Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (21 page)
Read Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases Online
Authors: Ann Rule
Tags: #General, #Murder, #True Crime, #Social Science, #Health & Fitness, #Criminology, #Programming Languages, #Computers
Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee would be arraigned on February 2. Despite intensified security in the King County Courthouse, the chance of escape is always highest when prisoners are being transported.
Even though the secret witness said that Fred McKee had admitted abducting Cheryl from her home, strangling her, and then beating her to death as she lay unconscious in the trunk of her car, McKee pled not guilty to the charges that he had murdered her.
Roland Pitre was predictable. Once again, he accepted an Alford Plea. “I did not intend to cause her [Cheryl’s] death, but I believe a jury would find I did, given the evidence against me.”
This time he did not feign insanity or seizures or blackouts. Perhaps even he realized he had come to the end of the road.
He had never really been on trial for any of the crimes he had committed, always choosing to cop a plea instead of facing a jury. Although he testified against his mistress, Maria Archer, and his boyhood friend, Steven Guidry, twenty-four years earlier,
he
wasn’t the one on trial; he had already made his plea bargain and wasn’t risking anything.
Just as he preferred not to actually participate in the crimes he planned, he seemed intimidated by the idea of facing his accusers, a judge, a jury, and a courtroom full of spectators.
Roland Pitre always schemed to be a behind-the-scenes man. He was forced to join Beth Bixler to kidnap Tim because Bud Halser was in jail. Detectives believed that he had been there with McKee when Cheryl died, too. That tiny speck of blood on his glasses might have been the connection if it had happened ten years later, but the speck dissolved on the damp swab.
He may even have been the person who shot Dennis Archer in 1980.
In a way, proving any of these things didn’t matter. He was looking at a very, very long sentence.
2004
On March 11,
2004, Roland Pitre was led through the marble corridors of the King County Courthouse. He scarcely resembled the muscular young Marine whose high jinks and practical jokes once made his buddies laugh. Nor was he the slickly handsome judo instructor and ladies’ man he was on Whidbey Island and later in Port Orchard in his first years on parole from prison. Rather he looked like an old man, far older than his fifty-one years. He was balding on top, and the rest of his hair was graying. It was long and tangled, and he had a beard. Headed for Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas’s courtroom, Pitre wore the bright red coveralls of a high-risk prisoner, handcuffs, and leg shackles. He looked so scrawny next to the two husky corrections officers who flanked him that he seemed hardly a threat.
This man who had connived and schemed and planned to terrorize and kill the family who tried to love him no longer controlled anyone. He may not have expected to face the presence in the courtroom of those who had every right to judge him most derisively. But they were there. André was in high school, and Bébé was a brilliant law student. They had changed their names and moved on with their lives (their names have been changed in this book, too, to protect their privacy). Despite everything their father had done to them, despite losing their mother to murder, they were survivors who still needed the opportunity to face the man who had done so much to destroy the serenity of their childhood years, the man who had killed their mother.
Bébé was 25 now. She was a beautiful young woman, married, happy, and on her way to a successful career. Given an opportunity to speak, Bébé addressed Judge Kallas:
“I request [that] you sentence my father to the max sentence allowable under the law,” she said firmly, describing him as a “dangerous psychopath” who hurt people because he was ultimately greedy. She said he had selfishly decided that a $125,000 life insurance payoff was worth more than her mother’s life.
“My mother and I shared a tremendous bond of love, fun, and nurturing. I knew that I was her world.”
She turned toward her father, boring her eyes into him as he sat slope-shouldered, head averted, at the defense table. He would not look at her, but she continued to say the things she had held back for so many years.
“You are a dangerous psychopath who cannot be a member of society, because you kill those around you…to attempt to fulfill your monetary greed,” Bébé said, tears beginning to flow. She had sensed that her mother was never coming back. “I remember feeling this horrible rush on Saturday; I just knew…I think intuitively I just always had faith he would be brought to justice.”
She told her father that she had learned of his plans to kill her, too, so he could collect on the insurance policies he held on her life. “The pain of knowing that you wanted me dead is so deep inside that when I think about it, my heart hurts. All I ever wanted to do was please you and have you love me the way I loved you.
“What’s so sad is, I really thought I could get you to stop killing people, lying, stealing, and hurting people. For so many years, I wore this pain on my shoulders…. You have given me a lifetime of fear.”
André, 16, didn’t even remember his mother. At least Bébé had that to hold on to. He said he recalled only a punitive, angry father. He, too, turned to face the shrunken man in the red coveralls. “I came to you as a kid looking for comfort,” he told Roland Pitre, as others in the courtroom fought to hold back tears. “Instead, you beat me. I came for guidance; instead, you terrorized me.”
