Cheryl Pitre hadn’t had a chance, and that galled the man who managed to get a message out to the Seattle Police investigators. With all the names that had come to the original detectives working Cheryl’s murder, the name this person put forward was new. Somehow he had never been mentioned in connection with her death. He wasn’t a big-time felon at all, just a druggie, both a user and a pusher.
His name was Frederick James McKee. His mug shot showed a cadaverous man, pale and thin with haunted eyes. If he was a likely suspect, there was no tearing hurry to contact him; he wasn’t going anywhere. In 2003, Fred McKee was in the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla, serving twelve years for manufacturing methamphetamine. Pitre, still in prison himself at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, couldn’t even hope for a parole hearing until 2018. The cold case detectives had plenty of time to investigate.
McKee wasn’t listed as one of Roland’s close associates during his stint at McNeil Island in the eighties, but according to the prison informant, Roland had done fatal business with McKee.
A convict’s accusing McKee of a fifteen-year-old murder wasn’t enough to charge him. Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon would have to find a way to connect him to Cheryl with physical evidence gleaned on the night of her murder.
McKee was 29 or 30 at the time of Cheryl’s murder. Now he was 45. Roland was 51. It would be difficult to work back through the intricate connections among and between convicts who served parallel prison terms on McNeil Island in the eighties, their release dates, where they were while on supervised parole, and their associates. Roland had his close friends on the outside he’d kept up with, and he’d even tried to go back to prison to visit some of his tightest buddies, for instance, Bud Halser. Would it be possible to link Pitre and McKee? Or Pitre, Halser, and McKee?
Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to go that route. If Gagnon and Mixsell could tie McKee to some part of the direct physical evidence found in Cheryl’s Topaz, they would have a strong case.
In 1988, DNA was a little-used forensic tool. It had been successful in closing a landmark homicide case in England the year before, but this had involved taking DNA samples from every male in a small town, more than five thousand of them. When Cheryl was murdered, detectives and crime scene specialists had retrieved blood, body fluid, hair, and tissue samples in the hope that they could obtain DNA matches. However, at the time it took a large sample to test for DNA, one that was usually destroyed by the tests themselves. Moreover, there was no national registry then of known DNA comparisons, not like the millions of fingerprints available from the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems) computer system. But the early investigators hadn’t been able to retrieve usable fingerprints. The cost of DNA testing was also prohibitive in the early days of forensic investigation.
Fortunately, Hank Gruber is an extremely precise man, and he had saved and labeled every scintilla of possible evidence he gleaned from Cheryl Pitre’s car. Evidence from her autopsy had also been carefully preserved. Gruber had always believed that something that existed in that silver car on the night Cheryl’s body was found would lead to her killer, despite the many blind alleys they went down in the intervening fifteen years.
Cheryl’s wrists had been bound behind her with strapping tape, and that tape still existed in the Seattle Police Department’s Evidence Room. The killer hadn’t left his fingerprints, but was it possible that he left something else of himself on that tape?
Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon obtained a search warrant to get Fred McKee’s DNA samples so they could compare them with material isolated from the strapping tape.
And finally, after so many years, they learned that the crime scene processing done in October 1988 had come to fruition after all. It just happened to take more than fifteen years for forensic science to catch up with this unsolved murder.
Fred McKee’s skin cells still clung to the tape he had used to bind Cheryl’s hands.
He might as well have written his name in her blood on the night of October 15. What could have possessed him to carry out such a cruel assignment?
McKee admitted to Mixsell and Gagnon that he met Roland Pitre and the anonymous protected witness while they were all serving time in prison. He had harbored no ill feelings toward Cheryl; he didn’t even know her. His motive was money. Roland Pitre promised him between $5,000 and $10,000 if he would kill Roland’s wife. The money was there, according to Pitre; McKee would just have to wait for it awhile until her insurance paid off.
