They couldn’t say for sure, but they were fairly certain that they had found Cheryl Pitre.
9
The woman in the trunk lay on her back, her shoulders and head toward the passenger side of the vehicle. She wore blue jeans with the left front pocket pulled inside out, an aqua T-shirt with a humorous logo, and a shiny red waterproof jacket. Her arms were hidden beneath her. The white lining of her jeans pocket bore blood stains, probably from the killer’s hand. A child’s folding stroller lay beside her. Her own car had been a hiding place for her body, and it might even be the scene of the crime.
The book that covered her face was entitled They’re All Dead, Aren’t They? It looked like a typical mystery novel; they didn’t know that this was the true story of a devout mother and her battle back from losing five children to murder and to cancer, the book that Cheryl had found inspiring. Joy Swift’s survival and renewed faith in the Seventh-Day Adventist church had helped Cheryl keep going when her world with her husband had shattered. What bleak irony that particular book should be used to hide her terribly battered face.
The fact that her face was covered made the detectives suspect that whoever killed her had had a personal relationship with her. Even with such violence, the killer apparently hadn’t been able to leave her body in the trunk without some attempt to hide his gruesome handiwork. Maybe, as he slammed down the trunk lid, he hadn’t wanted to think that her empty eyes were watching him.
The detectives couldn’t be sure who this female victim was yet, though they assumed it was Cheryl Pitre. The dead woman wore no shoes, but she did have either panty hose or knee-highs on, their bottoms shredded as if she had been walking on a rough surface.
Before the investigators removed the books and magazines from the victim’s face, they called the King County Medical Examiner’s office. An ME investigator, Kevin Gow, responded and assisted the detectives as they carefully uncovered the dead woman’s face.
Even if they had known her in life, they wouldn’t have been able to identify her. She had severe facial injuries. She had been battered repeatedly with something heavy and, possibly, with the trunk lid. Damaged tissue decomposes more rapidly than normal tissue, and the body’s head was unrecognizable. Blood and tissue were sprayed throughout the trunk area.
It looked as if she might have tried to fight her way out of the trunk, only to be struck again and again until the trunk lid was slammed on her, crushing her face. The detectives retrieved and bagged several of her teeth and pieces of bones.
“There was blood spatter on the inside of the trunk lid,” Hank Gruber wrote in his follow-up report.
Dr. Greg Schmunk, an ME’s deputy, and Kevin Gow took possession of the body, teeth, and bony chips. An autopsy should show exactly how this woman had died and when. It was doubtful that she had been raped. She was fully clothed, with her undergarments in place.
As they lifted her corpse from the trunk, the investigators saw that her hands were bound behind her, tightly secured with strapping tape. Her shoes, athletic running shoes, were in the trunk, too.
The two detective teams—one from the Seattle Homicide Unit and the other from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office—worked into the night, bagging tiny fragments of possible evidence that had been hidden by the body. Maybe some of it would help; maybe none of it would.
There was a bank envelope with seven dollars in cash inside, a receipt for a hamburger and fries from Friday, October 14, a red button, a single earring for pierced ears, a ballpoint pen. They found a small leather pouch that held a driver’s license for Cheryl Pitre and a receipt from a veterinarian. Both important items in the victim’s life and the detritus everyone collects were left in Cheryl’s car.
The detectives found hair fragments in six spots in the trunk and on the rear bumper, and they located more swaths of blood from the trunk and its lid. They took the dimensions of the trunk and photographed the exterior of the Topaz. Finally, they sealed the car and roped it off until they and expert crime-scene technicians could process the vehicle inch by inch.
The murder of Cheryl Pitre had just become a Seattle case—because her body was found within the Seattle city limits—but Detectives Doug Wright, Doug Hudson, and Jim Harris would continue to work on it. They were inclined to believe that she had been killed in Kitsap County and disposed of in Seattle to delay the discovery of her body and throw roadblocks in the path of the men who investigated it.
