Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (5 page)

Pitre said he had considered killing the child with a drug overdose by giving her access to his medicine cabinet or maybe stuffing her into a plastic garbage bag so that she would suffocate or throwing her from his moving van. He hastened to add that Maria had known nothing of these dark thoughts.

Pitre was asked about various statements he had made about Dennis Archer’s killing, with Mullen often pointing out discrepancies. Pitre answered that everything he said in each statement was “true at the time.”

Targan, the evil being, was blamed for the murder in a statement Pitre gave on August 28.

“Is Targan still with us today?” Mullen asked.

“No, he’s not.”

“Targan had nothing to do with it?” Mullen probed.

“No, but at that time, I thought he did.”

“You once claimed to be a hit man for organized crime in New Orleans. Was that true?”

“I was making a joke,” Pitre said with a smirk, as if it were laughable.

Pitre maintained in court that he felt overwhelming guilt about Dennis Archer’s murder. He said that there were times when he found it was difficult even to look at himself in the mirror to shave. But he was resolute about his testimony that Maria Archer had been the one who pushed and prodded him into arranging her husband’s killing.

“I was used,” he said flatly.

As the trial moved into its second week, Maria Archer herself took the witness stand, seemingly undisturbed by the television and still cameras that recorded her every movement. She appeared to have no stage fright in a courtroom filled to overflowing with the curious. It was easy to believe Maria. She perched on the edge of the witness chair, looking almost childlike, so tiny that her feet hardly touched the floor. She wore a plaid pleated skirt, a dark blazer, and a ruffle of white at her neck, and she smiled often, although it was a subdued smile, one suitable for a young widow.

Her voice was so soft that even with the amplification of a microphone, it didn’t reach to the rear of the courtroom. The jurors leaned forward in their chairs, straining to understand her words.

By testifying in her own defense, Maria opened herself up to cross-examination, but she seemed prepared for that. Her own attorney asked her many of the “tough” questions, aware that they would be forthcoming from the prosecutor, David Thiele, on cross. Mullen used this effective technique to defuse any of her answers that might make the jury think badly of her. If he asked them first, they wouldn’t have as much impact when the prosecutor asked them.

Maria repeated the story that Detective Edwards taped two days after her husband was killed. The jurors had already heard that tape, and it was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that the State had against her.

Now, on the witness stand, she once again admitted her affair with Roland Pitre. “Was it a physical affair?”

“That’s what I always understood an affair was,” she said a little condescendingly, toward even her own lawyer.

Maria said she believed that Roland understood her wish to return to Dennis, but then she said she was horrified at the way he began to cling to her. Once he came back to Whidbey Island with temporary custody of his daughter, he didn’t seem to know what to do. Yes, she admitted that she saw Roland Pitre almost every day for two weeks prior to the murder, but that had not been her choice. It was because he dogged her trail, confronting her everywhere she went. She could not avoid him, and she felt sorry for his sister. She recounted the meeting around July 1, 1980, in their mutual friends’ bedroom.

“I did not want to see him. But I went there. Mr. Pitre started talking to me. He was extremely apprehensive. He started crying. I thought he would not want to be embarrassed so we went to the bedroom to talk.”

Roland Pitre (whom she occasionally referred to as “Sensei,” a Japanese word for “teacher” used frequently in martial-arts training). “He was different from the nice friend who’d left. His hair was different, blond instead of dark. He sat on the bed. He was trembling. He asked if he was going to see me any more beyond judo class, and I shook my head no. ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ he said. He cried, and he caressed the air around me. He was afraid to touch me. I yelled at him and preached at him a lot.

“I told him: ‘You are a blind man touching a big, gigantic elephant, touching just the tail and you think the tail is the whole elephant. You can’t pray for anything you want! You are not a good Catholic.’ ”

She said that she had called him a fool.

As far as Maria was concerned, she testified, the affair was over, dead, cold.

“Did you ever at any occasion suggest anything that could have sounded like killing your husband?” Mullen asked.

“No. Never.”

“Did you talk to him about drugging or poisoning your husband? Did you say anything about giving him some Sominex?”

“Never. Never.”

“Had Mr. Pitre ever discussed his plan to kill your husband with you?”

“Never. He wouldn’t discuss my husband with me. Never.”

Maria’s scathing answers were spat out as Mullen asked her if she’d agreed to a plan to leave her children at home while a third party—Steven Guidry—went to her home to kill her husband. “Did you agree to expose the children to that danger?”

“I am not demented!”

The questions became more difficult after Prosecutor Thiele rose to cross-examine Maria Archer. Thiele asked, “You lied about being with Roland Pitre on the night your husband was shot. You asked Lola Sanchez to tell your husband you were with her?”

Thiele suggested that Dennis Archer had planned to move into a mobile home the Archers owned when he returned from deployment in June 1980, but he couldn’t do that because Maria had sold it while he was gone. He asked her if it was true that there would be no “quarters allowance” from the navy if Archer didn’t move back with her because of the problems they were having over Roland Pitre. He pointed out that she had financial motivation to reconcile with her husband.

Maria appeared not to understand what he was getting at. When Thiele asked her if she had—or would—derive any financial benefit from her husband’s death, Maria Archer said she couldn’t hear him. He repeated the question in a slightly louder voice. There was no way she could claim to be that deaf.

Thiele asked specifically about the three insurance policies: $25,000 from Old Line of the South, $20,000 from Servicemen’s Life Insurance, $3,000 (a navy policy), and mortgage insurance on the Archer home, which had recently been sold for $72,000.

Maria Archer barely acknowledged this information. Thiele then pointed out that all the money that might be coming to her was frozen because of litigation brought by Dennis Archer’s family. They were suing Maria in civil court through the Slayer’s Act (which denies insurance benefits or inheritance from wills or profits from writing about their crimes to someone who has caused the death of the benefactor).

