Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (16 page)

On Monday,
March 22, 1993, Bremerton detective Lewis Olan was officially assigned to the investigation of the attack or attempted kidnapping or burglary—whatever it was—of Tim Nash and his home. Olan had encountered Roland Pitre, Tim’s stepfather, two years earlier. He was one of the detectives who investigated the theft of the Pitre family safe. That investigation was never successfully concluded, although Roland had recovered some of the jewelry reported to be missing in the murky incident in which he said he was beaten and cut by someone never identified. That had been a strange case. This alleged burglary was even more peculiar.

Tim Nash appeared to be terribly frightened, but he wasn’t hurt. There was always the possibility that he’d made up the whole thing to get attention. Any experienced detective knows that people give false reports of crimes for all kinds of reasons. With no sign of tool marks or broken windows signaling a forced entry and no one tripping the security system, it was natural to wonder if the kid had done it. Nothing was missing.

But when Olan talked to both the victim and family members, taping their statements, they told him essentially the same things they told Officers Emm and Bogen the night before. None of them even suggested that Tim Nash might have made it all up. How would he have had access to Roland Pitre’s van and the two bags later found in his bedroom? That didn’t compute at all.

Tim made a very believable witness. According to all reports, he was a good kid. Olan pursued his investigation on the assumption that someone had indeed lured him away from the house just long enough for the couple in black to sneak in. And he suspected what the Pitre family suspected: that for some reason Pitre himself had crept into his onetime home and threatened his stepson.

Next, the Bremerton detective searched the two bags that Bébé Pitre had seen in her father’s van at noon on Sunday, then in Tim’s bedroom that night.

The blue nylon bag, now marked Number One, held a hundred-foot reel of white nylon rope, an open roll of duct tape, two rolls of duct tape still sealed in a package, several large plastic bags, a diver’s knife in a black rubber sheath, foam earplugs, a plastic sack from a Kmart store with a box half full of .44 Magnum bullets, and a receipt dated March 10, 1993.

Curious, Olan opened another, smaller, Kmart bag. It held a full box of earplugs and more than a dozen greeting cards. There were five more cards in another sack, a package of utility knife blades, and a white handkerchief.

So far, with the possible exception of the .44 rounds, there wasn’t anything really ominous about the contents of the blue bag. There could be dozens of legitimate reasons for having rope, duct tape, and greeting cards. Even the earplugs and the diver’s knife weren’t suspicious; there were hundreds of people in the Puget Sound area who dove beneath its surface for sport.

Olan turned next to the Slumberjack bag. Inside he found a bag from a PayLess store. It held three packages of five-by-eight-inch cards. One was open, and several of the cards had printing on them, done with a black felt-tip pen.

They seemed to be cue cards, meant for someone to read or perhaps to memorize or simply say aloud. It was apparent that Tim was the one who was supposed to read them.

Basically, the message was the same. Tim’s voice—probably in a phone call—would say he was in some kind of trouble and that the only one who could help him was Roland Pitre.

One read, “Hi, Mom, this is Tim. I moved out of the house.” Another said, “I’m in trouble this time. I need Roland’s help. I don’t know if he’ll help me because I switched his medication and then I put, I think, arsenic in his chewing…” (Olan couldn’t tell whether the blurred next word was “gum” or “tobacco.”) The writing ended abruptly.

Why would Tim need cue cards? Why couldn’t he just call up his mother and talk to her?

Detective Olan asked Bébé Pitre to look at the cards to see if she could identify the writing on them. She could. It was her father’s. For some reason, Roland Pitre had written a script for Tim to read.

There were more papers in the white canvas bag. Della Roslyn recognized them, even though she hadn’t seen them for almost two years. They were the documents that had been in her stolen safe. Stuffed in a paper bag were marriage and birth certificates, passports, insurance policies, and legal documents. Roland’s marriage certificate with Cheryl was there, as were birth certificates for some members of Della’s and Roland’s combined family. There were the adoption papers from when she had adopted Bébé and André. And there was a handful of newspaper clippings about Cheryl Pitre’s homicide in Kitsap County and even newspaper accounts of the trial after the murder of Dennis Archer on Whidbey Island and Roland’s conviction on conspiracy to commit that murder.

Lewis Olan had never believed that Roland wasn’t involved in the theft of the safe back in 1991, but he hadn’t been able to prove his complicity. Now in this bag was proof that he had undoubtedly kept the fruits of that theft while collecting insurance for the loss. The only documents that ever surfaced were papers that Roland needed. All of Della’s, Bébé’s, André’s, Tim’s, and Amy’s important papers were gone, but Roland managed to keep his birth certificate and that of his dead brother, Wade Pitre.

