Worth More Dead

in her house might be dangerous. “It’s perfectly safe,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t do anything to place you in danger—you know that—and I don’t see that you have any other choice right now.”
    Beth Bixler nodded hesitantly. Everything was happening so fast. It had been such a short time since she was a happily married, churchgoing young wife. Now she was with another man, and neither of them was officially divorced.
    But she did depend on Roland Pitre. She totally believed in him, unknowingly stepping into the next vacancy in a long line of women who had felt the same way only to regret it mightily later.
    Roland had a plan for Beth Bixler.

16
    March 1993
    Tim Nash drew his first easy breath in a long time when he realized that his mother was serious this time when she kicked Roland out and filed for divorce. Even though his stepfather still came by the house to visit with André and Bébé, Tim could make himself scarce and avoid him. To have his mother believe in him again meant a lot to Tim, and he began to regain a lot of his self-respect.
    The next step up a ladder of disturbing events in the Pitre family took place at a time when crime is usually at an ebb. It was a rainy Sunday evening, March 21, 1993—the first day of spring—when a Bremerton Police radio operator received a call from a man who sounded hysterical. It took a while for the dispatcher to understand his words. He was able to make out the address and understood that there was a burglary or robbery going on there, but not much else. The call for help came in shortly before 8:30.
    Officer Steve Emm was dispatched to the residence. There he found a young male who was still unable to control his emotions. In fact, he looked scared to death. Patiently, Emm got the complainant to calm down to a point where he could get information from him.
    He said his name was Tim Nash and that he lived there with his mother and a younger stepbrother and stepsister. His older sister had moved out, and so had his stepfather.
    Tim had a bizarre story to tell. He was all alone in the house when he received a phone call about half an hour earlier from a woman who called him by name. From background noises, it seemed to him that the call was coming from a phone booth. The woman sounded young and incredibly sexy. He thought it might have been some girl he knew at high school making a prank phone call.
    “She asked me if I knew who she was, and I said no, but she seemed to know who I was,” Tim told Emm. “She was kind of flirting with me and teasing me and making me guess her name. She finally said if I really wanted to find out about her I should come up to the Pancake House and meet her. So I said I would.”
    Tim said that the restaurant wasn’t far away. Tantalized, he hopped on his motor scooter and rode to the Pancake House. He checked out the restaurant for familiar faces, expecting to spot some girl he knew. There weren’t many people in the place at the time, and he didn’t recognize anyone there. Nobody waved at him or signaled to him in any way.
    Next, Tim checked out the parking lot for a vehicle he might recognize. But none of the cars parked there looked familiar. He waited for a while at the edge of the lot, thinking the woman must have called him from a phone booth located someplace else. He watched the area for five minutes or so, but no car pulled in.
    Tim told the investigators that he figured he had fallen for some dumb practical joke, so he left and went back home.
    He was sure he had armed their alarm system before he left and locked the front door. That was the rule in his family. Upon his return, he used his key to get back in and immediately disarmed the system.
    What happened next is the stuff of most people’s nightmares. As he would explain first to Officers Emm and Bogen, who had pulled up just behind the first squad car, and the next day to Detective Lewis Olan, Tim said he’d had the eerie sense that he was not alone in the house. It was quiet enough, but he still felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure why.
    Suddenly he heard a sound that seemed to be coming from his upstairs bedroom and recognized it as the slight rustling of venetian blinds. It was as if something or someone had just brushed against them. Of course, it could have been the wind.
    His mother was working, as she always did on Sunday nights, and his stepsister and stepbrother, Bébé and André, were supposed to be having a