20

Beth Bixler had plenty of time to think about what a fool she had been. She was the one who had taken almost all of the risks. The only thing Roland had done was to finally agree to go into the house with her to grab his stepson. She had borrowed the gun, bought all the items Roland needed, made the phone calls to Tim. And, afterward, when everything had gone wrong, Roland ordered her to get rid of the ski masks, the gloves, and the rifle. He even talked her into going to the police and telling lies meant to remove all suspicion from him.

Doug Wright asked Beth where she had disposed of the rifle and the other items. She told them, and their hearts sank. Anyone who thinks being a detective is all intrigue and excitement should know they often have to endure repugnant assignments that nobody would ever choose to perform. Beyond working a homicide crime scene with the corpse of the victim still present, searches for physical evidence too often lead them through garbage dumps or rat-infested hiding places under bridges and in sewers. Now the Bremerton and Kitsap County investigators had an even worse job ahead of them.

It was almost dark on March 24 when Beth Bixler rode with Lewis Olan and Wright to a park near Port Ludlow, pointing out places where she had thrown away the ski masks and the two pairs of gloves worn during the abortive kidnapping.

It was two when they found the women’s outhouses where Beth said she left the gloves and masks. They had come prepared—as much as they could be. “We had salmon-fishing poles with big hooks on them,” Wright recalled. “And we were there all night long, fishing through the sewage.”

Using high-powered flashlights to see, they dug through the human waste, and the trash, and garbage cans. They found one black racer-type glove with a white stripe on it in the filthy muck of an outhouse. The glove was just as Beth described.

The next morning, Olan, accompanied by Detectives Andy Oakley and D. Trudeau and Sergeant K. Long, returned to Port Ludlow to continue the search. After a long nauseating exploration in the privy, they found another glove, one of the brown gloves Beth wore when she purchased the bullets, greeting cards, and ski masks.

Olan went to the rock breakwater that held back the surging waters of Puget Sound. There he gazed down into the water trying to make out what seemed to be a rifle. Luckily the tide was out, and he could see a Winchester-type .44 Magnun rifle. The butt portion was sticking out of about three inches of water.

 

Beth Bixler’s house was located in Kitsap County, and Doug Wright and Jim Harris prepared to search it to see if the outrageous plan Beth had outlined to Wright was really true.

“We went all out on that,” Wright remembers. “If there was evidence of that kidnapping plan in her house, we were going to find it.”

Armed with a search warrant, the detectives swarmed over both Beth Bixler’s house and Roland Pitre’s green Ford Econoline van with its handicap license plate. They particularly wanted to inspect the basement bathroom to see if there really was a hidden holding room there. There was.

The thought that a human being was to have been held in the near coffin-sized space was sobering. Had Tim Nash not managed to escape from Roland and Beth, he would have been imprisoned in this impossibly small, airless room, so tiny, it would make anyone claustrophobic. Gagged, Tim’s voice would almost certainly have failed to carry through the walls that Roland had covered with thick insulation. Tied to a chair, his ability to hear shut off by earplugs, probably blindfolded, Tim’s confinement would have been torturous.

The detectives took dozens of photos that would be exhibits at Pitre’s trial. The pictures showed Beth Bixler’s basement, the holding cell itself, the insulation, earphones, earplugs, a knife and rope, and numerous receipts from Costco, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart for the purchase of tools and the lumber used to build the silent chamber in Beth’s basement.

The Bremerton detectives found that Roland hadn’t even bothered to remove the leftover pieces of lumber from his van. There they also found the family records that had once been in the stolen safe, in good shape because for years they’d been kept in a plastic bag. The duct tape, cue cards, and ammunition certainly dovetailed with Beth Bixler’s description of the kidnapping she said Roland had planned.

