Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (6 page)

The current plan was for Guidry to be the hit man while Pitre spent the time—set for Monday evening, July 14—with friends at the Globe and Anchor Bar so he’d have an alibi.

Guidry told the jurors next about a less than delightful “vacation” weekend in Washington State. He said that Pitre had insisted that he spend most of his time waiting in Pitre’s van, because Pitre didn’t want his sister to see him. Oddly, Pitre has taken Guidry to the Globe and Anchor (where Pitre worked) on Saturday night and introduced him around, but then he stashed him right back in the van parked outside Pitre’s apartment.

By Sunday, Guidry said, he was getting pretty annoyed. Pitre had taken him for a ride and bought him a couple of Big Macs, for a picnic on the beach. Then he started in again on how it was up to Guidry to shoot Dennis Archer.

The jurors glanced from Steve Guidry to Maria Archer and back again. Everyone involved in this case was talking and talking a lot. Whom were they going to believe?

Guidry testified that he never saw the Archer home and never saw Maria, but that he probably was the man walking near the truck that Jo Brock saw on Saturday afternoon. “Roland took me with him to borrow it because he said he needed it to move.”

Guidry said that he had finally had enough of Roland Pitre’s constant pressure to shoot Dennis Archer. “I told Roland that I was leaving Monday morning. He said he couldn’t take me to the airport Sunday night, because he was having company, or Monday morning, because he had to work. We started to bicker. We got back to his apartment about 5:30 on Sunday afternoon and Pitre told me again to ‘wait in the van’ until his sister left. I told him I was going to leave that night, and I needed transportation to the airport or I’d hitchhike. I got my suitcase and said I wanted to leave before the sun went down. Finally, he tossed me the keys to the truck, and I left.”

It was Guidry’s testimony that he drove out of Oak Harbor around seven. He took a wrong turn on his way to the airport, some 118 miles away, and ended up north of Oak Harbor in Anacortes instead of south heading for Seattle. Retracing his path, he finally headed in the right direction. He said he stopped once to go to the bathroom and ask directions and once to get something to eat.

Guidry swore on the stand he had nothing to do with Dennis Archer’s murder and that he’d told Pitre the whole plan was ridiculous.

The Archers’ children would probably have been the only witnesses anyone could believe for sure. Although they were nearly hysterical when the deputies responded to their mother’s phone call on the night of the murder, they had conveyed that their father had been shot and killed in his home by a “strange man.”

According to the medical examiner and neighbors’ statements, the shooting had probably occurred around ten
PM.

At ten
PM
, Maria Archer, by her testimony, was with Roland Pitre. At ten
PM
, Roland Pitre, by his testimony, was in bed with Maria Archer in his apartment. At ten
PM
, Steven Guidry, by his testimony, was driving toward the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. The driving time between Oak Harbor and the airport, which is fifteen miles south of Seattle, is just over two hours if one adheres to the speed limit.

Maria Archer left Roland Pitre’s apartment to return home at eleven
PM
. After her husband’s body was removed to await autopsy, Maria remained home for the rest of the night. She made one phone call at around 2:30
AM
. That call was to her friend Lola Sanchez, who reported that Maria said, “Someone broke into our house and shot my husband. It must have happened just when I was talking to you on the phone from Roland’s apartment.”

Roland Pitre spent most of the night driving by the death house, occasionally stopping and attempting to talk to Maria. Steven Guidry spent the night at the Sea-Tac airport awaiting the flight to New Orleans, which he boarded at seven on July 14.

In short, if one believed all of the testimony given in the three-week-long trial, none of the principals could have shot Dennis Archer. Each pointed a finger at someone else. It was the sort of stuff that can boggle juries’ minds.

Prosecutor David Thiele bluntly told the jury in his final arguments: “It is an either-or situation. There are only two possible murderers of Dennis Archer: Pitre or Guidry. Evidence has proved that the actual killing was done by Guidry.”

Thiele reminded the jury of Pitre’s testimony that he and the victim’s wife were in his apartment making love at the time of the murder. “Roland Pitre would not have had time to go out and do the killing himself. Roland Pitre was not the triggerman. Steven Guidry was the triggerman, and Maria Archer was a participant in the plot.”

Thiele pointed out a “fourfold” reason for Maria’s wanting her husband dead: “She wanted to rid herself of a husband she no longer loved or [even] liked.” Added to that, Archer’s death would clear the way, Thiele said, for Maria to marry Roland Pitre, give her financial gain in the amount of $120,000, and protect her from losing her children in a custody suit stemming from a divorce action.

Gil Mullen, Maria’s attorney, struck hard at Roland Pitre’s credibility as a witness. “The state’s case has got to rise or fall on the testimony of Roland Pitre. And Roland Pitre is a thief, a faker, a cold-blooded, violent, confessed murderer and an unmitigated liar!”

