Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (3 page)

What happened next was perhaps inevitable. Maria Archer never denied that after Dennis Archer went to sea, she and Roland Pitre began a physical affair sometime in the latter part of 1979. According to Maria, the affair continued until late March or early April 1980. They made no effort to hide it, and the liaison was an open secret in the small town of Oak Harbor. The couple were often seen out together, and they even entertained together. Maria admitted to having serious doubts that she could continue in her marriage.

Roland Pitre’s marriage blew sky-high, and his wife remained in Pennsylvania. Cheryl threatened to file for divorce, and he didn’t try very hard to dissuade her, although he did seem to be heartsick that he was separated from his daughter.

Maria insisted that her relationship with Pitre had nothing to do with the breakup of his marriage. She said that it was already over by the time she and Roland began to sleep together.

As for her own marriage, Maria had been torn. She wrote to Dennis and said, “If I can’t make you happy, I’m sorry, darling—but maybe we should try some other way.”

Maria recalled that she was surprised by her husband’s answer: he wrote that their problems were largely his fault, that he expected her to do everything. She wrote back and said part of it was her fault. “He opened up for the first time.

“He said he loved me very much, but he’d never contest a divorce. In late March or the first part of April 1980, I was planning to try my marriage again.”

According to Maria, Roland Pitre took her resolution to attempt to mend her marriage with grace. “He said, ‘I’m just a good friend. I’ll always be your friend. I just want you to be happy.’ ”

Dennis Archer was not due to return to Oak Harbor until June 1980. Still, Roland’s attitude toward her changed well before that. He seemed to accept her decision to end their affair but remained a constant in her life. They were no longer lovers, but he told her he considered her his closest friend. He would come to her house to babysit her children, and he was a great friend of the neighborhood children. She was busy sewing costumes for a town pageant and Roland even helped with that.

The Marine from New Orleans, who was four years younger than Maria, had lost his wife, his child, and now his mistress, but according to Maria, he accepted all of it with equanimity. He had asked her to divorce her husband and marry him, he had told her he loved her, but that was all in the past. Now, she was only his good friend: “the best friend he’d ever had.”

Roland still needed Maria’s advice. He wanted to gain custody of his daughter, Bébé. Maria pointed out that a little girl should be with her mother. He didn’t agree with her. Maria didn’t know Cheryl Pitre, but Roland was adamant that he would make a more reliable parent for his toddler daughter.

In June, Dennis Archer returned home. “We were going to be a family again,” Maria testified sadly. “My husband always said, ‘You don’t have to tell me everything,’ but I thought I would—but I didn’t want to hurt him.” Dennis seemed to accept her confessions, and she said their last weeks together were good. “My husband had changed. We would talk until four
AM
. We were going to leave and go camping. I told Roland I could finally express my feelings to my husband.”

Everything appeared to have come together flawlessly like the seamless ending of a romance novel. Maria’s husband appreciated and communicated with her now. She said he had forgiven her for her few months of infidelity. And her lover wasn’t the least bit upset that she had gone back to her husband. According to her astounding revelations, Pitre had moved smoothly into the position of her best friend. No one was jealous. No one had an axe to grind, or revenge to seek. All the ends were tied up neatly, too neatly for a skeptic to believe.

His divorce papers filed, Roland Pitre traveled to the East Coast and returned with his 20-month-old daughter and his sister around the first of July. He moved them into a new apartment in Oak Harbor. He called Maria to see how things were going with her. She remembered that she wasn’t really that happy to hear from him. She told him a little sharply, “It’s none of your business. My life is my life.”

Apparently, she no longer needed him as a best friend at that point, and after that, she said she didn’t care to see him at all. Maria was totally reconciled with Dennis. Or so it seemed.

It was 11:34
on Sunday night, July 13, 1980, when Maria Archer’s frantic phone call came into the Island County Sheriff’s Office in Coupeville, Washington, ten miles south of the Archer home. The dispatcher had to calm the female on the phone before he could understand what she was saying.

“Someone has broken in and shot my husband!” she cried.

The dispatcher was finally able to get the address, and he radioed the call to Deputy A. J. “Bud” Graves, who arrived at the residence in minutes. Graves found Maria and a neighbor waiting at the house on North Fairwood. She appeared very agitated, which was to be expected. She and the neighbor led Graves to an upstairs bedroom, where a man she identified as her husband, Dennis Archer, lay motionless.

There was no question that Archer was dead; the front of his polo shirt was one giant splotch of crimson, and still-liquid blood stained the carpet beneath him. Still, Graves knelt next to the body, and felt in vain for a pulse. Whatever had happened had happened very recently. There was no rigor mortis, no lividity; the body was still faintly warm to his touch. Nevertheless, Archer was dead.