Homicide investigators always look first at those who have been closest to the victim: relatives, friends, work associates. And even after their separation, Roland Pitre was probably the person Cheryl had been closest to. On Saturday morning, October 22—one week after Cheryl disappeared—Sergeant Joe Sanford and Detective Hank Gruber went to the Port Orchard offices of Detectives Doug Wright and Jim Harris. Roland Pitre and his new girlfriend, Della Roslyn, had been asked to come into the sheriff’s office at eleven. They had not yet been informed about the discovery of Cheryl’s body.
Joe Sanford and Jim Harris would interview Della, and Hank Gruber and Doug Wright would talk to Pitre.
Pitre and his girlfriend arrived fifteen minutes early. Neither of them appeared unduly nervous.
Alone now with Hank Gruber and Jim Harris, Pitre nodded as Gruber read him his rights under Miranda. He had heard them before, and he didn’t question why he had been warned as a suspect. “A suspect involving what?” most men would have asked, but Pitre didn’t. He signed the form.
“We found your ex-wife’s body in the trunk of her car,” Gruber said, studying Pitre’s face. The man before him was very quiet when he heard this news, but he didn’t seem overwhelmed or emotional.
“When did you see Cheryl last?” Gruber asked.
“In person?”
“Yes.”
“That would have been last Sunday—the ninth. I had dinner with her.” Pitre added that Cheryl was at work on Friday when he picked Bébé and André up from day care for their weekend with him. “So I didn’t see her.”
“Do you remember the last time you spoke to her?”
“That Saturday night. She was working at PJ’s, and I called her there to talk about getting our children back to her on Sunday. I was going to the Seahawks game—to cheer for the Saints—so I told her I might be a little late getting the kids back.”
Gruber already knew that Pitre had been to the football game on Sunday, October 16. The Kitsap County detectives had listened to the messages on Cheryl’s telephone answering machine. Roland Pitre had called her after the game, and he was joking because the Saints had won.
When he was asked about his activities on the weekend Cheryl disappeared, Pitre had ready answers. He recalled being with Della and her family along with his own children on Saturday.
“On Sunday?”
“Well, Della’s an early riser, and she always does her exercises each morning. Every Sunday I get up and go out to get the Tacoma News Tribune from a machine outside the Mile Hill Thriftway store. And then I fill up the gas tank of my Chevette at the Texaco station there because I have a credit card for it.”
Pitre recalled that it was still dark when he left on Sunday morning, but Della was up. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone. “However long it takes,” he said offhandedly. “I didn’t go anywhere else. I came home, read the sports section, and got ready to go to the football game in Seattle. Della, her sister, her brother-in-law, and I left for the game about nine. We drove to the ferry in Della’s car and parked it on the Bremerton side.”
When they returned from the Kingdome, Pitre said, he called Cheryl to see if she was coming over to Della’s to pick up Bébé and the baby or if she wanted him to drop them off. “She didn’t answer, so I left a message for her to call me if she wasn’t already on her way over.”
“What time was that?”
“About six-thirty.” Pitre said that about an hour later he learned that Cheryl hadn’t even gone to work at PJ’s that morning. “I began to worry,” he said earnestly. He’d had no idea w
here Cheryl might have gone, and he had called Bay Ford and other people she knew, but no one had seen her.
The investigators knew about Roland Pitre’s record and that he had gone to prison for his involvement in another murder only eight years before. And now here he was, looking only slightly upset, and acting mystified about his ex-wife’s fate.
He insisted that, of course, he was in no way involved in Cheryl’s death. He was eager to do anything he could to help find her killer. He willingly signed a consent-to-search form for the detectives to search Della’s home. Her recall of the prior Saturday and Sunday agreed with Roland’s.
The four detectives followed Roland and Della to Della’s house. Pitre showed them the two cars he routinely drove: a 1979 red Chevrolet Chevette, registered to him, and a silver 1980 Chevette, registered to Della. There was also a full-size Chevy pickup truck on the property, which was on loan to them.