Mullen did not attempt to paint Maria as a saint. “Maria Archer admits she had an affair with Roland Pitre, and she was ashamed and not very proud of it; but she is not here on trial for having an affair. She is not here on trial for committing sexual indiscretions. She is here on trial for murder—premeditated murder.”

Richard Hansen, Steven Guidry’s attorney, enlarged on the defense’s belief that Pitre was a liar. “If you convict these two innocent people, that is going to help Roland Pitre. He has a strong incentive to help convict these innocent people to help himself. It would cut off half or probably more of his sentence.”

By testifying against his former mistress and his former best friend, Roland Pitre was now allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder, and he would indeed have a much shorter sentence than life in prison.

And so,
on New Year’s Eve 1980, the tangle of evidence and testimony went at last to the jury. The press bench vacillated. As one reporter remarked, “One day, I think ‘guilty’ and then the next I think ‘not guilty.’ I wouldn’t want to be on the jury.”

After eleven hours, the jury came back.

The verdicts…Steven Guidry: first-degree murder, not guilty; conspiracy to commit murder, not guilty. Maria Archer: first-degree murder, not guilty; conspiracy to commit murder, not guilty.

Steven Guidry broke into tears. Maria Archer’s face was void of any expression. Then she smiled. Afterward, she told the press, “Anybody who had any sense could see what was right and what was true. It was ridiculous—having to go through all this.”

She spoke of her former lover, Roland Pitre, “I’d like to feel sorry for him. Sometimes I do. But that does not change the fact that he’s a liar and the most unscrupulous person I ever met.”

Maria said she didn’t care about the financial benefits derived from her husband’s death. Looking toward her former in-laws, she said, “I don’t care about the money. I’m not fighting them. They can keep it.”

If ever a murder case was over but yet not over at all, it was the bizarre killing of Dennis Archer. It was possible, some observers felt, that the man about to be sentenced for his murder, Roland Pitre, might not have committed the actual crime. The only eyewitnesses, the Archer children, were blocked from testifying in court by motions by the defense that stated that the children, at 7 and 10, were too young to be accurate witnesses. (That isn’t necessarily true. It depends on the child; in retrospect, it was probably far more beneficial to the children to keep them from testifying against their own mother.)

If they had seen a “strange man,” it might well have been Roland Pitre in his spiky new black wig.

Only one thing is certain. Dennis Archer most assuredly did not shoot himself in the chest three times. The gun never turned up, and it is probably still buried in the silt at the bottom of the limitless depths of the water at Deception Pass.

Detective Sergeant Ron Edwards of Island County would not forget this case. In the years ahead as an investigator, he often wondered if perhaps someday, sometime, the corrosive nigglings of conscience would force someone to speak out. A careless word to the wrong person.

That never happened. But the story of Roland Pitre was far from over.

1986

Because he
turned state’s evidence against his ex-mistress and boyhood friend, Roland Pitre drew only a thirty-five-year maximum prison sentence. His former wife, Cheryl, remained in Pennsylvania with their little girl, Bébé. Maria Archer went on with her life, never to make headlines again. Steven Guidry was far away in New Orleans, undoubtedly much relieved that he had been acquitted of murder.

Those of us who witnessed their trial in 1980 assumed that Roland Pitre would stay safely behind bars in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. It is located, as Alcatraz was, in an isolated spot surrounded by deep water. With good behavior, he might conceivably be released on parole in ten to fifteen years. But he had demonstrated that he wasn’t always who he appeared to be, so as charismatic and appealing as he often was, Pitre seemed an unlikely candidate for early parole.

Still, true sociopaths often make model prisoners, giving corrections officers little trouble. They learn that the way out is not to fight the system but to respond to those who are temporarily in control with charm and an earnest mask. No one could be more cooperative than Roland Pitre.

During his time on McNeil Island, he obtained his Associate of Arts degree from Centralia Community College and his B.A. degree from Evergreen State College through correspondence and prison courses.

Back east, Cheryl Pitre had never really stopped loving her ex-husband, and she wanted very much to believe his letters protesting his innocence in Dennis Archer’s murder. Perhaps even more compelling, Roland wrote of his tremendous regret that he had been unfaithful to her. His reasoning made more and more sense to her because he was telling her what she needed to hear. He had always been extremely persuasive, and he was very attractive to women. When he first proposed to her in the seventies, Cheryl was both grateful and baffled. She was not a beautiful woman, and she knew he had dated many gorgeous women in the past. She had thick chestnut hair and lovely blue eyes but was a little plump and somewhat plain. Where Maria Archer was tiny and slender, Cheryl was large-breasted and big-boned. Her confidence had been severely shaken when she learned that Roland was cheating on her with Maria.