Graves radioed for backup from Captain Robert E. Sharp, the head of Sheriff Richard Medina’s Criminal Investigation Unit. Detective Sergeant Ron Edwards was next up on the list to respond. Edwards was a ten-year veteran of the sheriff’s office, and he was about to become the investigator who would be principally responsible for probing into the baffling case.

He quickly ordered deputies to cordon off the house and yard to prevent curious bystanders from contaminating any evidence that might be there.

On the surface, the motive for Archer’s murder appeared to have been burglary: a stereo and other belongings of the family were stacked near the front door in the living room. Yet that was strange. The Archers, while comfortable, hardly seemed prime targets for a burglary. Nor did it seem prudent for a burglar to enter a home whose occupant, a husky, six-foot-tall 33-year-old naval officer was still awake. Far better to enter in the wee hours of the morning when the lights were out and the residents were sleeping.

Trembling, Maria Archer told the investigators that she had been out during the evening. She had driven a friend of one of her children home after baking pizza for her family and the other youngster. She left her children with Dennis so that she could visit a woman friend, Lola Sanchez,* who was also a Latin-American navy wife. Maria said she had intended to stop for a few breakfast items at a convenience store on her way home shortly after eleven but had decided it was too late and she had driven straight home from Lola’s house.

When she entered the house, the front door was unlocked, Maria said, but that wasn’t unusual. She called out, “Hi! I’m here,” expecting to hear her husband answer. Instead, she heard first silence, then her children screaming from somewhere in the basement.

“They were screaming, ‘Mommy! Mommy! Daddy locked us in the closet!’ I wondered if my husband had gone out of his mind,” she told Edwards. “Nothing made sense. There was a board across the door to our darkroom, and I wrenched it off to get my children out. The kids said a man came in the house. I looked around, but I was afraid. I was trembling inside, but I’m strong, a mother. I thought maybe someone was in the house, and I had to protect my children. The receiver was off the hook, and I called my neighbor and said, ‘Please come right now.’ The kids were blubbering. I left them with my neighbor, and I went upstairs.”

Maria Archer told the detective that she found her husband lying in the bedroom with his hand blocking the door. “His eyes were open. His mouth was open, and he was white. I knew he was dead. I kissed him and said, ‘Darling, we’ll always be together now. I’ll never leave you now.’ I moved his hand and shut the door.”

Maria said she was most concerned about her children and that she’d put them to bed, trying to calm them as they cried, “Daddy, where’s my daddy? Where did they take him?”

Then she went downstairs and told her neighbor that Dennis was dead and that she must call the sheriff.

It was a most puzzling case for the Island County investigators. If robbery was the motive, why wasn’t anything missing? Why did the supposed thief leave his loot still stacked in the living room? Had he been frightened off as Maria arrived home? A canvass of nearby homes by deputies elicited little information that might help. One neighbor thought she might have heard a shot approximately twenty minutes before Maria arrived home to find her husband’s body. Other nearby residents had neither heard nor seen anything.

Dennis Archer had been a well-liked and respected neighbor; no one could fathom why he would have been a likely target for murder.

The children, almost hysterical, could offer no help.

Nor could Maria.

*Some Names Have Been Changed. The First Time They Appear, They Are Marked With An Asterisk (*).

It was a long,
long night for Captain Sharp, Sergeant Edwards, and the investigative team as they diagrammed the crime scene, gathered the lethal .357 bullets, vacuumed for fiber samples, and cut sections of carpet from beneath the body. Dusting for latent prints proved to be fruitless. They didn’t find any useful possibles. There
were
tire tracks in the front yard of the Archers’ home, but they were faint because the weather was hot and dry; there wasn’t any mud to hold a good impression. Still, they painstakingly took samples of dirt and grass from the yard, hoping they would later use them to match debris caught in the undercarriage of a suspect vehicle.

There was one odd note that long night: Roland Pitre, who identified himself as a close family friend, made three visits to the Archer home, each time demanding to see Maria, insisting that she needed his emotional support. But Maria declined to see him until, at last angered by his continual prowlings by the house, she asked to confront him to tell him to go away. The detectives asked her not to do that. In fact, the Island County investigators were beginning to find Pitre’s presence highly suspect.

His stubborn refusal to leave was so questionable that they arrested him. He was soon charged on suspicion of first-degree murder. Detective Edwards drew up an affidavit and obtained a search warrant for Roland Pitre’s apartment, a residence approximately seven miles from the Archer home. The search warrant also listed Pitre’s van.

