Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (15 page)

She later admitted that she had become more and more attracted to Roland Pitre. They began to see each other regularly. Although he later denied they had a sexual relationship, Beth admitted that they did. Beyond her infatuation with him, Beth turned to Roland with
her
problems. She owned a large house, but as a single woman, her finances became a problem. She’d had no idea how much it cost to maintain a house: mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, general upkeep. Without her estranged husband’s help, Beth soon found herself wallowing in debt.

She counted on Roland’s considerable wisdom to help her with her financial quandary. He promised her that everything would be all right. She didn’t even consider one of his suggestions, thinking that he could not be serious even though she was aware of at least part of his criminal past. After they discussed her marital problems, he suggested that he could arrange for her estranged husband to be killed.

“How much insurance does he have?” Roland asked her bluntly.

“I don’t know,” she answered, hesitantly. “Maybe $100,000 or $150,000.”

“Well…”

That conversational thread ended abruptly. Beth would never dream of having her husband hurt or killed. Besides, she figured Roland hadn’t really meant it. He must have been making a bad joke.

Sometime later, Roland suggested that she consider renting out part of her house. That would bring in income, and she agreed it was a feasible possibility.

He told Beth that he knew of “an individual” who was looking for what Roland called “a safe house” for about six weeks.

“You can make $3,000 in rent in that short a time,” he promised her, and he calmed her fears that having a complete stranger with some kind of secret in her house might be dangerous. “It’s perfectly safe,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t do anything to place you in danger—you know that—and I don’t see that you have any other choice right now.”

Beth Bixler nodded hesitantly. Everything was happening so fast. It had been such a short time since she was a happily married, churchgoing young wife. Now she was with another man, and neither of them was officially divorced.

But she did depend on Roland Pitre. She totally believed in him, unknowingly stepping into the next vacancy in a long line of women who had felt the same way only to regret it mightily later.

Roland had a plan for Beth Bixler.

March 1993

Tim Nash
drew his first easy breath in a long time when he realized that his mother was serious this time when she kicked Roland out and filed for divorce. Even though his stepfather still came by the house to visit with André and Bébé, Tim could make himself scarce and avoid him. To have his mother believe in him again meant a lot to Tim, and he began to regain a lot of his self-respect.

The next step up a ladder of disturbing events in the Pitre family took place at a time when crime is usually at an ebb. It was a rainy Sunday evening, March 21, 1993—the first day of spring—when a Bremerton Police radio operator received a call from a man who sounded hysterical. It took a while for the dispatcher to understand his words. He was able to make out the address and understood that there was a burglary or robbery going on there, but not much else. The call for help came in shortly before 8:30.

Officer Steve Emm was dispatched to the residence. There he found a young male who was still unable to control his emotions. In fact, he looked scared to death. Patiently, Emm got the complainant to calm down to a point where he could get information from him.

He said his name was Tim Nash and that he lived there with his mother and a younger stepbrother and stepsister. His older sister had moved out, and so had his stepfather.

Tim had a bizarre story to tell. He was all alone in the house when he received a phone call about half an hour earlier from a woman who called him by name. From background noises, it seemed to him that the call was coming from a phone booth. The woman sounded young and incredibly sexy. He thought it might have been some girl he knew at high school making a prank phone call.

“She asked me if I knew who she was, and I said no, but she seemed to know who I was,” Tim told Emm. “She was kind of flirting with me and teasing me and making me guess her name. She finally said if I really wanted to find out about her I should come up to the Pancake House and meet her. So I said I would.”

Tim said that the restaurant wasn’t far away. Tantalized, he hopped on his motor scooter and rode to the Pancake House. He checked out the restaurant for familiar faces, expecting to spot some girl he knew. There weren’t many people in the place at the time, and he didn’t recognize anyone there. Nobody waved at him or signaled to him in any way.

Next, Tim checked out the parking lot for a vehicle he might recognize. But none of the cars parked there looked familiar. He waited for a while at the edge of the lot, thinking the woman must have called him from a phone booth located someplace else. He watched the area for five minutes or so, but no car pulled in.

Tim told the investigators that he figured he had fallen for some dumb practical joke, so he left and went back home.