Hank Gruber was known for his meticulous attention to detail in almost everything he did. He was a record keeper, an artist, a genius at scale drawings, and relentless when he processed rooms or vehicles for possible evidence. It was Gruber who introduced the idea of charting all Seattle homicides in any given year, noting address, date, victim’s name, manner of death and, hopefully, the date of arrest and the murderer’s name. He did all the diagramming of crime scenes. With his Bronx accent and his easygoing manner, he usually set suspects at ease, and they ended up telling him more than they intended to.
Now Gruber set about searching one of Roland Pitre’s vehicles. He noted the roll of strapping tape beneath the hatchback window of the red Chevette. He asked Pitre if he could take it, and Roland nodded, hastening to explain that he had used it a few days before to tape a note for Della to his door. Gruber slipped it into an evidence bag, noting that there were some hairs and fragments of something stuck to the side of the roll.
Doug Wright and Jim Harris found nothing of interest in the pickup truck, but Della’s silver car had what might be blood spots. The car was a little dirty inside, but the interior was light-colored so that they could easily see a tiny spot of what might be dried blood on the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel. With a swab dipped in a saline solution, they lifted the spot and sealed it for testing.
Gruber and Sanford searched the garage, noting that the overhead door was operated with a yellow nylon pulley rope. It was similar to a rope they had found in Cheryl’s car but of a smaller diameter, and this rope was old and dirty; the rope in the trunk with Cheryl’s body was new. A lot of people had yellow rope.
Joe Sanford helped the Kitsap County detectives gather dirt samples from the Roslyn property for comparison with dirt and debris found on the undercarriage of Cheryl’s Topaz.
Inside Della’s house, the investigators found blue jeans with red stains that could be either paint or blood. One of a pair of Adidas athletic shoes had hair and dried debris stuck to the bottom in dried liquid that might be blood. Pitre said those items belonged to him; he was very calm.
He wasn’t perturbed until Doug Wright noticed a very small dot of dark red on the glasses that the very nearsighted Pitre wore. It looked to Wright like back spatter from either a high-velocity or medium-velocity spray of blood, possibly from a gunshot wound or a bludgeoning weapon swung with great force.
“He just about collapsed,” Wright would recall, “when we saw that spot on his glasses.”
Wright lifted the spot with a swab and noted that Pitre’s hand was trembling slightly as he held out the glasses.
“I think it was blood,” Wright says, “but there wasn’t enough to test—not at that time—and it got diluted by the saline solution, so we couldn’t say absolutely that it was Cheryl’s.”
As suspicious as the detectives were of Roland Pitre, they had no probable cause to arrest him. Testing in the Western Washington State Crime Lab might match some of the stains to Cheryl’s blood type. It was 1988, though, and the science of DNA was in its infancy. Testers needed large samples because much of the substance to be examined would be destroyed by the tests themselves. Today, that tiny dried speck of blood on Pitre’s glasses could be multiplied infinitely, but in 1988 it was not enough.
Della Roslyn and Roland Pitre watched as the detectives drove away. They may have wondered what would come next, but Della believed totally in Roland, just as Cheryl had. He had shed no tears for the woman who had saved him from years in prison, the woman who had borne him two children.
At four PM, the four detectives drove to the small 1960s rambler where Cheryl lived after her marriage broke up. Doug Hudson had already searched it thoroughly and found no sign that violence had occurred there. The garage was so full of miscellaneous furniture and stored items that no one could park a car inside it. If she had been attacked at home and forced into the trunk of her car, it would have to have been in full view of a number of her neighbors. Yet no one had seen or heard anything unusual.
It was far more likely that she had been waylaid on her way home from PJ’s. She hadn’t been in an accident. Her car wasn’t damaged at all, not even a scratch, so that probably ruled out another vehicle’s having forced her off the road. For some reason, she had pulled her car over. Her killer would have to have been someone she knew and trusted or someone with a carefully planned ruse to get her to stop willingly. That could have happened anywhere along her usual route home, a road little-traveled near midnight. Once Cheryl was alone on the dark road, someone had abducted her in her own car, possibly beating her into unconsciousness before she could cry out for help.
