Worth More Dead

years in prison; now he faced more than twenty-five years of captivity. He was 41 years old, and would be 65 or more when he was paroled.
    Pitre was also ordered never to have contact with his wife and children.
     
    The prisoner’s immediate family picked up the frayed strands of their lives, although the emotional damage they suffered would never really go away. They moved on, some of them changing their names (Living in constant fear leaves victims with a programmed panic reaction.)
    And with it all, Cheryl Pitre’s murder was still a cold case. Despite the genuine suspicions of dozens of investigators, they were still unable to link her ex-husband to the terrible beating that ended her life.
    Years passed. Cheryl’s children grew up, but they never forgot their mother, and their overwhelming need to bring her some measure of justice didn’t go away.

22
    2003
    In the decade since Roland Pitre’s conviction in 1993, forensic science leapt ahead with remarkable techniques. Police departments across America established “Cold Case Squads.” The Seattle Police Department was one of them. Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon were the first Seattle homicide detectives assigned to read through cases that had gone unsolved for many years. Although Cheryl Pitre’s life was centered in Bremerton and Port Orchard and most investigators had concluded that she probably died there, her body was found in Seattle proper. By 2003, cold case squads utilizing DNA matches were closing unsolved cases in mounting numbers. Mixsell and Gagnon had solved a dozen cold cases, and they continued to move forward, mowing them down one by one.
    Hank Gruber, Rudy Sutlovich, and their sergeant, Joe Sanford, had retired from the Seattle Police Department by late 2003, although they never forgot the Pitre case. Kitsap County detectives Doug Wright and Jim Harris had also retired. Cheryl’s murder lingered in their minds, too, as unfinished business. But it was more than that for all the detectives, uniformed officers, and criminalists who had worked Cheryl’s murder case; she had been a warm and loving woman, a young mother, a friend to dozens of people.
    There is an unseen bond that links murder victims with the men and women who strive to find out exactly what happened to them and why. The investigators come to know the victims as well as—often better than—those who have known them in life. It is a heavy responsibility that doesn’t go away when a case is over, and an unsolved case is never over.
    Hank Gruber, who now works in courthouse security, has always kept in close touch with his former colleagues in the Homicide Unit, and he was one of the first to learn from Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon that there might be a revitalized probe into Cheryl Pitre’s murder, now fifteen years in the past.
    He was elated, as were the other detectives who had hoped that this day would come.
     
    There was someone who knew what had happened to Cheryl Pitre, someone other than the person or persons who had killed her. The knowledge had eaten away at his conscience for years, acid thoughts that disturbed his sleep and made him feel guilty, even though he had not participated in her death.
    But he was in prison, and there are few more dangerous things to do while in prison than to tell other prisoners’ secrets. “Snitches” don’t last long in prison. They have unfortunate accidents or untimely deaths. Even those who do come forward lose some of their effectiveness because their identity has to be protected by the law enforcement agencies they contact. Not surprisingly, they rarely agree to testify in court.
    Why do they come forward at all? Some prison informants do it because they have consciences. Some tell what they know out of the need for revenge; others hope they might get their own sentences shortened. A few of them are just natural-born tattletales and gossips.
    Since Roland Pitre was well acquainted with the much shortened life spans of prison snitches, he may have assumed that no one on the wrong side of the bars would be a threat to him, especially since with his contrived charisma, he had always been popular in prison.
    But there was at least one person who didn’t like him at all. The vast majority of inmates are serving sentences for crimes that haven’t physically hurt anyone. They have mothers and wives and children. They deplore sexual crimes and murder—particularly against female victims—just as much as anyone on the