Roland was still in the reformatory in Monroe, a small town about twenty-five miles northeast of Seattle. The Seattle cold case detectives traveled there to talk to him.
He had a story to tell Mixsell and Gagnon. His version of the motive behind the attack on Cheryl might even have been convincing—if it weren’t so familiar. The detectives had of course read over the Kitsap County and Bremerton Police Department files regarding the attempted kidnapping of Pitre’s stepson ten years earlier. Pitre had insisted then that the kidnapping wasn’t real; it was only an imitation of life, never meant to be carried out.
It was done, he had said, to win back the love of his second wife, Della, and the trust of his family.
Maybe Roland had forgotten what he told the authorities in Kitsap County, maybe he was confused and thrown off balance to find the two Seattle investigators waiting to talk with him about an old, old murder, or maybe his fertile brain had just run out of ideas.
Confronted with the evidence linking him to McKee and to Cheryl’s murder fifteen years earlier, Roland admitted that he hired McKee to frighten his estranged wife. He even gave him a key to Cheryl’s house, advised him of her work schedule for Saturday night, and drove him by the house to be sure he knew where she lived. Somewhat surprisingly, Cheryl wasn’t supposed to be abducted along the road from PJ’s Market as she headed for home. Instead, Roland wanted to have her surprised by a stranger in her own home. The time of the attack was set for midnight.
To be extra helpful, Roland even drove McKee to a hardware store to buy the rope and the duct tape he would need to render Cheryl immobile. Yes, he admitted he wanted her to be scared. “But he wasn’t supposed to kill her,” Pitre insisted. “I never intended for her to die.”
As he had always done, Roland constructed a finely tuned plot. He was going to tell Della, his new girlfriend, that he was going out for popcorn. Then his intention was to race to Cheryl’s house where he would storm in and thwart Fred McKee’s assault. Roland said he hadn’t planned to stay with Della; he wanted only to win back Cheryl’s love, and he figured that saving her from a mysterious intruder in the middle of the night would prove to her that they were meant to be together.
He would be her hero.
Gagnon and Mixsell stared at him. This was virtually the same scenario Roland had constructed to explain why he’d “pretended” to kidnap Tim Nash.
There was every indication that Cheryl Pitre was still in love with her estranged husband at the time of her death. She had been through so many challenges to get him released from prison and had done her best to support him emotionally and financially in the two years they lived together as man and wife after his parole. She had borne him a second child and worked double time while he attended college. And for most of those two years, he was cheating on her with other women, although she probably didn’t suspect it until their last few weeks together.
Ever the optimist, Cheryl wouldn’t have needed a staged rescue to convince her that she needed Roland. She knew she needed him.
Cheryl’s and Della’s roles in Roland’s life were almost interchangeable. The only difference was that Della had caught on quicker, so she was still alive.
Yes, Roland conceded that he hired McKee but hadn’t been able to stop him in time. During the late night of October 15, he had the terrible bad luck to suffer another one of his “blackouts,” the spells he said he had most of his life. Those blurred places in his memory had occurred way back, even before he suffered a str
oke. And he seemed brokenhearted now as he spoke to the cold case detectives that it had to happen just when he needed to rush to Cheryl’s aid.
“I woke up the next morning,” he said morosely, “and went about my day, and I suddenly realized that I forgot that I was supposed to rescue Cheryl.”
“You forgot?” Gagnon asked.
“That happens when I get blackouts.”
On January 20, 2004, Barbara Flemming, a King County deputy prosecuting attorney, filed charges of first-degree murder against Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee in the death of Cheryl Pitre. Both men were already in prison, but as a precaution the prosecutors asked for $2 million bail for Roland anyway. He had managed to stay free of the law for large chunks of time since his original arrest for murder twenty-four years earlier.
Roland Pitre and Frederick McKee would be arraigned on February 2. Despite intensified security in the King County Courthouse, the chance of escape is always highest when prisoners are being transported.
