Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (17 page)

Everything had started to collapse. She said Tim began to scream wildly, and someone in the apartment yelled and asked what was the matter. Beth said she and Roland ran to the bottom of the stairs and then ran from the house. “Roland was driving like a maniac when we left, and he was telling me I had to get rid of our masks and the gun, just dump them somewhere.

“We didn’t notice that we’d left those bags behind until we were driving away in the car. Roland asked me where they were, and I told him they were still in the house, and he said, ‘We’re fucked!’ ”

It certainly seemed that they were. After they managed to lure Tim away from the house and were able to enter without a problem, nothing went as Roland planned. They weren’t even able to accomplish the kidnapping, much less go forward with his foolproof plan to keep Tim tied up in Beth’s basement until his grandparents came up with the $250,000 ransom.

What would he have done with Tim at that point if Roland’s scenario had worked? The answer was obvious: Roland could never have let Tim go free. Tim surely would have figured out who was holding him captive, even if the amateurish soundproof prison actually blocked out all sound and Roland and Beth managed to change their voices enough to fool him when they checked on him. Tim would have become a major threat. Any reasonable person would deduce that Tim Nash—alive—could and probably would report Roland Pitre to the police.

Tim Nash, like others less lucky, would have been worth more dead to Roland Pitre.

At 4:10
PM
on March 24, Superior Court Judge Karen B. Conoley issued an arrest warrant for Pitre, not for kidnapping or conspiracy—which were still under intense investigation—but for burglary stemming from the theft on July 13, 1991, of the family safe, which was still missing. That would be enough to take him off the street and give his family a measure of relief that he would not be sneaking back into their house. Just to be sure, Della Roslyn obtained a restraining order that barred Roland from any contact whatsoever with his terrified family.

Tim had believed his stepfather had wanted to kill him for a long time, and the rest of the Pitre family, including his daughter and estranged wife, were deathly afraid of Roland. The charges were soon amended to include the attempted kidnapping and burglary. Christian Casad, Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for Kitsap County, and Deputy Prosecutor Brian Moran were assigned to handle the State’s case. Steve Sherman was appointed to represent Roland Pitre.

Held on $500,000 bail, Roland said he was shocked that anyone could possibly deduce that he would hurt his family. He said that he suffered from such terrible feelings of loneliness and loss after Della asked him to move out and told him she was going ahead with a divorce that he had come up with all the reasons he could to go back to what had been his home. Why would Della have allowed him to keep his key to the garage if she didn’t still need him? He said he tried to find small repairs to make and took his laundry there, making any excuse he could to stay close to her and his children.

As far as his having a sexual relationship with Beth Bixler, he laughed that off. He told detectives that he never considered sleeping with Beth and had no romantic feelings toward her. It was she, he insisted, who was the aggressor. She regularly came to his house, complaining about how miserable she was in her marriage, and they had commiserated with each other.

Roland said he was taken aback when Beth approached him and asked him to kill her husband, promising him a share of his $200,000 insurance policy.

“I told her immediately that I did not kill people,” he protested, seeming to be appalled at the very thought of it.

But Beth had persisted in her demands that either Roland or someone he could hire would murder her husband. It was at that point, Roland said, that he realized that Beth might be just the kind of person who could help him create a false danger for his family. He thought he might be able to use her to work out a scenario that wouldn’t truly be a menace to Della and the kids but one in which he could appear to be their savior.

Yes, he had told Beth Bixler a tall story of how Tim would be kidnapped and held for ransom. But her own “greed” took over, he recalled, and she came up with ideas on how they could accomplish the kidnapping.

“The holding room, the cards, and most of the other ideas were all hers,” Roland said quietly. “I just went along with several of her suggestions so she wouldn’t guess my true intentions of pretending to rescue my family until the last minute.”

Roland Pitre swore he never meant for the plan to go beyond frightening Tim. He assured the investigators that all he planned was for someone to get into the house, frighten Tim into believing he was about to be abducted, and then leave. At that point, Roland would come back home, and his family would realize they needed him to take care of them. His marriage would resume, and they would all live happily ever after.

But he knew that he couldn’t do it himself. If he went into the house, Tim would recognize him. Beth was afraid to go in alone, so she found some young guy Roland did not know to pretend to be a kidnapper. It was she, he insisted, who said they needed a gun. “I asked her to please just get a BB or a pellet gun,” he sighed. “Without my knowledge, she borrowed a .44 caliber gun from some coworker.”

He added that Beth was having a sexual relationship with that man.

On March 21, Roland said, he and Beth picked up a young man at the Handy Mart on Marine Drive. Then she called Tim and flirted with him, luring him to the Pancake House. When they saw Tim riding by on his scooter, Roland drove to Della’s house.

Yes, he parked in the back and provided them with a key and the alarm system code, but he only waited in the car. Beth got out of his van, carrying the two bags of items she thought she needed, and the stranger carried the rifle case.

Roland said he took the young man aside to be sure he understood that no one was to be hurt. All he was supposed to do was frighten Tim, then leave. “No harm was to come to him; I told him that.”

Beth and the other man came running out of the house a short time later, and Roland drove off with them. He left the stranger at the Handy Mart, and then Beth took over the driving and dropped Roland at his house.

As far as the theft of the safe holding Della’s possessions, jewelry, and the family’s documents, Roland admitted to that. But that had happened two years ago. He and Bud Halser had taken the safe to retaliate against Della for trying to divorce him a year before, sneakily filing papers when he was far away visiting in Louisiana. Insurance? Of course not, he said. He never even thought of insurance on the safe.

