Worth More Dead

attorney, struck hard at Roland Pitre’s credibility as a witness. “The state’s case has got to rise or fall on the testimony of Roland Pitre. And Roland Pitre is a thief, a faker, a cold-blooded, violent, confessed murderer and an unmitigated liar!”
    Mullen did not attempt to paint Maria as a saint. “Maria Archer admits she had an affair with Roland Pitre, and she was ashamed and not very proud of it; but she is not here on trial for having an affair. She is not here on trial for committing sexual indiscretions. She is here on trial for murder—premeditated murder.”
    Richard Hansen, Steven Guidry’s attorney, enlarged on the defense’s belief that Pitre was a liar. “If you convict these two innocent people, that is going to help Roland Pitre. He has a strong incentive to help convict these innocent people to help himself. It would cut off half or probably more of his sentence.”
    By testifying against his former mistress and his former best friend, Roland Pitre was now allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder, and he would indeed have a much shorter sentence than life in prison.

4
    And so, on New Year’s Eve 1980, the tangle of evidence and testimony went at last to the jury. The press bench vacillated. As one reporter remarked, “One day, I think ‘guilty’ and then the next I think ‘not guilty.’ I wouldn’t want to be on the jury.”
    After eleven hours, the jury came back.
    The verdicts…Steven Guidry: first-degree murder, not guilty; conspiracy to commit murder, not guilty. Maria Archer: first-degree murder, not guilty; conspiracy to commit murder, not guilty.
    Steven Guidry broke into tears. Maria Archer’s face was void of any expression. Then she smiled. Afterward, she told the press, “Anybody who had any sense could see what was right and what was true. It was ridiculous—having to go through all this.”
    She spoke of her former lover, Roland Pitre, “I’d like to feel sorry for him. Sometimes I do. But that does not change the fact that he’s a liar and the most unscrupulous person I ever met.”
    Maria said she didn’t care about the financial benefits derived from her husband’s death. Looking toward her former in-laws, she said, “I don’t care about the money. I’m not fighting them. They can keep it.”
    If ever a murder case was over but yet not over at all, it was the bizarre killing of Dennis Archer. It was possible, some observers felt, that the man about to be sentenced for his murder, Roland Pitre, might not have committed the actual crime. The only eyewitnesses, the Archer children, were blocked from testifying in court by motions by the defense that stated that the children, at 7 and 10, were too young to be accurate witnesses. (That isn’t necessarily true. It depends on the child; in retrospect, it was probably far more beneficial to the children to keep them from testifying against their own mother.)
    If they had seen a “strange man,” it might well have been Roland Pitre in his spiky new black wig.
    Only one thing is certain. Dennis Archer most assuredly did not shoot himself in the chest three times. The gun never turned up, and it is probably still buried in the silt at the bottom of the limitless depths of the water at Deception Pass.
    Detective Sergeant Ron Edwards of Island County would not forget this case. In the years ahead as an investigator, he often wondered if perhaps someday, sometime, the corrosive nigglings of conscience would force someone to speak out. A careless word to the wrong person.
    That never happened. But the story of Roland Pitre was far from over.

5
    1986
    Because he turned state’s evidence against his ex-mistress and boyhood friend, Roland Pitre drew only a thirty-five-year maximum prison sentence. His former wife, Cheryl, remained in Pennsylvania with their little girl, Bébé. Maria Archer went on with her life, never to make headlines again. Steven Guidry was far away in New Orleans, undoubtedly much relieved that he had been acquitted of murder.
    Those of us who witnessed their trial in 1980 assumed that Roland Pitre would stay safely behind bars in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. It is located, as Alcatraz was, in an isolated spot surrounded by deep water. With good behavior, he might conceivably be released on parole in ten to fifteen years. But he had demonstrated that he wasn’t always who he appeared to be, so as charismatic and appealing as he often was, Pitre seemed an unlikely