Worth More Dead

together with his past conviction for second-degree murder and the present allegations would indicate that Mr. Pitre is not only at high risk for engaging in future felonious offenses but also at high risk for engaging in future homicide. In view of the past allegations that the defendant is capable of engaging in extremely risky, self-injurious behavior as a means for achieving his personal goals, there is some risk that he could constitute a risk for harming himself in the Kitsap County Jail….
    Dr. Gagliardi was not sure that Roland would be a danger to himself, but he had certainly demonstrated he was a likely candidate to be a danger to others. He saw no reason to spend more time with Roland Pitre; it would only be a waste of the taxpayers’ money because Roland was playing games. He wasn’t cooperating, and he continued to pretend he was the resurrected Wade Pitre, not Roland Pitre at all.

    The long summer of 1993 crawled by, and detectives from several jurisdictions continued to add evidence to the case against Roland Pitre. He had tested mostly below normal with Dr. Gagliardi and well above normal in his scholastic venues and in prison. But despite all his planning and preparation to carry out crimes, he had always had a certain “klutziness” about him. Maybe he underestimated those who tracked him; maybe he was only careless.
    He assumed that his telephone conversations with a number of people involved in what was to have been a smooth caper to kidnap Tim Nash would be private. He had a private phone line, but he never learned how investigators could put traps on phones, obtain phone company records, or trace calls made from inside jails and prisons. As it happened, neither Pitre nor the police expected that someone unconnected to his ambitious scheme might listen in on his calls.
    A man named Wally Ersker* lived next door to the house Roland had moved to after Della kicked him out. Four years earlier, Ersker had purchased a set of Realistic brand walkie-talkies to use when he was hiking or camping with friends. They were fairly powerful—49.83 megahertz—and Ersker discovered that he could easily pick up phone conversations in the house next door to his. Technically, it was illegal to monitor someone else’s phone conversation, and some might well characterize Ersker as a busybody. Nevertheless, the conversations that came over his walkie-talkies were hard to ignore.
    They were electrifying enough that Ersker felt he should report them to someone, especially after Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler were arrested. He called Detective Andy Oakley and repeated what he had heard back in February and March.
    Ersker said he hadn’t recognized the voices he had heard at one AM on March 10, 1993. His ears perked up when he heard a discussion about leaving a van in a shopping mall parking lot with the keys in it in the hope that it would be stolen. In subsequent calls, he heard a man talking with a woman. They were discussing insurance fraud and car theft, getting a key to a side door somewhere, and obtaining a gun.
    By this time, Ersker thought he knew the man’s voice. It was that of his new neighbor, Roland Pitre. Pitre kept talking about someone named Tim, who was “screwing him over.”
    Apparently, this Tim would be sending postcards from his travels for a couple of weeks. The female voice reminded Pitre that they would have to take the tape off Tim’s eyes so he could sign the cards.
    “We’ll have to disguise our voices around him,” Pitre warned her.
    The planning went on. Ersker wasn’t sure what they meant to do, but it sounded pretty suspicious. The voice he was sure was Pitre’s said that Tim would be sleeping upstairs. He said that he knew the code to the alarm system, and he and the woman talked a little about deactivating the system.
    Wally Ersker took to watching Pitre’s rental house to see if there was any strange activity over there. “About 3:00 PM on March 21,” he told Oakley, “I saw Roland Pitre breaking out the passenger side wing window on a maroon van. Then he swept all the broken glass from the sidewalk.”
    Two hours later, as he listened on his walkie-talkies, Ersker heard a man named Bud start making collect phone calls to Roland. The calls were coming from the King County Jail. “This Bud guy was saying something about Roland taking the van and putting it on the Seattle–Bremerton ferry, and then Bud would have somebody pick it up and take it to Darrington,