He was sure he had armed their alarm system before he left and locked the front door. That was the rule in his family. Upon his return, he used his key to get back in and immediately disarmed the system.

What happened next is the stuff of most people’s nightmares. As he would explain first to Officers Emm and Bogen, who had pulled up just behind the first squad car, and the next day to Detective Lewis Olan, Tim said he’d had the eerie sense that he was not alone in the house. It was quiet enough, but he still felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure why.

Suddenly he heard a sound that seemed to be coming from his upstairs bedroom and recognized it as the slight rustling of venetian blinds. It was as if something or someone had just brushed against them. Of course, it could have been the wind.

His mother was working, as she always did on Sunday nights, and his stepsister and stepbrother, Bébé and André, were supposed to be having a visitation weekend with their father. There shouldn’t have been anyone else in the house.

Tim recalled that he tried to turn on the light on the staircase that led up to the bedroom landing, but it was burned out. He walked slowly up the stairs. When he got to the top, he pulled aside a curtain that covered his bedroom doorway and at the same time reached in to click on the light in his room.

That light didn’t go on, either. He went in anyway, wondering a little at the coincidence of two bulbs burning out at the same time.

“As I walked in,” he said, “a guy wearing a ski mask stepped out and stuck a rifle up against my throat.”

He froze, panicked, his heart beating loudly in his ears. Tim remembered that he looked into the dimness of his bedroom, lit only by a street light outside, and saw a second figure who also wore a mask. It was a woman. He couldn’t see her face, but she had full breasts that were obvious under her tight black pullover.

She mumbled something, and he instantly recognized her voice. It was the same woman who had called him and persuaded him to come to the Pancake House to meet her.

Although Tim didn’t know what was happening or who these wraithlike figures were, he believed he was in terrible danger and that the gun at his neck might go off at any moment. A scream burst from his throat. “Help! Help!” he called out frantically. “I’m being robbed.”

He had no reason to think that, but why else would anyone be hiding in his room? It was just the first thing that came to his mind. The Roslyn family owned a small apartment that was connected to their house at the first-floor level. He hoped desperately that the couple who lived there were home and would hear him. His house had a large window at the bottom of the stairs that offered a view right into one of the apartment’s windows. If he could manage to get downstairs and their drapes weren’t drawn, they would be able to see him.

No one responded at first to his screaming. And then one of the tenants shouted something. At least they were home and aware that he was in trouble. His knees buckled under him and he went limp, still calling out for help.

“Shut the fuck up,” the man in black growled.

“Shut up,” the woman hissed. “Just shut up.”

It was her all right. Tim couldn’t mistake that voice, but he had no idea who she was. The man ran down the stairs, but Tim, still lying on the floor, blocked the woman, so she nudged him aside and followed.

Unable to stand up because he was so frightened, the teenager prayed that they were leaving, but he expected them to come back upstairs and kill him.

He waited, the sound of his hoarse breathing seeming to fill the room. Then he realized that the house was silent. The two masked strangers appeared to be gone. Trembling, he made his way to a phone and called the Bremerton police emergency number. Next, he called his mother. She said she would come right home.

Then Tim grabbed a kitchen knife and put it his pocket. He locked all the doors and wedged a chair under the front doorknob. Although he doubted it would do any good, he reactivated the alarm system. It was odd. He had armed it when he left to meet the mysterious woman, but somehow she and the man had gotten in anyway without setting it off.

When Officer Emm arrived, he saw several faces peering out the window at him, trying to see who was knocking on the door. The neighbors had joined Tim. They were all frightened, but Tim was the most afraid since he was the only person who had actually encountered the strangers in black.

None of them knew who might have been in their house or why. They were not wealthy. They didn’t own anything worth a home-invasion burglary.

Emm and Bogen searched the house and checked the exterior doors. They found no sign of forced entry. Indeed, they couldn’t even be sure what the point of entry into the house was. They did discover why the lights on the stairs and in Tim’s room hadn’t responded when he hit the switch: someone had carefully unscrewed the bulbs.

They also found an empty gun case in Tim’s bedroom.

