Worth More Dead

told others that he planned to kill Dennis Archer.
    Edwards discovered that a .357 Magnum gun belonging to a friend of Pitre’s had turned up missing after he’d had a visit from the judo expert. Pitre borrowed a truck from another serviceman on the day of the murder, a truck that turned up—inexplicably—at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) the morning after the murder. The parking ticket for that vehicle, from the machine at the airport gate, read “12:16 AM , July 14.” That was just after midnight on Monday morning.
    There were so many parts to this puzzle, and they were such extraneous fragments that they could not be forced to mesh into a working mold. Dennis Archer had been gunned down on July 13 between nine and eleven PM . During that exact time period, Maria Archer swore she was with Roland Pitre and that neither of them had left his apartment.
    If the two lovers had arranged Dennis’s murder and were telling the truth about being together, there had to be a third individual who had done the shooting. Was it the “friend from home” that Pitre told the Brocks about? Jo Brock had seen a dark-haired, mustached man wearing a blue plaid shirt walk away from a truck near Pitre’s apartment on Sunday afternoon. Even though he was a stranger, she felt she could identify him if she ever saw him again.
    Edwards looked for this mysterious man as the case became curiouser and curiouser. Roland Pitre’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly in jail. He mumbled about a killer named Targan who was responsible for Archer’s death, he constantly carried around a blanket that he said was his small daughter, and he urinated on himself. He appeared to be in a catatonic state. He was either crazy or was doing a very good job of pretending to be. When he grew even more disoriented, he was taken first to a local hospital, then transferred to the Western Washington State Hospital for observation.
    While Pitre babbled incoherently and pretended not to understand what psychiatrists were saying to him, the Island County sheriff’s investigators learned that a close friend had indeed visited him in Oak Harbor on the weekend of July 12 and 13. This was Steven Guidry, 26, another man of Cajun descent, who normally lived in Hanrahan, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Airline records confirmed that Roland Pitre had prepaid a round-trip plane ticket through a travel agency for one “Billy Evans” to travel coach from New Orleans to Seattle. Edwards found that this ticket was canceled and that Pitre wired money to Steven Guidry instead.
    A “Billy Evans” had been on a flight that arrived at Sea-Tac airport around noon on July 12 (Saturday) and had departed Sea-Tac for New Orleans on a seven AM flight on Monday, July 14.
     
    Having been declared sane at the Western Washington State Hospital, Pitre was returned to the Island County Jail. On July 21, he visited in jail with relatives, and then asked to speak to Captain Sharp. His statements at that time gave the Island County Prosecutor’s Office probable cause to arrest Steven Guidry on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of Dennis Archer. Sergeant Edwards flew to New Orleans and assisted in the arrest, bringing an apparently bewildered Guidry to jail on Whidbey Island.
    The second arrest hit the community by surprise. Then the thirty-four-page statement that Roland Pitre gave to Edwards on September 2 led to yet a third arrest, one that sent shock waves through the tight community. Maria Elena Archer was booked into jail on September 6 on murder charges.
    The sheriff’s office tried to maintain a tight lid on information about the murder, but rumors spread furiously. Still, the curious would have to wait for the trial before any of the actual statements made by witnesses and the principals were revealed. A change of venue from Island County to King County was granted and the Seattle courtroom was jam-packed as the trial for Maria Archer and Steven Guidry began in early December. Many of the “Islanders” had taken the ferry from Whidbey Island to the mainland to listen to testimony.
    It seemed ironic that Roland Pitre was not on trial. With his statements about the guilt of Maria, his lost love, and Steven Guidry, he had cleverly manipulated his plea bargain. He had been allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder in exchange for his testimony.
    If Pitre ever had been crazy, he had quickly recovered his wits and made