If there had ever been any romantic connection between Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler—and detectives believed there had—there no longer was one. Now they were both in jail, and Roland evinced shock that Beth had betrayed him. He insisted that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Yes, he had originally deceived her when he told her that they were going to “kidnap” Tim and hold him for ransom. And yes, he had built a holding cell for Tim in the basement of Beth’s house. But that was all a false plot never meant to come to fruition

“I never intended to go through with it,” he said. “I just wanted to scare my family. I just wanted to be around to foil the attempt so Della would feel the need to have me move back in the home to protect them.”

He had wanted Della to understand the sense of loss that he felt when his marriage collapsed and he was banished to live alone.

When detectives asked him about the theft of the safe, Roland finally admitted that he had taken it from Della’s house. “But I never received or cashed any insurance checks from that,” he claimed once more, not very convincingly.

Trial dates for Roland Pitre were set and reset at the request of the defense for a delay.

As he had done after he was arrested for the murder of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer on Whidbey Island thirteen years earlier, Roland Pitre apparently suffered a mental collapse and made a halfhearted suicide attempt in the Kitsap County Jail. Judge Karlynn Haberly asked for a mental evaluation by a psychologist from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. Dr. Gregg Gagliardi was appointed and met with Roland Pitre on April 8, 1993.

This time, there was no “Targan,” the entity that Roland blamed for Archer’s death in 1980. When Gagliardi said that he would like to review reports of Pitre’s earlier breakdowns and his alleged stroke in 1991 and those of his outpatient counselor and the neurologist who verified the stroke’s effects to the Social Security Administration, Roland looked at him and said that he could not sign permission slips because he wasn’t Roland Pitre.

“I’m Wade Pitre,” he said. “The records say I died when I was two, but I didn’t really die. I was in a coma, and I didn’t come out of it until 1988. You’ll have to ask Roland’s attorney to sign those permission slips for you.”

Gagliardi stared at the man before him. Was he really looking at a dual personality, or was this a show put on just for him? He attempted to point out inconsistencies in Roland/Wade’s premise. “Wade” denied that he had ever been in the Marine Corps, even after Gagliardi pointed out the large Marine Corps tattoo on his upper left arm.

He tended to think that Roland Pitre was malingering and that his performance was “exceedingly amateurish” and thoroughly unconvincing. Despite the prisoner’s refusal to let him access his earlier psychiatric records, there was plenty of information on him on file in the corrections system of the State of Washington.

The psychologist knew the basics of Roland’s family history. There was no evidence of psychiatric disorder in any of his family members. Roland had always tested above average in IQ tests, and he had a stellar service record. He was a model inmate on McNeil Island. He’d done very well in college courses, both in prison and after he was paroled.

But now Roland Pitre was acting psychotic. He seemed to know he was in Bremerton but thought the county was either “King” or “Kansas City.” He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember even three objects shown to him and couldn’t count backward by seven, yet in other intelligence tests Gagliardi gave him, Pitre scored slightly above average.

On one test, Pitre scored in the bottom 0.007 percentile of the relevant adult population.

“If the present mental status examination findings and test results were to be believed,” Dr. Gagliardi wrote, “it would indicate that Mr. Pitre is not only suffering from multiple personality disorder, but also that the alter personality, ‘Wade’ Pitre, is moderately mentally retarded or moderately demented.”

But Gagliardi didn’t believe him for a minute. He’d talked to Pitre’s family and to Beth Bixler, and he believed the patient was faking. He mixed up his symptoms in ways that warred with what—or who—he was attempting to portray.

The psychologist even doubted that Pitre had suffered a stroke that allegedly made him 100 percent disabled. There were no indications of it. He felt he was looking at a Class A imposter.

One of the mental evaluations of Roland Pitre was available to Dr. Gagliardi. He read about the 1980 case and mentioned it in his 1993 report. “While undergoing a forensic mental evaluation pursuant to charges of Second Degree Murder, Mr. Pitre malingered symptoms of psychosis.”

