Worth More Dead

already on her way over.”
    “What time was that?”
    “About six-thirty.” Pitre said that about an hour later he learned that Cheryl hadn’t even gone to work at PJ’s that morning. “I began to worry,” he said earnestly. He’d had no idea where Cheryl might have gone, and he had called Bay Ford and other people she knew, but no one had seen her.
    The investigators knew about Roland Pitre’s record and that he had gone to prison for his involvement in another murder only eight years before. And now here he was, looking only slightly upset, and acting mystified about his ex-wife’s fate.
    He insisted that, of course, he was in no way involved in Cheryl’s death. He was eager to do anything he could to help find her killer. He willingly signed a consent-to-search form for the detectives to search Della’s home. Her recall of the prior Saturday and Sunday agreed with Roland’s.
    The four detectives followed Roland and Della to Della’s house. Pitre showed them the two cars he routinely drove: a 1979 red Chevrolet Chevette, registered to him, and a silver 1980 Chevette, registered to Della. There was also a full-size Chevy pickup truck on the property, which was on loan to them.
    Hank Gruber was known for his meticulous attention to detail in almost everything he did. He was a record keeper, an artist, a genius at scale drawings, and relentless when he processed rooms or vehicles for possible evidence. It was Gruber who introduced the idea of charting all Seattle homicides in any given year, noting address, date, victim’s name, manner of death and, hopefully, the date of arrest and the murderer’s name. He did all the diagramming of crime scenes. With his Bronx accent and his easygoing manner, he usually set suspects at ease, and they ended up telling him more than they intended to.
    Now Gruber set about searching one of Roland Pitre’s vehicles. He noted the roll of strapping tape beneath the hatchback window of the red Chevette. He asked Pitre if he could take it, and Roland nodded, hastening to explain that he had used it a few days before to tape a note for Della to his door. Gruber slipped it into an evidence bag, noting that there were some hairs and fragments of something stuck to the side of the roll.
    Doug Wright and Jim Harris found nothing of interest in the pickup truck, but Della’s silver car had what might be blood spots. The car was a little dirty inside, but the interior was light-colored so that they could easily see a tiny spot of what might be dried blood on the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel. With a swab dipped in a saline solution, they lifted the spot and sealed it for testing.
    Gruber and Sanford searched the garage, noting that the overhead door was operated with a yellow nylon pulley rope. It was similar to a rope they had found in Cheryl’s car but of a smaller diameter, and this rope was old and dirty; the rope in the trunk with Cheryl’s body was new. A lot of people had yellow rope.
    Joe Sanford helped the Kitsap County detectives gather dirt samples from the Roslyn property for comparison with dirt and debris found on the undercarriage of Cheryl’s Topaz.
    Inside Della’s house, the investigators found blue jeans with red stains that could be either paint or blood. One of a pair of Adidas athletic shoes had hair and dried debris stuck to the bottom in dried liquid that might be blood. Pitre said those items belonged to him; he was very calm.
    He wasn’t perturbed until Doug Wright noticed a very small dot of dark red on the glasses that the very nearsighted Pitre wore. It looked to Wright like back spatter from either a high-velocity or medium-velocity spray of blood, possibly from a gunshot wound or a bludgeoning weapon swung with great force.
    “He just about collapsed,” Wright would recall, “when we saw that spot on his glasses.”
    Wright lifted the spot with a swab and noted that Pitre’s hand was trembling slightly as he held out the glasses.
    “I think it was blood,” Wright says, “but there wasn’t enough to test—not at that time—and it got diluted by the saline solution, so we couldn’t say absolutely that it was Cheryl’s.”
    As suspicious as the detectives were of Roland Pitre, they had no probable cause to arrest him. Testing in the Western Washington State Crime Lab might match some of the stains to Cheryl’s blood type. It was 1988, though, and the science of DNA was in its infancy. Testers needed large samples