. “He had this check from the insurance policy. He said, ‘It just kills me to give this to Pitre.’ He said it was one time he wasn’t happy to present a payoff…”

As it turned out, except for about ten thousand dollars—which he spent right away—the money didn’t go to Roland Pitre; it was put in a trust by the Court for Bébé and André to have when they were old enough to go to college. Cheryl had apparently realized that her husband wasn’t trustworthy with money and had taken steps to protect her children. André wasn’t old enough to know anything about trust funds. As Bébé grew older, her father told her repeatedly that the money wasn’t hers—it was his—and that she would have to sign it over to him as soon as she got it.

Roland played with Bébé’s mind a lot. He had always manipulated people around him; he was skilled at making them believe what he wanted them to believe. It didn’t matter to him whether they were strangers, friends, or members of his family. A little girl was an easy target.

Bébé was confused about the sequence of events on the night that her mother died. She and André were living with her mother, but her father had visitation rights every other week. “One week, he came to pick me up,” Bébé said, “and after that night, I never saw her again.”

Bébé recalled going skating on that Saturday afternoon, but the evening was hazy. She had been very tired and couldn’t remember staying up late to watch wrestling on TV with her father and Tim. That would have been around midnight or one. She was pretty sure that she watched only a few minutes of TV before she went to bed and was therefore sound asleep at that time, but her father had told her she should tell the police that she was watching TV with him all that time. And she had done what he told her to do.

But Bébé was a very bright girl. She had a vague feeling that it was her father who killed her mother or at least that he had had something to do with it.

While Roland’s judo students and her mother’s church friends believed that her parents had had a perfect marriage, she had seen the dark side. One night after André was born, she had wakened to the sound of her mother’s screams. She had tiptoed out of bed and seen her father holding her mother’s arms “real tight, and squeezing and shaking her.”

The next morning, her mother had big purplish bruises on her upper arms.

Bébé Pitre was about 13 when she met Bud Halser. He became a fixture around their house after he was released from prison. He and Roland were really good friends. She was told to call him Uncle Bud, although she didn’t think he was her real uncle. Bébé had long since learned to tiptoe around her father because she knew what he was capable of. She was afraid of him and knew that money meant everything to him.

On the night of July 14, 1991, while Della Roslyn was at the hospital working a night shift, Bébé was the only one at home when her father and Bud Halser drove up in Bud’s van. She watched as they removed a safe from a closet and carried it to the van. Tim came home unexpectedly, and Bud hid in the back of his van with the safe until Tim left.

Afraid of her father, Bébé never told anyone what she saw. All Della knew was that the safe had been stolen sometime between 6:30
PM
, when she left for work, and 7:40 the next morning, when she got home. Officer Moon of the Bremerton Police Department took the burglary report and noted that Della said their house had a security alarm that should have been activated that night. Moon was unable to find any sign of forced entry, and the Pitres’ next-door neighbors had neither seen nor heard anything unusual during the night.

Although the safe itself was arguably Roland’s possession, it was filled with sentimental items belonging to Della Roslyn Pitre: two dozen pieces of her jewelry and important documents. She was distraught when she realized that they were gone. She told Moon that she suspected her husband because they were once again on the brink of divorce.

Roland said he had no idea who might have taken the safe; he had been away from home the night it disappeared. He said he’d taken Bébé and André to Panther Lake at 7:30 and hadn’t returned until the next day. As he thought now about the contents of the safe, he recalled that there had been some of his own jewelry in a jewelry box inside it. He added seven items to the inventory that Della had made of twenty-five pieces of her jewelry. Not counting the sentimental value of family keepsakes, the loss of the contents of the safe—almost all of it Della’s property—was well over $10,000.

As he often had, Roland Pitre submitted yet another insurance claim, this time for the stolen safe, to the American States Insurance Company. He soon received payment in the amount of only $1,715. The company said that the policy did not cover jewelry. The check didn’t begin to cover the value of Della’s rings and necklaces or the sentimental value of the family mementos she had lost.

Two months later, on August 23, Roland went to the emergency room at Harrison Hospital to be treated for what he called “slashing cuts” he said he sustained when someone assaulted him. He wasn’t badly hurt. He told Greg Rawlins, a Bremerton policeman, and Gary Crane, a Mason County detective, that he had set up a meeting with “some people” he suspected of stealing his family’s safe by pretending he had drugs to trade for Della’s jewelry. He had packaged up some powdered sugar to make it look like cocaine.

