Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (20 page)

It seemed odd that Ketchum did not ask if Roland killed Cheryl. Rather, he moved on quickly to queries about Beth Bixler.

The polygrapher asked Roland if Beth had told him she was romantically and sexually involved with a man other than her husband. He answered Yes.

The lie detector test ordered by Roland’s defense lawyer resulted in Ketchum’s belief that the subject had replied truthfully. At least, his physiological responses indicated no deception. There were several ways to react to these startling results. One was that Roland Pitre was an honest man, wrongly accused. Another was that the questions asked of him were carefully crafted to avoid those that would evoke the strongest response.

It was also possible that Pitre was a human completely without conscience, one who felt no guilt and no remorse. Without those emotions or any real apprehension about punishment, antisocial personalities often pass lie detector tests. Polygraphs are not foolproof; they depend upon the person who administers them, the emotional state of the subject, possible personality disorders in the subject, and a number of other factors. Unless both the prosecution and defense agree, lie-detector results are not admissible in a trial for those very reasons.

Verina Palmer wrote down what Roland told her. He seemed sure that those who read his version of the story would see that he was a much maligned innocent man and that the judge would feel the same way. Hadn’t he proved that with his lie-detector results?

He had not.

In December 1993,
Roland Pitre was to appear for sentencing for First Degree Burglary, Conspiracy to Commit First Degree Kidnapping, Willful Destruction of Insured Property, and First Degree Theft.

Chris Casad stated his reasons for believing that Pitre deserved an exceptional sentence. There were six factors to consider: abuse of trust; sophistication and planning; deliberate mental cruelty; lack of remorse; an especially culpable mental state; and, Casad stated, that Pitre’s crimes were more “egregious and onerous” than typical crimes in the four classifications.

While it is difficult to say what makes a crime typical, it is true that most criminals don’t confine their nefarious plots almost entirely to members of their own families. Roland Pitre had been a flimflam man to get relatively small amounts of money from strangers, colleges, and government agencies but his master plans involved his wives, children, and mistresses. He appeared to have loyalty to no one except himself and concern for only his own wants and needs.

Casad felt it was appropriate to impose a sentence of fifty years in prison and an additional five years of postrelease supervision.

On December 17, 1993, Judge Haberly sentenced Roland Pitre to 240 months in prison (with credit for 268 days already served in the Kitsap County Jail) on Count I and 120 months (with credit for the 268 days) on Count II. It was less than Chris Casad had asked for but far more than Steve Sherman, the defense counsel, felt was called for. Roland Pitre had been afraid of getting twelve years in prison; now he faced more than twenty-five years of captivity. He was 41 years old, and would be 65 or more when he was paroled.

Pitre was also ordered never to have contact with his wife and children.

The prisoner’s immediate family picked up the frayed strands of their lives, although the emotional damage they suffered would never really go away. They moved on, some of them changing their names (Living in constant fear leaves victims with a programmed panic reaction.)

And with it all, Cheryl Pitre’s murder was still a cold case. Despite the genuine suspicions of dozens of investigators, they were still unable to link her ex-husband to the terrible beating that ended her life.

Years passed. Cheryl’s children grew up, but they never forgot their mother, and their overwhelming need to bring her some measure of justice didn’t go away.

2003

In the decade
since Roland Pitre’s conviction in 1993, forensic science leapt ahead with remarkable techniques. Police departments across America established “Cold Case Squads.” The Seattle Police Department was one of them. Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon were the first Seattle homicide detectives assigned to read through cases that had gone unsolved for many years. Although Cheryl Pitre’s life was centered in Bremerton and Port Orchard and most investigators had concluded that she probably died there, her body was found in Seattle proper. By 2003, cold case squads utilizing DNA matches were closing unsolved cases in mounting numbers. Mixsell and Gagnon had solved a dozen cold cases, and they continued to move forward, mowing them down one by one.

Hank Gruber, Rudy Sutlovich, and their sergeant, Joe Sanford, had retired from the Seattle Police Department by late 2003, although they never forgot the Pitre case. Kitsap County detectives Doug Wright and Jim Harris had also retired. Cheryl’s murder lingered in their minds, too, as unfinished business. But it was more than that for all the detectives, uniformed officers, and criminalists who had worked Cheryl’s murder case; she had been a warm and loving woman, a young mother, a friend to dozens of people.

There is an unseen bond that links murder victims with the men and women who strive to find out exactly what happened to them and why. The investigators come to know the victims as well as—often better than—those who have known them in life. It is a heavy responsibility that doesn’t go away when a case is over, and an unsolved case is never over.