But now he was back in her life, telling her all the things she thought she would never hear. Cheryl took into account that he was in prison, where there were no women for him to cheat with. Still, he truly seemed to have come to appreciate her letters and her renewed loyalty to him. He wrote that he wanted to start over, to be a father to Bébé, who lived with Cheryl. If only, he wrote, he wasn’t stuck in prison for years.

It worked. They remarried in December 1981 while Roland was still in prison.

Cheryl made up her mind that she would do everything possible to help him achieve an early parole. She longed to be with him again. He explained that his only chance to get out before he was an old man was to have someone to come home to, someone with a solid reputation who had a house where he could move in. Someone who would arrange to have a job waiting for him, too.

Cheryl promised Roland that she would be that person for him. As she had before, she accepted him on faith. Just how much Cheryl knew about Roland’s life each time she married him may never be known. He was—and always had been—a man with an astounding gift of gab, and he was also a man with many secrets. He was a chameleon, changing his demeanor and attitude to suit whatever situation he was in. He always had many male friends and—this much Cheryl knew—any number of women who had loved him.

Roland usually told women that he suffered through an abusive childhood, but that may very well be only one of the lies he told to draw people to him and gain their sympathy. He was born in Donaldsville, Louisiana, on October 30, 1952, and was named after his father; he was Roland Augustin Pitre Jr. He was built exactly like his father, thin but tough as steel cable, with ropelike muscles.

Aside from his longtime friendship with Steve Guidry, Pitre’s early childhood in the New Orleans area is murky. He was born the third of six children, the second of five to survive. His parents, Roland Pitre Sr. and Emily Gros Pitre, apparently had a successful marriage that lasted until death parted them. There were five boys—Roland Jr., Danny, Michael, Rodney, and Wade—and one girl, Sherry. Tragically, Wade died at the age of 2. Roland’s father, 28 when Roland was born, was a truck driver with the Teamsters Local 207 in New Orleans and a Marine Corps veteran of World War II. His mother worked as a waitress. Both Roland’s parents were Cajun French, part of a large population that lived the rich culture handed down by their ancestors in Louisiana, enjoying zydeco music, spicy gumbo and crawfish cuisine, and folklore and ghost stories. They often spoke Cajun French in their home.

Roland would always have a trace of a French accent, although his bonds to Louisiana and his family were not particularly close. He attended St. Rita’s parochial school through the eighth grade, then went on to East Jefferson High School in Metairie, Louisiana. He dropped out of school in the eleventh grade.

Like his father before him, Roland enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was in his late teens. He flourished there and obtained his GED high school degree in the service. His fellow recruits called Roland “Pete” and admired his judo proficiency. One of his Marine buddies recalls a visit to Louisiana with Pitre in 1972.

“We went to New Orleans on a four-day weekend,” he says. “Five of us drove down from Cherry Point, North Carolina. We went to see Pete’s fiancée, who was named Debby.”

Roland had a large Marine Corps tattoo on his upper left arm and had DEB tattooed on his right arm.

“He always called her Deb,” his fellow Marine remembered. “He once told me that if he ever got into trouble and was asked about it, he would say his tattoo stood for
his
initials, and that his name was Donald Edward Buschere. It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure of the spelling.”

Pitre didn’t explain why he expected trouble or an arrest or why he might need an alias. The Marine, remembering Roland Pitre almost thirty-five years later, says he was impressed with Deb’s family. “We stayed at Deb’s parents’ house, a nice, upper-middle-class neighborhood. And they treated us like kings. Deb’s father was a fairly successful businessman, and her mother was a great cook. They seemed to think the world of Pete.”

Deb, who hoped to marry the dashing Marine that Roland Pitre was in 1972, was very petite and “gorgeous.” She rounded up two of her girlfriends to be blind dates for the two Marines who accompanied Pitre to New Orleans.

“We all went to the French Quarter one evening for drinks and dancing,” one of them remembers. “We visited Roland’s father—but only briefly—in this town outside New Orleans, called Metairie. We stayed at his house just long enough for Pete to show us a painting one of his girlfriends had done. It showed him in his karate or judo outfit executing a kick. I’m pretty sure he had his black belt in karate before he ever joined the Marines.”

Pitre had also been a boxer. He told his buddies that was where he got his broken nose. “The guy just loved to mix it up.”

But Roland Pitre didn’t marry his gorgeous girlfriend Deb, and he wasn’t faithful to her, either. He almost always had several women on the string at once. One of them may have been Cheryl, whom he eventually did marry. “We all traveled to Pennsylvania once,” a buddy recalls. “Pete had a girlfriend there, too, who was a student nurse. I’m not sure what her name was. Her family lived on a farm just outside Union City.”

They had another pleasant visit in that small town close to Lake Erie. Roland Pitre never seemed to mind that his buddies knew that he cheated on his women. Indeed, he seemed proud of it and counted on them not to say the wrong thing.

