Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (7 page)

That was not even vaguely believable, but that was Roland Pitre, and all his friends knew it. He was a compulsive liar, but they were on to him. He wasn’t a bad guy; you just couldn’t believe what he said.

No one who knew him in the seventies expected Pitre to do anything criminal. Years later, when one of the other men they had been with all through the Marine Corps years wrote to Pitre’s best friend to tell him that Pete had some “legal problems,” he didn’t believe it. “I thought he was pulling my leg.”

The Pete he recalled was in his early twenties, a handsome guy who was a practical joker, at most a small-potatoes con man. Thirty years later, his closest service buddy, who has become a successful businessman, was stunned to learn all that happened to Roland Pitre Jr. after their paths diverged.

“Pete was bright, well-spoken, and talented. He was fun to be around. He made things happen. He was tough—a brown belt in judo and a black belt in karate—when I knew him. We worked side by side almost every day for nearly two years. He was a good Marine—most of the time—and a good electronics technician. And
funny!

“When I think of what he could have accomplished and the life he could have had with just a little effort on his part, it depresses me.”

Kept from
the outside world in the McNeil Island Penitentiary, Roland Pitre had plenty of time to formulate careful plans for his future. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps, of course, and he had no option of military service. He needed to make contacts that he thought would be helpful to him later.

His letters from prison to Cheryl and their daughter, Bébé, were masterpieces of persuasion, if not outright brainwashing. He’d assured Cheryl again and again that he wanted only to rescue their marriage and help her raise their daughter. They could start a new life together if only he could be free to be with her.

Cheryl took a huge chance. So they could be close to Roland, she left her family and the security they offered her as she and Bébé moved back to Washington in the mid-eighties. Now Cheryl could visit Roland in the McNeil Island prison. She found a tiny place to live near Bremerton, site of the huge Bremerton Naval Base. She immediately looked for a job and found one with a local car dealer, Bay Ford.

Cheryl began to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist church and made friends. She was searching for the right church, and she read books and participated in Bible studies. Roland had been raised Catholic, but he hadn’t practiced that religion for a long time.

One of the books that tremendously impressed Cheryl was a true story called
They’re All Dead, Aren’t They?
by Joy Swift. Swift wrote of her marriage to a man much older than she was and then becoming the mother of five, including three stepchildren, when she was still in her teens. Her family’s lives were soon marked by terrible violence. Swift and her husband lost his two sons and the two little girls they had together to a teenaged mass murderer. Less than a year later, Joy’s young stepdaughter died of cancer. Swift’s book was a gripping and inspiring story about her struggle to find faith in the wake of incredible personal disasters. After studying the beliefs of many religions, Joy Swift found her answers in the Seventh-Day Adventists’ doctrine.

The book helped Cheryl believe that she, too, could turn the tragedies in her own life into triumphs.

Cheryl had long since forgiven Roland for his affair with Maria. That was in the past. She also convinced herself that Roland would never have wanted to kill Maria’s husband. She felt that if he had anything to do with Dennis Archer’s death, it could only have been because he was hounded and manipulated into a situation that raged out of control. Cheryl blamed Maria. Now she was willing to wipe the slate clean and to look at her marriage as if it was just beginning. Somehow she would find a way to show the parole board in Washington that Roland wasn’t dangerous and that he deserved to be free.

Cheryl Pitre was organized and precise, and she was a whiz at math. She rapidly became a very valuable employee in the office at Bay Ford. In a few weeks, she knew everything there was to know about car contracts, title searches, simple and compound interest. It wasn’t long before she was running the office and training new salesmen. Her bosses at Bay Ford were grateful to have her.

Greg Meakin, who later worked at the car dealer for over a year, recalls that Cheryl taught him “about paperwork and financing. She helped
everyone.
Cheryl was like—well, sort of like your favorite teacher in grade school. She was nice to everyone.”

And she was. It didn’t matter if it was the lot boy who washed the cars or one of the owners of Bay Ford, Cheryl went out of her way to help people.

Meakin remembers that it was obvious Cheryl didn’t spend money on clothes or makeup for herself. She wore stretch pants and bargain knit tops. The dealership was very much laid-back and casual, and nobody cared that she didn’t dress like a career woman.

