Worth More Dead

sincere in helping her. That didn’t work. She told him he’d better find a more effective way to kill Dennis.
    Killing Dennis had to be a sure thing, not just something that would give him a stomachache or put him to sleep for a day. It needed to be death by gunshot or knifing or bludgeoning.
    Because the community knew of his affair with Maria, the couple realized that neither of them could actually carry out the act of murder. They had to find someone totally unconnected to Dennis Archer, someone no one would recognize or remember who could do the killing. Stranger to stranger, the most difficult kind of homicide for detectives to solve.
    The jurors, transfixed, watched Roland Pitre as he glibly told them a story that sounded as though it had come out of a film noir.
    The plan had been refined, Pitre testified, to the point where he and Maria decided that he would contact his old friend, Steven Guidry, in Louisiana and fly him up to Washington, furnish him with plans of the Archers’ house layout, give him a gun, and send him off to do the job. Guidry would have firm instructions to make Archer’s murder look like the by-product of a burglary that he had interrupted. If this had been a forties movie, the plan would surely have called for Guidry to die, too, after he had accomplished his deadly assignment.
    Pitre said he had contacted Guidry and offered him $5,000 to do the killing. Guidry countered by saying he would do it for nothing. This was very hard for the jury and the gallery to swallow.
    Pitre testified that he picked up his old friend around noon on Saturday at the airport south of Seattle. He immediately drove him to the Whidbey Island ferry and then to his apartment. There he gave Guidry a key to the Archer residence and the gun, explaining that he and Maria would be miles away from the murder location. After Guidry had determined that Dennis Archer was indeed dead, he was to call Pitre and give him the code words “Bernie Garcia.”
    The witness said he explained to Guidry that the gun was to be dropped off the Deception Pass bridge as they drove to Sea-Tac airport after the murder. The water below was so deep that no one would ever find it.
    The plot to murder Maria’s husband sounded so cold-blooded as Roland Pitre spun it out. Cold-blooded it was and planned to the minute. On Sunday night, July 13, Pitre testified, he took his sister over to the Brocks’ home to visit as he planned. He had been very careful that no one in Oak Harbor saw Steve Guidry and kept him hidden in his van until the moment came for him to leave for the Archers’ house. Maria would not be there, of course, because they had planned for her to leave her home well before Guidry got there. The children were not to be hurt; they were to be shut up in the basement so they would not witness their father’s murder.
    After Pitre dispatched Guidry to commit murder, he said, he spent his time waiting for Maria, “frying fish, and watching Mork and Mindy.”
    The judo expert then described to the jury a Maria Archer who was completely different from the loving mother and penitent unfaithful wife that she portrayed herself to be in her statements and testimony.
    “She got there, and we sat on a sofa for a while,” Roland Pitre told the jurors. They gazed at Maria Archer as she sat at the defense table, her head slightly bowed, her hands clasped in her lap.
    “I was laying down with my head in her lap, and she asked me to make love to her,” Pitre continued. “That was about twenty minutes after she got there. We went upstairs. During the time we were upstairs, she asked several times what time it was and whether I thought it had happened yet. I told her I didn’t know. It was supposed to happen when it was dark. But the time wasn’t specific.”
    Pitre recalled that Maria rose from the bed, began to get dressed, and was brushing her long, dark hair about 10:30. She had then made a couple of phone calls, including one to her friend, Lola Sanchez.
    “Maria told me that Lola had told her she shouldn’t be seeing me and that Dennis was going to find out about us and she was going to lose everything,” Pitre testified. “Then she said, ‘You know, she’s right.’ Maria said it would be better for me and my daughter and for her and her kids if we not see each other anymore.”
    “I said, ‘You know, Maria, Dennis is probably dead now.’ ”
    “She said, ‘I know,’ and then she left.”
    Roland Pitre said he had