Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (2 page)

Human life is very precious to most of us; nothing is as valuable as drawing in breath and feeling the reassuring beat of our hearts. Most of us feel the same about the lives of other creatures, from fellow humans to animals, and this often includes even bugs’ small lives. Some people eat meat but would never think of hunting wild creatures. Some are vegetarians or vegans. The majority of us feel sad and even cry when we hear of disasters halfway around the world in which hundreds of people we never knew have perished. This ability to empathize—to identify with the pain of others—is the part of us that makes us human.

Yet there are other people who feel no sorrow or empathy when someone else suffers or dies. When they want something, the end justifies the means. Their motivation is usually financial gain or sexual conquest, but sometimes they act out of a need for revenge. If they look back at all on the death of someone who got in their way, it is without regret or guilt. With those who have no conscience and no empathy, there
are
no lingering doubts.

Despite my having written about a thousand or more killers, the ability to understand those without conscience is, for me, the most elusive. I can deal with it intellectually—but not emotionally.

The title of this book came to me full-blown, almost in a nightmare:
Worth More Dead.
As disturbing as it is to accept that these murderers believed their victims were, indeed, more valuable to them dead than alive, I know that it is true.

The first case history is about a man I encountered in a courtroom many years ago and never expected to hear about again. That he kept bouncing back into the headlines amazed me. He may have been smarter than many cold-blooded killers, or he may only have been more devious than most. He was always circumspect about choosing someone else to blame. Had he held the death weapons himself? That was always the question, but I think I may have finally answered it.

“It’s Really Weird Looking at My Own Grave” is the story of a serial killer and rapist who believed that if his victims were dead, they could not come back to identify him. Fortunately, some of them were smarter than he was.

“Old Man’s Darling” is a Colorado case, curious to ponder. The woman involved looked like an action-movie heroine, but her obsessions didn’t lend themselves to a romantic last chapter. How dare her aging lover cast her aside? Furious and desperate, she took action, and a terrible finale ensued.

“All for Nothing” is one of the most shocking cases I’ve ever written about, and my longtime readers know that that’s saying a great deal. Was it the result of a love triangle ripped apart? Or was it simply the inevitable ending to the erotic games one brilliant woman played with the men she delighted in enticing? She didn’t realize that one man was playing for keeps.

All of these murderers had what they considered a good reason to want their victims dead—be it financial or emotional—and the last case in this book, “A Desperate Housewife,” seems to have been fueled by both emotions. It is one of the saddest I’ve ever written about, although certainly none of the cases I cover are cheerful. What happened was so unnecessary, so selfish, and it will probably haunt you as it has me.

Summer, 1980

For servicemen,
there is good duty and bad duty. They are at the mercy of superiors who dispatch them around the globe, but few navy men would deny the many benefits of being stationed at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Oak Harbor, Washington. There is also a U.S. Marine detachment stationed on the island. With Deception Pass to the west and Skagit Bay to the east, the setting is idyllic, a virtual vacation spot. Sailors—civilian and navy alike—anchor pleasure craft in Oak Harbor, and it has a small-town atmosphere: friendly, welcoming. Like most small communities, there are few secrets. Neighbors know neighbors’ business, and gossip flourishes. Love triangles are rarely as clandestine as the participants believe they are. Most sexual straying there is uneventful, but the scandal and shock waves that reverberated throughout Oak Harbor in mid-July 1980 were of a magnitude seldom seen. When the dust settled, those involved and onlookers hoped devoutly that nothing like it would happen ever again.

Because of what happened shortly after ten
PM
on that sultry Sunday night of July 13, 1980, four lives that had come together from widely scattered parts of the world were irrevocably changed. One man died instantly in a barrage of bullets from a .357 Magnum. The other three principals would tell divergent stories during a lengthy trial in Judge H. Joseph Coleman’s courtroom in Seattle as the 1980 Christmas season approached. There was no question of holding the trial in Island County; there had been too much pretrial publicity, and there probably wasn’t a citizen in the whole county who hadn’t heard of the murder of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer.

I attended that trial. Much of the convoluted narrative that follows is either directly from court records or from my conversations with close associates of the principals and from detectives’ precise recall. Some of it is from my own observation.

The testimony that was elicited in Judge Coleman’s courtroom was so explosive that spectators lined up for hours to get in, content to sit packed into the rows of hard benches in the overheated room, eager to listen to the almost unbelievable sequence of events that led up to the brutal slaying of the high-ranking naval officer.

