Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (19 page)

He assumed that his telephone conversations with a number of people involved in what was to have been a smooth caper to kidnap Tim Nash would be private. He had a private phone line, but he never learned how investigators could put traps on phones, obtain phone company records, or trace calls made from inside jails and prisons. As it happened, neither Pitre nor the police expected that someone unconnected to his ambitious scheme might listen in on his calls.

A man named Wally Ersker* lived next door to the house Roland had moved to after Della kicked him out. Four years earlier, Ersker had purchased a set of Realistic brand walkie-talkies to use when he was hiking or camping with friends. They were fairly powerful—49.83 megahertz—and Ersker discovered that he could easily pick up phone conversations in the house next door to his. Technically, it was illegal to monitor someone else’s phone conversation, and some might well characterize Ersker as a busybody. Nevertheless, the conversations that came over his walkie-talkies were hard to ignore.

They were electrifying enough that Ersker felt he should report them to someone, especially after Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler were arrested. He called Detective Andy Oakley and repeated what he had heard back in February and March.

Ersker said he hadn’t recognized the voices he had heard at one
AM
on March 10, 1993. His ears perked up when he heard a discussion about leaving a van in a shopping mall parking lot with the keys in it in the hope that it would be stolen. In subsequent calls, he heard a man talking with a woman. They were discussing insurance fraud and car theft, getting a key to a side door somewhere, and obtaining a gun.

By this time, Ersker thought he knew the man’s voice. It was that of his new neighbor, Roland Pitre. Pitre kept talking about someone named Tim, who was “screwing him over.”

Apparently, this Tim would be sending postcards from his travels for a couple of weeks. The female voice reminded Pitre that they would have to take the tape off Tim’s eyes so he could sign the cards.

“We’ll have to disguise our voices around him,” Pitre warned her.

The planning went on. Ersker wasn’t sure what they meant to do, but it sounded pretty suspicious. The voice he was sure was Pitre’s said that Tim would be sleeping upstairs. He said that he knew the code to the alarm system, and he and the woman talked a little about deactivating the system.

Wally Ersker took to watching Pitre’s rental house to see if there was any strange activity over there. “About 3:00
PM
on March 21,” he told Oakley, “I saw Roland Pitre breaking out the passenger side wing window on a maroon van. Then he swept all the broken glass from the sidewalk.”

Two hours later, as he listened on his walkie-talkies, Ersker heard a man named Bud start making collect phone calls to Roland. The calls were coming from the King County Jail. “This Bud guy was saying something about Roland taking the van and putting it on the Seattle–Bremerton ferry, and then Bud would have somebody pick it up and take it to Darrington, Washington, and hide it.”

Bud talked about a woman named Bobbi and said that a woman named Beth could use her car. The man calling from jail also asked if he was going to make any kind of profit for helping Roland. “He asked about jewelry, gold, rifles or handguns, or anything that Roland would give to him. Roland said he could get Tim’s school ring and give him that.”

It appeared to Ersker that something big was going down on the third Sunday in March because the calls were coming closer together. Bud’s next collect call to Pitre came in about 7:15
PM
. This time, it was a female who accepted the call, but it wasn’t the woman Ersker had come to recognize as Beth. There had been another call from the county jail at 8:10
PM
. The woman next door laughed as she told Bud that Roland was showing off his “fashions in basic black.”

He heard a male voice warn, “Don’t say nothing to her what’s happening.”

Without Beth Bixler’s confession, the myriad phone calls that Wally Ersker reported wouldn’t have made much sense. But her details made it all clear. Bud Halser was, of course, Roland’s friend who was to have been the co-kidnapper of Tim Nash. But Bud was stuck in jail in Seattle, so Beth had to help kidnap Tim. She had told Doug Wright that she had never met Bud but had talked to him on the phone on three occasions. She also heard Roland planning the crime with him during their phone calls.

Roland told her about a three-way call among himself, Bud, and Bud’s girlfriend, Bobbi. On the night of the kidnapping, Bobbi would be at Roland’s house, babysitting the 5-year-old André and also accepting collect calls from Bud. If anyone checked, phone records would prove that someone at Roland’s house—presumably Roland himself—had accepted collect calls at the exact time Tim was being kidnapped. That was to be Roland’s alibi.

“Roland told me that he and Bud had been planning for two and a half years to kidnap Tim,” Beth told Wright. “He said that they stole the safe as the first part of that plan. That was just to set up Tim.”

The van they used in the abortive kidnapping belonged to Beth. It was a year-old Chevy, and she was months behind in the payments. Bobbi, Bud’s girlfriend, was supposed to drive it away after they locked Tim up in Beth’s basement. But Bobbi lost her nerve, so, Beth said, she and Roland drove it up to Snohomish County, north of Seattle. With the wing window broken out, it would be easy for someone to steal it. It was probable that Pitre would then advise Beth to make an insurance claim so that her van would be paid off. She might even realize some profit.

