Worth More Dead

evolving from the theft of the family’s safe and its contents: Willful Destruction of Insured Property and Theft in the First Degree.

    Sentencing would come later. In the meantime, Roland moved ahead to add luster to his reputation as a loving and caring man. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke about Cheryl Pitre’s murder to a presentence investigator, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Flint Police Department in Michigan. The investigator had been a detective sergeant before he retired to do private work. He had had ample opportunity over the years to study human nature. He found Roland Pitre an interesting challenge.
    Roland said he felt he was being singled out and punished again because people suspected that he had killed his first wife. And that simply wasn’t true. “I didn’t kill her,” he sobbed. “I knew when she was murdered that I would be blamed for it. There’s a time in a person’s life when things like that can happen, and everything just goes downhill from then on. I knew I’d never get my nursing license after she died. I’ve never been able to recover from that or clear myself.”
    Even though he had semi-confessed to the current charges and was awaiting sentencing, Roland continued to try to improve his image by doing his own PR. He readily agreed to speak with a reporter for the Independent, Port Orchard’s newspaper.
    He had to share the front page with Beth Bixler, but Roland got more coverage. Beth helped the detectives after her first obviously false story of Tim’s kidnapping, and she was prepared to testify against him if he had gone to trial.
    Because she had no prior record and because the investigators and the judge believed she was telling the truth, Beth had been sentenced to only four years in prison. With “good time,” she could hope to be back with her three children sooner than that.
    Beth had lost her marriage, come close to bankruptcy, and was no longer a member in good standing of the Church of Abundant Life because of her obsession with Roland, but at least the Court gave her a break in her sentence.
    “She was not the primary motivator behind the crime,” Chris Casad told a staff writer, Verina Palmer. “It was obviously thought up by Pitre.”
    Roland Pitre, speaking in the Kitsap County Jail, told Verina Palmer that he was horrified at the prospect of receiving a twelve-year sentence, the exceptional sentence sought by the prosecutors Casad and Moran. That was unthinkable to a man who cried as he spoke of how much he truly loved his family.
    Roland persisted in his version of what he considered a noncrime. He said that he saw himself as a hero, as only a simple man who tried his best to preserve his family. He had always been their protector, and he desperately needed to show them how very vulnerable they were without him.
    To be sure they were all protected, Roland related that he often parked nearby and stared at their house, sometimes spending all night, his eyes burning from lack of sleep as he watched over them. He had to find some way to prove to Della that she needed him to come home. He had even fantasized about different ways he could rush into the house at just the right moment when they were having a problem or even foil a crime in progress. If a rapist or a voyeur threatened his vulnerable family, he would be the shining knight there to save them.
    “I didn’t even have any certain crime I was saving my family from; I would just fantasize being there for the emergency, being there when I was needed.”
    Maybe he felt this way because he hadn’t been able to save Cheryl, he said. “I’ve always felt totally responsible for Cheryl Pitre’s death. I feel that if we had not divorced she’d still be alive. I suppose I’ll feel that way ad infinitum. The guilt is overbearing [ sic ].”
    Roland said he probably deserved to go to prison for the unsuccessful kidnapping of Tim, but he didn’t feel it should be for the twelve years that might lie ahead. “I was just trying to get back in my house to be part of a family.”
    Roland made sure that the Independent ’s reporter saw the results of a private polygraph he had taken on September 11.
    John L. Ketchum administered the lie detector test to Roland, hooking him up to the usual leads: blood pressure, galvanic skin response, respiration, heart rate, pulse.
    Pitre’s attorney conferred with Ketchum. They chose thirty-five questions, going back to 1980 when Lieutenant Commander Dennis