Worth More Dead

of first-degree murder against Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee in the death of Cheryl Pitre. Both men were already in prison, but as a precaution the prosecutors asked for $2 million bail for Roland anyway. He had managed to stay free of the law for large chunks of time since his original arrest for murder twenty-four years earlier.
    Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee would be arraigned on February 2. Despite intensified security in the King County Courthouse, the chance of escape is always highest when prisoners are being transported.
    Even though the secret witness said that Fred McKee had admitted abducting Cheryl from her home, strangling her, and then beating her to death as she lay unconscious in the trunk of her car, McKee pled not guilty to the charges that he had murdered her.
    Roland Pitre was predictable. Once again, he accepted an Alford Plea. “I did not intend to cause her [Cheryl’s] death, but I believe a jury would find I did, given the evidence against me.”
    This time he did not feign insanity or seizures or blackouts. Perhaps even he realized he had come to the end of the road.
    He had never really been on trial for any of the crimes he had committed, always choosing to cop a plea instead of facing a jury. Although he testified against his mistress, Maria Archer, and his boyhood friend, Steven Guidry, twenty-four years earlier, he wasn’t the one on trial; he had already made his plea bargain and wasn’t risking anything.
    Just as he preferred not to actually participate in the crimes he planned, he seemed intimidated by the idea of facing his accusers, a judge, a jury, and a courtroom full of spectators.
    Roland Pitre always schemed to be a behind-the-scenes man. He was forced to join Beth Bixler to kidnap Tim because Bud Halser was in jail. Detectives believed that he had been there with McKee when Cheryl died, too. That tiny speck of blood on his glasses might have been the connection if it had happened ten years later, but the speck dissolved on the damp swab.
    He may even have been the person who shot Dennis Archer in 1980.
    In a way, proving any of these things didn’t matter. He was looking at a very, very long sentence.

23
    2004
    On March 11, 2004, Roland Pitre was led through the marble corridors of the King County Courthouse. He scarcely resembled the muscular young Marine whose high jinks and practical jokes once made his buddies laugh. Nor was he the slickly handsome judo instructor and ladies’ man he was on Whidbey Island and later in Port Orchard in his first years on parole from prison. Rather he looked like an old man, far older than his fifty-one years. He was balding on top, and the rest of his hair was graying. It was long and tangled, and he had a beard. Headed for Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas’s courtroom, Pitre wore the bright red coveralls of a high-risk prisoner, handcuffs, and leg shackles. He looked so scrawny next to the two husky corrections officers who flanked him that he seemed hardly a threat.
    This man who had connived and schemed and planned to terrorize and kill the family who tried to love him no longer controlled anyone. He may not have expected to face the presence in the courtroom of those who had every right to judge him most derisively. But they were there. André was in high school, and Bébé was a brilliant law student. They had changed their names and moved on with their lives (their names have been changed in this book, too, to protect their privacy). Despite everything their father had done to them, despite losing their mother to murder, they were survivors who still needed the opportunity to face the man who had done so much to destroy the serenity of their childhood years, the man who had killed their mother.
    Bébé was 25 now. She was a beautiful young woman, married, happy, and on her way to a successful career. Given an opportunity to speak, Bébé addressed Judge Kallas:
    “I request [that] you sentence my father to the max sentence allowable under the law,” she said firmly, describing him as a “dangerous psychopath” who hurt people because he was ultimately greedy. She said he had selfishly decided that a $125,000 life insurance payoff was worth more than her mother’s life.
    “My mother and I shared a tremendous bond of love, fun, and nurturing. I knew that I was her world.”
    She turned toward her father, boring her eyes into him as he sat slope-shouldered, head averted, at the defense table. He would not look at her,