Della, Roland’s second wife, told him what she hoped for his future: “You have used and abused people all your life. I will never forgive you. Or myself, for bringing you into our home. I wish you loneliness and pain the rest of your life, and even that is too good. I wish you were dead.”
Undeterred, Roland Pitre chose to address the Court and those gathered there. He seemed to still believe that he could explain and temper the harshness of what he had done. He had always been able to use words effectively. He had taken the Alford Plea, he said, only to spare his family the ugliness of a trial. He recalled some nostalgic times with Cheryl, whom he claimed he had loved, and spoke of happy memories with Bébé and André. He apologized to his children and his ex-wife for the pain, fear, and embarrassment they had endured because of his actions.
“I’m a different person from the one you last saw,” he explained. “May the Lord smile on you and grant you peace.”
How different? In what way? The question begs an answer. Only a few months before, Roland Pitre had told Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon the same old tired story of his wish to be a knight on a white horse who would ride in and save André and Bébé’s mother, his wife who had done the best she could for him. But he had
forgotten
to rescue her.
He will have many years to ponder the new Roland Pitre. Perhaps he has seen the error of his ways, although it seems unlikely.
Judge Kallas sentenced him to forty years in prison. And those forty years will not even begin until he has completed serving the twelve years he still owes the state for his unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Tim Nash.
In fifty-two years, Roland Pitre will be 104 years old.
Seven months after Pitre was sentenced to life in prison, in October 2004, Frederick McKee stopped protesting that he had no guilty knowledge of Cheryl Pitre’s murder and pled guilty to second-degree murder. On November 19, 2004, Judge Robert Alsdorf of King County Superior Court sentenced him to twenty years in prison, four more years than the sixteen-year sentence the prosecutors recommended. He will be well into his seventies when he comes up for parole consideration.
Roland Pitre’s closest friend in the Marine Corps in the early seventies shakes his head in disbelief when he remembers Roland as he was then. He was a rascal and a chronic liar, yes, but there were also many periods when Pitre sailed smoothly, using all of his considerable intelligence to turn what he dreamed of into reality. He maintained a successful career in the service for a dozen years, moving up through the ranks. His onetime Marine buddy, now a successful, middle-aged businessman, says he was absolutely astounded to learn that the man he knew as Pete had gone to prison not once—but twice—on murder charges.
“You know, he could have been anything he wanted and done anything he set his mind to. I guess the one thing that surprised me is that his criminal career was so shot-through with mistakes and missteps.”
In the end, it was a matter of pure greed over intelligence.
And Pitre chose greed.
at My Own Grave”
Almost everyone
has felt a sudden, unexplainable shiver, that feeling that someone or some ghostly presence is running cold fingers up and down your spine.
I can remember my grandmother saying, “A rabbit just ran over my grave.” I couldn’t understand what that meant. How could she know where her grave would be?
She explained to me that was just an expression, something people said when they got that shivery feeling. In this case, it was much more than a strange, scary feeling.
Very few victims of violent sexual assaults want to return to the place where they were attacked. Some of them can’t return because they didn’t survive the attacks. One of the teenage girls in this case, whose quick thinking saved her life, went back to the frightening and lonely place, so far from anyone who could have rescued her from a madman. She knew just how close she had come to dying, and she breathed the words more to herself than to the detective who accompanied her: “It’s really weird looking at my own grave.”
Knowing that she was dead was extremely important to the murderer whose story follows. He didn’t kill for money or insurance or revenge or out of jealousy. He didn’t even know most of his victims until shortly before he attacked them. They were worth more dead to him because alive they could take away his precious freedom, perhaps even send him to the execution chamber.
And he had every intention of shutting them up.
Forever.
It was close
to five on the afternoon of September 25, 1979, when a resident of the Timberlane area east of Kent, Washington, drove slowly down a familiar rutted logging road near his home. It was seldom traveled by anyone other than loggers or residents of the neighborhood. He glanced idly over the vegetation that crept up to the road, much of it just beginning to take on the tinge of fall color. The underbrush was thick as it grew over deadfall logs with tangles of blackberry vines, Oregon grape, salal, and sword ferns. Suddenly, he spotted something light-colored that seemed out of place, and he backed his four-wheel-drive vehicle up and got out to get a better look. The only sounds in the lonely area were his boots crunching through the brush and the cries of crows and hawks. Then he sharply drew in his breath, shocked by what he found.
A skull that was almost certainly that of a human being lay about twelve feet from the road. He paused long enough to see that there were some tattered fragments of clothing, a few swatches of blondish-brown hair, and then he ran back to his rig and drove rapidly to his house, where he could use his phone.
When he reached the King County Police radio dispatcher, he blurted, “I just found a skull and some bones! They’re located approximately one mile northeast of SE 259th and 199th SE. I think that’s just outside the Kent city line. I’ll wait here at my house until you can send a car out.”
