Worth More Dead

site where it was found, only to be bludgeoned there? The Seattle investigators searched for a female detective who was about the same height as Cheryl. Sara Springer was five feet four and half and about the same weight. She eased into the driver’s seat and said she felt “perfectly comfortable” there.
    When a male detective who was five ten and a half tried the seat, he couldn’t fit; his legs were too long.
    There were many questions they could not answer definitively. Either Cheryl herself or someone less than five feet five inches tall was the last driver of the Topaz. Or maybe someone had deliberately pushed the seat forward to leave that impression.
    After the glue fuming, Donna West lifted twelve cards of prints, but she was not encouraged by the quality of those she isolated from the bloodstained area.
    The investigators agreed that Cheryl Pitre had almost certainly been bound—but alive—when she was forced into the trunk of her car. How far she was taken before the trunk lid was opened and her killer had struck her fatally with the tire iron or some other implement would be impossible to establish unless they found witnesses. Maybe she was forced to get into the trunk at the houseboat docks. Where she was when she was put into the trunk was unknown. They suspected it might have been close to PJ’s Market. If they could somehow find that location, they might also find the victim’s six missing teeth and the spot where Cheryl’s stocking bottoms were shredded by gravel and rocks.
    That was a very big if. Searches near PJ’s and around where her car was left yielded none of that information.

11
    Cheryl’s funeral was held in her church, and many of her friends were in attendance. Isak Nelson and his brother and some of the other regulars at the Port Orchard Judo Academy were there, as were, of course, most of her fellow employees at Bay Ford. So was Roland, who appeared to be stunned with grief.
    “The pastor who conducted the service didn’t know Cheryl,” Isak recalled with some bitterness. “It was a horrible eulogy because he said he was just getting to know her. Maybe he was just awkward at choosing his words, but he kept describing Cheryl as a ‘comfortable’ person, comparing her to an ‘old shoe.’ She was easy to be with and she made you feel safe and accepted, but she was only in her thirties. She wasn’t an ‘old shoe’ at all.”
    Roland came to the elder Nelsons’ house after the funeral service was over, something he rarely—if ever—had done before.
    “He was crying real tears, and he appeared to be grief-stricken,” Isak remembers. “Roland talked at great length to my dad. He had all these theories of what might have happened to Cheryl. He said he’d found books in her house about how someone could change their identity. He said he’d told the police that a young kid had been stalking Cheryl and that the person following her was driving a white convertible.
    “The thing was that I believed him at the time. I was in shock. You have to remember that I’d had to go to court to testify against these guys I knew who had shot their father not too long before Cheryl was killed. And they practically lived across the street from Cheryl. It was all too much for me to absorb at that age.
    “Everything Roland said seemed plausible. He just kept spinning out these possibilities about Cheryl’s murder. He’d never talked that much to my dad before, but he stayed at our house for hours.”
    Later, Isak Nelson wondered if Roland had been crying “crocodile tears” or if he were trying to foist suspicion onto someone else. It had never occurred to Isak, as it had to Cheryl’s coworkers at Bay Ford, that Roland could have hurt Cheryl. But then he had never imagined that the couple he admired so much would ever break up and talk about divorce, either.
     
    Despite his mourning, Roland took care of business. As her beneficiary, he filed a claim with the insurance company that had issued Cheryl the $125,000 policy just a few months before, and he applied for Social Security survivors’ benefits for André and Bébé under Cheryl’s account.

12
    The investigators from Kitsap County and the Seattle Police Department continued to divide up the case. Officially now Cheryl’s murder was a Seattle case, 88-551006, because her body was found there. But they all suspected that her abduction and the initial attack had occurred near Port Orchard. She would have had no reason to