One of the defendants on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy was Dennis Archer’s widow, Maria Elena, 32, an exquisitely beautiful woman of petite stature. She could not have been more than five feet tall, and she wore her long dark hair pulled back from her face and loosely braided in shining waves. Once released from its braids, her hair would make a shimmering cascade reaching below her waist. She didn’t look like a cold-blooded murderess. Her voice was soft and her clothing was feminine and demure.

But then, most murderers don’t look the part.

The second defendant was a man Maria claimed she had never met. He was, she said, a complete stranger to her. His name was Steven Guidry. He was 26, a short man with a slight build, rather attractive with his sideburns and handlebar mustache. Guidry had come to Oak Harbor from his home outside New Orleans on the fatal weekend Dennis Archer was killed. But he had stayed a very brief time, unusual after traveling such a distance.

The third figure in an alleged plot to kill Maria’s husband was not on trial. He would be a witness, but he had already confessed to conspiracy to commit murder. He was Roland Pitre, 27, and was also originally from Cajun country near New Orleans. Pitre was a Marine Corps staff sergeant and Maria’s admitted ex-lover. To save himself, he had agreed to turn state’s evidence and promised to take the witness stand to bolster the prosecution’s case.

Roland Augustin Pitre Jr. was a good-looking man. He looked every inch the Marine, although he no longer wore the uniform. He wasn’t much over five feet ten inches tall, but he was extremely muscular. He carried himself as a longtime military man is expected to. His part in this puzzling murder was clouded. Was it possible that he was admitting guilt to protect someone else? No one doubted that he and Maria Archer had enjoyed a consuming and passionate affair so intense, both of their marriages had been teetering on the edge of divorce. Murder made divorce unnecessary.

Just what part Roland Pitre might have played in Archer’s murder no one but the investigators and the attorneys yet knew.

What happened to make this man turn on both the woman he swore he loved and the man who had been his best friend since their boyhood? The first overt betrayal on Pitre’s part proved to be only the onset of a quarter of a century’s worth of crimes to come, tumbling down one after the other until justice began to seem not only blind but deaf, too.

Of course, none of us sitting in that courtroom could know that then. All we knew was that the engrossing trial was certainly not a slam-dunk case for either side. Nevertheless, observers expected it all to be over before the holidays so that the lawyers, jurors, reporters, and the judge’s staff could enjoy Christmas and then move into the New Year and the next newsworthy case.

The female defendant, Maria Elena Archer, was born in Oruro, Bolivia. She had three older sisters and a younger brother, and her wealthy family could well afford to send her to private schools in Bolivia. When she left Bolivia in 1966, Maria had already completed the equivalent of two years of college; she was as brilliant as she was beautiful. And beautiful she surely was.

Maria went first to Ohio State University in Columbus, but the campus and the city were just too big and overwhelming for the 18-year-old, and she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she attended Oregon State University. Although even at trial some fourteen years later Maria still spoke with a lilting Hispanic accent, her grasp of languages was excellent. Indeed, she majored in languages, business administration, and psychology at Oregon State. She attended college there for almost three years, excelling in her studies and attracting the eye of more than a few male students.

It was Dennis Archer who won her love after they met in class and began dating. Dennis was a handsome, solid young man about to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering, which would make him a sought-after candidate for a career in the navy. The husky American and the flowerlike girl from Bolivia made a storybook kind of couple when they married in Corvallis on December 27, 1969.

Dennis’s first duty station took them to Pensacola, Florida, for four months. Home of the Blue Angels, the navy’s incredibly synchronized jet flying squad, Pensacola had charming old houses and white-sugar-sand beaches. They were lucky, too, when Dennis was assigned to a naval base in Corpus Christi, Texas. Again, they stayed just four months before another transfer.

The first permanent home the Archers ever had was in Oak Harbor, Washington, where Dennis was a Navy Air Arm navigator.

Oak Harbor and the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station became a true home base for the Archers. Their first child, a girl, Denise, was born there ten months later. Maria was saved the arduous chore of packing up, moving, settling in again every year or so, and the Archers remained in Oak Harbor for ten years, although Dennis was often away on deployment. Maria estimated later that Dennis’s duties kept him away from home for at least four of their ten and a half years of marriage. Service wives have to accept that. When they cannot, their marriages usually end in divorce.

