Worth More Dead

plan.
     
    As the holidays approached, the Pitre family underwent what might be called a reorganization. Christmas in 1987 had been happy for Cheryl; she and Roland had their new baby and a new house, and the future looked promising. Now Cheryl was dead and their children were almost three thousand miles away.
    But Roland planned to rectify that. He arranged to have Bébé and André return from their maternal aunt’s home in Pennsylvania. They would soon have a stepmother to help care for them: He and Della Roslyn planned to get married on New Year’s Eve of 1988, ten weeks after Cheryl’s murder. It was as if she had been erased from Roland’s life and someone else quickly penciled in.
     
    Frank Haberlach, the insurance agent who sold the Pitres their individual $125,000 policies, got a call from Roland requesting payment on Cheryl’s death. Haberlach explained that the company would have to follow procedure and that it might have to go to the underwriters since the criminal case was still open.
    King County Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird had been evaluating the efficacy of bringing charges against Roland and calling possible witnesses to appear before an inquiry judge. As with a grand jury, what is said before an inquiry judge is secret. Should Della become the next Mrs. Roland Pitre, she could invoke marital privilege and refuse to answer questions that might serve to incriminate him.
    Baird subpoenaed Della to appear before Judge Charles Johnson on December 29. She was still single on that date. What she said behind closed doors was not revealed.
    On New Year’s Eve, Della and Roland were married. He became stepfather to her children, Amy and Tim, and Della, stepmother to Bébé and André. She loved them and knew they needed a mother badly, and she legally adopted them. Although Bébé, particularly, would never forget her own mother, Della wanted to be as close to a real mother for them as she could. Their lives went well at first, despite the stress of the murder investigation.
    At 14, Tim was at a difficult age to accept another man into the household, and he and Roland soon had problems. He always felt that Roland was putting him down.
    And soon there was no question that his new stepfather detested him.

13
    1989
    The detectives were a long way from giving up. With the new year, Doug Wright and Jim Harris and Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich continued their search for Cheryl’s killer. It had been a hard-luck case so far. Then, on February 13, 1989, they received information that moved the probe in an entirely different direction.
    Gruber and Sutlovich got a phone call from a man who identified himself as Creg Darby, a reporter for the Bremerton Sun. He said that someone had phoned him, asking for him by name.
    “He told me that he was the person who killed Cheryl Pitre,” Darby reported. “He said he killed her because she told him he was too young for her.”
    Darby said the anonymous caller went into specifics, saying that he first tried to strangle Cheryl but was unsuccessful. Next, he hit her with a pipe, then with a rock. The caller, who did sound like a young male in his late teens or early twenties, said he took Cheryl to Lake Union in Seattle about two on Sunday morning and left her in her car there.
    “She didn’t want me,” he said in what seemed a contrite voice. “I’m too young. I’m sorry.”
    This information galvanized the investigators. Maybe they had been focusing on the wrong suspect. The caller had his facts right about the manner of death, and his time line matched what they knew, too.
    Darby said he had tried his best to get the caller’s name. “He wouldn’t tell me that, but he said he would call back. He wanted my home phone number, but I wouldn’t give him that. He was very suspicious that his call was being recorded, and I had to reassure him about that. Of course, it wasn’t being recorded.”
    But as any good reporter would, Darby took notes during the call, and he readily agreed to give a taped statement to Hank Gruber. He mentioned that the unknown caller had a very soft voice.
    Darby and his editors agreed to have a trap put on his phone in case the man did call back. Rudy Sutlovich arranged with US West’s telephone security department to have a pen register put in place on Creg Darby’s office phone. It would be there for two weeks and would note the date, time, and phone number of the caller.
    Sixteen years later, the phone trap sounds antiquated, but