Patrol Officer Phillip Orwig was the first deputy to respond to the radio call to investigate “possible human remains.” Although it wasn’t unusual for citizens to call in reports of human skeletons, most turned out to be only the remains of animals. A few were Native American graves, where tribe members had been buried a hundred years earlier, unearthed now by bulldozers, as the cities of the Northwest were more and more enlarged by suburbs.
Orvig’s perusal of the scene told him that this was no coyote or elk. The skull was clearly of human origin. He was joined at the scene by Sergeant Sam Hicks and Detectives Bob La Moria, Frank Tennison, and Dave Reichert and King County Deputy Medical Examiner, Gordon Anderson.
The young investigators, most of them not long out of the Patrol Division, surveyed the scene, where someone had either wandered into the brush and died or, more likely, where a killer had attempted to hide a body. They could see fragments of bone and torn weathered clothing, but the time wasn’t right for an intensive crime scene search. Already the chill of the early fall evening made them shiver, and the setting sun made the woods murky. If they attempted to work the body site now, they might overlook something vital. The body had lain here for at least three months; twelve more hours wouldn’t matter. The detectives left patrol deputies to guard the area until they could return in the morning light to process the scene.
Shortly after eight the next day, Detective Sergeant Roy Weaver and Detectives Lockheed Reader and Frank Atchley arrived at the body site. First, they took many rolls of photographs, then they drove stakes into the ground so that they could always re-create the location of the body parts and any other pieces of physical evidence by using triangulation measurements. At a later date, this precise technique might prove to be vitally important.
Decomposition, animals, and the elements had removed all the body’s soft tissue. The skull was still attached to several cervical (neck) and thoracic (chest) vertebrae, but the rest of the skeleton had been scattered, presumably by animals. A single tennis shoe with a sock and a desiccated leg bone still inside it was on top of two deadfall logs.
Who was the person who had once lain here? The clothing, rotted and sun-bleached, appeared to be that of a young girl. The detectives picked up and bagged each piece: a mint green short-sleeved velour shirt with white trim and the label Cuckoo’s Nest, a hooded sweatshirt with dark blue appliquéd stripes, a pair of flared blue denim jeans, and a white bra.
Next, Reader and Atchley sifted the dirt and leaves in the wooded glen. They turned up more bones, and more pieces of cloth, one being a blue-and-white knotted strip of cloth found close to the dirt road. Twenty-one Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts, under the direction of Lee Hahn and Officer McDowell, fanned out through the woods. They too found more bits of evidence: the other blue tennis shoe, a fingernail with silver polish, some nylon material that proved to be torn panties, a clavicle bone, a rib, and various pieces of material either cut or torn from the victim’s clothing.
But there was nothing that would help identify the body quickly. No purse, no identification. Nor was there anything that might be deemed a weapon.
Dr. Donald Reay, the King County Medical Examiner, arrived to remove the fragments of bone that had once been part of a living human body. The first tentative presumption of just who the victim might have been would have to come from Dr. Reay’s examination.
Forensic pathology is a remarkable science and can give detectives a handle on a case that otherwise seems to be a loser from the start. On this one the King County detectives were at a definite disadvantage going in. They were called to the body site many months after the victim died, they didn’t know who she was or how she had died, and they had no witnesses. The trail was not only cold; it was icy.
Dr. Reay was able to determine many things from his initial examination. A rotting brassiere, its hooks fastened in the back, still clung to the thoracic portion of the skeleton. The front midline of the bra had been cleanly sliced through by some sharp object. Reay also found a linear one-inch cut in the right cup that appeared to have been made by a knife blade or a razor. This slice in the fabric had not been roughened by the rotting material. The right sleeve of the velour shirt was gone, apparently cut off. There was a tear in the green cloth over the right breast portion, and it fit exactly over the cut in the bra beneath.
The logical assumption was that someone had stabbed or cut the victim with considerable force and that the knife or sharp instrument had probably continued through the cloth into her flesh, maybe even into her heart or lungs. But there was no body tissue left to confirm that. Oddly, the lower part of the velour shirt had been sliced off horizontally, again by a sharp instrument.
One leg of her blue jeans was turned inside out, and the denim material next to the zipper had been cut. It appeared that the killer had literally cut the clothing from his victim then killed the nameless girl with a stab wound to the right breast. Dr. Reay examined the skull and found no blunt-force injuries, nor did he find any marks on the bones retrieved that might be from a bullet or a knife. Granted, many bones were still missing, but, given those parts he had to work with, the medical examiner could only conclude that the woman had been stabbed to death.
Reay could make certain judgments about the victim’s size and age by measuring the femur bone and studying the growth ends of other bones. He estimated that she had been between 14 and 20 and approximately five feet four inches tall and slender. When the medical examiner unraveled a few tangled hanks of the blondish-brown hair, it measured from six to ten inches in length. The girl’s teeth were in excellent repair. She had polished her toenails with the same silver polish as the lone fingernail.
