Worth More Dead

overflowing with the curious. It was easy to believe Maria. She perched on the edge of the witness chair, looking almost childlike, so tiny that her feet hardly touched the floor. She wore a plaid pleated skirt, a dark blazer, and a ruffle of white at her neck, and she smiled often, although it was a subdued smile, one suitable for a young widow.
    Her voice was so soft that even with the amplification of a microphone, it didn’t reach to the rear of the courtroom. The jurors leaned forward in their chairs, straining to understand her words.
    By testifying in her own defense, Maria opened herself up to cross-examination, but she seemed prepared for that. Her own attorney asked her many of the “tough” questions, aware that they would be forthcoming from the prosecutor, David Thiele, on cross. Mullen used this effective technique to defuse any of her answers that might make the jury think badly of her. If he asked them first, they wouldn’t have as much impact when the prosecutor asked them.
    Maria repeated the story that Detective Edwards taped two days after her husband was killed. The jurors had already heard that tape, and it was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that the State had against her.
    Now, on the witness stand, she once again admitted her affair with Roland Pitre. “Was it a physical affair?”
    “That’s what I always understood an affair was,” she said a little condescendingly, toward even her own lawyer.
    Maria said she believed that Roland understood her wish to return to Dennis, but then she said she was horrified at the way he began to cling to her. Once he came back to Whidbey Island with temporary custody of his daughter, he didn’t seem to know what to do. Yes, she admitted that she saw Roland Pitre almost every day for two weeks prior to the murder, but that had not been her choice. It was because he dogged her trail, confronting her everywhere she went. She could not avoid him, and she felt sorry for his sister. She recounted the meeting around July 1, 1980, in their mutual friends’ bedroom.
    “I did not want to see him. But I went there. Mr. Pitre started talking to me. He was extremely apprehensive. He started crying. I thought he would not want to be embarrassed so we went to the bedroom to talk.”
    Roland Pitre (whom she occasionally referred to as “Sensei,” a Japanese word for “teacher” used frequently in martial-arts training). “He was different from the nice friend who’d left. His hair was different, blond instead of dark. He sat on the bed. He was trembling. He asked if he was going to see me any more beyond judo class, and I shook my head no. ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ he said. He cried, and he caressed the air around me. He was afraid to touch me. I yelled at him and preached at him a lot.
    “I told him: ‘You are a blind man touching a big, gigantic elephant, touching just the tail and you think the tail is the whole elephant. You can’t pray for anything you want! You are not a good Catholic.’ ”
    She said that she had called him a fool.
    As far as Maria was concerned, she testified, the affair was over, dead, cold.
    “Did you ever at any occasion suggest anything that could have sounded like killing your husband?” Mullen asked.
    “No. Never.”
    “Did you talk to him about drugging or poisoning your husband? Did you say anything about giving him some Sominex?”
    “Never. Never.”
    “Had Mr. Pitre ever discussed his plan to kill your husband with you?”
    “Never. He wouldn’t discuss my husband with me. Never.”
    Maria’s scathing answers were spat out as Mullen asked her if she’d agreed to a plan to leave her children at home while a third party—Steven Guidry—went to her home to kill her husband. “Did you agree to expose the children to that danger?”
    “I am not demented!”
    The questions became more difficult after Prosecutor Thiele rose to cross-examine Maria Archer. Thiele asked, “You lied about being with Roland Pitre on the night your husband was shot. You asked Lola Sanchez to tell your husband you were with her?”
    A. …it was not the truth…
    Q. You lied to the police on that first night?
    A. But it had nothing to do with it.
    Q. Why did you tell them you were at Mrs. Sanchez’s?
    A. Wherever I was, it was none of their business.
    Q. In the statement you gave to Sergeant Edwards, you said you’d told Lola Sanchez to “just tell him [Archer] I was at your house?”
    A. I was under