Dennis Archer rose rapidly through the ranks, and he was a lieutenant commander by the late spring of 1980. He and Maria purchased a home on North Fairwood Place in Oak Harbor, and she was involved in activities both as an officer’s wife and as a member of the community. On the witness stand, Maria recalled that her marriage was one where she literally worshipped her husband. She said she had always placed Dennis “on a pedestal.” That attitude may have been the last vestige of her Bolivian upbringing.

She was totally devoted to her two children (a son was born a few years after Denise). Besides keeping an immaculate house, Maria loved to cook, to paint, and to study. She particularly enjoyed reading in the field of psychology, as she was fascinated by human behavior.

Surprisingly for a woman who appeared so delicate, Maria Elena had always been interested in exercise and physical activity; she took Middle Eastern dancing lessons (belly dancing is the more familiar term) and followed those up with jazz, tap, hula, and folk dancing. She became so adept that she taught dance classes at the Katherine Johnson Dance Studios in Oak Harbor and at Skagit Valley Community College in Mount Vernon, Washington. She directed and planned a Spanish night at the officers club and sewed costumes for and performed in local pageants and drama groups.

Like all service wives, she had to make a life for herself and her children, one that was not dependent on her husband. When Dennis was home, they were a regular family. But for much of the time she was basically a single mother.

“I was alone so much,” she remembered. “I spent a lot of time doing things with my children; I like to help other people and to get involved in the community.”

As idyllic as it sounded, things were not rosy in the Archer marriage. Their story is far from unique. Maria took much of the blame for the trouble, wondering if their relationship had faltered because she worshipped Dennis too much. “We weren’t on the same level. There was a lack of communication,” Maria said softly. “Dennis wasn’t willing to work out the marriage problems. His job was very important to him, and there was family pressure. We had counseling about four or five years ago, but I just couldn’t get close to him.”

As Dennis Archer trained to leave on another deployment in November 1979, Maria prepared to be alone again. She and the children would be alone for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. She testified that she was never unfaithful to her husband, even during the long months while he was away. To forestall temptation in a life without sex she deliberately kept herself very busy.

Maria explained that one of the activities that took up her time after the midsummer of 1979 were the judo classes that she—and the children—attended several times a week. The classes were very popular with service dependents in Oak Harbor. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Roland Pitre’s instruction in self-defense and martial arts drew packed houses. His reputation was such that there were waiting lists for his classes.

Maria recalled that she initially went to the judo classes because of her interest in sports. She said she also went because she was sometimes frightened at night when she was all alone in the house with the youngsters.

Roland Pitre was the instructor, and Maria was only one of many judo students. Then something changed—gradually, subtly, at first. Maria said she wouldn’t deny that there was a strong physical attraction between herself and the Marine who taught the judo classes with such grace and strength.

Roland Pitre didn’t talk much about his Cajun roots in Louisiana, but he still had a trace of the accent that was partly French and partly the melody of the bayous. He was not classically handsome; his chin was a little weak, and he had a small brush of a mustache, the same reddish color as his wavy hair. But he had a tautly muscled body and moved like a tiger. Although he wasn’t particularly well educated, Pitre was innately intelligent and had a quick mind. There was also a sense of danger about him, nothing overt, more like electricity in the air before a storm, the kind that makes the hair on your neck and arms stand on end.

Maria Archer’s and Roland Pitre’s magnetic attraction to one another was stronger than her loyalty to Dennis or the fact that Roland too was married. He and his wife, Cheryl, were married in May 1976. By May 1980 they were headed for divorce. She had moved back to Pennsylvania with their 18-month-old daughter, Bébé, to stay with relatives while they tried to sort their marriage out. Whether Cheryl knew all the details of Roland’s womanizing is unknown. Probably she didn’t. He had been like catnip to females since he was in his teens. Usually, he managed to keep his various conquests apart so that they had no way to compare notes.

Detectives one day winked as they said that besides his having well-toned abs and biceps, rumor said that Roland Pitre was exceptionally well-endowed and that that was one of his secrets in seducing the opposite sex.

Maria never mentioned that, of course. Later, she recalled that she was attracted to him because he seemed “a good person” and he adored children, as she did. She had felt a little sorry for him. He told her he’d spent six or seven years in an orphanage as a youngster, that he’d come from a home torn by dissension. “His first judo instructor changed his life,” she once told an Island County detective. “That was the first person who showed him he could be good at something. And he wanted to help other kids.”