Olan tended to believe Della Pitre when she said that Roland Pitre was connected to the incident with his stepson, Tim.

But why? Surely he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to terrorize a kid he didn’t like. Motive is a vital part in an investigation, and so far it was as obscure as a gray ship cruising on Puget Sound in a pea-soup fog.

One older mystery was solved, however: Bébé Pitre had identified her father’s handwriting on the cue cards and also said that the handkerchief in the Slumberjack bag belonged to Roland; now she was finally ready to reveal a secret he had made her keep since she was 13. She cleared up the question of who had stolen the safe from her house in 1991.

Bébé admitted that she had watched her father and Bud Halser carry the safe out. She explained, to her stepmother’s shock, that at her father’s insistence she accompanied them as they drove to an isolated spot near Panther Lake, Washington.

She told Lewis Olan and Della Roslyn that she saw the two men remove the contents of the safe before they attempted to bury it near an old outhouse. As they began to dig, they disturbed a nest of angry hornets. They abandoned that plan and drove instead to Renton, Washington, where she thought they left the safe with some relative of “Uncle Bud’s.”

Roland had warned Bébé that she must never tell that she saw him and Uncle Bud take the safe and bury it. His warning had been very effective; she was so frightened that she hadn’t told the story until now.

But Roland apparently hadn’t been able to restrain himself from bragging to his daughter about how clever he was. Bébé also told Olan that she knew her father used another name to get his certified nursing assistant’s license from the State of Louisiana. He used Wade Pitre’s name and Social Security number, and he finagled a way to use the Louisiana CNA credits to gain employment in Washington State. Wade had been dead for almost half a century, and apparently no one checked on the authenticity of Roland’s stolen identity.

Bébé’s admissions were a huge relief to her and proved that Roland Pitre was a liar and a thief, though that wasn’t a surprise to the investigating detective or Roland’s latest estranged wife. But the question of motive—
if
he was involved in the attack on Tim Nash—remained.

When Olan looked into the murders of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, he learned that Roland Pitre had had an alibi in each case. He was far more likely to be a conspirator in a crime than the one who actually committed it. Maybe “Uncle Bud” was the man in black in the mask?

Olan located the man Bébé called Uncle only to find that Bud Halser had the best alibi of all. He was once again behind prison bars, and there was no way he could have been free to commit any kind of crime on the night of March 21.

It wasn’t Halser, and the woman’s identity was even more difficult to puzzle out. All Tim could describe about her was that she had a good figure and that her voice sounded young.

That woman soon returned to Tim’s life.

On March 24,
three days after the home invasion, the Bremerton Police Department had an unexpected visitor. A nervous woman appeared, saying that she wanted to confess to a robbery.

Her name was Beth Bixler. She had red hair and pale skin dusted with freckles. She was undoubtedly paler than usual now but was pretty in a quiet way. She looked like the sort of young woman who should be teaching Sunday school rather than turning herself in as a felon.

She was quickly escorted to an interview room, where Lewis Olan and Detective Doug Wright listened with fascination to her story. They heard yet another woman go to bat for Roland Pitre.

Beth Bixler told them that she had conspired with Tim Nash to work out a plan to fake his own kidnapping.

Beth recalled that she had met Roland, Tim’s stepfather, at her church three years before and had participated in many church activities with him. She admitted that she recently found herself in love with him. Her husband accused her of having an affair with Roland, and her marriage completely collapsed. But her love for Roland Pitre was so compelling that she had accepted that she was headed for divorce.

According to Beth, Tim called her and told her that Roland was trying to get back with his mother, Della. Tim didn’t want that to happen; he hated Roland and wanted him to stay away forever. Beth said she didn’t want the Pitres to reconcile, either. She loved Roland and wanted to be with him. So, she said, Tim had come up with a plan that would make Roland look really bad to Della so that she would lose all respect for him and refuse to take him back.

The detectives stared at the woman who was confessing to what she called a complicated plot. They had seen Tim in the aftermath of the attack on him, and he certainly had not impressed them as the kind of mastermind who would suggest that Roland be framed to appear to be a monster. But that’s what Beth Bixler was telling them. At this point her version of the crime began to falter. She said Tim told her that if the two of them planted items that had obviously been in Roland’s custody—specifically, the two bags—in Della’s house, Della would be furious. That didn’t seem to be a particularly terrible thing for Roland to do: the investigators knew that Della allowed him to do his laundry there. She hinted that it was Tim’s idea to make up a story about the couple in black who threatened him, knowing that Della would immediately suspect Roland.

