Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (13 page)

A Port Orchard
woman had been wrestling with her conscience for several months. She believed that her ex-boyfriend might be the one who killed Cheryl, but because she herself had been beaten by him so many times she was afraid to report him. In late February 1989, she finally called the police. His name was Jack Short,* and he had a long rap sheet filled with charges for assault and rape. He was also an associate of a wealthy man who once had a financial interest in PJ’s Market.

Short had been imprisoned on McNeil Island, too, and was paroled in December 1987. Once more, Hank Gruber talked to the security staff at McNeil. He learned that though Short and Roland Pitre were never housed in the same unit, they had worked in prison shops that adjoined each other. There was a good possibility that they had known each other in prison.

But an intensive check of phone records in and out of the block where Jack Short served time failed to bring up any connections. Detectives were able to establish that Jack Short and Martin O’Brian,* a former owner of PJ’s, were well acquainted. The ex-con with a reputation for hurting and sexually attacking women and the wealthy man who tried countless times to set him on the straight path were both familiar faces at PJ’s Market.

When detectives talked to O’Brian in his opulent and well-kept home, they asked him about both Cheryl Pitre and Jack Short. O’Brian said he’d known Jack since they were kids when they’d been friends, but they’d taken different paths. He said Short had an “explosive personality” and was “scary” when he was drinking. Even so he had tried to help him. “I gave him jobs,” O’Brian said. “I even set up a work-release job for him, but the past few years he’s just been bad news.”

He said he’d given up on helping Jack Short because he no longer trusted him.

“Do you know if he knew Cheryl Pitre?” Hudson asked.

“I don’t know. He might have seen her at the market.”

O’Brian had nothing but good things to say about Cheryl. He’d always found her to be an excellent employee and said he’d been planning to ask her to do his bookkeeping for him in his various business ventures.

“When she worked for me,” he continued, “it was standard procedure for her to call me when she was locking up the store. She’d tell me what the day’s receipts were and assure me that she was okay and ready to leave. I may have been the last person to talk to her. She called me at 11:15 that last night. Everything was fine.”

O’Brian was able to account for his whereabouts that night. Telephone records verified that account.

The wild card in the deck was still Alby Brotzweller. His reluctance to cooperate with the investigators made him look guilty. Detective Jim Harris set up an appointment for Alby to take a polygraph test, telling him that that was one way to clear himself. He reluctantly agreed; then, on the March day when he was to be transported to Seattle for the lie detector test, he was nowhere to be found. When Harris called the house where he had been staying, someone who said his name was Harry said Brotzweller wasn’t there. Harris called again. The person who answered the phone said “Wrong number” and hung up. It sounded to Harris just like Alby’s voice.

Irritated, the Kitsap County detectives drove to the address. The residents said he wasn’t there; he had moved again. “He’s back at his dad’s place, and he don’t want to take that lie detector test anymore.”

Jim Harris spoke with Alby’s friend Jer. To Harris’s surprise, Jer said that Alby had indeed cut his hand on a very sharp fish knife. He himself had taken him to a hospital emergency room to get it sewed up. His mother said she was there when it happened. “He was new to fishing, and that was his first clumsy try at cleaning fish.”

Her description of the incident was identical in detail to what Alby told the detectives.

Beginning on March 13, 1989, Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich literally moved to Kitsap County to begin an intensive probe of Cheryl Pitre’s murder. They intended to talk to every suspect and every witness and to join in searches of homes and vehicles, anything that might tip the scales and cause a single suspect to emerge as Cheryl’s killer.

Detectives Harris and Hudson searched Alby Brotzweller’s car, which had been wrecked on the afternoon of October 14 and stored in an impound lot ever since. The front window was broken out, and there was a lot of interior water damage caused by winter snowstorms. They removed a tire iron and the steering wheel cover and had them tested for signs of blood. There were none.

Interestingly, they found a professionally typed résumé for Brotzweller in the car. This seemed to war with his statement that he had never gotten a résumé from Cheryl. They checked the tape of his statement, and their memories were correct. They had asked him: “Was Cheryl going to do a work résumé for you?”

“She was. She was going to help me out with a job or work résumé for the dental field but due to my procrastination, we never got around to completing that or even getting started on it.”

Yet here was a complete résumé! Had they caught Alby in a lie? They compared the font on the papers in Brotzweller’s car with all the typewriters at Bay Ford. None of them matched.

Now they checked again with the Source at the dealer who told them that Cheryl had picked the young lot boy up when his car broke down. Rumors were like the childhood game of “telephone.” They changed slightly when each person repeated them. Cheryl had told a friend of a friend about receiving a call at three
AM
from someone who needed help, but it hadn’t been from Alby Brotzweller at all. Rather, she said it was a friend of Roland’s who called. And Roland’s statement that his car had broken down the day before Cheryl was killed might even mean that he was the one who had attempted to lure her out of her house.

Jim Harris received an angry phone call from Alby Brotzweller. He was upset because the investigators were still asking questions about him. “I didn’t kill the bitch!” he said vehemently.

“Then why didn’t you take your polygraph?”

“It was snowing and I couldn’t make it. I talked to people who told me not to take a lie detector test in a police station. They said the police would just hold me there and pin that murder on me because you don’t know who did it. Those police lie detector guys can make the test come out any way they want them to.”

Asked about the résumés found in his car at the impound yard, Alby Brotzweller said he’d had that done four or five days after he quit Bay Ford. “They did it for me at the JPTA job training place in Bremerton. Cheryl didn’t have anything to do with those.”

It was the truth. The youth employment agency put detectives in touch with the typist who prepared the résumés. Alby Brotzweller caused himself a lot of trouble with his attitude, and he could have been cleared of suspicion a lot sooner. The investigators now believed he had nothing to do with Cheryl’s murder.