Their sweep of Pitre’s apartment unearthed one bizarre item: a spiky black wig. His van contained a duffel bag stenciled with the name “D. E. Woods.” Inside, they found only jeans and miscellaneous clothing. The duffel bag and its contents proved to have been reported as stolen by a D. E. Woods in a complaint filed three days before Dennis Archer was shot to death.

Subsequent lab tests found no fiber, dirt, or grass matches between the crime scene itself and Pitre’s home and vehicles.

For Detective Edwards, the father of small children whose wife was expecting another in November, the months ahead meant hours and hours of overtime, many trips across the country, and the wildest assortment of witnesses’ stories that any investigator had ever uncovered.

Virtually none of the principals had told the absolute truth going in. It didn’t take Edwards long to find out about the seven-month affair between the widow Archer and Roland Pitre. Maria Archer willingly gave Edwards an hours-long taped interview a few days after the murder, an interview in which she freely admitted that she and Pitre had been emotionally and physically involved from November 1979 until April 1980. She told Edwards of her resolution to rebuild her marriage at that point and of Pitre’s seeming acceptance of her decision.

More telling, she also admitted to Edwards that she had not in fact been with her friend Lola Sanchez on the Sunday evening her husband was killed. She had been at Roland Pitre’s apartment. “It didn’t have anything to do with anything—where I was—so I didn’t think it mattered.”

By late June, when he returned from the East Coast with his little girl and his sister, Maria said Roland Pitre had changed dramatically in his attitude toward her. Where he had seemingly released her from all obligations to him, he suddenly began to cling to her like a drowning man. He didn’t seem to be able to handle anything by himself: raising his daughter, helping his sister, planning his life. Maria told Edwards that she was appalled to realize how weak Roland really was.

He bombarded her with phone calls, begging her to come see him “just one more time…one more time.”

He had become the very opposite of what attracted her in the first place. Scornful that a man could be so powerless, Maria told Edwards that she nevertheless felt she had to help Pitre with all his problems.

She said she saw him in her regular judo classes between July 1 and July 13 and then he dropped in at her friend Lola’s one day when she was there. She agreed to have ice cream with Pitre and his sister one evening at his apartment. And she even invited his sister to her home for lunch one day. She wasn’t very surprised when Roland showed up too, and she had no choice but to let him join them. He then wangled an invitation to ride to Seattle with her to pick up costumes for the Spanish pageant on the pretext that his sister wanted to see the sights there. It was on that occasion, Maria believed, that he purchased a black wig, but she didn’t know what it was for.

“What happened on that Sunday night, the thirteenth?” Edwards asked Maria.

Maria deeply inhaled her cigarette’s smoke and recalled the last night of her husband’s life. She said Pitre called her that afternoon and pleaded with her to drop over in the evening to discuss his problems. She hadn’t really intended to go. She and Dennis had had a busy day: taking her children and their friends swimming, baking pizza for her family. She asked her son’s friend to spend the night, but his mother called to say that he had a doctor’s appointment early the next morning and that he’d better come home. So Maria had to deliver him there about eight. Then she visited with his mother, talking about the boys’ teacher and their school. Maria said she left and decided to drop in to see Roland, hoping that maybe she could finally get him straightened out so he wouldn’t be so fixated on her.

“I am very independent,” she said proudly. “I never knew anyone could be so dependent.”

When she arrived at Pitre’s apartment, she intended to stay only about twenty minutes. But she found him very anxious, and he said his sister was with friends for the evening. Maria said she meant to leave in plenty of time to get to the store to buy milk and bananas, but ended up talking with Pitre from about nine until eleven. She tried to explain to him that “responsibility is all around us—not just ourselves.”

Edwards’s mind was calculating the time sequence of the murder with Maria’s story. While she said she was in Pitre’s apartment,
talking
for two hours, someone stealthily entered her house, locked her children in the basement darkroom, and shot her husband.

Sergeant Edwards asked Maria the most cogent question: “Do you think Roland Pitre had anything to do with it [Archer’s murder]?”

She shook her head slowly. “Putting the pieces together, I asked myself, ‘Why did he come back? How could anybody do that?’ ”

Edwards wasn’t sure what she meant. “Why did
who
come back?” he asked himself. Did she mean, “Why did Pitre come back from the East Coast? Or why did he come back to her?” But she was talking freely, so he didn’t interrupt her.

Maria stated vehemently that she wanted only the truth. “I just want one thing. I pray to God. I don’t want to think he had anything to do with it. I’ve studied psychology. I thought he was all right.”

Maria seemed absolutely baffled that this man who showed such love for her, for her children, for all children, who seemed such a good person, could possibly be responsible for the death of her husband. And yet—and yet, he still loved her so much. She realized that he never really stopped adoring her, never accepted that she had totally gone back to her husband.

