Worth More Dead

was heartsick as she wondered if she had only been expedient for him, only a vehicle to facilitate his way out of prison. Still, whatever doubts she had, she kept them to herself, hoping he would come back to her. But even Isak, who had come to idolize Roland, had begun to notice an undercurrent that made him uneasy. “Something seemed awkward, wrong somehow. But I was too young to figure it out.”
    Isak noticed that Roland and Cheryl were having fights. “They were verbal—not physical—and they were very mild, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no! Like Mom and Dad are having a fight again.’ ”
    Their arguments became more frequent, and it wasn’t nearly as much fun at their house.

7
    1988
    Despite all she had done to stand beside Roland to give him a second chance, Cheryl realized that her marriage was the same sham it had always been, a facade that he no longer needed. He had at least one girlfriend he met in nursing school. Cheryl confronted him, and they fought about it openly. Their relationship was stormy. Increasingly, Cheryl caught Roland in lies. He had been so wonderful to her when he wrote from prison, and she had believed everything he told her. She had even been convinced that Roland was the innocent person in the Archer murder, set up as a patsy by Maria to serve time for something he had not done.
    Now she wondered about almost everything he said. Was it true or was it a lie? She learned that he didn’t have terminal cancer; he didn’t have cancer at all and never had. She was glad that he wasn’t dying because a big part of her still loved him, but she had to wonder why he hadn’t told her the truth. Maybe it was the insurance policies. He hadn’t needed to do that; she would have agreed to buy insurance.
    In midsummer 1988, Roland left Cheryl and moved in with his new mistress. There wasn’t even an interim period. His judo students helped him move his belongings to his new address.
    “I was still pretty naive,” Isak remembers. “When we carried stuff into her house for him, Roland introduced his girlfriend as ‘just a friend.’ It was like he was renting a room there, and we bought it. It didn’t really occur to us that he could leave Cheryl and move in with another woman.”
    She was a fairly attractive woman with blond hair and a good figure. Her name was Della Roslyn,* and she was 39, five years older than Cheryl. Just as Cheryl suspected, Roland had met Della when they were fellow students in the nursing program at Olympic Community College. Della had two children from a former marriage, a daughter, Amy Nash,* 17, and a son, Tim Nash,* 14. Della wasn’t prettier than Cheryl, but she seemed to contribute something to Roland’s life that his wife could not.
    It’s quite possible that Della was simply different, more of a challenge for a man who grew bored easily.
     
    Cheryl gave up their mobile home; there was no way she could keep up the payments without help from Roland. With Bébé and André, she moved into a small rambler house that was close to PJ’s. The street where they moved had been the scene of a violent crime only a year or so before; almost directly across from Cheryl’s rental, a teenager had shot and killed his father in an ambush, then set off to shoot his mother, too. Fortunately, he was captured before he could kill his mother.
    Cheryl wasn’t nervous, but she adopted a German shepherd and kept it in the yard, just in case there were prowlers. She had learned to live alone while Roland was in prison.
    Her marriage seemed to be over, but there was no true resolution of their relationship. Roland couldn’t quite make up his mind. He didn’t push for a divorce. He lived with Della, but he still saw Cheryl occasionally. They spent a weekend together in July on Vancover Island in Victoria, B.C., traveling in Cheryl’s 1984 Mercury Topaz. They went to the Washington State fair in Puyallup together in September. Roland often took Bébé and André on weekends. He wasn’t living with Cheryl, but he was good to their children, and he called her sporadically and talked about getting together, essentially being just kind enough to Cheryl to keep a little flicker of hope alive.
    But she knew that he wasn’t coming back to her, and she tried to embark on a social life of her own. At a friend’s suggestion, she joined Parents Without Partners. On Thursday, October 13, 1988, Cheryl attended a small group meeting in a home in Port Orchard. It took courage for