Even though the secret witness said that Fred McKee had admitted abducting Cheryl from her home, strangling her, and then beating her to death as she lay unconscious in the trunk of her car, McKee pled not guilty to the charges that he had murdered her.
Roland Pitre was predictable. Once again, he accepted an Alford Plea. “I did not intend to cause her [Cheryl’s] death, but I believe a jury would find I did, given the evidence against me.”
This time he did not feign insanity or seizures or blackouts. Perhaps even he realized he had come to the end of the road.
He had never really been on trial for any of the crimes he had committed, always choosing to cop a plea instead of facing a jury. Although he testified against his mistress, Maria Archer, and his boyhood friend, Steven Guidry, twenty-four years earlier, he wasn’t the one on trial; he had already made his plea bargain and wasn’t risking anything.
Just as he preferred not to actually participate in the crimes he planned, he seemed intimidated by the idea of facing his accusers, a judge, a jury, and a courtroom full of spectators.
Roland Pitre always schemed to be a behind-the-scenes man. He was forced to join Beth Bixler to kidnap Tim because Bud Halser was in jail. Detectives believed that he had been there with McKee when Cheryl died, too. That tiny speck of blood on his glasses might have been the connection if it had happened ten years later, but the speck dissolved on the damp swab.
He may even have been the person who shot Dennis Archer in 1980.
In a way, proving any of these things didn’t matter. He was looking at a very, very long sentence.
23
2004
On March 11, 2004, Roland Pitre was led through the marble corridors of the King County Courthouse. He scarcely resembled the muscular young Marine whose high jinks and practical jokes once made his buddies laugh. Nor was he the slickly handsome judo instructor and ladies’ man he was on Whidbey Island and later in Port Orchard in his first years on parole from prison. Rather he looked like an old man, far older than his fifty-one years. He was balding on top, and the rest of his hair was graying. It was long and tangled, and he had a beard. Headed for Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas’s courtroom, Pitre wore the bright red coveralls of a high-risk prisoner, handcuffs, and leg shackles. He looked so scrawny next to the two husky corrections officers who flanked him that he seemed hardly a threat.
This man who had connived and schemed and planned to terrorize and kill the family who tried to love him no longer controlled anyone. He may not have expected to face the presence in the courtroom of those who had every right to judge him most derisively. But they were there. André was in high school, and Bébé was a brilliant law student. They had changed their names and moved on with their lives (their names have been changed in this book, too, to protect their privacy). Despite everything their father had done to them, despite losing their mother to murder, they were survivors who still needed the opportunity to face the man who had done so much to destroy the serenity of their childhood years, the man who had killed their mother.
Bébé was 25 now. She was a beautiful young woman, married, happy, and on her way to a successful career. Given an opportunity to speak, Bébé addressed Judge Kallas:
“I request [that] you sentence my father to the max sentence allowable under the law,” she said firmly, describing him as a “dangerous psychopath” who hurt people because he was ultimately greedy. She said he had selfishly decided that a $125,000 life insurance payoff was worth more than her mother’s life.
“My mother and I shared a tremendous bond of love, fun, and nurturing. I knew that I was her world.”
She turned toward her father, boring her eyes into him as he sat slope-shouldered, head averted, at the defense table. He would not look at her, but she continued to say the things she had held back for so many years.
“You are a dangerous psychopath who cannot be a member of society, because you kill those around you…to attempt to fulfill your monetary greed,” Bébé said, tears beginning to flow. She had sensed that her mother was never coming back. “I remember feeling this horrible rush on Saturday; I just knew…I think intuitively I just always had faith he would be brought to justice.”
She told her father that she had learned of his plans to kill her, too, so he could collect on the insurance policies he held on her life. “The pain of knowing that you wanted me dead is so deep inside that when I think about it, my heart hurts. All I ever wanted to do was please you and have you love me the way I loved you.
