Worth More Dead by Ann Rule

Author:Ann Rule [Rule, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2005-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

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.

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