“She was poor as a church mouse, and she lived in this tiny little house down in Port Orchard,” Greg Meakin says. “She was pretty plain with long dark hair that had kind of a reddish tone to it,” Meakin says. “She was only about five feet three, and she was a little chubby. But she had a completely angelic demeanor and beautiful light-blue eyes. Everybody at Bay liked her.”

Between her job and her church, Cheryl Pitre had any number of friends. Some of them worried about her devotion to her convict husband, although she was careful to avoid telling anyone but Greg exactly why Roland was in prison. She wanted him to have a true fresh start when he was paroled.

Always seeing that Bébé had what she needed, Cheryl deprived herself of everything beyond necessities so that she could send Roland money for the prison canteen and put savings away for when he got out.

The dealer where Cheryl worked looked like a business frozen in time since the fifties or sixties. Bay Ford was owned by longtime Bremerton residents who knew almost everyone in Kitsap County. The office and the smaller cubicle rooms where car deals were made was a gathering place for a lot of Bremerton businessmen, who stopped by for a cup of coffee or a cigarette break or just to talk. Cheryl sat behind a counter in the large open space at the top of the stairs. Her desk was close to that of Bonnie Arter and that of the automobile title clerk.

Cheryl seemed always to be smiling, and customers and salesman alike enjoyed visiting with her. “She had a tremendous confidence in her own abilities,” Greg Meakin recalls. “She was
completely
trustworthy. She was fun-loving, and she had a great dry sense of humor, but there was a romantic in her, too.”

Because she took the time to listen, people shared their troubles and secrets with Cheryl. She wasn’t a gossip and never betrayed their confidences. Meakin, who avoided talking about his personal life on the job, did talk to Cheryl. He had just proposed to his girlfriend—who lived on the other side of Puget Sound in the Federal Way area—and he was very happy that she had accepted, but he didn’t want to talk about it with all the Bay Ford staff. Greg told only Cheryl, knowing that she would never tell anyone else.

And Cheryl talked to him about Roland. She was hoping to get him a job at Bay when he got out. Like her other friends, Meakin was worried that she might be in for a disappointment. Roland’s track record for honesty and fidelity didn’t sound promising. But Cheryl’s optimism was pervasive. She was able to get a number of references from her church friends and prominent businessmen verifying that she had the reSources to help her husband adjust to the world outside prison.

Her sincerity also came through to the Washington State Board of Prison Terms and Parole. She had established a good home and a solid place in the community and her church. She kept her small house spotless, and her credit record was excellent. And she had managed to arrange for a job for Roland at a branch of Bay Ford. He would start as a used-car salesman.

Cheryl blossomed with happiness when she learned Roland was coming home at last. She started wearing makeup, and she splurged on a haircut and styling at a beauty parlor. Her fellow employees at Bay Ford noticed when she wore a new sapphire blue dress to an office party. She had bought it especially for Roland. She was determined to be so attractive to him that he would never stray again.

On June 20, 1986, Cheryl waited for Roland when he walked through the gates of the McNeil Island prison. It was almost the first day of summer, and the sea air felt wonderful as they took the little ferry back to the mainland.

Their little girl, Bébé, was 8 then, and she was thrilled to have her father back in her life.

Roland Pitre was quietly paroled to his faithful wife after serving only six years of his thirty-five-year sentence. If there was any mention of his early release in the newspapers, it was only a short item in the back pages. Island County, where he was convicted of murder, was quite a distance away from Kitsap County, where he would be living. He settled into the Bremerton–Port Orchard area quickly. He went to work at the Subaru division of Bay Ford; Greg Meakin was his manager on the night shift.

To his surprise, Meakin found Roland less than the dynamic, handsome man Cheryl had described to him. “The first time I saw Roland was when he came to me with a car deal he was trying to make. He looked like a fish out of water. I remember he was wearing a 1960s-style plaid sport jacket and a really wide tie. His hair was very short—sandy-colored—and he wore really thick glasses.”

Meakin was struck by Pitre’s meek demeanor; he was nothing like the “killer convict” Greg had been worried about. “He spoke in a very soft voice, and he sure didn’t look like the judo expert I’d heard about. But it was easy to see the ‘sweet side’ of him that Cheryl had told me about.”

Cheryl seemed very happy to have Roland back in her life, and they were having a great time. She had always been a practical joker, a trait that balanced her angelic side. With Roland to assist in her elaborate plots, they often caught Cheryl’s fellow employees off guard.

