Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (4 page)

A “Billy Evans”
had
been on a flight that arrived at Sea-Tac airport around noon on July 12 (Saturday) and had departed Sea-Tac for New Orleans on a seven
AM
flight on Monday, July 14.

Having been declared sane at the Western Washington State Hospital, Pitre was returned to the Island County Jail. On July 21, he visited in jail with relatives, and then asked to speak to Captain Sharp. His statements at that time gave the Island County Prosecutor’s Office probable cause to arrest Steven Guidry on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of Dennis Archer. Sergeant Edwards flew to New Orleans and assisted in the arrest, bringing an apparently bewildered Guidry to jail on Whidbey Island.

The second arrest hit the community by surprise. Then the thirty-four-page statement that Roland Pitre gave to Edwards on September 2 led to yet a third arrest, one that sent shock waves through the tight community. Maria Elena Archer was booked into jail on September 6 on murder charges.

The sheriff’s office tried to maintain a tight lid on information about the murder, but rumors spread furiously. Still, the curious would have to wait for the trial before any of the actual statements made by witnesses and the principals were revealed. A change of venue from Island County to King County was granted and the Seattle courtroom was jam-packed as the trial for Maria Archer and Steven Guidry began in early December. Many of the “Islanders” had taken the ferry from Whidbey Island to the mainland to listen to testimony.

It seemed ironic that Roland Pitre was not on trial. With his statements about the guilt of Maria, his lost love, and Steven Guidry, he had cleverly manipulated his plea bargain. He had been allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder in exchange for his testimony.

If Pitre ever had been crazy, he had quickly recovered his wits and made sure he would do himself the most good. During the trial, Guidry was still in jail, but after spending several weeks in custody Maria was released on bail. She was free to come and go from the courtroom, to have lunch in downtown restaurants, and to mingle with trial observers in the marble hallways of the King County Courthouse.

The twelve jurors and two alternates in Judge H. Joseph Coleman’s courtroom did not have an easy task before them. They would hear the three different and completely contradictory statements regarding the murder of Dennis Archer. Just about the only thing that the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, and the defendants agreed on was that Dennis Archer was dead, that he had been sent to his grave by three bullets in his chest.

It was strange to see the two defendants in the courtroom. They were both small people who looked as if homicide would be completely alien to them. Steven Guidry sat at the far end of the L-shaped cluster formed by the two defense tables, next to his lawyer, Richard Hansen. Maria Archer sat three chairs away, beside her lawyer, Gil Mullen, a former Seattle police officer. During the three-week trial, Maria and Guidry never even glanced at each other.

It was quite possible that they
didn’t
know each other, although the State contended they almost certainly knew
about
each other because of the plotting between Maria and Roland.

David Thiele, the Island County prosecutor, presented the State’s case, and Sergeant Ron Edwards of the sheriff’s office assisted the prosecution, sitting close by Thiele to help with information on the details of his investigation.

The first row of the gallery was reserved for the media. We were packed so tightly that we could barely scribble on our yellow legal pads. The second row was made up principally of friends and family of the victim and of Maria Archer. The rest of the long oak benches were up for grabs by a long line of spectators.

The Archer-Guidry trial in 1980 was one of the very first in Washington where both television and still cameras were allowed into the courtroom, and cameramen from all major stations and newspapers in Washington took turns filming the proceedings. Maria, completely beautiful from any angle, was their chief subject. Sometimes it appeared that she was unaware of the cameras focused on her. Sometimes she seemed to pose for them.

Roland Pitre, the former Marine Corps staff sergeant, the judo instructor, the admitted ex-lover of the female defendant, transfixed the crowd and had the jury’s full attention for four days as he laid out a story of passion and conspiracy to commit murder.

Pitre maintained that he had been totally in love with Maria and that it was she—not he—who had convinced him that the only way they could ever hope to marry was to have her husband killed.

He testified that Maria was terrified that she would lose custody of her children if Dennis divorced her and that she couldn’t bear that. According to him, she begged and nagged him to help her until he finally agreed. “I was doing something that I didn’t want to do. I knew it was wrong,” Pitre earnestly told the jury.

He described how the pressure from Maria to kill her husband built during the last days before Archer’s murder. “I felt I was losing my grip on things.” Pitre said he thought about seeing a psychiatrist and that he spent some time reading
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(a book then popular about a young woman institutionalized for schizophrenia). Try as he might, he testified, he was unable to stop the inexorable progress toward murder. He sighed as he said that he himself could not bear the thought of murder, but then he couldn’t stand to lose Maria, either.

Pitre recalled that Maria had first brought up the matter of killing her husband a few weeks before the murder. They were making love on the floor of his apartment when she initially broached the idea after he asked her, “How can I really make you mine?” He told the jurors that she had answered quickly: “The only way I can really belong to you is if you kill Dennis.”

He was shocked, he said sadly, to hear her say that.

The witness said he tried at first to suggest the demise of Dennis Archer in a nonviolent way. Pitre admitted that he purchased three bottles of Sominex—an over-the-counter sleep aid—and gave them to Maria, hoping that she would believe they might poison her husband and therefore trust that he, Pitre, was sincere in helping her. That didn’t work. She told him he’d better find a more effective way to kill Dennis.

Killing Dennis had to be a sure thing, not just something that would give him a stomachache or put him to sleep for a day. It needed to be death by gunshot or knifing or bludgeoning.

Because the community knew of his affair with Maria, the couple realized that neither of them could actually carry out the act of murder. They had to find someone totally unconnected to Dennis Archer, someone no one would recognize or remember who could do the killing. Stranger to stranger, the most difficult kind of homicide for detectives to solve.