“She never got home at all,” Hank Gruber said. “And I don’t think she was conscious on the trip to Seattle where he, or they, left her car.”
10
A postmortem examination of Cheryl Pitre’s body was set for 9:30 on Monday morning, October 24. Detectives Wright and Hudson from Kitsap County and Hank Gruber observed as Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Schmunk began.
“Autopsy” means, literally, “to see for one’s self.” Someone had intercepted Cheryl as she headed home ten days earlier, quite probably unaware of danger. The investigators were still unsure of how she had died.
Her jeans, blue T-shirt, and undergarments had been removed from her body, and so had the strapping tape that bound her hands behind her. Gruber noted that it did not resemble the tape he removed from Roland Pitre’s vehicle.
The critical wounds had all been to Cheryl’s head. There were many of them.
“This might have looked like a single, massive wound,” Dr. Schmunk said, “but there were multiple blows.”
There were no stab wounds and no indications that she had been shot. Someone had beaten her to death by striking her skull and face again and again. She might have been choked, too, but her neck area was decomposed so much that they could not be certain. The hyoid bone in the back of her throat was not cracked as it often is in cases of strangulation.
She had probably fought her killer; there were many bruises on her knees and legs. But she had not been raped, nor had she recently had intercourse.
A forensic technician collected a number of hairs from the victim’s hair and ear and pointed out the dirt that clung to her body. It was very fine and appeared to be either beach sand or the soil found on road shoulders.
That wasn’t much of a clue. Fine sand like that could be found in hundreds of locations in Kitsap County.
Harris, Hudson, Wright, and Gruber hoped that there might be something in Cheryl’s car that the killer had left behind. They would see that it was processed with the utmost care so that no minute bit of physical evidence would be lost.
Bill Haglund, the Chief Investigator of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, who had great expertise in forensic odontology, called them to say that six front teeth were missing from the victim’s jaw and asked them to search for them when they processed her car. Shortly after noon, the detectives met at the Seattle Police Processing Room with George Chan from the Western Washington Crime Lab, Don McDowell from the Ph
oto Lab, and Donna West, an ID technician. They discussed the best way to process the Topaz. First they took blood swab samples for testing and cross-matching. Since the interior had many obvious blood smears, they hoped that there might be fingerprint ridges hidden in the swirls. To isolate fingerprints, Chan suggested that they use Super Glue to enhance any ridges but only after the inside of Cheryl’s car was photographed to preserve blood spatter patterns.
If Roland Pitre should emerge as the prime suspect, finding his fingerprints in blood would be tremendously valuable, absolutely irrefutable evidence that he had been present when Cheryl was dying. That would place him at the murder as it happened. Merely finding his fingerprints in Cheryl’s car wouldn’t help much. Intrafamily murders—when a family member kills another—are extremely difficult to prove. Obviously, their blood, sweat, hair, fibers, etc., will be found in their homes and their cars, and there is little a criminalist can do to mark the time this potential evidence was deposited. Historically, the best physical evidence to be found is a clear fingerprint with numerous matching points pressed into the life’s blood of a victim.
A button found in the trunk with Cheryl’s body might have been important, but it turned out to be from her own jacket. The detectives bagged possible evidence from the car. With a vacuum, Gruber carefully recovered hair, dirt, and fibers from the driver’s seat and floor, the passenger seat, the trunk liner, and the bed liner beneath it.
They removed a length of nylon rope, an orange throw rug, and miscellaneous items in a plastic bag near where the victim’s feet had rested: a first aid kit, a window scraper, paper towels.
When they removed the bottom liner of the trunk they found something interesting. The wire that led to the taillights on the driver’s side was completely free of its socket. Disconnected, neither the taillights nor the brake lights would have worked. Somehow, Cheryl Pitre might have either kicked the wire loose or managed to rip it free before her hands were taped behind her, probably in the vain hope that a police officer would pull her car over for a “no taillights” violation.