It was clear that she was painting herself as a woman who loved her husband, who had no reason to want him dead, and at the same time describing Roland Pitre as a besotted man who might well have done
anything
to win her back.

Ron Edwards interviewed a number of people who verified that Roland Pitre and Maria had been—at least for several months—a flaming duo. Jo and Mick Brock,* who categorized themselves as good friends of Pitre’s and more casual friends of Maria’s, had some electrifying information. Jo Brock said that before Dennis Archer returned from deployment, Maria had discussed her affair with Pitre.

“She said she loved Roland and she was afraid Dennis would keep her children if she divorced him. I told her to keep her family together and not consider Roland’s feelings.”

Jo Brock recalled that Roland begged her to call Maria and arrange a meeting between him and his lost love in the Brock home on the first or second of July and that this was after Dennis Archer returned from sea. “I did that, and they talked awhile in the living room and then went upstairs to our bedroom to talk for a couple of hours. When they came down, Maria rushed out and we could tell that Roland had been crying.”

Jo Brock said her husband had helped Roland move on or about July 1 and that Mick had been terribly upset afterward. “I finally got him to tell me what was wrong. He said Roland told him that he and a friend of his from back home [New Orleans] were going to kill Dennis Archer and make it look like an accident. We went to our chaplain and told him about what Roland had said. That was on July 5. My husband tried to talk Roland out of it. He didn’t know if he’d succeeded or not, but Roland thanked him for his concern.”

Jo Brock recalled that she had seen Roland Pitre three times on Sunday, July 13, the day Dennis was murdered. Roland lived only a half-block from the Brocks. He was “quite hyper” that day. “He came over around three to three-thirty, and he sat in the kitchen juggling brightly colored balls. He had dressed up like a clown the day before and juggled for the kids, and he promised to teach them how and to have a party for them. Then he came back at six to six-thirty and asked if his sister could spend the evening with us—because Maria was coming to see him and he wanted to talk to her alone. We liked his sister, so we said, ‘Sure,’ and she came over that evening about eight and stayed until eleven-thirty.”

“You said you saw Roland Pitre three times that Sunday?” Edwards prodded.

“Yes. Roland came over again at twelve-thirty, and he was so hyper that his hair was literally standing on end. He said he thought something had happened at Maria’s because he saw police cars there. He wanted me or Mick to drive over there with him. I was afraid of him. I thought he might hurt me or Mick—or maybe that other person he’d talked about would—but Mick went with him.”

Of course, something
had
happened at the Archer home.

Roland Pitre seemed to have had a motive for murder as old as the history of man: jealousy. Despite his later insistence that he and Maria had become only platonic friends, he had told others that he planned to kill Dennis Archer.

Edwards discovered that a .357 Magnum gun belonging to a friend of Pitre’s had turned up missing after he’d had a visit from the judo expert. Pitre borrowed a truck from another serviceman on the day of the murder, a truck that turned up—inexplicably—at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) the morning after the murder. The parking ticket for that vehicle, from the machine at the airport gate, read “12:16
AM
, July 14.” That was just after midnight on Monday morning.

There were so many parts to this puzzle, and they were such extraneous fragments that they could not be forced to mesh into a working mold. Dennis Archer had been gunned down on July 13 between nine and eleven
PM
. During that exact time period, Maria Archer swore she was with Roland Pitre and that neither of them had left his apartment.

If the two lovers had arranged Dennis’s murder and were telling the truth about being together, there had to be a third individual who had done the shooting. Was it the “friend from home” that Pitre told the Brocks about? Jo Brock had seen a dark-haired, mustached man wearing a blue plaid shirt walk away from a truck near Pitre’s apartment on Sunday afternoon. Even though he was a stranger, she felt she could identify him if she ever saw him again.

Edwards looked for this mysterious man as the case became curiouser and curiouser. Roland Pitre’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly in jail. He mumbled about a killer named Targan who was responsible for Archer’s death, he constantly carried around a blanket that he said was his small daughter, and he urinated on himself. He appeared to be in a catatonic state. He was either crazy or was doing a very good job of pretending to be. When he grew even more disoriented, he was taken first to a local hospital, then transferred to the Western Washington State Hospital for observation.

While Pitre babbled incoherently and pretended not to understand what psychiatrists were saying to him, the Island County sheriff’s investigators learned that a close friend had indeed visited him in Oak Harbor on the weekend of July 12 and 13. This was Steven Guidry, 26, another man of Cajun descent, who normally lived in Hanrahan, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Airline records confirmed that Roland Pitre had prepaid a round-trip plane ticket through a travel agency for one “Billy Evans” to travel coach from New Orleans to Seattle. Edwards found that this ticket was canceled and that Pitre wired money to Steven Guidry instead.