Worth More Dead

as a CNA at a nursing home in Poulsbo, although Della still made about double the salary he did.
    Frank Haberlach, the insurance agent who had sold Roland the policies back in 1988, stopped in at Bay Ford and spoke to Greg Meakin.
    “He looked glum,” Meakin recalled. “He had this check from the insurance policy. He said, ‘It just kills me to give this to Pitre.’ He said it was one time he wasn’t happy to present a payoff…”
    As it turned out, except for about ten thousand dollars—which he spent right away—the money didn’t go to Roland Pitre; it was put in a trust by the Court for Bébé and André to have when they were old enough to go to college. Cheryl had apparently realized that her husband wasn’t trustworthy with money and had taken steps to protect her children. André wasn’t old enough to know anything about trust funds. As Bébé grew older, her father told her repeatedly that the money wasn’t hers—it was his—and that she would have to sign it over to him as soon as she got it.
    Roland played with Bébé’s mind a lot. He had always manipulated people around him; he was skilled at making them believe what he wanted them to believe. It didn’t matter to him whether they were strangers, friends, or members of his family. A little girl was an easy target.
    Bébé was confused about the sequence of events on the night that her mother died. She and André were living with her mother, but her father had visitation rights every other week. “One week, he came to pick me up,” Bébé said, “and after that night, I never saw her again.”
    Bébé recalled going skating on that Saturday afternoon, but the evening was hazy. She had been very tired and couldn’t remember staying up late to watch wrestling on TV with her father and Tim. That would have been around midnight or one. She was pretty sure that she watched only a few minutes of TV before she went to bed and was therefore sound asleep at that time, but her father had told her she should tell the police that she was watching TV with him all that time. And she had done what he told her to do.
    But Bébé was a very bright girl. She had a vague feeling that it was her father who killed her mother or at least that he had had something to do with it.
    While Roland’s judo students and her mother’s church friends believed that her parents had had a perfect marriage, she had seen the dark side. One night after André was born, she had wakened to the sound of her mother’s screams. She had tiptoed out of bed and seen her father holding her mother’s arms “real tight, and squeezing and shaking her.”
    The next morning, her mother had big purplish bruises on her upper arms.
     
    Bébé Pitre was about 13 when she met Bud Halser. He became a fixture around their house after he was released from prison. He and Roland were really good friends. She was told to call him Uncle Bud, although she didn’t think he was her real uncle. Bébé had long since learned to tiptoe around her father because she knew what he was capable of. She was afraid of him and knew that money meant everything to him.
    On the night of July 14, 1991, while Della Roslyn was at the hospital working a night shift, Bébé was the only one at home when her father and Bud Halser drove up in Bud’s van. She watched as they removed a safe from a closet and carried it to the van. Tim came home unexpectedly, and Bud hid in the back of his van with the safe until Tim left.
    Afraid of her father, Bébé never told anyone what she saw. All Della knew was that the safe had been stolen sometime between 6:30 PM , when she left for work, and 7:40 the next morning, when she got home. Officer Moon of the Bremerton Police Department took the burglary report and noted that Della said their house had a security alarm that should have been activated that night. Moon was unable to find any sign of forced entry, and the Pitres’ next-door neighbors had neither seen nor heard anything unusual during the night.
    Although the safe itself was arguably Roland’s possession, it was filled with sentimental items belonging to Della Roslyn Pitre: two dozen pieces of her jewelry and important documents. She was distraught when she realized that they were gone. She told Moon that she suspected her husband because they were once again on the brink of divorce.
    Roland said he had no idea who might have taken the safe; he had been away from home the night it disappeared. He said he’d taken