Worth More Dead

some guy from Seattle.”
    “That’s from your own knowledge or did Roland tell you that?” Sanford asked.
    The man mumbled something that was hard to understand. The investigators knew that Roland Pitre had a number of observations about Cheryl that he was quite willing to share. Most of them were different scenarios about who might have killed her: stalkers, men she might have dated. But Cheryl hadn’t really had time to date. When she wasn’t working, she was looking after André and Bébé or in church. Her foray into the Parents Without Partners coffee group was the most adventure-some thing she’d done since Roland left her.
    The Kitsap County and Seattle detectives still had the same problem: they had not come up with enough physical or circumstantial evidence to arrest Roland Pitre for her murder.
    Nevertheless Roland was getting impatient. It was May, seven months after Cheryl’s death, and the Lutheran Brotherhood Insurance Company had not yet paid off on the policy he purchased on her life. When the company called Joe Sanford to ask if the police investigation was over, Sanford told them that the active investigation was still alive. “Roland Pitre has not been eliminated.”
    Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich had to end their full-court press on the other side of the sound from Seattle and move back home. With Jim Harris, Doug Wright, and Doug Hudson, they had given the Pitre murder investigation everything they had for several weeks, talked to dozens of people, followed innumerable leads—no matter how far-fetched—and were left with unanswerable questions.
    Cheryl’s murder looked as though it might be headed for the cold-case files. It galled them, but there it was. If anything new turned up, they would of course check it out. But there were other homicides to work in Seattle and in Port Orchard. Nobody forgot Cheryl Pitre, the young mother who had fought so hard to have a happy family only to be savagely beaten to death.
    Sadly, no one knew how long it would be before Cheryl would have some kind of justice.

15
    1990–1993
    Roland Pitre moved swiftly on to his next marriage. He and Della Pitre graduated from Olympic College and applied for their registered nurse licenses. Della became an RN, but Roland ran into trouble. When the Washington State Nursing Board checked his background and found that he had been convicted of murder and a number of lesser crimes and that he “was a prime suspect in his ex-wife’s murder,” they denied him a nursing license. Della became the main financial support of the family, often working double shifts at Harrison Hospital in Bremerton and Tacoma General Hospital while Roland stayed home to take care of the children.
    In a sense he contributed to the family income: Cheryl’s children, Bébé and André, received Social Security payments from their dead mother’s account. These payments went to their father, of course.
    Later, Roland tried again to get a nursing license. With some sleight of hand, he apparently became a certified nursing assistant (CNA). He had learned not to use his own name, however. He used the identity and the Social Security number of his long-dead brother, Wade, who was only two when he died.
    Roland’s marriage to Della was troubled from the beginning. Try as she might, Della couldn’t make Roland accept her son, Tim, or Tim accept Roland. They were always wrangling about something. Initially, she believed her new husband when he told her that Tim was sneaky, told lies, and stole things. She began to look at her son with suspicion.
    Tim later recalled his mother’s marriage to Roland and their family life as “an absolute living hell.” His mother was always at work, and he felt that Roland was constantly criticizing him and making him look bad. In Roland’s eyes, nothing Tim did was right. André was only 3 and he could barely remember his mother, but Bébé, at 12, mourned for her mother and wanted to believe in her father. When he was nice, he was really fun to be around. But Bébé was also afraid of him; his temperament was volatile and she never knew how he was going to act. Sometimes he slapped her for no reason at all. Della was good to her, but Della wasn’t her real mother.
    Della and Roland had frequent arguments, and they separated in October 1990. They hadn’t been married even a year. They got back together after several months, but there was no feeling of permanency in their family.
    Roland eventually got a job