Worth More Dead

sure he would do himself the most good. During the trial, Guidry was still in jail, but after spending several weeks in custody Maria was released on bail. She was free to come and go from the courtroom, to have lunch in downtown restaurants, and to mingle with trial observers in the marble hallways of the King County Courthouse.
    The twelve jurors and two alternates in Judge H. Joseph Coleman’s courtroom did not have an easy task before them. They would hear the three different and completely contradictory statements regarding the murder of Dennis Archer. Just about the only thing that the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, and the defendants agreed on was that Dennis Archer was dead, that he had been sent to his grave by three bullets in his chest.
    It was strange to see the two defendants in the courtroom. They were both small people who looked as if homicide would be completely alien to them. Steven Guidry sat at the far end of the L-shaped cluster formed by the two defense tables, next to his lawyer, Richard Hansen. Maria Archer sat three chairs away, beside her lawyer, Gil Mullen, a former Seattle police officer. During the three-week trial, Maria and Guidry never even glanced at each other.
    It was quite possible that they didn’t know each other, although the State contended they almost certainly knew about each other because of the plotting between Maria and Roland.
     
    David Thiele, the Island County prosecutor, presented the State’s case, and Sergeant Ron Edwards of the sheriff’s office assisted the prosecution, sitting close by Thiele to help with information on the details of his investigation.
    The first row of the gallery was reserved for the media. We were packed so tightly that we could barely scribble on our yellow legal pads. The second row was made up principally of friends and family of the victim and of Maria Archer. The rest of the long oak benches were up for grabs by a long line of spectators.
    The Archer-Guidry trial in 1980 was one of the very first in Washington where both television and still cameras were allowed into the courtroom, and cameramen from all major stations and newspapers in Washington took turns filming the proceedings. Maria, completely beautiful from any angle, was their chief subject. Sometimes it appeared that she was unaware of the cameras focused on her. Sometimes she seemed to pose for them.
    Roland Pitre, the former Marine Corps staff sergeant, the judo instructor, the admitted ex-lover of the female defendant, transfixed the crowd and had the jury’s full attention for four days as he laid out a story of passion and conspiracy to commit murder.
    Pitre maintained that he had been totally in love with Maria and that it was she—not he—who had convinced him that the only way they could ever hope to marry was to have her husband killed.
    He testified that Maria was terrified that she would lose custody of her children if Dennis divorced her and that she couldn’t bear that. According to him, she begged and nagged him to help her until he finally agreed. “I was doing something that I didn’t want to do. I knew it was wrong,” Pitre earnestly told the jury.
    He described how the pressure from Maria to kill her husband built during the last days before Archer’s murder. “I felt I was losing my grip on things.” Pitre said he thought about seeing a psychiatrist and that he spent some time reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (a book then popular about a young woman institutionalized for schizophrenia). Try as he might, he testified, he was unable to stop the inexorable progress toward murder. He sighed as he said that he himself could not bear the thought of murder, but then he couldn’t stand to lose Maria, either.
    Pitre recalled that Maria had first brought up the matter of killing her husband a few weeks before the murder. They were making love on the floor of his apartment when she initially broached the idea after he asked her, “How can I really make you mine?” He told the jurors that she had answered quickly: “The only way I can really belong to you is if you kill Dennis.”
    He was shocked, he said sadly, to hear her say that.
    The witness said he tried at first to suggest the demise of Dennis Archer in a nonviolent way. Pitre admitted that he purchased three bottles of Sominex—an over-the-counter sleep aid—and gave them to Maria, hoping that she would believe they might poison her husband and therefore trust that he, Pitre, was