They also knew that Pete lied, but they suspected he did it to be funny, and he didn’t hurt any of them; his fibs and outright lies were often hilarious. Early on, his closest Marine friend had his doubts about Pitre’s truthfulness. They were assigned to the same training schools, beginning with seven months of avionics classes at a base just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Then they were transferred to the Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron 1 (VMCJ-1) for photo reconnaissance and electronic warfare operations at MCAS at Cherry Point, North Carolina. During their four months there, he and Pitre worked on two types of aircraft: the McDonnell Douglas RF-4B Phantom II and the Grumman Intruder. One of the planes was equipped to collect photographic intelligence; the other retrieved electronic intelligence and also jammed and garbled enemy radar. The young Marines worked principally on the jammers. Their training was given only to students with superior IQs and carried with it a lot of responsibility.

Roland Pitre had keen native intelligence, although he had minimal formal schooling. He also had his rowdy and mischievous side. “Pete told me that he was working as a narc for the military police,” his buddy says. “He would go out and smoke dope with his ‘friends,’ and then he would turn them in. He told me once he borrowed a car from one of his doper buddies and drove it to the MP station, revealing a substantial stash of marijuana. He then told the dopers that the MPs and a drug dog had busted him at the main gate.”

Pitre never appeared to have any pangs of conscience about narcing on his friends, and he certainly never felt guilty about betraying the women in his life. He was 19 or 20 and romance was a game of conquest to him; he wasn’t looking for any serious relationship.

When they graduated from ALQ-76, the Cherry Point school, Roland and his closest friends became lance corporals, and they celebrated at a bar in Morehead City. They were next transferred to Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron 14 in El Toro, California.

Seven of the highly trained Marines from Marine Corps Avionic School (MCAS) were soon notified that they had less than twenty-four hours to pack up and head overseas; they were ordered to travel in civilian clothing and board civilian airlines to Hiroshima, Japan. Once there, they changed into fatigue uniforms and flew in military aircraft to Cubi Point in the Philippines.

While the Marines were stationed in the Philippines, Pitre—who ignored the venereal disease warnings in the movies they were required to watch—contracted a painful dose of gonorrhea. Because he’d bragged so much about his success with women, his buddies were merciless as they tormented him. “We’d follow him to the latrine when he’d go to relieve himself, and we’d wait outside so we could listen to him whimpering in pain. Naturally, we’d either imitate him or just laugh our butts off.”

Eventually the penicillin shots he received kicked in, and Pitre recovered. He’d pulled so many practical jokes on the other guys in his unit that nobody really felt sorry for him.

After that, Pitre slowed down on his dating by the numbers and became semimonogamous when he moved in with a Filipina whose nickname was “Baby.”

“I particularly remember this,” his buddy says, “because when we finally got back to the States, Pete tried to get off-base housing by telling the Marines that he had gotten married to Baby while we were in the Philippines. When he told me he had gotten married, I wrote to her to find out if that was in fact the case. I remembered her address because I had visited the house on occasion while I was there: 550 Santa Rita. By this time, I knew not to take Pete at his word on
anything.”

Baby wrote back, telling him that she had never married Roland Pitre, had never even considered it. “When I showed her letter to Pete, he was the typical kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Silly grin. No explanation.”

The two Marines stayed in the same unit, waiting in El Toro for their next assignment. After a few months, they were transferred to Iwakuni, Japan. “We both found places to live off base,” his long-ago friend says, noting that the base housing had two dozen men to a room “unless you were a sergeant. Pete was a regular at my house for parties or just to hang out. I don’t recall any serious scams or activities that Pete was involved in at this time, but he did get involved in the streaking craze. People said he streaked the BX [Base Exchange] as well as an on-base softball game.”

Pete Pitre may have run naked around the Japanese base to show off; anyone who ever knew him really well commented that he was exceptionally well-endowed.

The Marines were young men in their prime, all interested in having fun and partying. Although his buddy didn’t trust the man he called Pete to tell him the truth or to be there for anything that counted, he liked him well enough.

In their off-duty hours, the young Marines threw parties. “We had a lot of parties at my place, so Pete spent a lot of time there, drinking, talking, just passing the time. Somewhere, I still have a tape of a time when Pete and I conspired to get another buddy of ours to sing a particularly risqué song. Of course, he didn’t know he was being recorded!”

Roland Pitre had always had a short fuse, and he got in a little trouble when he punched a gunnery sergeant, but as always he talked his way out of big trouble. He did his job well in the Marines, and so he remained in the service even after some of his friends opted for civilian life. His best friend in the Corps was back at Cherry Point, awaiting his discharge, when Pitre came to see him.

“Pete’s story was that he had been ordered back to the States to appear as a witness in a trial against some of his doper buddies. And, of course, he had to make it more interesting by telling me that someone had taken a shot at him—on base!”