The jurors, transfixed, watched Roland Pitre as he glibly told them a story that sounded as though it had come out of a film noir.

The plan had been refined, Pitre testified, to the point where he and Maria decided that he would contact his old friend, Steven Guidry, in Louisiana and fly him up to Washington, furnish him with plans of the Archers’ house layout, give him a gun, and send him off to do the job. Guidry would have firm instructions to make Archer’s murder look like the by-product of a burglary that he had interrupted. If this
had
been a forties movie, the plan would surely have called for Guidry to die, too, after he had accomplished his deadly assignment.

Pitre said he
had
contacted Guidry and offered him $5,000 to do the killing. Guidry countered by saying he would do it for nothing. This was very hard for the jury and the gallery to swallow.

Pitre testified that he picked up his old friend around noon on Saturday at the airport south of Seattle. He immediately drove him to the Whidbey Island ferry and then to his apartment. There he gave Guidry a key to the Archer residence and the gun, explaining that he and Maria would be miles away from the murder location. After Guidry had determined that Dennis Archer was indeed dead, he was to call Pitre and give him the code words “Bernie Garcia.”

The witness said he explained to Guidry that the gun was to be dropped off the Deception Pass bridge as they drove to Sea-Tac airport after the murder. The water below was so deep that no one would ever find it.

The plot to murder Maria’s husband sounded so cold-blooded as Roland Pitre spun it out. Cold-blooded it was and planned to the minute. On Sunday night, July 13, Pitre testified, he took his sister over to the Brocks’ home to visit as he planned. He had been very careful that no one in Oak Harbor saw Steve Guidry and kept him hidden in his van until the moment came for him to leave for the Archers’ house. Maria would not be there, of course, because they had planned for her to leave her home well before Guidry got there. The children were not to be hurt; they were to be shut up in the basement so they would not witness their father’s murder.

After Pitre dispatched Guidry to commit murder, he said, he spent his time waiting for Maria, “frying fish, and watching
Mork and Mindy.”

The judo expert then described to the jury a Maria Archer who was completely different from the loving mother and penitent unfaithful wife that she portrayed herself to be in her statements and testimony.

“She got there, and we sat on a sofa for a while,” Roland Pitre told the jurors. They gazed at Maria Archer as she sat at the defense table, her head slightly bowed, her hands clasped in her lap.

“I was laying down with my head in her lap, and she asked me to make love to her,” Pitre continued. “That was about twenty minutes after she got there. We went upstairs. During the time we were upstairs, she asked several times what time it was and whether I thought it had happened yet. I told her I didn’t know. It was supposed to happen when it was dark. But the time wasn’t specific.”

Pitre recalled that Maria rose from the bed, began to get dressed, and was brushing her long, dark hair about 10:30. She had then made a couple of phone calls, including one to her friend, Lola Sanchez.

“Maria told me that Lola had told her she shouldn’t be seeing me and that Dennis was going to find out about us and she was going to lose everything,” Pitre testified. “Then she said, ‘You know, she’s right.’ Maria said it would be better for me and my daughter and for her and her kids if we not see each other anymore.”

“I said, ‘You know, Maria, Dennis is probably dead now.’ ”

“She said, ‘I know,’ and then she left.”

Roland Pitre said he had realized suddenly at that point that he had been “tricked” and “manipulated” into arranging his lover’s husband’s murder and that Maria had never intended to marry him at all. He had been duped. The thought of what he had done for a love that didn’t really exist ate at his mind like acid. Not surprisingly, he said his mental problems had grown worse after his arrest, that he had stopped eating and drinking and that he even lost his memory for long periods of time. He actually began to believe that it was an evil being named Targan who made him do the bad things he did to keep Maria’s love.

Still, he recalled that Maria came to visit him once in jail and that she mouthed the words “I love you” during that visit.

But she never came back.

Roland Pitre was supremely convincing as the betrayed lover, who was now facing years in prison because he had been seduced by a wanton woman and used to carry out her murderous desires. On the witness stand, he managed to hide the muscles of a trained judo expert and looked like the pathetic loser he claimed to be.

Now it was time for the defense. Maria Archer’s lawyer, Gil Mullen, one of Seattle’s most effective criminal defense lawyers, tore into Roland Pitre during cross-examination. Mullen aimed at Pitre’s credibility as a witness, which he showed was highly suspect by quoting lies in several statements Pitre gave to the Island County lawmen since his arrest. Pitre’s statement that Steven Guidry arrived from Louisiana wearing only rubber thongs as footwear seemed one of the more minor oddities in a case already so strange. But then what are the rules of dress for someone contemplating murder? Suit and tie? Trench coat? Hip boots? Whether Guidry wore thongs or sneakers didn’t seem to have much to do with his guilt.

Now Gil Mullen smiled sardonically as he pointed out that Pitre’s insistence that Guidry was such a loyal friend that he offered to be the triggerman for nothing, refusing $5,000, money he needed badly, defied credulity.

And what are the limitless bounds of friendship? The jury was considering these peculiarities when counselor Mullen hit on an area that shocked most of the gallery.

Mullen elicited an admission from Roland Pitre that he had considered murdering his 20-month-old daughter earlier in the summer of 1980. For profit. Pitre admitted that he had insured Bébé’s life for as much as he could, an amount the State estimated at $45,000. He said the thought of killing little Bébé, who had been entrusted to him in temporary custody, had seized his mind—but for only a day or so. Then he said he dismissed the idea.

“But the thought did occur while I was putting Bébé to sleep for her nap,” Pitre testified. “I said ‘Nothing better happen to you, or I’ll be a rich man.’ ”

“What method did you consider when you thought of killing your daughter?” Mullen probed.