Worth More Dead by Ann Rule Page B

well have been Roland Pitre in his spiky new black wig.
    Only one thing is certain. Dennis Archer most assuredly did not shoot himself in the chest three times. The gun never turned up, and it is probably still buried in the silt at the bottom of the limitless depths of the water at Deception Pass.
    Detective Sergeant Ron Edwards of Island County would not forget this case. In the years ahead as an investigator, he often wondered if perhaps someday, sometime, the corrosive nigglings of conscience would force someone to speak out. A careless word to the wrong person.
    That never happened. But the story of Roland Pitre was far from over.

5
    1986
    Because he turned state’s evidence against his ex-mistress and boyhood friend, Roland Pitre drew only a thirty-five-year maximum prison sentence. His former wife, Cheryl, remained in Pennsylvania with their little girl, Bébé. Maria Archer went on with her life, never to make headlines again. Steven Guidry was far away in New Orleans, undoubtedly much relieved that he had been acquitted of murder.
    Those of us who witnessed their trial in 1980 assumed that Roland Pitre would stay safely behind bars in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. It is located, as Alcatraz was, in an isolated spot surrounded by deep water. With good behavior, he might conceivably be released on parole in ten to fifteen years. But he had demonstrated that he wasn’t always who he appeared to be, so as charismatic and appealing as he often was, Pitre seemed an unlikely candidate for early parole.
    Still, true sociopaths often make model prisoners, giving corrections officers little trouble. They learn that the way out is not to fight the system but to respond to those who are temporarily in control with charm and an earnest mask. No one could be more cooperative than Roland Pitre.
    During his time on McNeil Island, he obtained his Associate of Arts degree from Centralia Community College and his B.A. degree from Evergreen State College through correspondence and prison courses.
     
    Back east, Cheryl Pitre had never really stopped loving her ex-husband, and she wanted very much to believe his letters protesting his innocence in Dennis Archer’s murder. Perhaps even more compelling, Roland wrote of his tremendous regret that he had been unfaithful to her. His reasoning made more and more sense to her because he was telling her what she needed to hear. He had always been extremely persuasive, and he was very attractive to women. When he first proposed to her in the seventies, Cheryl was both grateful and baffled. She was not a beautiful woman, and she knew he had dated many gorgeous women in the past. She had thick chestnut hair and lovely blue eyes but was a little plump and somewhat plain. Where Maria Archer was tiny and slender, Cheryl was large-breasted and big-boned. Her confidence had been severely shaken when she learned that Roland was cheating on her with Maria.
    But now he was back in her life, telling her all the things she thought she would never hear. Cheryl took into account that he was in prison, where there were no women for him to cheat with. Still, he truly seemed to have come to appreciate her letters and her renewed loyalty to him. He wrote that he wanted to start over, to be a father to Bébé, who lived with Cheryl. If only, he wrote, he wasn’t stuck in prison for years.
    It worked. They remarried in December 1981 while Roland was still in prison.
    Cheryl made up her mind that she would do everything possible to help him achieve an early parole. She longed to be with him again. He explained that his only chance to get out before he was an old man was to have someone to come home to, someone with a solid reputation who had a house where he could move in. Someone who would arrange to have a job waiting for him, too.
    Cheryl promised Roland that she would be that person for him. As she had before, she accepted him on faith. Just how much Cheryl knew about Roland’s life each time