Worth More Dead

because much of the substance to be examined would be destroyed by the tests themselves. Today, that tiny dried speck of blood on Pitre’s glasses could be multiplied infinitely, but in 1988 it was not enough.
    Della Roslyn and Roland Pitre watched as the detectives drove away. They may have wondered what would come next, but Della believed totally in Roland, just as Cheryl had. He had shed no tears for the woman who had saved him from years in prison, the woman who had borne him two children.
     
    At four PM , the four detectives drove to the small 1960s rambler where Cheryl lived after her marriage broke up. Doug Hudson had already searched it thoroughly and found no sign that violence had occurred there. The garage was so full of miscellaneous furniture and stored items that no one could park a car inside it. If she had been attacked at home and forced into the trunk of her car, it would have to have been in full view of a number of her neighbors. Yet no one had seen or heard anything unusual.
    It was far more likely that she had been waylaid on her way home from PJ’s. She hadn’t been in an accident. Her car wasn’t damaged at all, not even a scratch, so that probably ruled out another vehicle’s having forced her off the road. For some reason, she had pulled her car over. Her killer would have to have been someone she knew and trusted or someone with a carefully planned ruse to get her to stop willingly. That could have happened anywhere along her usual route home, a road little-traveled near midnight. Once Cheryl was alone on the dark road, someone had abducted her in her own car, possibly beating her into unconsciousness before she could cry out for help.
    “She never got home at all,” Hank Gruber said. “And I don’t think she was conscious on the trip to Seattle where he, or they, left her car.”

10
    A postmortem examination of Cheryl Pitre’s body was set for 9:30 on Monday morning, October 24. Detectives Wright and Hudson from Kitsap County and Hank Gruber observed as Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Schmunk began.
    “Autopsy” means, literally, “to see for one’s self.” Someone had intercepted Cheryl as she headed home ten days earlier, quite probably unaware of danger. The investigators were still unsure of how she had died.
    Her jeans, blue T-shirt, and undergarments had been removed from her body, and so had the strapping tape that bound her hands behind her. Gruber noted that it did not resemble the tape he removed from Roland Pitre’s vehicle.
    The critical wounds had all been to Cheryl’s head. There were many of them.
    “This might have looked like a single, massive wound,” Dr. Schmunk said, “but there were multiple blows.”
    There were no stab wounds and no indications that she had been shot. Someone had beaten her to death by striking her skull and face again and again. She might have been choked, too, but her neck area was decomposed so much that they could not be certain. The hyoid bone in the back of her throat was not cracked as it often is in cases of strangulation.
    She had probably fought her killer; there were many bruises on her knees and legs. But she had not been raped, nor had she recently had intercourse.
    A forensic technician collected a number of hairs from the victim’s hair and ear and pointed out the dirt that clung to her body. It was very fine and appeared to be either beach sand or the soil found on road shoulders.
    That wasn’t much of a clue. Fine sand like that could be found in hundreds of locations in Kitsap County.
    Harris, Hudson, Wright, and Gruber hoped that there might be something in Cheryl’s car that the killer had left behind. They would see that it was processed with the utmost care so that no minute bit of physical evidence would be lost.
     
    Bill Haglund, the Chief Investigator of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, who had great expertise in forensic odontology, called them to say that six front teeth were missing from the victim’s jaw and asked them to search for them when they processed her car. Shortly after noon, the detectives met at the Seattle Police Processing Room with George Chan from the Western Washington Crime Lab, Don McDowell from the Photo Lab, and Donna West, an ID technician. They discussed the best way to process the Topaz. First they took blood swab samples for testing and cross-matching. Since the interior had many obvious blood smears, they hoped that there might be fingerprint ridges hidden in