Worth More Dead

arrested yesterday: March 24, 1993.”
    Beth Bixler was stunned when Doug Wright placed her under arrest. She had probably been duped, just as Roland Pitre had duped so many other people, many of them women who—at least initially—were in love with him. At this point, her feelings were ambivalent. She still felt a very strong attraction to him, but she said that she had also come to be afraid of him. He had told her that he believed in revenge and that he knew people who owed him favors.
    Shaken, Beth was booked into jail.
    It took only a few hours for Beth Bixler to send word to Wright through the jail staff that she wanted to talk to him. It was ten minutes after ten that Wednesday night when Wright called Olan and then walked over to the jail. At Wright’s request, the jail staff advised Beth Bixler of her rights under Miranda and asked her if she wanted to have an attorney present.
    She shook her head. “I want to talk to the detectives,” she said. “I want to tell them the truth and confess.”
    Even though the two detectives hadn’t believed her original recitation of events, the real story was nevertheless a surprise.
    The winsome, churchgoing mother said that she was desperate for money, and the $3,000 in rent money that Roland promised her never materialized, even though she kept asking him where the renter who needed a safe house was. She was ready to listen to any solution he could offer her.
    Finally Roland told her that he had developed another plan, one that would bring them a lot more money. He explained to her how much he disliked his stepson, Tim. “He was responsible for the failure of my marriage to Della,” Pitre said. “And now, he’s going to be involved in my new plan.”
    While Beth listened, both shocked and mesmerized, Roland laid out the specifics of his scenario. First, he and his good friend, Bud Halser, planned to kidnap Tim and hold him for $250,000 ransom. Currently in jail, Bud would have been out in plenty of time to help Roland.
    When Beth opened her mouth to protest, Roland jumped ahead. “We won’t really kidnap him,” he promised her. “I know I can convince Tim to go along with the plan. See, I’m going to pay him $50,000 and buy him a plane ticket to Hawaii.”
    She wondered where the $250,000 was going to come from. Surely Della didn’t have that kind of money. Roland said that was true, but Della’s parents had a large and expensive home. Tim would be instructed to tell his mother that he had been abducted by people to whom he owed money. Then Della would persuade her parents to take out a second mortgage on their house. They were very respectable citizens with good credit, and they loved their grandchildren. Roland was positive they would agree to do that, anything to save Tim from his kidnappers. They would be told to leave the $250,000 somewhere where Roland or Bud could retrieve it without being seen. Subsequently Tim would be released.
    Nobody would be hurt, Roland had promised her. The police would never even know about any of it.
    It was a wild idea, a scheme rife with holes and things that could go wrong. What if Tim wouldn’t go along with it? How long would it take to get a house refinanced? What if his grandparents refused to go into debt for a quarter of a million dollars? What if somebody called the FBI?
    Roland waved away all of Beth Bixler’s questions, telling her that she lacked the “ability to think big.” He assured her that he had never had a plan go wrong, that he always won because he was a detail man with a great talent for predicting what people would do. It was all a matter of pushing the right buttons, and he knew where those buttons were.
    She was entranced with him, passionately in love with him. She had already betrayed her husband for him, shocked her church, and put her family in jeopardy. And she was about to lose her house because she couldn’t pay her bills.
    Beth asked Roland what her part of the project would be.
    “Hardly anything,” he said easily. “All we need is your house, just the basement of your house, actually. We have to have someplace to hide Tim.”
    She wondered about that. If Tim was cooperating and would get a ticket to Hawaii, why would they have to hide him? But Roland said they needed him at first. Tim would have to be available to make phone calls to his mother. If he were in Hawaii, there would be long-distance phone bills that could be traced, and there was also the matter of controlling