“What’s so sad is, I really thought I could get you to stop killing people, lying, stealing, and hurting people. For so many years, I wore this pain on my shoulders…. You have given me a lifetime of fear.”
André, 16, didn’t even remember his mother. At least Bébé had that to hold on to. He said he recalled only a punitive, angry father. He, too, turned to face the shrunken man in the red coveralls. “I came to you as a kid looking for comfort,” he told Roland Pitre, as others in the courtroom fought to hold back tears. “Instead, you beat me. I came for guidance; instead, you terrorized me.”
Della, Roland’s second wife, told him what she hoped for his future: “You have used and abused people all your life. I will never forgive you. Or myself, for bringing you into our home. I wish you loneliness and pain the rest of your life, and even that is too good. I wish you were dead.”
Undeterred, Roland Pitre chose to address the Court and those gathered there. He seemed to still believe that he could explain and temper the harshness of what he had done. He had always been able to use words effectively. He had taken the Alford Plea, he said, only to spare his family the ugliness of a trial. He recalled some nostalgic times with Cheryl, whom he claimed he had loved, and spoke of happy memories with Bébé and André. He apologized to his children and his ex-wife for the pain, fear, and embarrassment they had endured because of his actions.
“I’m a different person from the one you last saw,” he explained. “May the Lord smile on you and grant you peace.”
How different? In what way? The question begs an answer. Only a few months before, Roland Pitre had told Gregg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon the same old tired story of his wish to be a knight on a white horse who would ride in and save André and Bébé’s mother, his wife who had done the best she could for him. But he had forgotten to rescue her.
He will have many years to ponder the new Roland Pitre. Perhaps he has seen the error of his ways, although it seems unlikely.
Judge Kallas sentenced him to forty years in prison. And those forty years will not even begin until he has completed serving the twelve years he still owes the state for his unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Tim Nash.
In fifty-two years, Roland Pitre will be 104 years old.
Seven months after Pitre was sentenced to life in prison, in October 2004, Frederick McKee stopped protesting that he had no guilty knowledge of Cheryl Pitre’s murder and pled guilty to second-degree murder. On November 19, 2004, Judge Robert Alsdorf of King County Supe
rior Court sentenced him to twenty years in prison, four more years than the sixteen-year sentence the prosecutors recommended. He will be well into his seventies when he comes up for parole consideration.
Roland Pitre’s closest friend in the Marine Corps in the early seventies shakes his head in disbelief when he remembers Roland as he was then. He was a rascal and a chronic liar, yes, but there were also many periods when Pitre sailed smoothly, using all of his considerable intelligence to turn what he dreamed of into reality. He maintained a successful career in the service for a dozen years, moving up through the ranks. His onetime Marine buddy, now a successful, middle-aged businessman, says he was absolutely astounded to learn that the man he knew as Pete had gone to prison not once—but twice—on murder charges.
“You know, he could have been anything he wanted and done anything he set his mind to. I guess the one thing that surprised me is that his criminal career was so shot-through with mistakes and missteps.”
In the end, it was a matter of pure greed over intelligence.
And Pitre chose greed.
“It’s Really Weird Looking
at My Own Grave”
Almost everyone has felt a sudden, unexplainable shiver, that feeling that someone or some ghostly presence is running cold fingers up and down your spine.
I can remember my grandmother saying, “A rabbit just ran over my grave.” I couldn’t understand what that meant. How could she know where her grave would be?
She explained to me that was just an expression, something people said when they got that shivery feeling. In this case, it was much more than a strange, scary feeling.
Very few victims of violent sexual assaults want to return to the place where they were attacked. Some of them can’t return because they didn’t survive the attacks. One of the teenage girls in this case, whose quick thinking saved her life, went back to the frightening and lonely place, so far from anyone who could have rescued her from a madman. She knew just how close she had come to dying, and she breathed the words more to herself than to the detective who accompanied her: “It’s really weird looking at my own grave.”