Worth More Dead

Washington, and hide it.”
    Bud talked about a woman named Bobbi and said that a woman named Beth could use her car. The man calling from jail also asked if he was going to make any kind of profit for helping Roland. “He asked about jewelry, gold, rifles or handguns, or anything that Roland would give to him. Roland said he could get Tim’s school ring and give him that.”
    It appeared to Ersker that something big was going down on the third Sunday in March because the calls were coming closer together. Bud’s next collect call to Pitre came in about 7:15 PM . This time, it was a female who accepted the call, but it wasn’t the woman Ersker had come to recognize as Beth. There had been another call from the county jail at 8:10 PM . The woman next door laughed as she told Bud that Roland was showing off his “fashions in basic black.”
    He heard a male voice warn, “Don’t say nothing to her what’s happening.”
    Without Beth Bixler’s confession, the myriad phone calls that Wally Ersker reported wouldn’t have made much sense. But her details made it all clear. Bud Halser was, of course, Roland’s friend who was to have been the co-kidnapper of Tim Nash. But Bud was stuck in jail in Seattle, so Beth had to help kidnap Tim. She had told Doug Wright that she had never met Bud but had talked to him on the phone on three occasions. She also heard Roland planning the crime with him during their phone calls.
    Roland told her about a three-way call among himself, Bud, and Bud’s girlfriend, Bobbi. On the night of the kidnapping, Bobbi would be at Roland’s house, babysitting the 5-year-old André and also accepting collect calls from Bud. If anyone checked, phone records would prove that someone at Roland’s house—presumably Roland himself—had accepted collect calls at the exact time Tim was being kidnapped. That was to be Roland’s alibi.
    “Roland told me that he and Bud had been planning for two and a half years to kidnap Tim,” Beth told Wright. “He said that they stole the safe as the first part of that plan. That was just to set up Tim.”
    The van they used in the abortive kidnapping belonged to Beth. It was a year-old Chevy, and she was months behind in the payments. Bobbi, Bud’s girlfriend, was supposed to drive it away after they locked Tim up in Beth’s basement. But Bobbi lost her nerve, so, Beth said, she and Roland drove it up to Snohomish County, north of Seattle. With the wing window broken out, it would be easy for someone to steal it. It was probable that Pitre would then advise Beth to make an insurance claim so that her van would be paid off. She might even realize some profit.
     
    On May 1, 1993, Bud Halser was charged with Willful Destruction of Insured Property. On June 15, his indictment was amended to include Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping in the First Degree. Halser, always before a willing participant in Roland Pitre’s schemes and his longtime close friend, no longer wanted to be associated with him. Through his lawyer, Halser petitioned to have the charges against him completely severed from any courtroom proceedings involving Pitre. Obviously, he had not participated in person in the clumsy kidnapping of Tim Nash; he was locked up tight in the King County Jail. As far as the theft of the Pitre family safe, Halser insisted that he was simply helping his good friend move a heavy item, much as any friend would help someone move. He said he had no idea the safe was stolen.
     
    Roland was in a much more tenuous position than Bud. On September 9, 1993, faced with the multitudinous physical evidence and eyewitness testimony against him, Roland Pitre, who appeared to be fully restored to sanity, entered Alford Pleas to several charges against him before Judge Karlynn Haberly of the Kitsap County Superior Court. He was not admitting guilt: the Alford Plea mean that he was neither admitting nor denying guilt but that he believed he would be found guilty if his case went to trial.
    There were indeed many charges against him, and Chris Casad, the prosecutor, intended to ask for exceptional sentences for each of them. Given Pitre’s record and that he had taken advantage of the very people who should have had reason to trust him—his own family—made his alleged crimes particularly egregious.
    Still feeling confident, Roland Pitre took the Alford Plea in Count I: First Degree Burglary; Count II: Conspiracy to Commit First Degree Kidnapping and to further charges, many