Hank Gruber, who now works in courthouse security, has always kept in close touch with his former colleagues in the Homicide Unit, and he was one of the first to learn from Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon that there might be a revitalized probe into Cheryl Pitre’s murder, now fifteen years in the past.

He was elated, as were the other detectives who had hoped that this day would come.

There was someone who knew what had happened to Cheryl Pitre, someone other than the person or persons who had killed her. The knowledge had eaten away at his conscience for years, acid thoughts that disturbed his sleep and made him feel guilty, even though he had not participated in her death.

But he was in prison, and there are few more dangerous things to do while in prison than to tell other prisoners’ secrets. “Snitches” don’t last long in prison. They have unfortunate accidents or untimely deaths. Even those who do come forward lose some of their effectiveness because their identity has to be protected by the law enforcement agencies they contact. Not surprisingly, they rarely agree to testify in court.

Why do they come forward at all? Some prison informants do it because they have consciences. Some tell what they know out of the need for revenge; others hope they might get their own sentences shortened. A few of them are just natural-born tattletales and gossips.

Since Roland Pitre was well acquainted with the much shortened life spans of prison snitches, he may have assumed that no one on the wrong side of the bars would be a threat to him, especially since with his contrived charisma, he had always been popular in prison.

But there was at least one person who didn’t like him at all. The vast majority of inmates are serving sentences for crimes that haven’t physically hurt anyone. They have mothers and wives and children. They deplore sexual crimes and murder—particularly against female victims—just as much as anyone on the outside.

Cheryl Pitre hadn’t had a chance, and that galled the man who managed to get a message out to the Seattle Police investigators. With all the names that had come to the original detectives working Cheryl’s murder, the name this person put forward was new. Somehow he had never been mentioned in connection with her death. He wasn’t a big-time felon at all, just a druggie, both a user and a pusher.

His name was Frederick James McKee. His mug shot showed a cadaverous man, pale and thin with haunted eyes. If he was a likely suspect, there was no tearing hurry to contact him; he wasn’t going anywhere. In 2003, Fred McKee was in the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla, serving twelve years for manufacturing methamphetamine. Pitre, still in prison himself at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, couldn’t even hope for a parole hearing until 2018. The cold case detectives had plenty of time to investigate.

McKee wasn’t listed as one of Roland’s close associates during his stint at McNeil Island in the eighties, but according to the prison informant, Roland had done fatal business with McKee.

A convict’s accusing McKee of a fifteen-year-old murder wasn’t enough to charge him. Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon would have to find a way to connect him to Cheryl with physical evidence gleaned on the night of her murder.

McKee was 29 or 30 at the time of Cheryl’s murder. Now he was 45. Roland was 51. It would be difficult to work back through the intricate connections among and between convicts who served parallel prison terms on McNeil Island in the eighties, their release dates, where they were while on supervised parole, and
their
associates. Roland had his close friends on the outside he’d kept up with, and he’d even tried to go back to prison to visit some of his tightest buddies, for instance, Bud Halser. Would it be possible to link Pitre and McKee? Or Pitre, Halser, and McKee?

Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to go that route. If Gagnon and Mixsell could tie McKee to some part of the direct physical evidence found in Cheryl’s Topaz, they would have a strong case.

In 1988, DNA was a little-used forensic tool. It had been successful in closing a landmark homicide case in England the year before, but this had involved taking DNA samples from every male in a small town, more than five thousand of them. When Cheryl was murdered, detectives and crime scene specialists had retrieved blood, body fluid, hair, and tissue samples in the hope that they could obtain DNA matches. However, at the time it took a large sample to test for DNA, one that was usually destroyed by the tests themselves. Moreover, there was no national registry then of known DNA comparisons, not like the millions of fingerprints available from the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems) computer system. But the early investigators hadn’t been able to retrieve usable fingerprints. The cost of DNA testing was also prohibitive in the early days of forensic investigation.

Fortunately, Hank Gruber is an extremely precise man, and he had saved and labeled every scintilla of possible evidence he gleaned from Cheryl Pitre’s car. Evidence from her autopsy had also been carefully preserved. Gruber had always believed that something that existed in that silver car on the night Cheryl’s body was found would lead to her killer, despite the many blind alleys they went down in the intervening fifteen years.

Cheryl’s wrists had been bound behind her with strapping tape, and that tape still existed in the Seattle Police Department’s Evidence Room. The killer hadn’t left his fingerprints, but was it possible that he left something else of himself on that tape?

Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon obtained a search warrant to get Fred McKee’s DNA samples so they could compare them with material isolated from the strapping tape.

