Worth More Dead

She was shocked by the way he twisted the truth to suit his purposes. Her family had seen through him before she had—as families often do—but she had been bedazzled by him. That caused a rift between Della and her family, although she was working hard to mend it. Della had always enjoyed a good reputation, and she felt that her association with Roland had tainted her image and cost her promotions at work. Worst of all was how he had persuaded her to distrust her son. She regretted the pain that Tim had gone through and vowed to make it up to him if she could.
    Della knew her children were all suffering from post-traumatic stress. To be at home with them during nighttime hours, she resigned from her second-shift job at Tacoma General Hospital. She had been making about $70,000 a year; suddenly, her income had dropped to $24,000.
    Like Bébé, Della came to believe that Roland was behind Cheryl Pitre’s murder, even though she had been his main alibi witness. Five years earlier, he persuaded her that he had come to bed that Saturday night at almost exactly the time Cheryl locked up PJ’s Market and headed for home. She had had no reason to doubt Roland at the time, but now Della wasn’t so sure.
    Everyone in the Pitre house was sleeping, either in bed or in front of the TV set, between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM. Everyone but Roland. Roland told Della that it was 11:30 when he came to bed, but she hadn’t checked. It was an hour later when they made love. When Della awakened at five the next morning, he was there beside her. But had he really been there all night?
    Bébé knew that she hadn’t watched wrestling on television with her father that night because she had gotten so sleepy that she went to bed. But she was only 10 years old at the time, much too young to even understand what an alibi was.
    Now she did.

20
    Beth Bixler had plenty of time to think about what a fool she had been. She was the one who had taken almost all of the risks. The only thing Roland had done was to finally agree to go into the house with her to grab his stepson. She had borrowed the gun, bought all the items Roland needed, made the phone calls to Tim. And, afterward, when everything had gone wrong, Roland ordered her to get rid of the ski masks, the gloves, and the rifle. He even talked her into going to the police and telling lies meant to remove all suspicion from him.
    Doug Wright asked Beth where she had disposed of the rifle and the other items. She told them, and their hearts sank. Anyone who thinks being a detective is all intrigue and excitement should know they often have to endure repugnant assignments that nobody would ever choose to perform. Beyond working a homicide crime scene with the corpse of the victim still present, searches for physical evidence too often lead them through garbage dumps or rat-infested hiding places under bridges and in sewers. Now the Bremerton and Kitsap County investigators had an even worse job ahead of them.
    It was almost dark on March 24 when Beth Bixler rode with Lewis Olan and Wright to a park near Port Ludlow, pointing out places where she had thrown away the ski masks and the two pairs of gloves worn during the abortive kidnapping.
    It was two when they found the women’s outhouses where Beth said she left the gloves and masks. They had come prepared—as much as they could be. “We had salmon-fishing poles with big hooks on them,” Wright recalled. “And we were there all night long, fishing through the sewage.”
    Using high-powered flashlights to see, they dug through the human waste, and the trash, and garbage cans. They found one black racer-type glove with a white stripe on it in the filthy muck of an outhouse. The glove was just as Beth described.
    The next morning, Olan, accompanied by Detectives Andy Oakley and D. Trudeau and Sergeant K. Long, returned to Port Ludlow to continue the search. After a long nauseating exploration in the privy, they found another glove, one of the brown gloves Beth wore when she purchased the bullets, greeting cards, and ski masks.
    Olan went to the rock breakwater that held back the surging waters of Puget Sound. There he gazed down into the water trying to make out what seemed to be a rifle. Luckily the tide was out, and he could see a Winchester-type .44 Magnun rifle. The butt portion was sticking out of about three inches of water.
     
    Beth Bixler’s house was located in Kitsap County, and Doug Wright and Jim Harris prepared to search it