Jack Short was the next suspect for the detectives either to close in on or to eliminate. It was quite likely that he had at least seen Cheryl working at PJ’s Market since he had been friends with the store’s owner. Whether he knew her as anyone beyond a clerk no one knew. And there was his record of violence against women to consider. At the investigators’ invitation, he sauntered into the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. He explained to Jim Harris and Hank Gruber that his official address was with his brother, but he was presently staying with a “female friend” in Port Orchard.

He was a very relaxed interviewee, apparently not in the least upset to be questioned about a brutal murder. Shown photos of both Roland and Cheryl, he said he didn’t know either of them.

“You never saw her at PJ’s?”

“Don’t remember her. I go there to charge stuff and cash checks sometimes, but I don’t remember her face at all.”

“You were housed close to Roland Pitre during the same time period at McNeil Island,” Gruber said.

“Naw, I was on D Block. Never met the guy. I was in a whole different place. I was a meat cutter there.”

“You keep in touch with the guys you knew there?”

“Nope. I don’t have any contact with them. No mail. Nothing. My mom won’t pass on mail or messages from anyone wanting to talk to me if they’re from McNeil. She doesn’t want me seeing that old gang.”

Gruber and Harris noted that Short talked a lot but didn’t say much that was useful to them. His demeanor was so confident that they felt he had no guilty knowledge of Cheryl Pitre’s death.

Perhaps the most peculiar suspects yet in this totally frustrating investigation were the men who had found Cheryl’s purse floating in Lake Union way back in October near where her body lay hidden in the trunk of her own car. They were Native Americans who actually lived in Suquamish, which is in Kitsap County north of Bremerton, not that far from where Cheryl lived and worked. That they should be the ones who spotted her belongings so far from where they—and she—lived could serve to implicate them in the crime. Initially, detectives didn’t know that the men who called to report the purse were not Seattle residents.

But then this case was becoming infamous for the number of slam-dunk “has to be a connection” suspects, none of whom had panned out.

And this one didn’t either. Hank Gruber talked to Sant D’Eagle,* who owned a funky and popular antique store in Suquamish. D’Eagle said that he and a male friend had indeed found the things that belonged to Cheryl Pitre drifting near the houseboats as they walked along Fairview Avenue East.

“What were you doing way over there?” Gruber asked.

“We went over to see a game on TV. See, we scout out different places around Puget Sound, checking to see which taverns have the biggest TV sets. And Bogie’s has the biggest screen—ten feet diagonally—and the best food. We’ve got a boat with a canopy, and we just take an excursion…”

“You cross the sound in a small boat to get to a tavern?” Gruber asked incredulously.

“Sure do. It only takes us about half an hour to get to Seattle and then some more time to get through the locks in Ballard.”

Apparently D’Eagle and his pals considered taking such an unorthodox shortcut to Seattle, even in bad weather or rough seas, an adventure.

“We’re going to Camano Island next weekend,” he added.

It seemed like a long way around to watch a televised game in a tavern, but Gruber had been a detective for years and he’d seen stranger things. He went to the address D’Eagle had given him for another of the Native Americans who made it a point to find the best taverns on Puget Sound via the sea route. Asked if they really did travel that far in a small craft, the man gave the same details D’Eagle had. They didn’t see any need to take the ferries. Cost too much and took too long.

Neither man had the slightest connection to Roland or Cheryl Pitre (beyond finding her sodden purse near where her body was left) or to Alby Brotzweller, Jack Short, or Bud Halser.

Although leads continued to trickle in through the spring of 1989, their possible worth in identifying Cheryl Pitre’s murderer diminished steadily.

One man, a truck driver, said he stopped at PJ’s every morning to buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a pack of cigarettes and sometimes talked to Cheryl there when she worked a rare morning shift. He said he also knew Roland. Like so many others, he had met Roland in prison.

“Last time I talked to Cheryl was about three weeks before she got killed,” he said. “At the time, there was some guy and a bunch of kids in the parking lot, and I asked her what that was all about. She said she thought the guy was selling drugs.”

“Can you describe him?” Sergeant Joe Sanford asked.

The witness shrugged his shoulders. “All I remember is he was older than the kids.”

“What kind of car was he driving?”

“I can’t remember.”

He offered his opinion. “You know, toward the end, Cheryl was having mood swings,” he said. “She was going over the deep end. She was dating some guy from Seattle.”

“That’s from your own knowledge or did Roland tell you that?” Sanford asked.

The man mumbled something that was hard to understand. The investigators knew that Roland Pitre had a number of observations about Cheryl that he was quite willing to share. Most of them were different scenarios about who might have killed her: stalkers, men she might have dated. But Cheryl hadn’t really had time to date. When she wasn’t working, she was looking after André and Bébé or in church. Her foray into the Parents Without Partners coffee group was the most adventure-some thing she’d done since Roland left her.

The Kitsap County and Seattle detectives still had the same problem: they had not come up with enough physical or circumstantial evidence to arrest Roland Pitre for her murder.

Nevertheless Roland was getting impatient. It was May, seven months after Cheryl’s death, and the Lutheran Brotherhood Insurance Company had not yet paid off on the policy he purchased on her life. When the company called Joe Sanford to ask if the police investigation was over, Sanford told them that the active investigation was still alive. “Roland Pitre has not been eliminated.”

Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich had to end their full-court press on the other side of the sound from Seattle and move back home. With Jim Harris, Doug Wright, and Doug Hudson, they had given the Pitre murder investigation everything they had for several weeks, talked to dozens of people, followed innumerable leads—no matter how far-fetched—and were left with unanswerable questions.