And finally, after so many years, they learned that the crime scene processing done in October 1988 had come to fruition after all. It just happened to take more than fifteen years for forensic science to catch up with this unsolved murder.

Fred McKee’s skin cells still clung to the tape he had used to bind Cheryl’s hands.

He might as well have written his name in her blood on the night of October 15. What could have possessed him to carry out such a cruel assignment?

McKee admitted to Mixsell and Gagnon that he met Roland Pitre and the anonymous protected witness while they were all serving time in prison. He had harbored no ill feelings toward Cheryl; he didn’t even know her. His motive was money. Roland Pitre promised him between $5,000 and $10,000 if he would kill Roland’s wife. The money was there, according to Pitre; McKee would just have to wait for it awhile until her insurance paid off.

Roland was still in the reformatory in Monroe, a small town about twenty-five miles northeast of Seattle. The Seattle cold case detectives traveled there to talk to him.

He had a story to tell Mixsell and Gagnon. His version of the motive behind the attack on Cheryl might even have been convincing—if it weren’t so familiar. The detectives had of course read over the Kitsap County and Bremerton Police Department files regarding the attempted kidnapping of Pitre’s stepson ten years earlier. Pitre had insisted then that the kidnapping wasn’t real; it was only an imitation of life, never meant to be carried out.

It was done, he had said, to win back the love of his second wife, Della, and the trust of his family.

Maybe Roland had forgotten what he told the authorities in Kitsap County, maybe he was confused and thrown off balance to find the two Seattle investigators waiting to talk with him about an old, old murder, or maybe his fertile brain had just run out of ideas.

Confronted with the evidence linking him to McKee and to Cheryl’s murder fifteen years earlier, Roland admitted that he hired McKee to frighten his estranged wife. He even gave him a key to Cheryl’s house, advised him of her work schedule for Saturday night, and drove him by the house to be sure he knew where she lived. Somewhat surprisingly, Cheryl wasn’t supposed to be abducted along the road from PJ’s Market as she headed for home. Instead, Roland wanted to have her surprised by a stranger in her own home. The time of the attack was set for midnight.

To be extra helpful, Roland even drove McKee to a hardware store to buy the rope and the duct tape he would need to render Cheryl immobile. Yes, he admitted he wanted her to be scared. “But he wasn’t supposed to kill her,” Pitre insisted. “I never intended for her to die.”

As he had always done, Roland constructed a finely tuned plot. He was going to tell Della, his new girlfriend, that he was going out for popcorn. Then his intention was to race to Cheryl’s house where he would storm in and thwart Fred McKee’s assault. Roland said he hadn’t planned to stay with Della; he wanted only to win back Cheryl’s love, and he figured that saving her from a mysterious intruder in the middle of the night would prove to her that they were meant to be together.

He would be her hero.

Gagnon and Mixsell stared at him. This was virtually the same scenario Roland had constructed to explain why he’d “pretended” to kidnap Tim Nash.

There was every indication that Cheryl Pitre was still in love with her estranged husband at the time of her death. She had been through so many challenges to get him released from prison and had done her best to support him emotionally and financially in the two years they lived together as man and wife after his parole. She had borne him a second child and worked double time while he attended college. And for most of those two years, he was cheating on her with other women, although she probably didn’t suspect it until their last few weeks together.

Ever the optimist, Cheryl wouldn’t have needed a staged rescue to convince her that she needed Roland. She knew she needed him.

Cheryl’s and Della’s roles in Roland’s life were almost interchangeable. The only difference was that Della had caught on quicker, so she was still alive.

Yes, Roland conceded that he hired McKee but hadn’t been able to stop him in time. During the late night of October 15, he had the terrible bad luck to suffer another one of his “blackouts,” the spells he said he had most of his life. Those blurred places in his memory had occurred way back, even before he suffered a stroke. And he seemed brokenhearted now as he spoke to the cold case detectives that it had to happen just when he needed to rush to Cheryl’s aid.

“I woke up the next morning,” he said morosely, “and went about my day, and I suddenly realized that I forgot that I was supposed to rescue Cheryl.”

“You
forgot?”
Gagnon asked.

“That happens when I get blackouts.”

On January 20, 2004, Barbara Flemming, a King County deputy prosecuting attorney, filed charges of first-degree murder against Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee in the death of Cheryl Pitre. Both men were already in prison, but as a precaution the prosecutors asked for $2 million bail for Roland anyway. He had managed to stay free of the law for large chunks of time since his original arrest for murder twenty-four years earlier.