On May 1, 1993, Bud Halser was charged with Willful Destruction of Insured Property. On June 15, his indictment was amended to include Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping in the First Degree. Halser, always before a willing participant in Roland Pitre’s schemes and his longtime close friend, no longer wanted to be associated with him. Through his lawyer, Halser petitioned to have the charges against him completely severed from any courtroom proceedings involving Pitre. Obviously, he had not participated in person in the clumsy kidnapping of Tim Nash; he was locked up tight in the King County Jail. As far as the theft of the Pitre family safe, Halser insisted that he was simply helping his good friend move a heavy item, much as any friend would help someone move. He said he had no idea the safe was stolen.

Roland was in a much more tenuous position than Bud. On September 9, 1993, faced with the multitudinous physical evidence and eyewitness testimony against him, Roland Pitre, who appeared to be fully restored to sanity, entered Alford Pleas to several charges against him before Judge Karlynn Haberly of the Kitsap County Superior Court. He was not admitting guilt: the Alford Plea mean that he was neither admitting nor denying guilt but that he believed he would be found guilty if his case went to trial.

There were indeed many charges against him, and Chris Casad, the prosecutor, intended to ask for exceptional sentences for each of them. Given Pitre’s record and that he had taken advantage of the very people who should have had reason to trust him—his own family—made his alleged crimes particularly egregious.

Still feeling confident, Roland Pitre took the Alford Plea in Count I: First Degree Burglary; Count II: Conspiracy to Commit First Degree Kidnapping and to further charges, many evolving from the theft of the family’s safe and its contents: Willful Destruction of Insured Property and Theft in the First Degree.

Sentencing would come later. In the meantime, Roland moved ahead to add luster to his reputation as a loving and caring man. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke about Cheryl Pitre’s murder to a presentence investigator, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Flint Police Department in Michigan. The investigator had been a detective sergeant before he retired to do private work. He had had ample opportunity over the years to study human nature. He found Roland Pitre an interesting challenge.

Roland said he felt he was being singled out and punished again because people suspected that he had killed his first wife. And that simply wasn’t true. “I didn’t kill her,” he sobbed. “I knew when she was murdered that I would be blamed for it. There’s a time in a person’s life when things like that can happen, and everything just goes downhill from then on. I knew I’d never get my nursing license after she died. I’ve never been able to recover from that or clear myself.”

Even though he had semi-confessed to the current charges and was awaiting sentencing, Roland continued to try to improve his image by doing his own PR. He readily agreed to speak with a reporter for the
Independent,
Port Orchard’s newspaper.

He had to share the front page with Beth Bixler, but Roland got more coverage. Beth helped the detectives after her first obviously false story of Tim’s kidnapping, and she was prepared to testify against him if he had gone to trial.

Because she had no prior record and because the investigators and the judge believed she was telling the truth, Beth had been sentenced to only four years in prison. With “good time,” she could hope to be back with her three children sooner than that.

Beth had lost her marriage, come close to bankruptcy, and was no longer a member in good standing of the Church of Abundant Life because of her obsession with Roland, but at least the Court gave her a break in her sentence.

“She was not the primary motivator behind the crime,” Chris Casad told a staff writer, Verina Palmer. “It was obviously thought up by Pitre.”

Roland Pitre, speaking in the Kitsap County Jail, told Verina Palmer that he was horrified at the prospect of receiving a twelve-year sentence, the exceptional sentence sought by the prosecutors Casad and Moran. That was unthinkable to a man who cried as he spoke of how much he truly loved his family.

Roland persisted in his version of what he considered a noncrime. He said that he saw himself as a hero, as only a simple man who tried his best to preserve his family. He had always been their protector, and he desperately needed to show them how very vulnerable they were without him.

To be sure they were all protected, Roland related that he often parked nearby and stared at their house, sometimes spending all night, his eyes burning from lack of sleep as he watched over them. He had to find some way to prove to Della that she needed him to come home. He had even fantasized about different ways he could rush into the house at just the right moment when they were having a problem or even foil a crime in progress. If a rapist or a voyeur threatened his vulnerable family, he would be the shining knight there to save them.

“I didn’t even have any certain crime I was saving my family from; I would just fantasize being there for the emergency, being there when I was needed.”

Maybe he felt this way because he hadn’t been able to save Cheryl, he said. “I’ve always felt totally responsible for Cheryl Pitre’s death. I feel that if we had not divorced she’d still be alive. I suppose I’ll feel that way ad infinitum. The guilt is overbearing [
sic
].”

Roland said he probably deserved to go to prison for the unsuccessful kidnapping of Tim, but he didn’t feel it should be for the twelve years that might lie ahead. “I was just trying to get back in my house to be part of a family.”

Roland made sure that the
Independent
’s reporter saw the results of a private polygraph he had taken on September 11.

John L. Ketchum administered the lie detector test to Roland, hooking him up to the usual leads: blood pressure, galvanic skin response, respiration, heart rate, pulse.

Pitre’s attorney conferred with Ketchum. They chose thirty-five questions, going back to 1980 when Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer was murdered in Oak Harbor. Ketchum asked the questions and watched the pens on the polygraph move along the chart.

To questions about whether he had known about Dennis Archer’s insurance policies, Pitre answered no. He also denied that he bought insurance on Bébé’s life when she was a toddler for any reason other than because he was preparing for a custody battle with Cheryl.