Dr. Gagliardi made the following DSM-III-R (the “bible” used by psychologists and psychiatrists) diagnoses:

AXIS 1: 1) Malingering V65.20; 2) Alleged Adul Antisocial Behavior V71.01

AXIS II Antisocial Personality Disorder, by history

AXIS III Alleged Stroke resulting in 100% disability, March, 1991 (unconfirmed)

These terms are meaningful to professionals in mental health. According to this summary, Roland Pitre was much like any number of felons who make headlines.

Next, Dr. Gagliardi wrote a narrative that would hopefully help the Court decide what Roland Pitre’s sentence should be for the crimes where he had chosen to take the Alford Plea—which stipulated that he denied guilt, but believed he would be found guilty in a trial. Roland had every reason to hope that he would get a short sentence. Hadn’t he, after all, walked out of prison in only six years after his first conviction of murder? Surely, the simple theft of a safe and what he insisted was nothing more than a little scheme gone wrong wouldn’t bring him even that much prison time.

Dr. Gagliardi was not of the same mind.

Forensic Psychological Opinions:

As the foregoing evaluation shows, Mr. Pitre is not suffering from a major mental disease or defect. Consequently, by statutory definition, he is competent to stand trial. Moreover, the available information suggests that at the time of the alleged burglary and the attempted kidnapping, Mr. Pitre was not suffering from symptoms of a mental disease or defect. The factual basis for my opinion is not only a clinical assessment of Mr. Pitre, but also the statements of witnesses (particularly Mrs. Beth Bixler) who knew the defendant well over a period of the alleged offenses. Since Mr. Pitre is not suffering from a major mental disease or defect, he would not qualify for an insanity defense.

By state law, I am obliged to render an opinion regarding the defendant’s future dangerousness. If the information presented in the voluminous police discovery materials is, in fact, true, there can be little doubt that Mr. Pitre represents a particularly high risk of engaging in future felonious acts, jeopardizing public safety and security. If it is ultimately shown that Mr. Pitre did kill his first wife Cheryl, this, taken together with his past conviction for second-degree murder and the present allegations would indicate that Mr. Pitre is not only at high risk for engaging in future felonious offenses but also at high risk for engaging in future homicide. In view of the past allegations that the defendant is capable of engaging in extremely risky, self-injurious behavior as a means for achieving his personal goals, there is some risk that he could constitute a risk for harming himself in the Kitsap County Jail….

Dr. Gagliardi was not sure that Roland would be a danger to himself, but he had certainly demonstrated he was a likely candidate to be a danger to others. He saw no reason to spend more time with Roland Pitre; it would only be a waste of the taxpayers’ money because Roland was playing games. He wasn’t cooperating, and he continued to pretend he was the resurrected Wade Pitre, not Roland Pitre at all.

The long summer of 1993 crawled by, and detectives from several jurisdictions continued to add evidence to the case against Roland Pitre. He had tested mostly below normal with Dr. Gagliardi and well above normal in his scholastic venues and in prison. But despite all his planning and preparation to carry out crimes, he had always had a certain “klutziness” about him. Maybe he underestimated those who tracked him; maybe he was only careless.

He assumed that his telephone conversations with a number of people involved in what was to have been a smooth caper to kidnap Tim Nash would be private. He had a private phone line, but he never learned how investigators could put traps on phones, obtain phone company records, or trace calls made from inside jails and prisons. As it happened, neither Pitre nor the police expected that someone unconnected to his ambitious scheme might listen in on his calls.

A man named Wally Ersker* lived next door to the house Roland had moved to after Della kicked him out. Four years earlier, Ersker had purchased a set of Realistic brand walkie-talkies to use when he was hiking or camping with friends. They were fairly powerful—49.83 megahertz—and Ersker discovered that he could easily pick up phone conversations in the house next door to his. Technically, it was illegal to monitor someone else’s phone conversation, and some might well characterize Ersker as a busybody. Nevertheless, the conversations that came over his walkie-talkies were hard to ignore.