Thiele led Maria through the many meetings, phone calls, judo classes, and the countless hours that Maria had spent with Roland Pitre since her husband’s return. Still, she was adamant that she had merely been trying to help a man who was as dependent upon her as a baby.

With her chin tilted up haughtily, Maria denied absolutely that she had wanted her husband dead.

Now, two versions of the strange case had been told. It was almost Christmas, and outside the courtroom the first-floor lobby of the King County Courthouse held a towering, decorated fir tree, but there was no holiday spirit at all inside.

Steven Guidry had said nothing during the trial. He had barely glanced up from the yellow legal sheet that he filled with scrawls during the long court sessions. Now it was his turn to tell of the events leading to the strange and fatal weekend in Oak Harbor, Washington, in July 1980.

Guidry was neither timid nor cocky as he took the witness stand to be questioned by his lawyer, Richard Hansen. The second defendant recalled that he and Roland Pitre were best friends from their early teens until Pitre joined the Marines. And it was Steve Guidry, not Pitre, who first became interested in judo. The defendant said he joined the Jefferson Parish Junior Deputies (an organization the sheriff’s office sponsored to stop crime among juveniles) when he was 12 or 13. Steve took to the judo instruction with enthusiasm, and he persuaded Roland, who lived a few blocks away, to join, too. They both became adept in the martial art.

After Pitre left for the Marines, Steve said he saw him four or five times over the years and that Pitre sent him postcards and letters from Japan. He didn’t know Pitre’s wife well, although he and his wife double-dated with the Pitres on one occasion. He didn’t feel that Pitre’s wife was well suited to him but didn’t explain why.

Steve Guidry said that life wasn’t going so well for him in the late spring of 1980. He was working on a pipeline repairing gas detectors and mud-monitoring equipment, and he wasn’t contented with the work. The apartment he shared with his wife and son had a broken-down air conditioner, which in New Orleans in the summer made the rooms like ovens. His wife took their child and moved to her parents’home. Since Guidry didn’t get along well with them, he moved in with his mother and sisters.

“I wanted to buy a house,” Guidry told the jury. “But I couldn’t see how I’d ever be able to pay for one, so I joined the Marines, thinking I’d learn a specialty and eventually be able to afford a house for us.”

Guidry spent every day in late June and early July 1980 with Marine recruiters, taking tests, talking about the opportunities in the Marines. “My test results were so high that I qualified for every school they offered. I wanted electronics, but the only thing available in that field at the time was refrigeration school, and I didn’t really want that.”

For the first time in a long time, Guidry had called his old friend, Roland Pitre, “to discuss the Marines and what schools I might want to get into.”

Guidry said Pitre urged him to wait until the avionics school was available. Steve followed his advice, delaying his departure for basic training until sometime in September. It left him with several weeks of free time on his hands; he’d quit his job and had virtually no money. He testified that he was really pleased when Pitre called him a few days later and invited him to come up to Washington State for a visit. It would give him the opportunity to look over the Marine installation in Oak Harbor.

It turned out that Roland’s life wasn’t running smoothly, either. He told Steve Guidry that he was in terrible trouble, something he couldn’t discuss over his phone, which he said was tapped. “He told me I was the only person he could trust. He offered to pay for my ticket both ways and all expenses if I’d fly up.”

Guidry testified that he agreed to fly to Washington. He was supposed to leave during the week of July 14 to July 19, but he had received an eviction notice from his landlord and had to wangle an extension from a Hanrahan constable. He called Pitre and said he couldn’t make it. “He told me I had to come—it was so important—so I told him I’d come for a couple of days anyway.”

Guidry said he thought it was kind of strange that Pitre didn’t want him to fly under his own name, but he finally agreed to fly under the name “Billy Evans.” He flew into Sea-Tac airport on Saturday morning. He brought one change of clothes, and, yes, he had worn his usual rubber thongs for footwear.

“Roland met me about noon on July 12. I axed [
sic
] him what the trouble was, but he told me to wait till we were in his van. First, he bought my return ticket, and then we headed for Oak Harbor. I axed him again what the big problem was, and he started talking about his affair with his girlfriend and how much he loved her and how he wished he’d met her before he met his wife and how no woman ever treated him like that before. It seems like she was married and her husband was back from deployment. The guy being back presented a big problem. Roland said that the guy knew about him and the wife and was going to have Roland sent to a military prison because you can’t go out with an officer’s wife while he’s gone on duty.”

Then Roland said, Guidry testified, that he really brought Guidry up to Washington State to kill his girlfriend’s husband.

“He says he wants me to kill the husband because of the prison threat and that the guy found out because he’d tapped the phone and heard his wife and Roland talking. He said the guy had beat the girlfriend and her kids up, too.”

Guidry said he’d been shocked and told Pitre it was ridiculous to plan to kill the man. “But Roland ignored me. He showed me a pistol, ammo, and some maps in a duffel bag. It was a .357 pistol.”

Guidry said he’d called Pitre “crazy,” and Pitre assured him that nothing could go wrong, the killing had been planned for weeks. The maps and diagrams were of the house where the man was to be killed. Pitre explained several plans that had already been considered and discarded. In one plan, Pitre was going to have someone fly to California or Oregon under Dennis Archer’s name. Then Pitre was going to kill Dennis and dispose of the body, and it would look as if Archer had simply disappeared from the flight. In another, Pitre was going to talk Archer into climbing a ladder, from which he would fall and break his neck. Guidry testified that he was dumbfounded. None of his old friend’s wild imaginings sounded like the Pitre he knew.