Worth More Dead

serving time in prison. He had harbored no ill feelings toward Cheryl; he didn’t even know her. His motive was money. Roland Pitre promised him between $5,000 and $10,000 if he would kill Roland’s wife. The money was there, according to Pitre; McKee would just have to wait for it awhile until her insurance paid off.
    Roland was still in the reformatory in Monroe, a small town about twenty-five miles northeast of Seattle. The Seattle cold case detectives traveled there to talk to him.
    He had a story to tell Mixsell and Gagnon. His version of the motive behind the attack on Cheryl might even have been convincing—if it weren’t so familiar. The detectives had of course read over the Kitsap County and Bremerton Police Department files regarding the attempted kidnapping of Pitre’s stepson ten years earlier. Pitre had insisted then that the kidnapping wasn’t real; it was only an imitation of life, never meant to be carried out.
    It was done, he had said, to win back the love of his second wife, Della, and the trust of his family.
    Maybe Roland had forgotten what he told the authorities in Kitsap County, maybe he was confused and thrown off balance to find the two Seattle investigators waiting to talk with him about an old, old murder, or maybe his fertile brain had just run out of ideas.
    Confronted with the evidence linking him to McKee and to Cheryl’s murder fifteen years earlier, Roland admitted that he hired McKee to frighten his estranged wife. He even gave him a key to Cheryl’s house, advised him of her work schedule for Saturday night, and drove him by the house to be sure he knew where she lived. Somewhat surprisingly, Cheryl wasn’t supposed to be abducted along the road from PJ’s Market as she headed for home. Instead, Roland wanted to have her surprised by a stranger in her own home. The time of the attack was set for midnight.
    To be extra helpful, Roland even drove McKee to a hardware store to buy the rope and the duct tape he would need to render Cheryl immobile. Yes, he admitted he wanted her to be scared. “But he wasn’t supposed to kill her,” Pitre insisted. “I never intended for her to die.”
    As he had always done, Roland constructed a finely tuned plot. He was going to tell Della, his new girlfriend, that he was going out for popcorn. Then his intention was to race to Cheryl’s house where he would storm in and thwart Fred McKee’s assault. Roland said he hadn’t planned to stay with Della; he wanted only to win back Cheryl’s love, and he figured that saving her from a mysterious intruder in the middle of the night would prove to her that they were meant to be together.
    He would be her hero.
    Gagnon and Mixsell stared at him. This was virtually the same scenario Roland had constructed to explain why he’d “pretended” to kidnap Tim Nash.
    There was every indication that Cheryl Pitre was still in love with her estranged husband at the time of her death. She had been through so many challenges to get him released from prison and had done her best to support him emotionally and financially in the two years they lived together as man and wife after his parole. She had borne him a second child and worked double time while he attended college. And for most of those two years, he was cheating on her with other women, although she probably didn’t suspect it until their last few weeks together.
    Ever the optimist, Cheryl wouldn’t have needed a staged rescue to convince her that she needed Roland. She knew she needed him.
    Cheryl’s and Della’s roles in Roland’s life were almost interchangeable. The only difference was that Della had caught on quicker, so she was still alive.
    Yes, Roland conceded that he hired McKee but hadn’t been able to stop him in time. During the late night of October 15, he had the terrible bad luck to suffer another one of his “blackouts,” the spells he said he had most of his life. Those blurred places in his memory had occurred way back, even before he suffered a stroke. And he seemed brokenhearted now as he spoke to the cold case detectives that it had to happen just when he needed to rush to Cheryl’s aid.
    “I woke up the next morning,” he said morosely, “and went about my day, and I suddenly realized that I forgot that I was supposed to rescue Cheryl.”
    “You forgot?” Gagnon asked.
    “That happens when I get blackouts.”

    On January 20, 2004, Barbara Flemming, a King County deputy prosecuting attorney, filed charges