Worth More Dead

was.
    “Old Man’s Darling” is a Colorado case, curious to ponder. The woman involved looked like an action-movie heroine, but her obsessions didn’t lend themselves to a romantic last chapter. How dare her aging lover cast her aside? Furious and desperate, she took action, and a terrible finale ensued.
    “All for Nothing” is one of the most shocking cases I’ve ever written about, and my longtime readers know that that’s saying a great deal. Was it the result of a love triangle ripped apart? Or was it simply the inevitable ending to the erotic games one brilliant woman played with the men she delighted in enticing? She didn’t realize that one man was playing for keeps.
    All of these murderers had what they considered a good reason to want their victims dead—be it financial or emotional—and the last case in this book, “A Desperate Housewife,” seems to have been fueled by both emotions. It is one of the saddest I’ve ever written about, although certainly none of the cases I cover are cheerful. What happened was so unnecessary, so selfish, and it will probably haunt you as it has me.

Worth More Dead

This case or, rather, series of cases, defies categorizing. The true culprit behind a number of fatal, near-fatal, cruel, and serious felonies wasn’t easy to spot. He���or she —was either really smart or really dumb. But then I’ve run across a number of killers who scored near genius in IQ tests but had no sense of how they appeared to others. And no common sense at all. Was this killer crazy? Probably not. Were his intricate plots brilliant and well designed? Sometimes. But sometimes not.
    With every public document about this case that I have read over the last twenty-five years, I’ve become more incredulous. If the events weren’t so tragic, many of them would be funny, anecdotes suitable for “The World’s Dumbest Criminals.”
    Still, there isn’t anything humorous about violent death, betrayal, and dark, emotional games designed to break hearts.
    I don’t even know where to start explaining this killer, so I think I’ll jump in the middle and try to bring all the edges together. That way, my readers won’t ask, “What did you say?” as did a number of mystified judges when attorneys tried to detail the myriad felonies.
    When even judges shake their heads in disbelief, you know you’re dealing with a tangled tale.

1
    Summer, 1980
    For servicemen, there is good duty and bad duty. They are at the mercy of superiors who dispatch them around the globe, but few navy men would deny the many benefits of being stationed at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Oak Harbor, Washington. There is also a U.S. Marine detachment stationed on the island. With Deception Pass to the west and Skagit Bay to the east, the setting is idyllic, a virtual vacation spot. Sailors—civilian and navy alike—anchor pleasure craft in Oak Harbor, and it has a small-town atmosphere: friendly, welcoming. Like most small communities, there are few secrets. Neighbors know neighbors’ business, and gossip flourishes. Love triangles are rarely as clandestine as the participants believe they are. Most sexual straying there is uneventful, but the scandal and shock waves that reverberated throughout Oak Harbor in mid-July 1980 were of a magnitude seldom seen. When the dust settled, those involved and onlookers hoped devoutly that nothing like it would happen ever again.
    Because of what happened shortly after ten PM on that sultry Sunday night of July 13, 1980, four lives that had come together from widely scattered parts of the world were irrevocably changed. One man died instantly in a barrage of bullets from a .357 Magnum. The other three principals would tell divergent stories during a lengthy trial in Judge H. Joseph Coleman’s courtroom in Seattle as the 1980 Christmas season approached. There was no question of holding the trial in Island County; there had been too much pretrial publicity, and there probably wasn’t a citizen in the whole county who hadn’t heard of the murder of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer.
    I attended that trial. Much of the convoluted narrative that follows is either directly from court records or from my conversations with close associates of the principals and from detectives’ precise recall. Some of it is from my own observation.
    The testimony that was elicited in Judge Coleman’s courtroom was so explosive that spectators lined up for hours to get in, content