When Wright and Olan questioned Beth Bixler about the details of the plot, her answers became increasingly vague. But she continued to insist that Roland had done nothing wrong; that he wasn’t even in Della’s house on Sunday night and had no knowledge of the plan she and Tim had formulated. She told them that it had basically been Tim’s plot to get rid of a stepfather he hated. He was so persuasive that she went along with it in the hope that Della would be angry and reject Roland and then she would have him to herself.

Beth said she filled the two carryall bags that were supposed to be given to Tim to put in his bedroom and that a “female and a male were there,” but her description of the evidence didn’t match what the detectives knew. She inadvertently put herself into the crime, slipping up and admitting that she was the female involved.

“The police were not supposed to be involved,” she stammered. “Somehow, everything got messed up.”

It didn’t take much adept questioning by the detectives to shred Beth Bixler’s story. Doug Wright told her frankly that the statement they had just taped was obviously false.

“After a brief discussion that we did not believe her story,” Lewis Olan told a Superior Court judge, “at which time she was given the choice to tell the truth—and decided not to—she was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary, conspiracy, attempted kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit murder.”

“When was she arrested?” the judge asked.

“She was arrested yesterday: March 24, 1993.”

Beth Bixler was stunned when Doug Wright placed her under arrest. She had probably been duped, just as Roland Pitre had duped so many other people, many of them women who—at least initially—were in love with him. At this point, her feelings were ambivalent. She still felt a very strong attraction to him, but she said that she had also come to be afraid of him. He had told her that he believed in revenge and that he knew people who owed him favors.

Shaken, Beth was booked into jail.

It took only a few hours for Beth Bixler to send word to Wright through the jail staff that she wanted to talk to him. It was ten minutes after ten that Wednesday night when Wright called Olan and then walked over to the jail. At Wright’s request, the jail staff advised Beth Bixler of her rights under Miranda and asked her if she wanted to have an attorney present.

She shook her head. “I want to talk to the detectives,” she said. “I want to tell them the truth and confess.”

Even though the two detectives hadn’t believed her original recitation of events, the real story was nevertheless a surprise.

The winsome, churchgoing mother said that she was desperate for money, and the $3,000 in rent money that Roland promised her never materialized, even though she kept asking him where the renter who needed a safe house was. She was ready to listen to any solution he could offer her.

Finally Roland told her that he had developed another plan, one that would bring them a lot more money. He explained to her how much he disliked his stepson, Tim. “He was responsible for the failure of my marriage to Della,” Pitre said. “And now, he’s going to be involved in my new plan.”

While Beth listened, both shocked and mesmerized, Roland laid out the specifics of his scenario. First, he and his good friend, Bud Halser, planned to kidnap Tim and hold him for $250,000 ransom. Currently in jail, Bud would have been out in plenty of time to help Roland.

When Beth opened her mouth to protest, Roland jumped ahead. “We won’t
really
kidnap him,” he promised her. “I know I can convince Tim to go along with the plan. See, I’m going to pay him $50,000 and buy him a plane ticket to Hawaii.”

She wondered where the $250,000 was going to come from. Surely Della didn’t have that kind of money. Roland said that was true, but Della’s parents had a large and expensive home. Tim would be instructed to tell his mother that he had been abducted by people to whom he owed money. Then Della would persuade her parents to take out a second mortgage on their house. They were very respectable citizens with good credit, and they loved their grandchildren. Roland was positive they would agree to do that, anything to save Tim from his kidnappers. They would be told to leave the $250,000 somewhere where Roland or Bud could retrieve it without being seen. Subsequently Tim would be released.

Nobody would be hurt, Roland had promised her. The police would never even know about any of it.

It was a wild idea, a scheme rife with holes and things that could go wrong. What if Tim wouldn’t go along with it? How long would it take to get a house refinanced? What if his grandparents refused to go into debt for a quarter of a million dollars? What if somebody called the FBI?

Roland waved away all of Beth Bixler’s questions, telling her that she lacked the “ability to think big.” He assured her that he had never had a plan go wrong, that he always won because he was a detail man with a great talent for predicting what people would do. It was all a matter of pushing the right buttons, and he knew where those buttons were.

She was entranced with him, passionately in love with him. She had already betrayed her husband for him, shocked her church, and put her family in jeopardy. And she was about to lose her house because she couldn’t pay her bills.

Beth asked Roland what her part of the project would be.

“Hardly anything,” he said easily. “All we need is your house, just the basement of your house, actually. We have to have someplace to hide Tim.”

