Worth More Dead

drive to Seattle late at night.
    Hank Gruber contacted Roland Pitre’s parole officer at the Washington State Department of Corrections. She had no trouble remembering him. Because his wife stood so firmly behind him and because he was a model prisoner, he had been released far sooner than most convicts with that long a sentence. His parole officer verified that he had first been enrolled at the University of Washington and had commuted there by ferry several times a week. The location near the houseboats where Cheryl’s car was parked was a few miles south of the university and only a block off Eastlake Avenue, a popular route for those who preferred to avoid the I-5 freeway. Roland would have been familiar with the area.
    As standard procedure, Pitre’s parole officer had talked with a number of people he interacted with as a free man. She was surprised to hear one of the administrators at Olympic Community College rave about Roland. “She went way overboard in describing what a wonderful person he was and spoke of him almost as if he was the greatest student she had ever encountered. She helped him to become student body president and seemed entranced with him. I began to wonder if there was more going on than the usual student-teacher relationship.”
    Although parolees are urged—sometimes ordered—not to spend time with other recently released prisoners, Roland Pitre had seen his prison friends and even returned to visit some of those still locked up. The parole officer furnished Gruber with the names and addresses of a half-dozen convicts and parolees Roland had associated with since he walked out of prison in 1986. Since there was still the suspicion that he had not acted alone in the murder of Dennis Archer in 1980, the Seattle detective wondered about his more recent felon friends. All of them had convictions for sexual crimes, some including rape. One man, Olaf Svenson,* had gone to prison for rape and “promoting a suicide.” He was reporting to a parole office in Olympia. The others were scattered from the south end of King County down to Vancouver, Washington.
    Detectives located and talked to them about their whereabouts on the night of October 15.
    On October 28, six detectives from three jurisdictions attended a summit meeting on Roland Pitre. Doug Wright, Jim Harris, and their Chief of Detectives, Dave Morgan, were there from Port Orchard; Hank Gruber and Joe Sanford represented Seattle; and Ron Edwards, who had investigated the Archer murder in Oak Harbor eight years before, gathered to discuss Pitre. Edwards brought the bulging file he’d put together on his case. He had certainly not expected Pitre to be walking free so soon.
    Still frustrated by not knowing where the murder had taken place, all six returned to Lake Union, where they fanned out. It was a bright sunlit day and they covered every inch of the ground where Cheryl’s car ended up. They were looking for Cheryl Pitre’s six missing teeth. They didn’t find them. They got little satisfaction from gathering dirt samples from the lake bank and the parking area to save for possible comparisons down the road.
    This killer had been clumsy and sloppy, leaving a welter of blood and dozens of smudged prints, and he should have been easy to track.
    But he wasn’t.
    On Halloween, Hank Gruber pored over Sea-King (Seattle police and King County sheriff) files looking for any entries for Roland and Cheryl Pitre and Roland’s new girlfriend, Della Roslyn. He hoped that he might find some link to the houseboat area. Seattle police records noted both complainants and suspects. He found absolutely nothing on any of the three, either in the city or in King County. Next, he ran the names of the parolees that Pitre’s parole officer provided. There was nothing to link any of them to the vital neighborhood. He checked their license numbers. No contact with the King County sheriff or the Seattle police. He couldn’t even find a parking ticket for any of them.
    Gruber placed a phone call the next day to Roland Pitre. Della answered. She sounded suspicious and a little hostile at first. Reluctantly, she called Roland to the phone. Gruber asked him if they could arrange to get a full set of fingerprints from him. He agreed but said he would have to go through his attorney. His children were returning from the East Coast in a few days, he said, and he wanted to get into Cheryl’s house to remove some of her possessions he expected that they—and