“I met these four males who were driving a yellow car. They showed me a bag with some of our things in it,” he said. “I grabbed the bag and pulled it inside my van. But then I was either shot or hit with a club or something…”

Roland said he somehow managed to struggle free and drive himself to Harrison Hospital’s emergency room. He showed the investigators the bag he allegedly wrested from his mysterious attackers. He gave the police the bag of costume jewelry. They noted that it contained only the inexpensive pieces Della listed as missing.

In February 1992, Roland Pitre allegedly suffered a stroke, although he seemed to have no lingering effects beyond what he termed “seizures.” These often occurred when he was in the Social Security Administration offices, filling out forms to apply for Supplemental Social Security benefits. He claimed to be 100 percent disabled. He was so convincing that he received payments of $600 a month for his disability. Among the perks resulting from his stroke were license plates that allowed him to park in spots reserved for the disabled.

The once-powerful judo instructor and Marine Corps staff sergeant said he could no longer work as a CNA at the nursing home. Instead, he again enrolled as a full-time student at Olympic College, this time majoring in accounting.

With his marriage to Della crumbling, Roland turned to religion, or seemed to. He began to attend the Church of Abundant Life, a fundamentalist congregation. He became so devout that he even went to Bible study classes at the home of Duane and Beth Bixler,* a couple he met in church.

“Everyone in our group felt sorry for him,” Beth Bixler said. “He told us that he had been framed for murder and sent to prison for the death of his wife. And he was very unhappy in his current marriage.”

Again, Roland Pitre had shaded the truth, combining his earlier crimes and rearranging them to make his story better. He had
not
been convicted of murdering his wife; Cheryl’s murder case was still open and unsolved. He sensed—correctly—that the facts about the murder of his mistress’s husband wouldn’t garner as much sympathy if he told them that that was why he went to prison. To the naive churchgoers, his troubles seemed overwhelming. The tears is his eyes appeared genuine, the grief of a martyr. The Bible study group soon spent as much time discussing Roland’s misfortunes and trying to help him as they did examining Bible passages. “We were supposed to support and pray for each other,” Beth Bixler explained, “and in that particular environment everyone showed compassion and sympathy.”

No one in the congregation knew that Roland Pitre’s estranged wife, her children, and his own children lived in fear of what he might do next. He had always been able to morph from a seemingly meek man to a swaggering martial arts expert and then to a charismatic ladies’ man.

By February 1993, Della Pitre could see clear to the center of who her husband really was. She found herself in the same position that Cheryl was in when Roland cheated with Della. At first, Della believed him when he said her son Tim was the liar and had probably stolen their safe.

As she lost her trust in Roland, it slowly dawned on Della that her son was the innocent one and that she had made his life worse by doubting him. Although she couldn’t prove it, she suspected that Roland was behind the disappearance of the safe.

She also speculated that her husband was being unfaithful to her despite his protestations when she questioned him. Finally, Della asked Roland to move out of their home and filed for divorce. This time she meant it, and no amount of sweet talking from him changed her mind. His children remained with her; Della had adopted them, she loved them, and she feared for them if they were alone with Roland. By 1993, Della’s son Tim was 18, Bébé was 15, and André was 5. Although he had not lived with the family for a month, Roland came over often to visit his children, his eyes filling with tears as he tried to tell Della how lonesome he was without her.

He made a big show of being a concerned father, particularly when Bébé began to date. Her boyfriend, Mike, was just an awkward, “cocky, pretending to be invulnerable” kid, and their dates were innocent. “I was close to Bébé from September 1992 through June 1995,” Mike recalled. “After Roland’s separation from Della, he invited Bébé and me over for dinner. He made a very good manicotti and he entertained us with stories from his Marine Corps drill instructor days as I was considering [enlisting], which I did after graduating. After dinner, Bébé excused herself to go to the bathroom. Roland stepped right up in my face, playing the role of the all-American father, saying, ‘If you ever hurt my daughter, I will kill you, and believe me, I know
how.’

“I just looked him back in the eye and told him I would never hurt her.”

Mike remembered Roland as a man of contrasts, as one who desperately wanted the affection and loyalty of his family but was also quite willing to hurt them deeply. And, even though he had tried to intimidate Bébé’s young boyfriend, Roland came to his wrestling matches, taught him techniques, and cheered for him.

In truth, Roland was not heartbroken over the end of his second marriage, and he wasn’t lonely. He had someone to talk to. Beth Bixler, who along with her husband had been among his most sympathetic church friends, was there for him. The two began to meet outside of the Bible study meetings, and Beth didn’t bring her husband along. They consummated their passion on Valentine’s Day 1993. Della Pitre’s suspicions were accurate.

Not surprisingly, Beth’s marriage soon became shaky. By March 1993, she and Duane separated.