They were electrifying enough that Ersker felt he should report them to someone, especially after Roland Pitre and Beth Bixler were arrested. He called Detective Andy Oakley and repeated what he had heard back in February and March.

Ersker said he hadn’t recognized the voices he had heard at one AM on March 10, 1993. His ears perked up when he heard a discussion about leaving a van in a shopping mall parking lot with the keys in it in the hope that it would be stolen. In subsequent calls, he heard a man talking with a woman. They were discussing insurance fraud and car theft, getting a key to a side door somewhere, and obtaining a gun.

By this time, Ersker thought he knew the man’s voice. It was that of his new neighbor, Roland Pitre. Pitre kept talking about someone named Tim, who was “screwing him over.”

Apparently, this Tim would be sending postcards from his travels for a couple of weeks. The female voice reminded Pitre that they would have to take the tape off Tim’s eyes so he could sign the cards.

“We’ll have to disguise our voices around him,” Pitre warned her.

The planning went on. Ersker wasn’t sure what they meant to do, but it sounded pretty suspicious. The voice he was sure was Pitre’s said that Tim would be sleeping upstairs. He said that he knew the code to the alarm system, and he and the woman talked a little about deactivating the system.

Wally Ersker took to watching Pitre’s rental house to see if there was any strange activity over there. “About 3:00 PM on March 21,” he told Oakley, “I saw Roland Pitre breaking out the passenger side wing window on a maroon van. Then he swept all the broken glass from the sidewalk.”

Two hours later, as he listened on his walkie-talkies, Ersker heard a man named Bud start making collect phone calls to Roland. The calls were coming from the King County Jail. “This Bud guy was saying something about Roland taking the van and putting it on the Seattle–Bremerton ferry, and then Bud would have somebody pick it up and take it to Darrington, Washington, and hide it.”

Bud talked about a woman named Bobbi and said that a woman named Beth could use her car. The man calling from jail also asked if he was going to make any kind of profit for helping Roland. “He asked about jewelry, gold, rifles or handguns, or anything that Roland would give to him. Roland said he could get Tim’s school ring and give him that.”

It appeared to Ersker that something big was going down on the third Sunday in March because the calls were coming closer together. Bud’s next collect call to Pitre came in about 7:15 PM. This time, it was a female who accepted the call, but it wasn’t the woman Ersker had come to recognize as Beth. There had been another call from the county jail at 8:10 PM. The woman next door laughed as she told Bud that Roland was showing off his “fashions in basic black.”

He heard a male voice warn, “Don’t say nothing to her what’s happening.”

Without Beth Bixler’s confession, the myriad phone calls that Wally Ersker reported wouldn’t have made much sense. But her details made it all clear. Bud Halser was, of course, Roland’s friend who was to have been the co-kidnapper of Tim Nash. But Bud was stuck in jail in Seattle, so Beth had to help kidnap Tim. She had told Doug Wright that she had never met Bud but had talked to him on the phone on three occasions. She also heard Roland planning the crime with him during their phone calls.

Roland told her about a three-way call among himself, Bud, and Bud’s girlfriend, Bobbi. On the night of the kidnapping, Bobbi would be at Roland’s house, babysitting the 5-year-old André and also accepting collect calls from Bud. If anyone checked, phone records would prove that someone at Roland’s house—presumably Roland himself—had accepted collect calls at the exact time Tim was being kidnapped. That was to be Roland’s alibi.

“Roland told me that he and Bud had been planning for two and a half years to kidnap Tim,” Beth told Wright. “He said that they stole the safe as the first part of that plan. That was just to set up Tim.”

The van they used in the abortive kidnapping belonged to Beth. It was a year-old Chevy, and she was months behind in the payments. Bobbi, Bud’s girlfriend, was supposed to drive it away after they locked Tim up in Beth’s basement. But Bobbi lost her nerve, so, Beth said, she and Roland drove it up to Snohomish County, north of Seattle. With the wing window broken out, it would be easy for someone to steal it. It was probable that Pitre would then advise Beth to make an insurance claim so that her van would be paid off. She might even realize some profit.

