Worth More Dead and Other True Cases, Page 4

  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.

  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?”

  A. …it was not the truth…

  Q. You lied to the police on that first night?

  A. But it had nothing to do with it.

  Q. Why did you tell them you were at Mrs. Sanchez’s?

  A. Wherever I was, it was none of their business.

  Q. In the statement you gave to Sergeant Edwards, you said you’d told Lola Sanchez to “just tell him [Archer] I was at your house?”

  A. I was under Valium. I don’t remember the statement.

  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 lat
e 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.”