Worth More Dead

stories were diametrically opposed, each version rendering the other as entirely false. But if Beth Bixler was the brains behind the plot to kidnap Tim Nash, why had she come to the police in an attempt to take all the blame away from Roland? On the other hand, he had thrown her to the wolves quite easily. And Roland Pitre was the one who had a long rap sheet and a reputation for being a convincing liar. It wasn’t that the investigators believed her just because she was a woman; they had seen a number of female felons. But Beth Bixler had no criminal past, and Roland had been tied to two homicides.
    Roland lied as easily as he breathed. And he had a history of filing claims with insurance companies. He was a shoplifter and a faithless lover. Was he only a con man and a grifter, or was he far more dangerous than that? It certainly seemed so when one considered the escalation of his alleged crimes over the past twenty years. He had been close to the violent deaths of both Dennis Archer and Cheryl Pitre, although his actual whereabouts at the moment of their murders was still murky.
    Even though she had come to fear him, Bébé Pitre clung to the hope that deep in his heart her father loved her and the family. That all crumbled when she and her boyfriend Mike were cleaning out Roland’s rental house after his arrest for attempted kidnapping. As they made piles of things to keep and things to give to the Goodwill, they found the transcripts from the 1980 trial in which Roland testified against his mistress and his best friend. Reading them, Bébé suddenly came across the questions about Pitre’s onetime plan to kill her for insurance money. To her shock and sadness, she finally comprehended just how little she meant to her father.
    She was only 15 years old when she realized the danger she had been in at the tender age of 20 months. On page 102 of the transcript, she read that her father admitted to buying an insurance policy on her life. A page later, he spoke of thinking about ways to kill her.
    “How did you plan on killing your daughter?” the defense attorney, Gil Mullen, asked him.
    “I thought about making it look like she accidentally got into some drugs. I thought about making it look like she was kidnapped. I hadn’t really come down to a final…the plan was that I was more leaning towards was her getting into the medicine cabinet. She was at the…she was always crawling around getting into things.”
    “Did you call anybody [Seattle’s Poison Control Center] in reference to a drug overdose or anything in Seattle?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What was that about?”
    “Uh, I didn’t know how much it would take. I called to see about how much it would take, how many. I couldn’t get any prescription drugs. I was thinking about sleeping pills. I wanted to know how much it would take to kill somebody.”
    Mullen had questioned Roland about the details of his buying the insurance policies.
    “Okay. Now let’s talk about the times that you bought these policies. When did you buy those $20,000 policies?”
    “I got the first policy during the first or second week I was there in Pennsylvania [when he was picking tiny Bébé up for a visit to Washington in 1980].”
    “Before you thought of killing your daughter?”
    “Yes.”
    “And the second $20,000 policy was purchased after you thought of killing your daughter?”
    “Yes.”
    It is almost impossible to contemplate what reading these transcripts must have been like for a teenager. Now Bébé admitted to the prosecution team that she had always been afraid of her father and that he had continually tried to draw her into whatever his scheme of the moment was, but she had been much too fearful to tell anyone, even her adoptive mother, who was also frightened. With Roland shut away in jail, Bébé made copies of the court transcripts where her own murder was contemplated and gave them to the prosecutors and the investigators.
    They didn’t disagree with her when she told them that she was finally convinced that her father had killed her mother. That was the very worst truth she had to accept. She had loved him so much, but his latest attack had been just another of his sinister schemes, this time to take away the only family she had left. His lies and manipulations were obvious.

    Della Roslyn Pitre talked to the investigators about her fear of Roland Pitre. He had been a very romantic boyfriend, but once they were married he soon became another person.