“She got me a couple of times,” Meakin remembers. “I was brand-new the first time. In walks Cheryl with this ‘cop.’ It was Ed MacNamara, who was a civil deputy for Kitsap County. He told me he had a search warrant for my office for ‘contraband from the other side of the water.’ I was floored and shocked. Ed started searching my desk and all around my office. Then he pulls out a little bag of what looked like cocaine! I have never used drugs, and I didn’t know how it got there.”

While Meakin sputtered that he had never seen it before, he saw a big grin spread over Cheryl’s face.

“April Fool!” she shouted, even though April was long past.

Roland helped Cheryl with her most intricate gag. A customer who was gay appeared to be very attracted to Greg Meakin, who was now the finance manager for Bay Ford, and the other salesmen loved to tease him about it. Philip* always asked for Greg when he came in to look at cars, and he called often to ask Greg questions. Finally, he signed a contract for a new car, and Greg figured he’d seen the last of him.

Apparently he hadn’t.

“As the manager who closed the sales, I was the last one to talk to Philip,” Greg says, “I knew Philip had a boyfriend named Ronnie,* who was very jealous. And all of a sudden, I started getting these phone calls from Ronnie, and he wasn’t happy.”

Meakin didn’t notice that Cheryl was peeking around his office door and listening to his end of the phone calls. “So finally this Ronnie calls me, and he’s mad. He said, ‘I hear you were with Philip, and I don’t like that. You’d better stay away from him—or you’ll be sorry.”

Ronnie was a big guy, and this sounded like a serious threat. Then Meakin looked up to see Cheryl giggling. She laughed as she admitted that it wasn’t Philip’s lover on the phone at all, it was Roland pretending to be Ronnie. Meakin’s face was red as everyone in the office started to laugh, and then he laughed, too. None of Cheryl’s practical jokes were mean, but she and Roland made quite a pair with their ability to catch someone off guard.

He didn’t sell many used cars so Roland Pitre didn’t last long at Bay Ford. After he left, he found work here and there. He worked for a while stuffing envelopes for the
Port Orchard Independent,
a biweekly newspaper in Kitsap County. It paid only minimum wage, but it was something. Although he had never shown any interest in a medical career before, Roland looked into nursing courses at the University of Washington and Olympic Community College in Bremerton. He told Cheryl that in two years he could get a degree as a licensed practical nurse, which would open up many job opportunities. He started the interviewing and paperwork process, saying that he hoped eventually to be an RN. He didn’t feel that his criminal conviction was anyone’s business, so he didn’t mention it.

As always, Roland’s charm with women helped him. Several supervisors reviewed his application and thought he would be ideal in the medical field, so he was not only admitted to the program but given a scholarship.

Roland made plans to teach judo classes again, an enterprise in which he had always succeeded. In the meantime, Cheryl worked two jobs: days at Bay Ford, and on weekends and some evenings she clerked at PJ’s Market at Woods Road and Mile Hill Drive in Port Orchard. Sometimes when she worked the evening shift, then switched to days on Saturday and Sunday, she closed up PJ’s at eleven and returned to open the store before seven in the morning. She also did the books for her boss. Cheryl had once taught math and was adept at bookkeeping and business matters.

With her careful budgeting and Roland’s growing clientele of judo students, the Pitres were able to purchase their first home. It was a triple-wide mobile home on Westway in Port Orchard. Although it was about twenty years old, it had been kept up by the previous owners. It had wall-to-wall dark shag carpeting. They furnished their new home with pieces they picked up at yard sales or at bargain prices. Roland saw that the detached garage would make a perfect studio for his self-defense classes. He would have his own dojo.

“They looked like a normal suburban couple,” Greg Meakin remembers. “My wife and I were very friendly with them, and a lot of the young people who took judo lessons from Roland looked upon their place as a second home.”

Roland had contacted the local YMCA to arrange for a space where students of the art could meet. Judo was an offshoot of the much more violent jujitsu. Judo was the creation of Jigoro Kano, who visualized the graceful and powerful body movements as a sport, a nonviolent one. Kano, who died in 1938, was the ultimate master of judo, a holder of the highest degree of black belt. Pitre told students that Kano had inspired him and claimed to have attended the Kodokan Institute in Japan, the Yale or Harvard of judo instruction.