Somewhere, someone must surely be worried about her. She had to be someone’s wife, daughter, sister. But whose?
The King County Sheriff’s Office immediately issued a nationwide bulletin with the description of the girl as she had been in life, along with photos and a detailed description of the clothing found in the woods. Not surprisingly, they were deluged almost immediately with calls from other agencies. In an era when so many young women hitchhiked and sought out rock concerts and commune lifestyles, there were dozens, scores, hundreds of girls classified as runaways or missing persons at any given time.
Ted Bundy had just been convicted of numerous murders in a Florida courtroom. No one had yet heard of Randy Woodfield—The I-5 Killer—or Gary Ridgway—the Green River Killer. But the world seemed to be growing more dangerous all the time.
One by one, missing women in other areas were eliminated. Some were found alive and well. Some were accounted for with the discovery of their bodies in Oregon or California or Iowa or Texas. Dental charts sent from other agencies didn’t match. Or either the hair color, height, and weight were wrong or the dates of disappearance did not mesh with the estimated time of death of the victim. This nameless girl in the woods had probably been killed and left there sometime in late May or in June. Somehow, she had gone undiscovered for three to five months.
In the end, the detective team found they hadn’t needed to look farther than the Kent-Renton area in the south part of King County to discover the name of the murdered girl. When the detailed description of the victim appeared in Seattle and suburban papers, they received calls from teenagers who had wondered about the sudden disappearance of Jacqueline Annette Plante, 17. Jacqueline, whose family had lived in the Timberlane area until the previous February, attended the Thomas Continuation School in the Kent School District. When her family moved to Utah, Jackie went with them. Then, according to friends, she flew into Seattle for a visit in late May.
“She was here just a day or so, staying with her boyfriend, Buck Lewis, and then she just disappeared,” was the story detectives heard over and over. The general description of Jackie Plante matched the description of the homicide victim, but it was only that: “general.”
Detective Lockheed Reader contacted the Thomas Continuation School and learned that Jackie Plante had transferred earlier in the year to Dugway High School in Dugway, Utah. When Reader contacted the principal of the Utah school, he learned that Jackie had attended school there until the end of the spring term. “Her sister’s here, though,” the principal offered to Reader’s surprise. “Do you want to talk to her?”
Reader most certainly did. Talking with her sister, he learned that Jackie had flown to the Seattle area in late May and that the family had not heard from her since the day of her arrival. She said it would be difficult to reach the girls’ parents. They could be contacted only by leaving a message at a toll station near an isolated ranch in Skull Valley, Utah.
On September 28, Jackie Plante’s parents called the King County detectives. Worriedly, they listened as Detective Sergeant Sam Hicks read them the description of the clothes found with the unidentified body. Yes, Jackie had clothes like that, they told him.
Jackie Plante’s parents knew the teenager had arrived safely in Seattle and that she had been staying at the Lewis residence. They had grown increasingly concerned about their missing daughter but had tried to believe she had simply chosen to live in the Seattle area. Her mother explained that she had never reported her daughter as a missing person, even after her calls to Buck Lewis’s home in the early part of the summer elicited only vague answers on Jackie’s whereabouts. The Lewises said only that Jackie had moved out of their house, leaving most of her belongings behind.
Her family tried to convince themselves that Jackie was staying with other friends in the Seattle area and that she would return to Utah to start school in the fall, as she had promised.
“We knew that she got there all right, on May 28,” her mother said, “but they said she’d left and they didn’t know where she was.”
The Plantes gave Hicks the names of dentists their family members had gone to in the Kent-Renton area. Reader and Hicks checked with several dentists who treated the Plante children over the years and finally located a Kent dentist who remembered treating Jackie. He turned over her dental X-rays, which were rushed to the King County Medical Examiner’s office. Reader talked to Dr. Bruce Rothwell, a forensic odontologist, who found that the dental X-rays and charts from the Kent dentist matched up exactly with those taken from the skull and mandible found in the woods near Timberlane.
There was no longer any question. The homicide victim was Jackie Plante. Detective Reader called the sheriff’s office closest to the isolated ranch in Utah where the dead girl’s parents lived. He asked that a deputy go to Jackie’s mother and father and give them the tragic news of their daughter’s death.
An hour later, Jackie’s mother called to talk to Detective Reader, hoping against hope that the message about her daughter’s death wasn’t true. He had to tell her that it was indeed true.
The King County detectives knew now who their victim was. They were on the first rung of a tall ladder, but they had a long way to go. Now they attempted to trace Jackie Plante’s movements from the time she left Utah, happy and excited about a visit to see her boyfriend and her old school friends, to the moment she had vanished. Perhaps somewhere in so many witnesses’ remembrances of her they could find a lead to her killer.