She wondered about that. If Tim was cooperating and would get a ticket to Hawaii, why would they have to hide him? But Roland said they needed him at first. Tim would have to be available to make phone calls to his mother. If he were in Hawaii, there would be long-distance phone bills that could be traced, and there was also the matter of controlling Tim. Roland wanted to be right there with him to be sure he said the right things at the right time.

One element of the perfect caper went awry early on. Bud Halser, who was to be Roland’s wing man, was arrested for the umpteenth time and sent back to prison. He was no longer available to help Roland “kidnap” Tim.

That wasn’t a real problem, Roland told his new girlfriend. She could take Bud’s place. It wouldn’t require any particular strength. All she had to do was follow his instructions.

First they had to do some construction in the basement of Beth’s house. She became caught up in the plotting, each step tumbling after the other until it seemed to make some crazy kind of sense, and the deeper she was pulled in, the more difficult it was for her to back out. Roland convinced her that they had to build a little room within a room that had to be soundproof so that no one inside or outside the house would know where Tim was staying.

The bathroom in Beth’s basement was fairly good-sized, and Roland built a tiny room inside. By removing the shelves in a large closet in the bathroom, he constructed a space that was approximately two feet by three and a half feet. He built a false wall that hid the entrance to the room within a room. He added thick layers of insulation to deaden any sounds coming from the cramped chamber. Then he pulled the flowered shower curtain over his handiwork so that no one could detect that this was anything but a basement bathroom.

Beth went on with her confession. The earplugs in the two bags accidentally left behind after the failed kidnapping had a purpose. Tim Nash was supposed to be tied up and taped to a chair in the hidden room. Then the earplugs would be inserted into his ears so he wouldn’t be able to hear whether anyone was home in the house.

Essentially, had the kidnapping been a success, Tim would have been held captive and deprived of most of his senses. He would not have been able to move, to see, to hear. If he called out for help, no one would be able to hear him outside the soundproofed walls.

By this time, Beth said, she was terrified by Roland. She felt she had to continue with the plot. “I was afraid of not doing it, and I just didn’t say no.”

He instructed her to get a gun. She borrowed one from a coworker, telling him that she was afraid to be alone and needed a gun for protection. Roland told her to buy a box of bullets and some greeting cards. They were to be used as letters that Tim would periodically send to various relatives. Beth said she wore brown gloves whenever she purchased the things on Roland’s list at Kmart so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints behind.

Roland prepared the script that Tim was to follow and printed the words carefully on the five-by-eight-inch lined cards she bought. When Tim called his mother, he would be forced to stick to the words written on the cue cards. Roland’s scenario called for Tim to tell his mother that he hated her and that she was responsible for making his life miserable and for his disappearance. Further, the script called for Tim to say that Roland was not to be blamed for leaving, that instead Della should notify Roland that Tim desperately needed his help.

This woman, who never expected to see the inside of a jail, said she was completely trapped at this point and could find no way out of her lover’s scheme. Beth said Roland’s scenario moved along with a life of its own. Whether the detectives were buying her whole story was questionable, although it was apparent that she didn’t have a strong personality: they could see how someone like Pitre could have dominated her.

Doug Wright asked her what she and Roland had worn when they went to his former home to confront Tim Nash.

“Roland was wearing black pants and either a black turtleneck or sweatshirt; I can’t remember which right now. He had a black leather fanny pack and a black pair of shoes.”

On his instruction, Beth said, she also wore black clothing, and they both wore dark ski masks.

Actually, they had been geared up to kidnap Tim a week earlier than when they carried it out. Roland said they should do it on a Sunday night since he could be sure that Tim would be alone. They’d gotten dressed in black on March 14, but for some reason Roland had a bad feeling and put it off for a week.

Roland had it worked out to the tiniest detail. He had Bud Halser’s girlfriend, Bobbi,* babysitting for André at his apartment. Bobbi would also serve as an alibi for Roland, swearing that he had been home all evening.

Bébé would be sitting for Beth’s children so her father could be sure she wasn’t in the house with Tim.

Beth told Doug Wright that she was the female who called Tim. “On the way to the house, we stopped at the R and H Market on Kitsap Way. I disguised my voice and called Tim and coaxed him to come to the Pancake House.”

After Roland and Beth were sure Tim had left his home, they went to Della Pitre’s house, parked in the back, and entered the house through the garage. “Roland still had a key to the door. He turned off the alarm system and then unscrewed the lightbulbs over the stairs and in Tim’s room.”

Beth said that when Tim returned, the alarm had temporarily activated, which spooked her, but Tim quickly turned it off.

“I was in a state of shock at this point,” she said. “When the light didn’t go on over the stairs, he walked up anyway. When he reached the landing, Roland pointed the gun at him and said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ ”