Worth More Dead

realized suddenly at that point that he had been “tricked” and “manipulated” into arranging his lover’s husband’s murder and that Maria had never intended to marry him at all. He had been duped. The thought of what he had done for a love that didn’t really exist ate at his mind like acid. Not surprisingly, he said his mental problems had grown worse after his arrest, that he had stopped eating and drinking and that he even lost his memory for long periods of time. He actually began to believe that it was an evil being named Targan who made him do the bad things he did to keep Maria’s love.
    Still, he recalled that Maria came to visit him once in jail and that she mouthed the words “I love you” during that visit.
    But she never came back.
    Roland Pitre was supremely convincing as the betrayed lover, who was now facing years in prison because he had been seduced by a wanton woman and used to carry out her murderous desires. On the witness stand, he managed to hide the muscles of a trained judo expert and looked like the pathetic loser he claimed to be.
     
    Now it was time for the defense. Maria Archer’s lawyer, Gil Mullen, one of Seattle’s most effective criminal defense lawyers, tore into Roland Pitre during cross-examination. Mullen aimed at Pitre’s credibility as a witness, which he showed was highly suspect by quoting lies in several statements Pitre gave to the Island County lawmen since his arrest. Pitre’s statement that Steven Guidry arrived from Louisiana wearing only rubber thongs as footwear seemed one of the more minor oddities in a case already so strange. But then what are the rules of dress for someone contemplating murder? Suit and tie? Trench coat? Hip boots? Whether Guidry wore thongs or sneakers didn’t seem to have much to do with his guilt.
    Now Gil Mullen smiled sardonically as he pointed out that Pitre’s insistence that Guidry was such a loyal friend that he offered to be the triggerman for nothing, refusing $5,000, money he needed badly, defied credulity.
    And what are the limitless bounds of friendship? The jury was considering these peculiarities when counselor Mullen hit on an area that shocked most of the gallery.
    Mullen elicited an admission from Roland Pitre that he had considered murdering his 20-month-old daughter earlier in the summer of 1980. For profit. Pitre admitted that he had insured Bébé’s life for as much as he could, an amount the State estimated at $45,000. He said the thought of killing little Bébé, who had been entrusted to him in temporary custody, had seized his mind—but for only a day or so. Then he said he dismissed the idea.
    “But the thought did occur while I was putting Bébé to sleep for her nap,” Pitre testified. “I said ‘Nothing better happen to you, or I’ll be a rich man.’ ”
    “What method did you consider when you thought of killing your daughter?” Mullen probed.
    Pitre said he had considered killing the child with a drug overdose by giving her access to his medicine cabinet or maybe stuffing her into a plastic garbage bag so that she would suffocate or throwing her from his moving van. He hastened to add that Maria had known nothing of these dark thoughts.
    Pitre was asked about various statements he had made about Dennis Archer’s killing, with Mullen often pointing out discrepancies. Pitre answered that everything he said in each statement was “true at the time.”
    Targan, the evil being, was blamed for the murder in a statement Pitre gave on August 28.
    “Is Targan still with us today?” Mullen asked.
    “No, he’s not.”
    “Targan had nothing to do with it?” Mullen probed.
    “No, but at that time, I thought he did.”
    “You once claimed to be a hit man for organized crime in New Orleans. Was that true?”
    “I was making a joke,” Pitre said with a smirk, as if it were laughable.
    Pitre maintained in court that he felt overwhelming guilt about Dennis Archer’s murder. He said that there were times when he found it was difficult even to look at himself in the mirror to shave. But he was resolute about his testimony that Maria Archer had been the one who pushed and prodded him into arranging her husband’s killing.
    “I was used,” he said flatly.
    As the trial moved into its second week, Maria Archer herself took the witness stand, seemingly undisturbed by the television and still cameras that recorded her every movement. She appeared to have no stage fright in a courtroom filled to