Roland maintained that Della was the one who filed the insurance claims and that the money received from the company was deposited in her personal bank account. After he managed to recover the jewelry, he said, he attempted to report that to the insurance company, but they weren’t interested. “They told me the matter was closed and wasn’t worth pursuing.”

Roland’s great and good friend, Bud Halser, presently in prison, was not charged in Tim’s kidnapping attempt, but he was charged in the theft of the safe in 1991. As tight as the two men had been for years, Halser’s lawyer nevertheless set out immediately with motions to sever his case from Pitre’s. Evidence showed that Halser’s girlfriend was involved in the kidnapping plot, too. She placed several phone calls to Bébé, who was babysitting for Beth Bixler, in an effort to give Roland a backup alibi.

It was a matter of whom to believe, Beth Bixler or Roland Pitre. Their stories were diametrically opposed, each version rendering the other as entirely false. But if Beth Bixler was the brains behind the plot to kidnap Tim Nash, why had she come to the police in an attempt to take all the blame away from Roland? On the other hand, he had thrown her to the wolves quite easily. And Roland Pitre was the one who had a long rap sheet and a reputation for being a convincing liar. It wasn’t that the investigators believed her just because she was a woman; they had seen a number of female felons. But Beth Bixler had no criminal past, and Roland had been tied to two homicides.

Roland lied as easily as he breathed. And he had a history of filing claims with insurance companies. He was a shoplifter and a faithless lover. Was he only a con man and a grifter, or was he far more dangerous than that? It certainly seemed so when one considered the escalation of his alleged crimes over the past twenty years. He had been close to the violent deaths of both Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, although his actual whereabouts at the moment of their murders was still murky.

Even though she had come to fear him, Bébé Pitre clung to the hope that deep in his heart her father loved her and the family. That all crumbled when she and her boyfriend Mike were cleaning out Roland’s rental house after his arrest for attempted kidnapping. As they made piles of things to keep and things to give to the Goodwill, they found the transcripts from the 1980 trial in which Roland testified against his mistress and his best friend. Reading them, Bébé suddenly came across the questions about Pitre’s onetime plan to kill her for insurance money. To her shock and sadness, she finally comprehended just how little she meant to her father.

She was only 15 years old when she realized the danger she had been in at the tender age of 20 months. On page 102 of the transcript, she read that her father admitted to buying an insurance policy on her life. A page later, he spoke of thinking about ways to kill her.

“How did you plan on killing your daughter?” the defense attorney, Gil Mullen, asked him.

“I thought about making it look like she accidentally got into some drugs. I thought about making it look like she was kidnapped. I hadn’t really come down to a final…the plan was that I was more leaning towards was her getting into the medicine cabinet. She was at the…she was always crawling around getting into things.”

“Did you call anybody [Seattle’s Poison Control Center] in reference to a drug overdose or anything in Seattle?”

“Yeah.”

“What was that about?”

“Uh, I didn’t know how much it would take. I called to see about how much it would take, how many. I couldn’t get any prescription drugs. I was thinking about sleeping pills. I wanted to know how much it would take to kill somebody.”

Mullen had questioned Roland about the details of his buying the insurance policies.

“Okay. Now let’s talk about the times that you bought these policies. When did you buy those $20,000 policies?”

“I got the first policy during the first or second week I was there in Pennsylvania [when he was picking tiny Bébé up for a visit to Washington in 1980].”

“Before
you thought of killing your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“And the second $20,000 policy was purchased after you thought of killing your daughter?”

“Yes.”

It is almost impossible to contemplate what reading these transcripts must have been like for a teenager. Now Bébé admitted to the prosecution team that she had always been afraid of her father and that he had continually tried to draw her into whatever his scheme of the moment was, but she had been much too fearful to tell anyone, even her adoptive mother, who was also frightened. With Roland shut away in jail, Bébé made copies of the court transcripts where her own murder was contemplated and gave them to the prosecutors and the investigators.

They didn’t disagree with her when she told them that she was finally convinced that her father had killed her mother. That was the very worst truth she had to accept. She had loved him so much, but his latest attack had been just another of his sinister schemes, this time to take away the only family she had left. His lies and manipulations were obvious.

Della Roslyn Pitre talked to the investigators about her fear of Roland Pitre. He had been a very romantic boyfriend, but once they were married he soon became another person. She was shocked by the way he twisted the truth to suit his purposes. Her family had seen through him before she had—as families often do—but she had been bedazzled by him. That caused a rift between Della and her family, although she was working hard to mend it. Della had always enjoyed a good reputation, and she felt that her association with Roland had tainted her image and cost her promotions at work. Worst of all was how he had persuaded her to distrust her son. She regretted the pain that Tim had gone through and vowed to make it up to him if she could.

Della knew her children were all suffering from post-traumatic stress. To be at home with them during nighttime hours, she resigned from her second-shift job at Tacoma General Hospital. She had been making about $70,000 a year; suddenly, her income had dropped to $24,000.

Like Bébé, Della came to believe that Roland was behind Cheryl Pitre’s murder, even though she had been his main alibi witness. Five years earlier, he persuaded her that he had come to bed that Saturday night at almost exactly the time Cheryl locked up PJ’s Market and headed for home. She had had no reason to doubt Roland at the time, but now Della wasn’t so sure.

Everyone in the Pitre house was sleeping, either in bed or in front of the TV set, between 11:30
PM
and 12:30
AM.
Everyone but Roland. Roland told Della that it was 11:30 when he came to bed, but she hadn’t checked. It was an hour later when they made love. When Della awakened at five the next morning, he was there beside her. But had he really been there all night?

Bébé knew that she hadn’t watched wrestling on television with her father that night because she had gotten so sleepy that she went to bed. But she was only 10 years old at the time, much too young to even understand what an alibi was.

Now she did.