 

On May 1, 1993, Bud Halser was charged with Willful Destruction of Insured Property. On June 15, his indictment was amended to include Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping in the First Degree. Halser, always before a willing participant in Roland Pitre’s schemes and his longtime close friend, no longer wanted to be associated with him. Through his lawyer, Halser petitioned to have the charges against him completely severed from any courtroom proceedings involving Pitre. Obviously, he had not participated in person in the clumsy kidnapping of Tim Nash; he was locked up tight in the King County Jail. As far as the theft of the Pitre family safe, Halser insisted that he was simply helping his good friend move a heavy item, much as any friend would help someone move. He said he had no idea the safe was stolen.

 

Roland was in a much more tenuous position than Bud. On September 9, 1993, faced with the multitudinous physical evidence and eyewitness testimony against him, Roland Pitre, who appeared to be fully restored to sanity, entered Alford Pleas to several charges against him before Judge Karlynn Haberly of the Kitsap County Superior Court. He was not admitting guilt: the Alford Plea mean that he was neither admitting nor denying guilt but that he believed he would be found guilty if his case went to trial.

There were indeed many charges against him, and Chris Casad, the prosecutor, intended to ask for exceptional sentences for each of them. Given Pitre’s record and that he had taken advantage of the very people who should have had reason to trust him—his own family—made his alleged crimes particularly egregious.

Still feeling confident, Roland Pitre took the Alford Plea in Count I: First Degree Burglary; Count II: Conspiracy to Commit First Degree Kidnapping and to further charges, many evolving from the theft of the family’s safe and its contents: Willful Destruction of Insured Property and Theft in the First Degree.

Sentencing would come later. In the meantime, Roland moved ahead to add luster to his reputation as a loving and caring man. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke about Cheryl Pitre’s murder to a presentence investigator, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Flint Police Department in Michigan. The investigator had been a detective sergeant before he retired to do private work. He had had ample opportunity over the years to study human nature. He found Roland Pitre an interesting challenge.

Roland said he felt he was being singled out and punished again because people suspected that he had killed his first wife. And that simply wasn’t true. “I didn’t kill her,” he sobbed. “I knew when she was murdered that I would be blamed for it. There’s a time in a person’s life when things like that can happen, and everything just goes downhill from then on. I knew I’d never get my nursing license after she died. I’ve never been able to recover from that or clear myself.”

Even though he had semi-confessed to the current charges and was awaiting sentencing, Roland continued to try to improve his image by doing his own PR. He readily agreed to speak with a reporter for the Independent, Port Orchard’s newspaper.

He had to share the front page with Beth Bixler, but Roland got more coverage. Beth helped the detectives after her first obviously false story of Tim’s kidnapping, and she was prepared to testify against him if he had gone to trial.

Because she had no prior record and because the investigators and the judge believed she was telling the truth, Beth had been sentenced to only four years in prison. With “good time,” she could hope to be back with her three children sooner than that.

Beth had lost her marriage, come close to bankruptcy, and was no longer a member in good standing of the Church of Abundant Life because of her obsession with Roland, but at least the Court gave her a break in her sentence.

“She was not the primary motivator behind the crime,” Chris Casad told a staff writer, Verina Palmer. “It was obviously thought up by Pitre.”

Roland Pitre, speaking in the Kitsap County Jail, told Verina Palmer that he was horrified at the prospect of receiving a twelve-year sentence, the exceptional sentence sought by the prosecutors Casad and Moran. That was unthinkable to a man who cried as he spoke of how much he truly loved his family.

Roland persisted in his version of what he considered a noncrime. He said that he saw himself as a hero, as only a simple man who tried his best to preserve his family. He had always been their protector, and he desperately needed to show them how very vulnerable they were without him.