Della arrived home shortly after the police left. She was instantly suspicious. She had her own idea of who had attacked Tim. That was strengthened by Bébé’s call to Della from Beth Bixler’s house, where she was babysitting. The teenager was nervous because she kept getting phone calls. The caller hung up as soon as she answered. And she told Della that Roland phoned her late in the evening to tell her that he’d suffered a blackout and couldn’t remember what he had done for several hours. He had had blackouts and “spells” before, which he attributed to his stroke; nevertheless, Della found this sudden loss of memory a little too convenient.

Roland had been late picking Bébé up earlier in the day, arriving at noon rather than at 10:30 as he’d promised. They hadn’t spent very much time together. He told her then that he promised she would babysit for Beth Bixler’s children.

When Bébé got home late Sunday night, she found the house in an uproar. Of course, it wasn’t the first time she experienced some kind of emergency in her family. Over the years she had known any number of traumatic times: she witnessed her parents’ violent fights, her mother’s fear, her parents’ divorce, and her mother’s disappearance, which proved to be her kidnapping and murder. There was the theft of the family safe, the time her father said he’d been beaten so badly he had to go to the hospital, his fights with Tim, and all the times Della and Roland broke up.

Rather than becoming accustomed to unexpected events, it was natural that Bébé was sensitized to danger and particularly fearful. In the month since her father had been out of the house, it had been almost serene, at least compared with what it was like when he lived there.

Now everyone in his family tried to reassure Tim that he didn’t need to worry anymore. The police knew what had happened, the family was all together now (with the exception of Roland), and the doors were locked. Eventually Tim calmed down and Bébé headed upstairs.

She was startled to see that there were two carryall bags in Tim’s room. She recognized them. One belonged to her. It was a white canvas bag with “Slumberjack” printed on the side and her name written in pen in small letters. She had kept her old sleeping bag in it, but lately she used it to carry things to school. The other was a blue nylon bag with “Mum’s” embroidered on the side with red thread. It was a laundry bag from a local firm. Both bags had been around for a long time, a familiar sight in the household.

But Bébé had seen those bags earlier in the day, and they weren’t in her adoptive mother’s home at that time. They had been in Roland’s green van when he picked her up at noon. She was positive of that. Her dad’s van was cluttered with a whole bunch of stuff, and she had moved the bags out of the way to make room for her little brother, André, to sit down.

Now, here they were back in the house, in Tim’s bedroom. They were full of items, but she didn’t check to see what was inside. When Bébé told Della what she had found, Della called the police and asked that the officers return. “I want to report a suspect, too,” she said.

She told the police officers that her estranged husband, Roland, was quite capable of either committing or orchestrating a crime like burglarizing his family’s home and threatening her son. She also showed them the two bags, explaining that Bébé had seen those bags in Roland’s van earlier in the day. She believed that he must have brought them back into her house at the time her son was assaulted. He knew the alarm code, she said; she hadn’t bothered to change it. She allowed him to do his laundry in her house, and he still came to visit André. Still, even though she knew Roland to be a liar and a cheat, she hadn’t considered him a real danger to any of them. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Bogen and Emm took the suspect bags and logged them into evidence.

Bébé Pitre had a really bad feeling. Her father had acted out of character all day. After he picked her up at noon, he actually asked her how Tim was doing and made a number of positive comments about her stepbrother. He never said anything nice about Tim. She knew that her father and Tim hadn’t gotten along for years, and it was weird that all of a sudden her dad talked about Tim in such a solicitous and complimentary way.

“How’s Tim doing?” Roland had asked her. “I’d like to spend more time with him, sit down and talk with him and become pals.”

That caught her off guard. The two had hated each other for as far back as she could remember. Why was her father suddenly doing this about-face?

Bébé Pitre was 15, a very intelligent 15, and she was no longer the easily manipulated little girl who always did what her father wanted her to do. Questions kept popping up in her mind. She even began to explore her doubts about her mother’s murder. Cheryl Pitre’s death remained a mystery five years after it occurred, and Bébé could no longer deny her sixth sense that her father might have had something to do with it. She didn’t want that to be true. It was hard enough to have her mother gone. She didn’t even want to think that her father had done something as bad as that.

Secrets she had been forced to keep for a long time bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness, demanding that she tell someone. Part of her still loved her father, but she was afraid of him. After what had happened to Tim, they were all afraid of Roland and what he might do next.

Bébé made up her mind to tell the police investigators about her doubts.