Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF

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.
    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.