To be sure they were all protected, Roland related that he often parked nearby and stared at their house, sometimes spending all night, his eyes burning from lack of sleep as he watched over them. He had to find some way to prove to Della that she needed him to come home. He had even fantasized about different ways he could rush into the house at just the right moment when they were having a problem or even foil a crime in progress. If a rapist or a voyeur threatened his vulnerable family, he would be the shining knight there to save them.

“I didn’t even have any certain crime I was saving my family from; I would just fantasize being there for the emergency, being there when I was needed.”

Maybe he felt this way because he hadn’t been able to save Cheryl, he said. “I’ve always felt totally responsible for Cheryl Pitre’s death. I feel that if we had not divorced she’d still be alive. I suppose I’ll feel that way ad infinitum. The guilt is overbearing [sic].”

Roland said he probably deserved to go to prison for the unsuccessful kidnapping of Tim, but he didn’t feel it should be for the twelve years that might lie ahead. “I was just trying to get back in my house to be part of a family.”

Roland made sure that the Independent’s reporter saw the results of a private polygraph he had taken on September 11.

John L. Ketchum administered the lie detector test to Roland, hooking him up to the usual leads: blood pressure, galvanic skin response, respiration, heart rate, pulse.

Pitre’s attorney conferred with Ketchum. They chose thirty-five questions, going back to 1980 when Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer was murdered in Oak Harbor. Ketchum asked the questions and watched the pens on the polygraph move along the chart.

Q. Were you at your apartment with Maria Archer while Steven Guidry shot and killed Dennis Archer in the Archer home?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you and Steven Guidry conspire to kill Dennis Archer?

A. Yes.

Q. Did Maria Archer ask you to kill or have Dennis Archer killed?

A. No.

To questions about whether he had known about Dennis Archer’s insurance policies, Pitre answered no. He also denied that he bought insurance on Bébé’s life when she was a toddler for any reason other than because he was preparing for a custody battle with Cheryl.

Q. Was the last time you saw Cheryl Pitre on Sunday, October 9, 1988?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you leave your home on the morning of October 16, 1988, to purchase The Tacoma News Tribune and gasoline for your car?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you meet with anyone on the morning of October 16, 1988?

A. No.

Q. On the previous night—October 15, 1988—did your stepdaughter’s conversation with Della delay your going to bed?

A. Yes.

It seemed odd that Ketchum did not ask if Roland killed Cheryl. Rather, he moved on quickly to queries about Beth Bixler.

Q. After your refusal to kill Duane Bixler, did Beth Bixler then offer that you and she could share in Duane Bixler’s $200,000 life insurance?

A. Yes.

Q. Was your response…also no?

A. Yes.

The polygrapher asked Roland if Beth had told him she was romantically and sexually involved with a man other than her husband. He answered Yes.

Q. Did Beth Bixler approach you to have her van stolen for a sum of money to be given to her?

A. Yes.

The lie detector test ordered by Roland’s defense lawyer resulted in Ketchum’s belief that the subject had replied truthfully. At least, his physiological responses indicated no deception. There were several ways to react to these startling results. One was that Roland Pitre was an honest man, wrongly accused. Another was that the questions asked of him were carefully crafted to avoid those that would evoke the strongest response.

It was also possible that Pitre was a human completely without conscience, one who felt no guilt and no remorse. Without those emotions or any real apprehension about punishment, antisocial personalities often pass lie detector tests. Polygraphs are not foolproof; they depend upon the person who administers them, the emotional state of the subject, possible personality disorders in the subject, and a number of other factors. Unless both the prosecution and defense agree, lie-detector results are not admissible in a trial for those very reasons.

Verina Palmer wrote down what Roland told her. He seemed sure that those who read his version of the story would see that he was a much maligned innocent man and that the judge would feel the same way. Hadn’t he proved that with his lie-detector results?

He had not.